The “Democrats Must Be Losing Because They Don’t Agree With Me” Fallacy

Matthew Yglesias points us to a Michael Lind article about how the Dems would win if they pandered more to middle-class suburbanites, and identifies a major problem pretty much endemic to the genre. However, there’s enough projection and sloppy thinking here to be worth a more extensive exploration. The central problem with Lind’s article, as with virtually all such arguments, is that the central premise–that Democratic politicians lose because they spend too much time mocking everyone who doesn’t live in a major coastal city–is utterly fucking nuts. Of course, the actual situation is the reverse; Republicans can, up to and including in a Presidential debate, can invoke “Massachusetts” as an epithet until the cows come home, but a national Democrat could never use “Texas” (or “suburbia”) in the same way. Obviously, what’s going on here is that–as is evident from Up From Conservatism–is that Lind is a social conservative who likes suburbs and hates cities. That’s his privilege, and people who live and certainly people with this set of beliefs can and should be part of the Democratic coalition. (Of course, no Democrats ever say people shouldn’t be allowed to live in the suburbs. And, yes, some people don’t like box stores and cookie-cutter suburbs–so what? Since when is only Michael Lind allowed to express aesthetic judgments and values?) In many respects his arguments–such as his claim that people who live in cities and use mass-transit are un-American–are normatively odious, but I’ll leave that aside for now. More importantly, his belief that Democrats must be losing because they’re not enough like him creates all kinds of problems for his prescriptive arguments:

1. On a minor point, his reading of the arguments made by Democrats about “parasite” red states is willfully obtuse. Democrats do not argue that these transfers are necessarily bad; indeed, most progressives would enact policies that would transfer wealth on balance from wealthy states to poor states (although some of these transfers–with agricultural subsidies at the top of the list–are not good policy.) Rather, the point is to attack the hypocrisy of rural Republicans who sneeringly compare their “self-reliant” states with “coastal elites” while happily accepting their money. (This can be perhaps the be called “I’ll take your money, but I won’t clean your driveway” argument.)
2. The argument really goes off the rails when he engages in an extended, incoherent attack on people who like to live in dense urban areas. Remember, this is an argument about national policy. He doesn’t adduce national Democratic politicians who oppose suburban sprawl, for the obvious reason that there aren’t any. So is this about policy? That seems to be it, but obviously a claim that the federal government when controlled by Democrats subsidized cities and mass transit at the expense of cars and suburbs would be Orwellian, so again he can’t actually cite any examples. What he does criticize when he gets around to an actual argument about policies, then, is the (few) cities that choose to favor density over sprawl. Which convieniently reminds us that his singing of the praises of federalism and republicanism later on is, as is almost always the case, purely expedient. When communities choose policies that he doesn’t agree with, republicanism seems to lose its allure for Lind. And, obviously, as an argument about what Dems need to do to get Congress back this argument is wholly without value. Last time I looked, Democratic candidates weren’t having trouble winning in Portland or New York City, despite the urban policies everybody there must hate because Michael Lind hates them.
3. But wait, it gets worse. Lind asks: “Why have liberal Democrats in recent decades done so much for the largely urban working poor and relatively little for the suburban working class?” The first problem is that this argument is generally false. In the real world, Dems have successfully defended middle-class entitlements, but caved on welfare reform. What about Lind’s one example of this, health care? Normatively, his argument is pretty appalling; it strikes me that the claim that people without insurance have a more serious problem than insured people whose expenses are rising is rather compelling. But, that aside, we can see here the worst part of Lind’s argument: He blames urban liberal Democrats for the policies of conservative Democrats. You may recall that Clinton tried to pass a health care policy that would focus on cutting costs, and it failed despite Democratic majorities. So, who rolled on this–liberals from San Fransisco and Boston? Of course not; it was the conservative Dems from the south and midwest that Lind fetishizes who killed it. And what about the best chance of reducing health care costs–single payer? (Yes, it’s true–even France spends less state money on health care than the U.S.) Here, the pattern would be even more extreme; the only support would come from the dense urban centers and college towns Lind despises.

Lind is a smart guy, and there may be a salvageable argument here. But as long as he allows his obsession with urban dwellers who refuse to get with the “American dream “–exclusive definer, Michael Lind–to distort his claims, his argument won’t get anywhere worth going.