Democrats May Deliver the Goods, but They Need an Answer of the Spirit: the Grabowskis
Jack Grabowski is alienated. His great grandparents immigrated to America in the early 1900s, fleeing the widespread pogroms in the Russian Empire. They initially arrived at Ellis Island before eventually settling in Millhurst, Pennsylvania (a fictional city).
Jack, born in 1976, was the middle of six siblings and grew up juggling household responsibilities.They lived in a small, two bedroom, one bath house which was originally built during the Victorian Housing boom. A coat of white paint adorned its walls with a creaky porch that Jack’s dad had to keep repairing.
His father was named Pyotr Grabowski. Pyotr married young to Jack’s mom, Elina Grabowski. Jack’s parents were loving and hard workers. Pyotr worked day in and day out at the Millhurst steel mills, while Elina stayed home raising all five of the Grabowski kids. Jack rarely saw his father, and when he did, Pyotr was a gruff disciplinarian. Still, Jack knew that both his parents loved him and wanted the best for him.
Like many families, The family wasn’t destitute, but they lived paycheck to paycheck, and Jack still remembers the hard months.
Of course, Jack’s family participated in the time honored American tradition of political participation. Jack’s parents were Democrats. Pyotr was a Vietnam vet and benefited from the Great Society of LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson). Pyotr was also a union worker and participated in local union-organizing meetings.
After high school and community college, Jack followed his father into the steel plant. One of his older brothers, Michael, got a scholarship to attend UC Berkeley and left for California around the same time. The rest of the Grabowski family would scatter with only Pyotr and Elina staying in Millhurst.
Jack also wedded young like his parents, marrying Ana Isabel Soria. Ana’s parents immigrated to Millhurst to escape the poverty that ravaged generations of her family in Central America. Ana and Jack became “The Grabowski’s” and had two children, a boy, and a girl. They buy a nice house with a white picket fence.
Everything appeared to be going well for the Grabowski’s.
Then everything changed: the steel plant closed, and Jack had to take odd jobs to keep his family afloat.Pyotr and Elina passed away, leaving Jack and his wife and kids, the only Grabowski’s left, in Millhurst.
That’s when Michael calls. Michael tells Jack he has a job lined up for him in San Francisco, at his startup. It’s something Jack can do—elementary management—-and best of all, it pays much better than the steel plant ever did.
Jack says no.
How the Democrats Lost Jack
But why? While fictional, Jack’s story is hardly unique, as any visit to a dwindling Rust Belt town will show. People in dire economic conditions, oftentimes so bad that they scrape to get by, choose to stay put and not leave their communities.
This baffles people. And most of all, it baffles the Democratic Party. Throughout the aftermath of the 2024 election defeat, DNC consultants tripped over themselves trying to rationalize how Americans could have voted for Trump when the Biden administration had, by all available economic metrics, improved their standard of living.
A couple of decades ago, Thomas Frank published “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” based on the befuddlement that Kansans were voting against their economic self-interest. Doesn’t economics drive voting behavior?
No, it does not.
Here’s one study that illustrates this. The researcher Nima Sanandaji calculated the poverty rate of Americans with Swedish ancestry. It was 6.7 percent. He also looked at the poverty rate in Sweden, using the American standard of poverty, and it was also 6.7 percent. Different political systems, same outcome.
What’s the commonality between Kansans, Jack, and American-Swedes? All of them are living proof that progressive material analysis is incomplete..
The assumption that people need more money, that they need more “material” to raise their standard of living, to be “fulfilled,” and that they will vote accordingly is the underlying assumption of current Democratic orthodoxy, and consequently, was the approach of the Biden administration.
Biden literally gave Americans money through his stimulus checks. What could be more simple than that? People need money, Biden gave them it, and thus, he should be rewarded. Yet he was not. Plenty of people squandered those stimulus checks, and plenty more felt the economic ease from them but voted the other way anyway.
