Political Power Flows From Shared Culture

But voters do not share the culture reflected by today's Democratic Party

Plato understood that politics is downstream from culture.¹ He advocated censoring poems in ancient Athens because he believed that the arts, myths, and poetry shape the soul and, therefore, the health of the city. Confucius believed something similar. He stressed that political order flows from shared music, rituals, and cultural practices. Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized that American political institutions rested on religious, familial, and cultural habits more than on laws. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued that “cultural hegemony” (meaning the control of media, education, and religion/morality) shapes political power.²

Culture Signals a Moral Framework

Culture operates at a deeper level than policy. It signals whether a leader shares the basic moral framework required to earn voter trust. Without trust, nothing else matters. Voters will reject policies they support if they come from a source they view as morally suspect. For this reason, cultural alignment is not just another policy consideration – it is a precursor to political persuasion. Democrats are paying a huge price for forgetting this lesson.

Trump grasps this instinctively. He uses elite cultural symbols to hammer one consistent message: "These people have screwed you."

Until Democrats stop embracing the cultural signifiers of urban professionals, they'll keep losing non-college voters. For Democrats to rebuild support with non-college voters, they must stop embracing symbols of elite culture on issues like guns, crime, race, immigration, trans issues, and climate.³

• Guns. Gun ownership signals masculinity, self-reliance, and personal security—not values that most Democrats prioritize. Instead of legislating sweeping federal restrictions, Democrats should move the assault weapon debates to states (ten have already enacted bans — enough to learn whether they work). With respect to federal policy, Dems should follow the lead of law enforcement: support background checks, domestic violence restrictions, prohibitions on ghost guns, and crackdowns on illegal weapons sales.

• Crime. A Democrat who hasn't renounced luxury beliefs like "defund the police" can't credibly attack Trump's law-and-order theatrics in Washington, DC. Our capital has one of the nation’s highest crime rates (even if it has fallen in recent years). Dems should emphasize public safety, support police and prevention programs, back prosecutors, and demand decent prisons.

• Race. Doctrinaire DEI programs and language policing make Democrats sound like the nation's HR department. Democrats should celebrate diversity, condemn all racial discrimination, and, like Martin Luther King, “judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Americans believe that merit matters – Democrats should as well.

• Immigration. Biden's border chaos allowed more than two million people into the country illegally and devastated his party. Dems need to celebrate legal immigration as a national treasure while condemning the illegal kind – as Barack Obama did. Support border security and expanding avenues for legal immigration, ideally based on a point system and regional visas. Remind voters that Trump killed the bipartisan border bill to help his campaign – then abandoned bipartisanship entirely in favor of executive actions free of Congressional oversight.

• Trans Issues. Many Democrats see gender as a social construct or an identity, but most voters focus on biological sex. Dems need to uphold three principles: nondiscrimination, non-interference in medical decisions, and local choice. Medical transitions, like abortions, should be private family decisions, not legislative debates. Whether trans women compete in women’s sports should likewise be decided by local teams and leagues, not Congress.⁴ When in doubt, Dems should follow the lead of Sarah McBride, the smart and pragmatic trans activist who represents Delaware in Congress.

• Climate. Apocalyptic messaging doesn’t work. Skip the Biden/Harris "existential crisis" rhetoric and focus instead on cheap energy. Instead of EV subsidies for upper-middle-class households, Democrats need to emphasize affordable energy. Drill if it's cheaper, build renewables if they're cheaper. The energy transition is happening fastest in Texas, not due to environmental fear-mongering, but because renewables cost less. Affordable energy is a green agenda because the energy contest is over. Renewables won.

These signals matter. In post-election polling, 58% of voters say that Democrats moved too far left, and only 47% say Republicans moved too far right. Working-class voters rated Kamala Harris as more extreme than Donald Trump. Political scientists and pollsters find the same thing. Liberal political analyst Kevin Drumm concludes, “Democrats have moved significantly to the left on most hot-button social issues while Republicans have moved only slightly right.”

Many Democrats miss this entirely. They treat fanciful social justice positions as cost-free and dismiss cultural concerns as right-wing manipulation of ignorant voters. This condescension deepens the problem.

It's Not Just the Economy

James Carville's mantra, "It's the Economy, Stupid," is often credited with Bill Clinton's 1992 win. But Clinton's "Sister Soulja moment" may have mattered more than the advice of the Ragin’ Cajun.

By condemning a Black activist's inflammatory rhetoric about killing white people—speaking directly to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition—Clinton showed he wouldn't excuse extremism from his own side. The left attacked him for it, which probably earned Clinton five mainstream voters for every progressive he lost.

Clinton understood that rejecting cultural double-standards enabled voters to hear his economic message who would not otherwise listen. This matters. The Progressive Policy Institute found that non-college voters did not believe that Kamala Harris could stand up to the more extreme members of her party – but by 41 points, they believed Trump could stand up to his own party’s extremists.

Today's Democratic party has too many Sister Souljas and too few Bill Clintons willing to call out extremism in their own ranks. The ACLU sued Biden for trying to control the border. Eric Adams defended sanctuary cities until he decided to cooperate with ICE rather than face corruption charges. Democrats who want to lead need to condemn this behavior. Strategist Ruy Teixeira, channeling his inner Che, called for Democrats to find "two, three, many Sister Soulja moments."

Republicans fully grasp that politics is downstream from culture. Until Democrats recognize this and reclaim the cultural mainstream, they'll keep losing the voters they need to win.

Musical Coda

1. The phrase “politics is downstream from culture” came from Andrew Breitbart, who concisely distilled a long intellectual tradition, even if his idea of culture was misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist.

2. Gramsci was offering a very fundamental critique of Marx, whose historical materialism argued that economics determines culture and politics (“the superstructure”). BTW, we know about Gramsci thanks to Pete Buttigieg’s late father, Joe, a Notre Dame professor who translated Gramsci’s three-volume Prison Notebooks.

3. (Those who, like me, lean on mnemonics can use “Gun CRITIC” to recall these hot-button cultural issues.) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

4. Only one openly transgender woman has ever competed in the Olympics. Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand qualified for the Tokyo 2020 weightlifting event under IOC rules. Despite intense media attention and claims of unfair advantage, she failed to complete a lift and finished near last. Despite the partisan fear-mongering, no transgender woman has ever won an Olympic medal.