Can Democrats Close the Symbolism Gap?

Excerpted from Ch. 3, How Democracy Can Survive 

In late 2022, virtually every economic forecaster and periodical insisted that a recession in the United States was inevitable. A year later, not only had a recession failed to occur, but the American economy grew at its most robust pace in decades, at an astounding 4.9 percent annualized rate in the third quarter. Inflation moderated, joblessness was near historic lows, and the stock market hit an all-time high. And gas prices—over which Presidents notoriously have little or no control—had also moderated substantially. 

Good economic times, deserved or otherwise, usually benefit an incumbent President. And in this case there was strong evidence that the Biden administration’s policies had played a substantial role in bringing about this economic turnaround. The economy, by most measures, was equally strong or stronger than in the best years of President Trump’s administration. Trump inherited a good economy from his predecessor, Barack Obama. And relative to the post-Covid downturn the comparison was no contest: Trump left office having lost more jobs than any President since Herbert Hoover. 

And yet: Biden was at or near the lowest approval rating of his Presidency, trailed Trump in aggregate polling for the 2024 election, and was some twenty points in arrears in questions over which candidate would best handle the economy. 

Moreover, this pattern, though extreme, was characteristic of generations of polling on the issue. Though by virtually any measure of the economy—jobs, inflation, the deficit, or the stock market—Democrats have the advantage historically, Republicans tend always to be trusted more in opinion polls. 

There are a number of possible explanations. Many of them have merit. The price level, not the inflation rate, is the way many Americans—few of whom have experienced rapid or sustained inflation—regard the economy. What Americans care about the most in terms of their futures—housing and education—are pricier than ever, with high and persistent interest rates. 

American media slants right, and all of it, including even the legacy newspapers of record, is more oriented toward entertainment rather than relaying civic information. Local media is reeling and national media is fragmented. The United States, unlike virtually every other developed country, lacks a major government media outlet, such as Canada’s CBC or Great Britain’s BBC, that routinely covers what is going on in government from a basically factual perspective. This means that most Americans, who live comparatively in news bubbles, tend to be entirely unaware of what federal and state governments are doing on a day-to-day basis. 

Plus revisionist narratives about Covid-19 had obscured or wrongly seemed to absolve Trump’s role in mismanaging the pandemic, allowing nostalgia about the relatively strong economy he presided over pre-pandemic to reemerge.  

Moreover, Republicans are typically much more likely than Democrats to view economic performance through an entirely partisan lens, meaning that they will judge an objectively worse economy to be better if they feel happier that a President of their own party in power. Polling questions about the economy turn on a dime, like a forked hockey stick, when partisan power changes, irrespective of the fundamentals. 

That said, this gulf between beliefs and outcomes has a much deeper root, though it is hard to prove empirically. It reflects the fact that the GOP has managed to corral most of the positive symbolism associated with the history of the United States, in most cases through a deliberate strategy, while successfully painting Democrats as the enemy of these symbols, and indeed increasingly as the symbolic enemy of the country itself.  

Mark Levin, whose recent bestseller The Democrat Party Hates America, and his earlier work American Marxism, sums up the essentials of this theme, which is echoed every day in more or less sophisticated versions through Fox News and thousands of right-wing media outlets on television and talk radio: Democrats are against freedom, immoral, and Godless, as they are “socialists,”(the most potent keyword) which encompasses being against the market and intent on cramming alien values down the throats of “real Americans,” principally feminism and the erosion of gender norms, through the vehicle of higher education, all of which for him (and countless others) come under the rubric of “Marxism.” 

In the 1960s, political scientists Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril released a massive study of public opinion. It argued that Americans are symbolic conservatives and operational liberals. Republicans, they argued, had a philosophy but no programs, while Democrats had programs but no philosophy. If by “conservative” is understood libertarian, namely deep suspicion of government, individualism, and distrust of hierarchy, excepting possibly the church, this observation still holds up well. The famous quip, which I have heard often in real life without irony, “Get the government’s hands off my Medicare!” illustrates this dichotomy. 