So then if it’s not economics, material, that drives voting behaviors, what is it? Turning to conservative authors like Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and James Q. Wilson reveals the power of nonmaterial forces — culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and community cohesion.
Let’s turn back to Jack. Jack values his community church, the bakery that knows his order and lets him slide on payments, and the rough-and-tumble Midwestern culture. There is no substitute for that in the comparably artificial culture of the A.I boom of San Francisco.
And that’s what he cares about. Sure, it might be a struggle to make the rent or put food on the table—but at the end of the day, Jack is surrounded by loving people. As the old adage goes “money can not buy happiness.” Jack’s happiness does not flow from material: it flows from the non-material, the culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, and community cohesion.
It’s no surprise, then, that Republicans—drawing from a conservative tradition of non-material analysis—have been better equipped than Democrats, rooted in material analysis, to appeal to Jack’s non-material needs.
Enter the new culture war. When American Eagle received pushback for its “Sydney Sweeny has good genes” ad, and when Cracker Barrel moved to change their logo to a more slick modern design, the conservative internet world mobilized to defend a supposed “leftist coup” of traditional American culture.
Jack sees all of this. He looks on as conservative influencers spin a narrative of a Democratic plot to strip away his traditional “beautiful white women” and good old fashioned Southern cuisine.
What is the Democratic retort? A muddled message about the Inflation Reduction Act, and Infrastructure policy, with a side dish of labeling Jack as a “red necked racist hick.”
Republicans have successfully outmaneuvered Democrats on the issue of culture. Coining the term “woke,” they have been able to cast Democrats as attacking traditional American culture. A culture that a lot of Americans, Jack included, care deeply about, more than any material economic promises.
This is what has allowed Republicans to sweep back into power and enact their authoritarian agenda. Thus, if Democrats want to stop that sweeping authoritarianism, they will need to craft a strategy that counters that. Democrats will need to start playing to voters’ non-material needs.
The first step would be for the Democratic party to stop obsessing over policy. The second would be to accept that on such issues as immigration, crime, and cultural norms, matter more in how they affect people’s culture than their economics. Democrats can bemoan the economic benefits of asylum, but the facts remain that the majority of Americans simply want a restrictive immigration policy.
The Democratic Party is out of step with voters when it comes to cultural issues. It has tried to supplant this reality by providing better economic policy than the Republican alternative. This strategy has failed, because Americans care more about culture than economics.
Were a Democratic government to come into office that cut immigration, increased prison sentences, and said vaguely encouraging things about tradwives, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. The 90s were a long time ago, but they’re not ancient history. Bill Clinton ran on increasing the length of prison sentences and expanding the use of the death penalty.
He had what was at the time the most diverse administration on record by a large margin. He safeguarded abortion rights. He promoted women to high office in unprecedented ways.
In then follows that a Democratic Party that accepted that most Americans want a restrictive immigration policy, from a cultural perspective, could also safeguard trans rights. As Sarah McBride, the first openly Trans member of congress, noted in her podcast with Ezra Klein, taking the most maximalist progressive position on cultural issues will inevitably alienate people who agree with a bulk of the issue but not the most extreme 1%.
This “reorientation,” so to speak, of the Democrats’ approach to rhetoric and governing is opposed to the prevailing theory offered by those on the left of the party Cade Kuzina, Jadian Leary: namely, that Biden simply did not cut enough checks to people.
Medicare for all, UBI, free transportation, free childcare, rent-stabilization, food assistance, and all the other sweeping policy proposals championed by progressives ultimately rest upon the assumption that simply giving people money will automatically improve their economic conditions.
Money =/ Results. Culture Does
Today, we spend more money combating poverty than the entire US GDP from 1969, yet “the share of Americans whose pretransfer income places them in absolute poverty has barely fallen.”
A lack of money may be the definition of being poor, but it isn’t the cause of being poor. The causes lie elsewhere – skills, impulsiveness, criminality, addiction—in non-material forces. Instead of giving out money, a better path should focus on these non-material forces: (1) education to provide skills, (2) treatment to curb bad behavior, and (3) more law enforcement when incentives don’t work.
