The Iron Cage: Chapter 10 of The Liberal Backbone

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The crisis of liberalism is nowhere more serious than on the liberal left.

As I write, public approval of the Democratic Party stands, wobbling, at 29 percent in one major poll and 27 percent in another.

This may not be surprising to young Americans, who have never known a time when Democrats didn’t feel like underdogs.  

And yet for almost 50 years, the Democratic Party dominated American government.

Between 1933 and 1981, there were 24 sessions of Congress. For 22 of those 24, Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. During the same time there were 12 presidential terms. Eight were served by Democrats.

Now Democrats can lose, twice, to a party led by Donald Trump, whose campaigns have been natural experiments in just how bad a candidate can be and still beat the Democrats.

What happened?

The durable conventional wisdom has it that the problem is policy: Democrats have moved too far left. Or no, they’ve moved too far right.

And Democrats love to argue over policy, to do polls on policy, and design clever new policies.

But the fact is that most Democratic policies have always been popular with most Americans, and polls show most still are, even now.

Most Americans just don’t like Democrats any more.

And they’re telling Democrats why, if Democrats can hear.

Just after the 2024 election, Navigator Research organized focus groups with voters who had formerly voted Democratic but either switched to Trump or didn’t vote at all. For many, Kamala Harris represented what was wrong with the party. This participant, quoted in Politico magazine, spoke for many:

It seemed like a lot of what she came out and said wasn’t really off-the-cuff, wasn’t coming from her. Seemed like every interview, every time she came out and talked about something, it was planned out and never her thoughts, didn’t seem genuine to her thoughts, whereas, Trump, even though you never really knew what he was going to say, when he was going to say it, it was always him and genuine to what he thought, so that’s what swayed me.

Democrats, no matter how highly qualified they are, as Harris was, have come to exemplify alienation. They’ve become strangers to much of America, including much of their former blue collar and minority base.

Politics, now more than ever, depends on connection.  Trump, ostentatiously unqualified, connects.

A MAGA voter in Tennessee summed it up for a New York Times reporter in 2018:

I don’t really look at him as a politician. Even now, I look at him as just one of us. He doesn’t act like he’s above you, as a person.

This blue collar Tennessean was talking about a rich, scandal-ridden Manhattanite who had recently been caught expressing his contempt for Southerners.

But as we’ve all long since learned, the truth about Trump doesn’t matter much.

One of the most iconic political cartoons of this era was drawn by Paul Noth for The New Yorker. It shows a flock of sheep grazing under a campaign billboard for a wolf. The headline is “I AM GOING TO EAT YOU.”

“He tells it like it is,” says one sheep to another.

It’s not the message, it’s the way the message feels. And Trump can make a message feel right to his voters, no matter how wrong it is.

Voters often talk about Trump’s authenticity, and Democrats’ phoniness, even when Trump lies flagrantly and Democrats bring stacks of facts. Trump just feels more authentic.

People trust people they connect with, who are “one of us.”

And this, by the way, is true of people on the left and the right; it’s just that on the right it’s currently on spectacular display.

Yale psychologist Daniel Kahan studies a phenomenon called “identity-protective cognition.” Even highly educated people unconsciously warp reality to fit what their group believes about reality. And despite the fond hopes of liberals, more information doesn’t help.

Kahan demonstrated the power of identity-protective cognition in a 2013 experiment.

Participants were sorted according to two characteristics: their political views and their “numeracy,” or math skills.

Then each one was asked to interpret data from a simulated scientific study. Sometimes, the study would be about the effectiveness of a new cream in treating a skin condition. Other times, it was about the effectiveness of a new gun law in reducing crime. Sometimes the numbers showed that the cream or the gun law worked, other times that they didn’t.

Unsurprisingly, highly numerate participants were more likely to interpret the numbers correctly — when they were about skin cream. But if the same numbers were about the gun law, and the correct interpretation would challenge the participants’ views on guns, they were much more likely to get the wrong answer.

They weren’t doing it deliberately. Their political opinions had changed their reasoning — even though they were good at reasoning.

Is it any wonder that a candidate’s policy can be this or that, or as so often with Trump, nothing? Their voters will make it right, as long as the candidate is “one of us.”

In recent decades, for too many Americans, Democratic candidates have not felt like “one of us.” They’ve felt like aliens.

There have been exceptions: masters of personal, emotional connection, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But the rule has been Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris. All were eminently qualified, and none of us who aren’t family or friends can know what they were like in private. But in public, they came across as alienated, like many Democrats do.

It’s not what they said. It’s how they said it, and how they looked and sounded while they  said it. It’s how they felt. And as we saw with Alex Todorov’s experiments with candidate photos, people can decide how they feel about you before you say anything at all. Much other research yields similar results. My experience does too.

One example among many: While working on campaigns for Obama and then Hillary, I shot thousands of photos of each. They’re equally fine-looking people. But going over all those frames, I discovered that it’s hard to take a good picture of Hillary and nearly impossible to take a bad one of Obama.

The camera captures things the conscious mind misses: fleeting expressions that either do or don’t invite connection, because they do or don’t express feelings like warmth, ease, confidence, or humor. Unconsciously, we’re like the camera, sensitive to all those instantaneous images. They create a strong impression before someone says a word, let alone makes a speech. 

Obama and Bill Clinton are frequently described as “charismatic.” The word echoes the work of the influential early sociologist Max Weber.

Weber identified three sources of political authority: traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal, otherwise known as bureaucratic.

Obama and Bill Clinton personify the charismatic leader. Such a person, Weber says, has

…the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely personal devotion [to] and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, and other qualities of individual leadership.

When someone has the gift of charisma, their mere presence makes a powerful impact. I can vouch for that in the case of Obama, having watched him enter quite a few rooms. I’d call the effect mysterious, except it can be analyzed, as Todorov does in his work.

I will say it’s extremely hard to learn and imitate, though. When people try, they often make things worse, like when Dukakis rode in a tank, Kerry posed in hunting gear, Hillary hoisted a cold one in a blue-collar bar, or Kamala did an expert job of re-running an Obama campaign.

You probably have a good guess how Weber would see them. Rational-legal leaders, he said, claim authority not by their personal charisma but

…by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional ‘competence’ based on rationally created rules.

Not quite as inspiring, is it?

Weber is one of the most-cited scholars of modern alienation. Or, as he also called it, “disenchantment,” echoing the poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller. Weber wrote:

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

The rational-legal bureaucrat is the tribune of the disenchanted world.

Weber recognized that Enlightenment science had produced unprecedented progress – more then had occurred in all of previous history. And he recognized the necessity of bureaucracy in running the complex world science had created.

But that world could also feel like what Weber called an “iron cage.” Inside the iron cage is only what’s rational. Everything else is locked outside.

That “everything else“ includes gods, spirits, omens, blessings, curses, ecstasy, awe, terror, meaning, and… connection.

It’s not just that you can no longer believe in things that don’t exist. Even things that do feel less real.

You’re no longer immersed in the world, but observing it, and all that’s in it, not so much experiencing it as considering it.

That includes other people. If your communication with others is confined within the bounds of rationality, their, and your, physical presence is missing.

I don’t think that if you use Enlightenment reason it will inevitably take over your mind and condemn you to the iron cage.

But I do think it’s happened to a lot of today’s Democrats.

And that, maybe more than anything else, explains why they’re losing.

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Image: Max Weber, public domain via Wikimedia Commons