The GOP, as many have observed, has become effectively an entirely symbolic “post-policy” party. The GOP’s decision to retain President Trump’s 2016 policy platform for the 2020 campaign was practically a formal acknowledgement that Republicans have eschewed running on a positive agenda altogether. In the wake of the dozens of unsuccessful attempts to elect a GOP Speaker of the House, Republican consultant Alex Castellanos noted that “this is a party with no new ideas.” At the press conference announcing speaker-designate Michael Johnson, he and his fellow legislators stonewalled press questions with cries of “no policies.”.  

During candid moments, during the tortured attempts to link Hunter Biden with his father and with supposed misdeeds, and the Biden impeachment hearings, many House Republican legislators acknowledge that virtually their entire agenda is all political theater, designed to soften up Biden electorally, along with members of his administration, in the way the Benghazi hearings, though devoted to a far more serious matter, were about finding ways to attack Hillary Clinton politically. 

This almost complete reliance on negative partisanship underwritten by symbolism theater, with no political consequence for Republican members in safe districts, is the natural culmination of years of the GOP’s running against government and then reaching a dead end when trying to manage it. They are courting either a full-fledged spoils system, with government favors bestowed on loyalists in Trump fashion, or gridlock. As the late humorist and conservative P.J. O’Rourke once quipped, conservatives run on saying that government doesn’t work and then get elected and prove it. But that conservative antipathy toward government has been replaced by a full-blown hostility to the working of the state altogether, and toward the base of evidence that even skeptics of government need to agree upon for society to function. 

Even the GOP’s “culture war” policies, such as book bans and curbs on trans participation in women’s sports, are not especially popular, generally because they project the power of the state onto the private lives of indviduals. And this is not even taking the rollback of Roe v. Wade into account. The “Trump-in-waiting” Project 2025 book produced by the Heritage Foundation, which calls for eliminating government departments, rolling back most economic regulations, and vastly increasing the scope of executive power, encapsulates a very unpopular set of ideas, taken individually.  

But while the GOP is increasingly incapable of governing and on the wrong side of policy preferences and of observable facts, for the most part, it always rebounds swiftly at the polls. This is because it has successfully captured virtually the entire cultural and symbolic high ground of American myth: flag, faith, and freedom. God, gas, and guns. 

This project has been underway for generations. Thomas Frank noted twenty years in his classic account What’s the Matter With Kansas that ethnocultural identity had replaced economic self-interest as the basis for the votes of most rural Republicans, but the dominance of such symbolism is much stronger today. The contours of this symbolism were set, and in some respects reached an early zenith, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who set the rhetorical terms of the debate even as his administration still used all the familiar tools of government, including raising taxes when needed. Reagan’s message (as condensed artfully, and accurately, in a mashup by clinical psychologist Drew Westen) was about individual success and its supposed adversaries. Who’s getting in your way? Elites who want to take the money you have striven for and to give it to undeserving folks. 

“Once upon a time, American was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way. …Instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hardworking Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens. …Instead of adhering to traditional American values of family, fidelity, and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex, and the gay lifestyle… and they encouraged a feminist agenda that undermined traditional family roles.” 

The political genius of this rhetoric is that it aligns the market with positive symbolism while attributing what Reagan sees as negatives to government, irrespective of capitalism’s role in creating inequality, or welfare recipients, or the actual adherence of liberals or conservatives to family values, as Reagan sees them.   

Republicans over the years have been especially adroit at linking free market fundamentalism to a positive association with capitalism. They insist that objecting to this version of capitalism on behalf of a mixed economy, in which the market has a place in some spheres and not others, is tantamount to an attack on freedom. Large corporations have attempted to make this association between freedom and capitalism from the start with a barrage of advertising, and further associating freedom with consumer choice (Reagan got his start as a pitchman for GE and Lucky Strikes cigarettes) 

As Naomi Oreskes writes, the Republican party has cemented “Not just the belief that free markets are the best means to run an economic system but also the belief that they are the only means that that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms. It is the belief in the primacy of economic freedom not just to generate wealth but as a bulwark of political freedom.” 