Return to that study about Swedish Americans I mentioned earlier. What allows Swedish Americans to succeed is not economic fortune—Swedes out of all economic strata performed on level with each other—rather, it is the cultural norms Swedish Americans inherit from their Swedish culture. A strong work ethic, a society characterized by high trust, and an emphasis on education, are what shape the economic fortunes of Swedes. If it was solely economics that determined the eventual fortunes of American-Swedes—as is the assumption of progressives—then the data would show that lower income Swedes go on to have a higher poverty rate than high income ones.
Yet that’s not what it shows. Swedes in Sweden and Swedes in America have the same economic outcomes. Because they are all Swedes. In the absence of any shared economic reality, what determines the destiny of Swedes is their culture—their non material.
A more tangible example of this can be found in a tweet by former presidential candidate, turned Ohio gubernatorial candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
Vivek was responding to the ongoing H1B visa debate in MAGA world, taking the side of keeping the visa, while offering a rebuttal of the race-based explanations offered by those in the far-right of the GOP for the over-representation of Indian-Americans in STEM fields.
As Vivek points out, the reason for why H1B visa holders overperform Americans in STEM fields is because of the stagnant lack of focus on education by American culture and the heightened focus placed on it by immigrant cultures.
Immigrants, on average, start off with fewer economic resources than native born Americans. Yet they are (generally speaking) able to rise to the top of high income and prestige fields because of the emphasis their culture puts on achieving it. A jock can have all the money in the world, but if they don’t hit the books, they will be beaten by the nerd who comes from a poor background.
This highlights another reason why it’s unwise for Democrats to keep insisting that material conditions alone determine people’s success. That argument can be weaponized by the far right. White supremacists, for example, might point to the fact that Indians are overrepresented in STEM fields compared to white Americans, despite coming from less advantaged backgrounds, and then use hate and racism to fill in the gaps. When Democrats claim that “economics alone” explains outcomes, people will inevitably seek darker, more toxic explanations once that claim inevitably turns out to be bunk.
As I write this, Charlie Kirk, founder and CEO of TPUSA, has just been horrifically assassinated in Utah. The right, and the alt right, has responded to this event by blaming the “left” for the killing, in particular blaming the “radical left culture”, that, in their re-telling, is hostile to the White Christian America that Kirk represented.
The Democratic response has been to blame the “polarized culture” of America for this latest instance of political violence. The key word there is “culture”. This violence has nothing to do with a “class revolution” or the greed of the “1%”, instead it has to do with “culture”: the non material. If Democrats want to effectively end this country’s epidemic of political violence, they must go beyond vague platitudes blaming “polarized culture”, and instead shift their rhetoric towards addressing the non-material forces that have led us to that hyper-violent, polarized, culture.
How the Democrats can win back Jack
So then the bottom line is this: Democrats need to acknowledge the non material. Both when it comes to voting behaviors and economic outcomes.
More than just acknowledge it, they need to embrace it. Democrats need to lean into culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and community cohesion. One of the key ways to do this, would be to proudly embrace religion, as Texas state representative Tom Talarico has been doing in his stump speeches.
Democrats are uniquely positioned to reclaim religion right now. At a time when we’ve been hearing Republicans condemn the “sin of empathy”, Democratic positioning on culture should be to return to our most basic “golden rule”, “love thy neighbor”, gospels.
Another would be to moderate on culture more generally. If Democrats decide to shun everyone who fails to embrace certain progressive cultural values, then we will end up with a bunch of very authoritarian Republicans winning elections and everyone standing around wondering what happened. Simply doubling down on economic populism without addressing cultural issues on their own terms is unlikely to work.
The last two Democratic Presidents who won two terms and workable congressional majorities did this. I brought up the example of Bill Clinton earlier, but as recently as 2008, Barack Obama opposed same-sex marriage equality, and won a landslide victory that would eventually enable his administration to recognize same sex marriage.
