One thing I’ve learned over the years is that most people are casual political onlookers who pretend to be experts. They pay attention around election time, pick up a few talking points, and suddenly think they understand the electorate better than anyone else.
People like me geek out over politics the way other people geek out over sports, Dungeons & Dragons, and high-fantasy book series. I haven’t been a casual onlooker for many years. I eat, sleep, drink, shit, and breathe politics. Since I was a child, I’ve felt that staying informed was part of my civic duty. That means paying attention to who is running, why they are running, and what they actually stand for.
I shouldn’t be special in this way. For a long time, I assumed that plenty of people approached politics the same way I did. A peace rally and demonstration I attended in 2003 helped shake me out of that assumption.
Since then, I’ve watched people repeat bullshit talking points from the major cable news networks over and over again until they mistake repetition for knowledge. They believe what they’ve been fed, then treat anyone who questions it as politically naïve.
Meanwhile, too many of these supposed experts have no real feel for working-class and middle-class America. They don’t understand how squeezed people feel, how angry they are, or how tired they’ve become of being told to accept less while the people at the top keep getting more.
The certainty that Bernie Sanders is “unelectable” reminds me of the same certainty I heard about Barack Obama before he started winning primaries. People swore up and down that America wasn’t ready for a Black president. They treated that assumption as a fact.
I disagreed.
When I was tapped to work with Obama’s campaign in the summer of 2007, I committed to it. That wasn’t because I thought Obama was a messiah or because I belonged to some political cult. Dennis Kucinich was my first choice, based on principles. But I also understood that Kucinich had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, while Obama had the political talent to pull it off.
I could distinguish between the candidate whose positions I preferred and the candidate whose ability to win I believed people were underestimating. Apparently, that distinction is difficult for people who assume that supporting a campaign means worshipping the candidate.
What frustrates me is how often political conventional wisdom gets passed off as expertise. People inside the same circles repeat the same assumptions, reinforce one another, and then act shocked when voters do something they didn’t expect.
At some point, we have to ask whether these people understand the electorate or just understand each other.
Too many political commentators, party insiders, and casual observers are living in a bubble. They underestimate the anger of American workers while overestimating the authority of the people who tell them what is politically possible.
We saw that in 2016. I hoped that election would force the media, the Democratic Party, and the people who followed their predictions to examine what they had missed.
Instead, too many went right back to the same assumptions and the same dismissive bullshit.
Working people are telling us how angry they are. They are telling us how squeezed they feel. If our response is to lecture them about what they should accept, we shouldn’t be surprised when they stop listening to us.
Pay attention. The people repeating conventional wisdom the loudest are not automatically the people who understand what is happening.