In this regard, Governor Nikki Haley’s recent tortured non-response to a simple question posed at a New Hampshire town hall, “What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?” nicely illustrates cultural symbolism at work. Haley, to be sure, was pandering to the Trumpist base and trying to avoid mentioning race and slavery at any cost, but it is the pure symbolic boilerplate she defaulted to, like most Republican candidates, that is especially telling: 

“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And we will always stand by the fact that I think the government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn't need to tell you how to live your life. They don't need to tell you what you can and can't do. They don't need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom.”

This dominance of the symbolic realm obscures the extent to which the modern GOP has become increasingly tolerant of actions, under President Trump, that would be rightly seen as authoritarian and possibly unacceptable if they took place elsewhere, as well as outside the mainstream on virtually every policy issue. 

The continuity of the symbolic dimension, at the same time, obscures the extent to which the modern GOP has become increasingly authoritarian and extremist, by objective measures. It also means that Democrats need virtual Hall-of-Fame candidates like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to win, and indeed their equivalents at the state and local level, while Republicans can win with Ron Johnson, Michael Johnson, or virtually anyone who repeats the right mantras. The symbolism gap allows the GOP to win with marginal candidates while strong Democratic candidates have to run near-flawless and well-funded races just to be competitive. 

As with Reagan’s “counter-establishment” and Trump’s “deep state,” this pose is sustained by a successful ideological feint in which Democrats are presented as captured by the cultural "far left" and “socialists” whether or these terms have any relationship to economic or social reality. The GOP has convinced voters that the Democratic Party is dominated by a cartoonish version of the fringes of the cultural left, usually obscure professors in humanities departments and washed-up actors like Peter Fonda. 

Their counterparts in extremism on the Republican side tend to be actual officeholders or those who, like the white supremacist and misogynist Nick Fuentes of the Proud Boys, manage to have lunch with ex-President Trump. Powerless people with extreme views framed against those with actual power and access to power. Occasionally actual politicians, typically women and minorities, can fit the bill, such as Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and Rashida Tlaid and the so-called “Squad,” for example, —who in international comparative terms are run-of-the-mill social democrats. 

These largely mythic Democrats are supposedly at war with mostly made-up or exaggerated cultural tropes of the mythical Real America, like the mostly fanciful “War on Christmas” that was a staple of Fox News coverage for many years (and featured the bathetic episode in which anchor Megyn Kelly asserted, among other things, “Santa just is white.”) It was Donald Trump’s mock-forceful stance on this contrived symbolic issue, according to some accounts, that won over influential evangelical Christian ministers to his side. Such extreme examples of cultural symbolism are effective in large part since they are hard to counterattack directly, as they rest on things hardly anyone believes, and even fewer say. (There is no end of debatable things that majorities or substantial pluralities within the Democratic Party do believe, such as immigration policy, but this is rarely the ground on which the GOP takes its stand.) These symbolic attacks win over many who are not, in fact, strong Trump supporters but have simply have been trained to hate Democrats more.  

It is strange, on the face of it, that most right-wing books, with varying degrees of sophistication, are preoccupied with attacking the supposed influence of Marxism and socialism when, from the standpoint of political scientists, who are presumably part of the ruling cabal, there are fewer actual socialists in the US than just about anywhere in the developed world. But it is all about perception, not reality, and caricatures are easier to hate than actual real-world people.  

Finally, through their presumed control of the “deep state,” as prefigured by Nixon and Reagan’s attacks on the “liberal establishment,” Democrats are always seen to be in charge, which absolves the GOP of having to do anything constructive while in office, and policy change has now effectively been outsourced to the Supreme Court. At the same time, Republicans vote against bills developed and sponsored by Democrats, always buoyed by the fact that they can rely on Democrats to pass programs (symbolic conservatives and operational liberals) while satisfying their symbolic crusade against government and not reaping the negative consequences.  

This symbolism gap represents a huge and persistent electoral handicap for Democrats. As well as a persistent problem for governing. Over the past several generations, Republicans have made the “messes,” for the most part: Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Great Recession, and (arguably) Covid-19, while Democrats have been the cleanup squad. Once the cleanup is complete, Republicans reassert their symbolic advantage, more strongly each time around. 