Democrats should also adjust their approach towards combating poverty. They should take a page out of Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and his famous maxim: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.”
Democrats need to be willing to spend money fighting poverty but also be willing to promote the traditional values and practices that enable people to rise.
In 2024 Jack cast his ballot for Donald Trump. It didn’t matter that it was Biden’s surplus checks that kept his family afloat during the pandemic, or that it was the Biden infrastructure investments that kept his town from crumbling. What did matter, is what always has mattered, to Jack, and to most Americans: the spirit.
The invisible non material forces that truly are the hearts and souls of the American people. If Democrats want to win back Jack’s vote, they need to look inward, beyond the flashy material, and into that spirit.
Epilogue
As an epilogue to this article, I want to speak a bit about the Biden Administration, and its missteps when dealing with America’s “non material forces”. Biden was elected as a moderate. He was elected as someone playing to “the soul of America”. That was what he was talking about in his stump speeches, and addresses to the nation during his administration. He was elected on the backbone of his vision for a rebirth of the lost culture of America under Trump.
His major misstep came in trying to achieve this “rebirth” through progressive materialism. Joe Biden and his team had one job: to make sure Donald Trump never set foot in the White House again. They tried to accomplish that the only way they knew how: throw money at the problem. The vast bulk of the new Biden spending went to red states to employ workers without college degrees. Politically, the project was a complete failure. Populism is not primarily economic; it’s about respect, values, and national identity—-non material forces. All that spending did not win anybody over.
Today, most of our problems are moral, relational, or spiritual—not purely economic. Biden should have tried to solve those problems by engaging with them on their own turf: engage morality with morality, not with cash. As an example, Biden would always opine on the need for a “strong non-Trump GOP”, but he made virtually no effort during his term to actually govern bipartisanly, instead jamming through massive progressive spending packages. Spending packages that went to red states, under the assumption that cash = votes.
Biden had half the equation right. He knew that America was in a crisis of the non-material. He simply tried to solve that problem the only way liberals seem to know how to: by cutting checks.
I do think there is a point where material and non material conditions overlap. I just think the left does a terrible job addressing it. “Silicon Valley is intentionally destroying the social fabric for profit” was the big elephant in the room of the last decade and nobody wanted to address it because their employees had pronouns in their email signatures.
The products of Big Tech are just as much “material conditions” as say the wages of their employees. Oftentimes leftists want to blame “material conditions” for stuff instead of blaming social media, which is seen as centrist and lame, but clearly the products made by these massive companies are a “material condition” .
A workable leftist approach could be mixing these two things together. “Big tech is destroying the social fabric for profit” is a message I could get behind.
The Last Part: Bernie Sanders vs Joe Manchin, in West Virginia
There is a conventional wisdom in politics: The American voter base leans right on culture, and left on economics. It’s a pickle then that our politicians are Joe Manchin, a right winger on both issues, and Bernie Sanders, the reverse. Both can win big—even in West Virgina—as Manchin showed by sticking it out as a Democrat there, and Bernie has shown by sweeping the state in the 2016 Democratic Primary.
So then who do we pick? I would pick Joe Manchin. The reason I would pick Manchin, is because while Manchin has stood like a stonewall on his right wing economics, the supposedly unpopular part of the package, Bernie has cracked on culture. Bernie has said the Democratic party needs to get tougher on immigration, has taken a more pro-gun position than is the norm within the party, and has said the party needs to move away from a “woke agenda”. Now, of course, Bernie always folds these positions into a larger populist left wing narrative, even going as far to call open borders a “Koch Brothers scheme”.
Despite that, it’s telling that even Sanders has conceded that economic populism can not compensate for a defense of deeply unpopular cultural values, instead choosing to marry economic populism with palatable views on cultural issues.
Compare that to Manchin. He’s been able to stick it out, without having to break on his side of the “unpopular with Americans” coin.
Democrats should take a cue.