The Manhattan Institute report finds that about 11 percent of Democrats identify ideologically with what the report terms the Woke Fringe. Here’s how the report puts it:
The Woke Fringe (11% of the Democratic coalition)—voters who describe themselves as a “Democratic Socialist” or “Communist.”
The Woke Fringe stands apart demographically and attitudinally. It is the youngest faction, with an average age of 43 and seven in ten members under the age of 50. It is the group with the fewest Hispanics (6%) but the largest proportion of black (22%) and Asian voters (7); 60% are white. This group is more likely to live in urban areas, particularly in the Northeast. Ideologically, it is the most consistently left-leaning faction, with a majority identifying as “very left-leaning.” Members of this group are also significantly more likely than other Democrats to report poor mental health (25%), compared to the other groups (14% for Moderates, 16% Progressive Liberals.)
You know my basic view of both parties. They’re too internally democratic—TLDR: primaries suck—and they are too institutionally weak to do the admittedly hard, but obviously smart, thing: purge or marginalize their fringes in an unapologetic campaign to win over the voters in the middle.
As a purely political matter (we can leave policy and morality out of it for the moment), the reason such a purge would be smart for Democrats—or Republicans—is simply that there are more voters in the middle than there are on the fringes. Moreover, the more “normie” voters you get, the more fringy you make the other party look. Enduring majorities are built on this basic logic.
The main reason it’s hard is that those on the fringe—and the fringe-sympathetic—care more about politics and take politics more seriously than normal voters who, broadly speaking, have more important and rewarding things to do with their time and energy. (The suits at The Dispatch often call these normies, or “our audience.”) The fringers have more internal power within the parties and the network of institutions that fund and support them (with media coverage, donations, organization, and mobilization).
An additional challenge is negative polarization and hyper-partisanship. Attacking members of your own “team” outrages even very moderate members of your coalition. J.D. Vance’s anti-anti-Nazi schtick is one variant of this. The left’s longstanding love affair with popular frontism and its outrage at “hippie punching”—i.e., criticizing the left instead of aiming all hostilities rightward—is another. Lots of normie Democrats and Republicans simply hate the other party so much these days that they confuse internal hygiene and sanity with “divisiveness” and “cancel culture.” This logic is all very stupid, but its practitioners make it sound very sophisticated (charges of hypocrisy and double standards are a key tool for enforcing cohesion: “How dare they criticize our whack jobs when they don’t criticize their own! I won’t give them the satisfaction of denouncing someone on my team.”).
What interests me about the Democrats is where their fringe comes from. You’ve heard me channel Yuval Levin many times about how institutions mold character. The lazy or louche hippie gets sent to the Marines and comes out the other side a straight-backed, disciplined young man. The self-involved kid joins the Boy Scouts and comes out helping old ladies with their groceries.
I’ve long argued that elite universities play a similar function for progressive ideologues. Now, it’s not the case that everyone who goes to Brown or Yale comes out a social justice warrior. But for a lot of young people, that is exactly what happens. Pick certain classes, fall under the sway of a particular mentor, land in the right (or wrong) crowd, and you come out with expectations and ideological commitments that are downright fringy. Some kids go into college seeking that stuff—and they find it. Others get converted to it.
But it’s not just a matter of ideological indoctrination. The institution itself breeds certain ways of thinking. When I used to do a lot of campus speaking, I’d have great fun poking at this thinking. College kids, particularly ones with affluent parents who don’t need to work their way through school, tend to think they’re incredibly independent.
This is understandable. For most attendees, college is the first extended period of being on your own, away from parents and the expectations of friends and family. You have to make your own way to class. You pick your courses. You rise and sleep on your own schedule and eat and drink as you want. But ye gods, you’re not independent. Nearly everything is provided for you. Someone else shops for your food, prepares it, and cleans up after you. Campus security protects you. Describe college life to a middle-aged professional and it sounds a lot more like a vacation, a bougie rumspringa, than a serious burden.
I think that for a serious fraction of college graduates—especially, but not solely, the fringers—they internalize the idea that this is how life is supposed to work. The government should act like university administrators on a national scale. It should enforce diversity and police affronts to one’s self-esteem. It should ensure that everyone gets to “be who they want to be.” Psychologically and sociologically, this is why so many progressives go to graduate school. They want to keep the idyll going, to extend their stay in Shangri-la.
When they eventually go out into the real world, they gravitate toward organizations and vocations that are closest to the campus mindset—nonprofits, the media, activist groups, education, government, public sector unions, and the Democratic Party. This ecosystem is very insular and self-reinforcing. Politicians tend to reflect the attitudes of the audiences they speak to, and the feedback they get from those audiences tends toward a worldview that says America should be like one vast college campus, where you don’t worry about health insurance, saving money, forming a family, or hard work that you don’t enjoy.
I still chuckle at one of the arguments that Nancy Pelosi made for passing Obamacare. With the Affordable Care Act, she explained, you’ll be freed from being “job-locked.” Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of decoupling health insurance from your employer. Employer-sponsored health insurance was a World War II-era innovation at a time when wages were frozen, so employers started offering it as an alternative form of compensation.
But when making her argument, Pelosi said that once free from job-lock you’ll be free to do whatever you want, including “write poetry.” People who really love writing poetry have always been free to do so. What Pelosi was appealing to is the idea that the government should free you from the burdens of work so you can indulge your heart’s desires. I don’t think Pelosi is a Marxist, but this is a very Marxish idea. Here’s how Karl put it:
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
Now, this G-File is getting long, and my plane is about to land in Dallas, so let me see if I can land the former before the pilots handle the latter.
Obviously, there’s a lot of generalization here. And we should be fair to the non-college-educated left-wing lunatic fringe, which punches above its weight. And since I’m offering clean-up caveats, I should also note that there are plenty of right-wing lunatics who are shaped by their college experiences in unhelpful ways (trolling gets rewarded in college, too).
Regardless, I think it’s useful to think about how certain institutions mold characters that are fit for one institution but problematic for another. The example that comes most immediately to mind is fascism. Benito Mussolini saw fascism as a way of extending the “socialism of the trenches” he experienced during World War I. He was hardly alone. Whether you call it fascism, militarism, or simply esprit de corps, history is full of intellectuals and political leaders who thought they could take their experience in the military and graft it onto government.
But that’s not the only example. The clichés about running government like a business rest on the same sort of assumptions. Heck, right now we’re experimenting with reality show and cable news hosts running the country and taking us to war.
Once you start looking for it, it’s a pattern going back centuries (I’ll spare you my deeper-cut historical riffs on Jansenism, Puritanism, and the Cluniac Reforms). People from one kind of institution think they can make government and politics operate by the same rules as that institution and under the same assumptions, if they’re given power.
Anyway, my basic point is that people with bangs are crazy. No, wait—that’s not it.
The problem with the phrase “lunatic fringe” or even “fringe” is that it assumes that members of the fringe are on the outskirts, the periphery, of politics. But that’s not the case. In the GOP, lunatics run several very important wings of the asylum. In the Democratic Party, the lunatics are often lionized as heroes who symbolize the core values of the party, or the left.
I guess the point, or at least a point, is that government in a free society is an institution like no other and cannot be meaningfully run like a business, the military, or a college campus without society losing some of its freedom. We need politicians who know what government is for and, relatedly, who know what it can and cannot do. Political parties are supposed to help such politicians get elected and to govern. Parties won’t be able to do that until they figure out a way to make “fringe” mean something again.
