Thread by @asymmetricinfo

Ross Douthat's must-read column on the "second civil war" discourse popular among the twitterati (nytimes.com/2022/01/12/opi…) reminds me to promote my own most recent column, which asks Dems to imagine a world in which the GOP won more votes.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…

How are these two things connected?

Bear with me.

They're both about the obsessive fears of an anti-democratic right that you see on social media and increasingly, in regular media.

I pause to note that Trump's attempt to steal the 2020 election gave the left good reason for real worries, a view I think Douthat shares.

But these worries long predate 1/6. They go back to the 2002 Judis/Teixera "Emerging Democratic Majority" thesis--a decent hypothesis that was treated as a prophecy by the left. My sense is that most non-pros still believe some version even though both authors have now recanted.

You could date it even farther back, to the left's self-conception as the party of the people, with "people" defined as >50% of the population.

Naturally, if this is your assumption, you will assume that any free, fair, and representative election will put Democrats in power.

And of course, Democrats are currently disadvantaged by the structure of the US political system, which gives outsized influence to lower-population areas where Republicans outperform Democrats. This understandably seems unfair to the left; the right would feel the same way.

This also makes them feel aggrieved about gerrymanders, even though the left is perfectly capable of gerrymandering with the best of them--see what's happening in Illinois and New York right now.

I don't dismiss the grievances or the worries at all. I too am worried, including fears that by cravenly humoring Trump's lies about election fraud, the GOP has put itself in a place where the base they've bamboozled will expect them to make the next count come out "right".

That said, I have been surprised over the last year to watch the left focus almost all its energy on "defending democracy" type threats, and almost none on what seems to be a fairly rapid defection of Hispanic voters to the GOP.

The reason John Judis and Ruy Teixera ultimately backed away from the Emerging Democratic Majority hypothesis (henceforth to be known as "EDM") is that it depended on keeping a chunk of white working class voters, who instead defected en masse to Trump.

Ironically, one reason this probably happened is that the left believed immigration-driven demographic change made their majority inevitable, so they didn't have to do unpleasant things like woo working class whites. They felt free to move sharply leftward, which alienated WCWs.

When this happened, the left assured itself that it didn't need WCWs, and instead framed the movement as a coalition of educated progressives, and racial and sexual minorities.

That's potentially a winning coalition.

But it depends on Democrats winning strong majorities of Hispanic votes. All else equal, if Trump had won half of the Hispanic vote, rather than a third, he would have won the popular vote.

Of course, he didn't win half. But he did improve his Hispanic vote share over time.

In 2016, he won 28% of Hispanics. In 2020, he won 32%. This is exactly the opposite of what the left expected. Moreover, that trend has continued since he left office; a recent WSJ poll showed Hispanics split evenly between the parties: 37% GOP, 37% Dem, the rest undecided.

If the GOP hits 50% with Hispanics, without losing another part of their coalition (BIG "if"), Democrats will have trouble winning the popular vote. That may not be the most likely outcome, but it is sufficiently possible, and disastrous, that it ought to be front of mind.

But in a lot of spaces where left-wing policy gets made and debated, I think it's being crowded out by the "save our democracy" strain of left-wing politics.

Which brings me back to Ross's column.

One thing Ross points out, more gently than I am about to, is how the "save our democracy" and "soft civil war" strains of left-wing discourse have both exaggerated the threat from the right and edited out the parts where the left has contributed to the fraying of our civic bonds

That's not "both-sidesing"--January 6th was worse than anything the left has done--but there are two players in this toxic game of tit-for-tat, not an abuser and an innocent victim.

This narrative has taken hold because it is self-flattering, and relieves left-wing moderates of the need to criticize any members of their coalition. I'd suggest that this is also why "save our democracy" has so thoroughly crowded out the possibility that Dems will just ... lose

I pause again to reiterate that I think the threat Trump poses to democracy is real, though I am more worried about norm erosion than I am about random back-benchers in state legislatures proposing never-never laws to cook the vote.

But for Democrats, the threat of losing a critical coalition member is also real, and pretty immediate, and very few people on the left, outside of pros, seem to be thinking about it.

I search for an explanation for this surprising behavior. And one thing that occurs to me is that while Trump's anti-democratic antics are alarming, they do not require the unpleasant self-scrutiny of asking "Why are so many Hispanic voters leaving us?"

They don't require you to have ugly fights with other people in your coalition, in which blame is cast and imprecations hurled. All you have to do is hate Republicans, and worry that they're going to do something awful, which conveniently, is what you were already doing.

So whenever you have a choice between starting an unhappy conversation about what's going on with Hispanic voters, or talking about the latest Republican outrages ... well, it really is pretty outrageous, what those guys are doing!

This tweetstorm is getting too long, so I'll close by noting that our best hope of undoing Trump's damage may be a GOP that just wins elections, and therefore accepts the results.

It's ironic that our best hope of that may be a Democratic Party that can't believe that's possible

Column is here, if you made it this far, thanks for reading.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…