For the Democratic Party to even begin to move forward, they need to stop focusing on themselves and start focusing on the Americans they claim to serve.
A recent poll by the New York Times and Ipsos found that many Americans do not feel that the Democrats share their values. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, only 31 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, and more than half of respondents have an unfavorable view of it. Yet in Democratic election postmortems, liberal media and political leaders’ reactions have ranged from characteristic shrillness to self-loathing, blame games, and party infighting. What we have yet to see is Democratic leaders truly trying to understand the American people and why they have recoiled from the party. This excessive self-regard gone unchecked could cause much more than an election loss and become an existential threat to the party.
As a part of the research for my book The Overlooked Americans, I spent over five years talking to people who live in rural America, a voting bloc that overwhelming voted for Donald Trump in 2024. In my interviews, which ranged across favorite holidays, religion, and parenting, a number of my respondents expressed a wariness towards an unforgiving form of political correctness (a.k.a. “wokeness”) that judges people for accidentally using the wrong pronoun or not being entirely on board with the Democratic social agenda. These folks were not dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters, nor were they ultraconservative. But many of them expressed a frustration with the progressive politics that have subsumed the Democratic Party. This estrangement of rural Americans, which has been in the works for years, has now borne out in our national, state, and local elections.
In the aftermath of 2024, Democrats need to stop paying so much attention to themselves and pay far more attention to the American people and the issues they really care about. The potentially unsurmountable roadblock for Democrats is accepting not only that liberal values are not “everyone’s values” but that others’ values can be just as legitimate. Through the course of the campaign, liberal elites evolved merely from harshly judging to barely tolerating with bafflement the idea that rural Americans hold dear values different from theirs. The next and only step for Democrats, if they wish to succeed, is to embrace the fact that rural values — which, as it turns out, are pretty reflective of most of the country — are no less important.
I recall one autumn afternoon, when I gave a talk on my book at the University of Southern California, where I work. The students in attendance were part of the Academy for Polymathic Study, a group of some of the brightest and most intellectually engaged students on campus. At the end of the event, one student came up to me and politely remarked, “You say we need to convince people of vaccines and climate change and marriage equality through tolerance and not by looking down on them, but did it cross your mind that maybe you shouldn’t be trying to convince anyone of your values at all?” The student’s remarks stuck with me as I watched the Democratic Party implode. I am a lifelong Democrat who has worked as Mayor David Dinkins’s teaching assistant while at Columbia University. I was a fellow at Hillary Clinton’s Senate office and had volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. This student’s clear-eyed observations were nowhere in Democratic Party discourse.
When we discuss liberals’ inability to understand that rural Americas simply have different values (and are not inherently against liberal values), I often return to Obama’s “guns and religion” phrase and Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” — essentially repeated by Biden in his comment that Trump voters are “garbage.” These remarks confirm what rural Americans have long suspected the liberal establishment thinks of them. Or, as a few rural folks said to me when I asked them what they thought coastal America thought of them, “They think we’re just a bunch of hillbillies.” The problem is that liberal elites can’t seem to comprehend that there may be other values in the ether, and those values can be equally justifiable and valid.
For example, liberal elites (at least overtly) prize intellectualism and secular values — be it science and data or philosophical concepts like equity and justice. They judge fellow Americans who may question, based on their religious beliefs, such practices as abortion or vaccination. This worldview came in sharp relief as I interviewed rural Americans, almost all of whom, without prompting, discussed their relationship with God. I realized that I knew whether my urban friends were Jewish, Muslim, or Catholic, but I didn’t know their actual beliefs in detail, or if they even believed in God. I have had conversations with friends in Los Angeles, for example, who cannot grasp that someone might value their religion over science (which is not to say, of course, that religious people refuse all vaccinations).
Liberals are so anti-gun (I include myself in this group) that they can lose sight of the fact that rural folks may want a gun simply for hunting or for self-protection. I grew up in a Pennsylvania town where, starting when I was in high school, the school district gave us the day after Thanksgiving off, for hunting. This past October, on a trip to visit my parents, my family drove I-80 to my hometown, Danville, Pa., and we must have driven past ten dead deer that had raced across the highway at dusk. Deer in Pennsylvania have no natural predators, so hunters arguably do a service by helping regulate the deer population. Many hunters also eat the meat, cure the venison, and use the pelt. These folks’ desire for a gun is reasonable. As is their desire for a gun for self-protection. They might never use it, but, like an alarm system, a gun makes them feel safe. The liberal trope, however, lumps gun owners in rural America with, say, machine-gun zealots who might shoot up a school.
Some liberals sneer at rural Americans also for lacking higher education. In part, this is a devaluation of the trades, crafts, and vocational work that power many rural economies. This view also fails to appreciate that many rural Americans don’t have the financial means to afford a university education and don’t have parents who went to college, and their high schools might not possess the “college knowledge” needed to get students into the top schools.
Fundamentally, however, rural Americans, like many across the country, are tired of being told they should care about wider social justice issues above and beyond their own families’ needs. As one woman I interviewed explained to me, big government policies and increased taxes will make her life harder. She shouldn’t be met with incredulity when she says she cares more about economic issues such as her grocery bills and her mortgage, or her family or her church, than LGBTQ issues. This woman, incidentally, happens to have a transgender niece and has nothing against her or anyone else who is transgender. This issue is just further down her list. The woman said she was just so sick of Hollywood moralizing about what she should care about. A farmer from Iowa told me he didn’t feel strongly about marriage equality either way. He explained he felt that everyone had a right to a civil marriage but that this was not his issue to fight: “I think everyone should be free to be who they are and who they want to be,” he explained. “But some of these things get so stigmatized. . . . You should be free to be who you are, but don’t stuff it down other people’s throat.”
For the Democratic Party even to begin to move forward, it needs to stop focusing on itself and start focusing on the Americans it claims to serve. The Democrats might be surprised to find a lot of open-minded, tolerant people who understand and even share some of their values — but also have values of their own that deserve dignity and respect.