Joe Biden has gambled that accomplishing nuts-and-bolts tangible economic improvement can trump, as it were, fifty plus years of cultural conditioning. Democrats do almost nothing but pocketbook issues and long-run plays to shore up the economy. Biden, in particular, gets little or no credit for doing them, even when his administration has adroitly steered legislation through a divided and often hostile Congress. This is because the GOP and its vast network of sympathetic media have successfully convinced their base voters, and many Democrats, that the Democratic Party is controlled by extreme leftists and foes of capitalism. This can’t be fixed entirely by doing more constructive things, and trying to call attention to them, but by engaging in and to some extent winning the battle over cultural symbolism.  

Democratic constituents expect Democrats to deliver, and most Democratic leaders, in Congress and the President, are struggling mightily to do this. But the GOP has hamstrung government, relying on the counter-majoritarian structure that favors rural areas over cities, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. This distrust cycle, the outgrowth of the symbolism gap, further hurts Democrats. A President can’t simply push things through in the face of a divided Congress and a resistant Supreme Court, Green-Lantern superhero style, but a coalition of voters that depends largely on irregular young voters and urban working class voters who have little time or patience for politics quite understandably has little conception of this. They prefer to place a pox on all political houses. Which further helps the Republican party as it habitually runs against the idea of a competent government. 

It is one thing to win House seats, or local races, by concentrating on local issues, in addition to abortion, and in fact Democratic candidates in the most recent midterm and off-year cycles have outperformed in that regard. It is much harder to win presidential elections that way.

It is unfair to say that Democrats don’t have a philosophy. They do. Even if it is sometimes tacit, not explicit, and as virtually all their big ideas (“Medicare for All”) and the small-ball tactics reflect. It is to be more like Europe, or rather an idealized Europe, with social democratic institutions and more equality without the lower material standards of living and the actual xenophobia that prevails in most real-life European countries.

Unfortunately, that is not the foundation that the United States is built on, formerly or at present. Culturally speaking, it is inhabited by strivers, many of whom were in fact immigrants who arrived with next to nothing. Even if most of those immigrants didn’t win the game in a big way, this American Dream remains intact. It is the dream not only of comfortable material success but of winning beyond imagining and being willing to do the nearly insane to get there. Insanity is part of the American DNA. Many immigrants and especially those bound for college, and recent graduates want to succeed with the passion of a thousand suns. I’ve interviewed them as university applicants for decades. They are not disaffected nor opponents of capitalism in the least. They tend to run rings around the native-born population, especially American-born men, in their ambition and their accomplishments.    

Strivers. Glenn Campbell captured the essence of them in his song about yearning for fame and success, “Rhinestone Cowboy”:

I've been walkin' these streets so long
Singin' the same old song
I know every crack in these dirty sidewalks of Broadway
Where hustle's the name of the game
And nice guys get washed away like the snow in the rain

There's been a load of compromising
On the road to my horizon
But I'm gonna be where the lights are shinin' on me

Like a rhinestone cowboy
Riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo
Like a rhinestone cowboy
Getting cards and letters from people I don't even know
And offers comin' over the phone

The song is half celebratory, half melancholy. You tend to learn, after you improbably achieve success, that fame is not all it is cracked up to be. Like Icarus, you crash and burn. Hence Citizen Kane. Or Jimmy Cagney in Public Enemy. But that is for later, another quintessential American story. 

When George McGovern ran for president, he proposed a steep top progressive tax rate that would affect a handful of wealthy Americans and raise funding for a variety of major social programs, including expanded health insurance coverage. Told by his campaign manager that the idea was polling badly among his working-class Democratic base, he asked with incredulity: “Do all these people think they are going to win the lottery?” “Yes, George, they do,” the staffer astutely replied. 

Even if it is the result of family and group solidarity, immigrants are drawn to the United States to chase individual success. And thus back to the symbolism gap, as it pertains to economics. As with much of the support for Donald Trump and Republicans, which reflects aspirational identity, not his real story, the symbolism gap is about aspirational economics, not real-life economics. It is an aspirations gap, not a reality gap. Success, not stability, is the core American dream. Republicans have the music, and Democrats have the words. After the Democrats sort things out, Americans return to the music (or, in this case, the music man, but I digress) 

To return to the economy. Even those who are modestly ambitious, not rocket-fueled, want a piece of the American Dream, in the sense of getting ahead. They are thwarted by the modern economy. The forty percent rise in housing costs, as well as persistent student debt, have a lot to do with this sense of being blocked. If you are trying to make a down payment for a home, get your child into a good school, or place your aging parents in a decent nursing home, these big life goals are harder to attain than ever.  It is small consolation that the U.S. is doing better, by far, than much of the developed world, as while the goals may be unrealistic, they remain aspirational. As I drove around the country, frequently asking young people what they wanted, fully half told me that they wanted to start a successful business. Which needs capital. This is also why, in addition to the drumbeat of wrong predictions, why polls show that a majority of Americans believe wrongly that the country is in a recession.  

If the symbolism gap is real, what should Democrats do, if anything, to close it? 

One influential school of thought believes that this is the wrong question and indeed a pernicious one. What we should be doing is dismantling “master narratives” and myths and trying to move beyond the kind of tribalism, at its worst racism and white supremacy, that these stories inevitably denote. Democrats are reluctant to lean into these symbolic myths in part because the progressive wing of the party believes, rightly for the most part, that they whitewash history, literally. They gloss over the struggles of minority and working Americans and are irretrievably tainted as a result. 

As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has observed in focus groups, liberals and progressives tend to reject entirely the narratives of authority and loyalty that anchor the moral convictions of conservatives. For many liberals, Haidt writes, these values “don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression.” 

Others, reluctant to make these full-throated claims that are so clearly belied by historic and current realities, are trying in effect to build a new set of symbols, usually grounded in the positive values of diversity. Much of this effort is admirable, and new sets of American cultural symbols are no doubt long overdue. But diversity is not the stuff that myths are easily made of. It is descriptive, it can be worked for, it can be celebrated, but it almost by definition it lacks the tug of common purpose, because it is anti-tribal, that value-laden symbolism contains. This may be a plus in terms of human interaction, but it is counterproductive and premature, politically speaking. This symbolism around diversity tends to fall flat, even among large numbers of minorities and women whose equality, and indeed visibility, is rightly being elevated. 

Human beings are ineluctably tribal, and politics is the realm of the tribe, not the reasoning individual, contrary to myth. Avoiding competing in this symbolic realm means always rolling the rock uphill, which Democrats typically do. Though these symbols are tainted, it is hard if not impossible to propose a common vision of the future without a shared vision of the past that is substantially positive. And the party that can’t articulate such a vision won’t achieve sustained success. There is, as well, an element of political jiu-jitsu involved, attacking the opposition at what seems to be its strongest point. 

Appealing to symbolism is needed to sustain a fragile coalition of Democratic voters who have very little in common, in ways that are needed to win under today’s electoral and counter-majoritarian rules. Democrats have to win, or lose less badly, in all the midwestern and mid-Atlantic places, and among constituencies, where these dreams, aspirations, and myths have the strongest hold. While this approach is not going to work with diehard Christian evangelicals who constitute the heart of the GOP’s base, it can get traction with many rural and indeed urban Americans, especially men, and recent immigrants, Latino and Asian, for whom these symbolic issues resonate. Whose support for Democrats, if the polling of the last year is generally believable, has been eroding rapidly. 

Moreover, when Trump is off the stage, it will be harder to gin up fear about his successor. This is where a sustained appeal to symbolism comes in. How durable is the suburban vote for Democrats if Trump is neither on the ballot nor in the public eye and as those he has endorsed, and those who try to mimic his style, are up for election? My guess is not very durable, and rural voters will be far less inclined to vote for Democrats than suburbanites to switch back to the GOP, unless some kind of cultural affinity is reestablished.  

(My younger friends ask me when they can vote on principle rather than defensively. I tell them that when most of those older people voting today are dead, or when they can get more than twenty-five percent of their cohort to the polls.) 

Democrats don’t have to win on all every symbolic issue, or even most of them. As Haidt has persuasively written, liberals and progressives are at a permanent disadvantage in the debates over moral language, in part because conservatives play on all strings of the violin, so to speak (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, for the most part) while liberals and progressives tend to counter with Compassion and Equality. Results, not framing, will always have to be a big part of the liberal arsenal. But they do have to bridge this yawning chasm. Democrats have made some headway prying back “freedom,” but only at the cost of what was believed to be a settled Constitutional right. 

Progressive ideas can be advanced in part through an appeal to the narrative of individual success and the fulfillment of the American Dream. Democrats should back progressive policies that reduce inequality, but talk about them, especially to audiences of strivers, in ways that are connected to individual success. 

Universal health care is about not having to offer health care as an employer and to be at a disadvantage relative to the big established companies. Regulation and antitrust enforcement is not about red tape but about opening industries to competition. It is about your chance at getting an even chance to compete. Better home care is about being freed of family constraints, even if borne with love and grace, so that you can found the business you want. Government is not your antagonist, but your partner. Emphasize how the programs that Democrats have passed, such as clean energy, are plausible steps on the ladder of individual entrepreneurial success. Recent surveys show that Black and Hispanic men are over-represented among entrepreneurs and startups, and this is the group whose needed support for Democrats is shaky. Congressman Ro Khanna has been promoting the revival of the American Dream using a theme of economic patriotism, the need for new industries to be diffused throughout the country and for prosperity to be shared (“Americans love money, and opportunity”), and this call is in the same vein. 

(It is possible to stoke this myth without offending those who are truly struggling, but it takes a certain persona and a gift for rhetoric that is hard to pull off.  Which Biden lacks, even though he says with personal conviction, as I saw him say in person at a fall 2023 fundraiser, that he likes to see people get rich but that everyone needs to be raised up.)  

When Democrats eschew cultural symbolism, they are not simply jettisoning the flawed triumphalist myths but also the powerful symbolic message of liberal idealism, namely that the United States is flawed but making progress, that our best selves are yet to come. This was a winning tactic for Democratic standard bearers Clinton and Obama and, in fact, Jimmy Carter in 1976, whose subsequent bold call for unity was successfully distorted by Ronald Reagan. Exceptionalism and progress is the nation’s civic religion—not because the record has been exceptional, and indeed often the opposite, but because the ideals lend themselves to building greater than the Founders knew. 

This is the famous call of Langston Hughes, “America/ never was America to me/ But America, America, America will be. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her nomination acceptance speech to the Supreme Court, following a bruising and unfair confirmation hearing at the hands of Ted Cruz and other Republicans, summed up this illustrated this American dream:

“Among my many blessings -- and indeed, the very first -- is the fact that I was born in this great country. The United States of America is the greatest beacon of hope and democracy the world has ever known.”

Before the crucial group stage match against Iran in the most recent men’s World Cup of soccer, twenty-three-year old midfielder Tyler Adams, the son of a black father and a white mother, was asked by an Iranian journalist, who chided him for mispronouncing “Iran,” on racial discrimination in the United States. Adams replied, in part:

“My apologies on the mispronunciation of your country. That being said, there’s discrimination everywhere you go. One thing that I’ve learned, especially from living abroad in the past years and having to fit in in different cultures, is that in the U.S., we’re continuing to make progress every single day.”

Embracing aspirational national goals and symbols rather than uncomfortable realities are performative skills that are needed to win elections, and in this case to sustain the country’s democratic experiment altogether. Democrats need to lean into these goals without reservation. At the end of the great John Ford film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Jimmy Stewart, a newspaper owner, is asked about a key ambiguous event in the story of the protagonist. “Print the legend,” he responds. For politics, if not education, that is the right advice. 

Leif Wellington Haase, former director of New America in California,  is a political consultant based in northern California.