“Some people don’t want a tent so big that it includes bigots.”
This is a relatively common sentiment on the left, one that I heard echoed in a group chat several weeks ago. My fellow chat-ter was incensed by the notion that bipartisan abundance efforts included people with unsavory views.
This is an appealing notion. Bigotry is bad! I don’t like bigots. I share the widespread sense on the left that the political success of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has inspired a coarsening of our culture that tolerates and even celebrates expressions of bigotry that deserve to be stigmatized.
The sense that bigotry is not only bad but requires a kind of purifying distancing is not a new one. As a teenager, I knew They Might Be Giants’ “Your Racist Friend” well. The song’s narrator attends a fun party, but feels forced to leave not, per se, because he finds the racist friend so unpleasant, but because he finds the host’s willingness to tolerate the racist friend to be intolerable.
The ethic advanced in the chorus was politically advanced for 1990, when the song was released (Strom Thurmond was a senator in good standing and a few years later an aircraft carrier would be named after John Stennis) but very emblematic of more contemporary progressive attitudes toward such matters:
This is where the party ends
I can’t stand here listening to you
And your racist friend
I know politics bore you
But I feel like a hypocrite talking to you
And your racist friend
And yet, when it comes to the work of Democratic politics, this ethic of shunning is counterproductive and unworkable. Nobody should celebrate or encourage bigotry or hang a giant “BIGOTS WELCOME HERE” sign on the outside of their tent. But a political coalition large enough to wield power and accomplish useful things absolutely needs to include bigots.
Put so bluntly, it’s uncomfortable. But any halfway serious effort to reckon with actual facts about American public opinion and demographics will reach the same conclusion.
According to the 2024 General Social Survey, 32% of Americans say it is “always wrong” for same-sex adults to have sexual relations. This number has declined precipitously over the past generation, from 73% in 1990 to 58% in 2004. Today, it is a decidedly minoritarian view.
Still, 32% is a large number.
Liberals I tell this to tend to assume the 32% are all hardcore right-wingers whose views they don’t really need to consider as an electoral matter. And it’s of course true that the GSS reveals a huge partisan split, with 52% of Republicans saying it’s always wrong versus just 17% of Democrats.
That said, 17% of Democrats isn’t nothing. If 17% of Democrats all defected to the GOP, the result would be a landslide election.
Who are these homophobic Democrats? Well, only 30% of white Americans say same-sex relationships are always wrong, but 43% of African Americans agree. Knowing what we know about the strong correlation between race and partisanship in the United States, it follows that while white Democrats have very low levels of homophobia, a reasonably large minority of Black Democrats hold anti-gay views.
When you get people out of politics mode and into just thinking about their interactions with human beings in society, this is the kind of thing that they tend to be aware of.
When my kid was about three or four, I took him to a family-friendly street fair. The adults were a mix of Logan Circle yuppie parents and foreign-born nannies, mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean. Someone started handing out helium balloons to the kids, some blue and some pink. The kids were grabbing the balloons and playing without paying much attention to the color, but then some of the adults started intervening and sorting the balloons: blue for boys and pink for girls.
Take a second and guess whether it was the white yuppies or the Latino and Afro-Caribbean working class who were the self-appointed gender police.
When I ask people in my life this question, absolutely everybody guesses correctly that it was the nannies. Normal adult Americans with eyes and ears are aware that while the epicenter of American conservatism is rural white evangelical Republican types, lots of other kinds of people hold traditionalist views on a range of questions related to gender and sexuality.
Just as many white Americans hold and articulate unflattering stereotypes of Black people, so do many Hispanic and Asian Americans. There is no way to put together a winning political coalition based entirely on people who hold all-around progressive views on social and cultural issues, because such people are a relatively small minority of the country. The only reason progressive cultural politics seems even vaguely plausible is that, in a practical sense, a relatively narrow, relatively elite group is counting on the votes of a lot of sexist nannies and homophobic Black churchgoers.
Progressives tend to hand-wave these realities away, but they are stark. One of the big surprises of the past three election cycles is the extent to which, despite Trump’s often-inflammatory rhetoric, he has consistently gained ground with nonwhite voters across cycles.
Some of that relates to issues that are far outside the cultural domain. But some of it stems from the fact that the increasing stringency of progressive taboos against bigotry is working.
The range of views that one is allowed to hold or express while remaining a member in good standing of America’s center-left has gotten smaller. This means that fewer people are in it and Republicans are winning more elections.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s final book before he died, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? featured his late-career thoughts on the kind of broad program of economic development and empowerment that he believed would build a more egalitarian American society. He also wrote explicitly about what kind of political coalition he believed could deliver this change.
King was, I think it is fair to say, not blind to the problems of bigotry in American life or indifferent to it as a problem. But his explicit view was that it would not be possible to construct the required majorities purely on the basis of a coalition with “woke” white anti-racists. He hoped instead to make common cause with low-income white people, people who he believed had historically been prevented from joining forces due to bigotry but who he wanted to welcome into the big tent:
Within the white majority there exists a substantial group who cherish democratic principles above privilege and who have demonstrated a will to fight side by side with the Negro against injustice. Another and more substantial group is composed of those having common needs with the Negro and who will benefit equally with him in the achievement of social progress. There are, in fact, more poor white Americans than there are Negro. Their need for a war on poverty is no less desperate than the Negro’s. In the South they have been deluded by race prejudice and largely remained aloof from common action. Ironically, with this posture they were fitting not only the Negro but themselves. Yet there are already signs of change. Without formal alliances, Negroes and whites have supported the same candidates in many de facto electoral coalitions in the South because each sufficiently served his own needs.
When I first read that passage several years ago, it reminded me of a conversation I had back in 2016 with a now-former elected official from northern Maine. He lived in a county that voted for Bill Clinton twice, for John Kerry, and for Barack Obama twice but has since gone for Trump three times. He warned me at a time when we both mistakenly believed Hillary Clinton would win in a landslide that Trump was going to post major gains in the inland parts of Maine.
“My constituents aren’t racists,” he told me. “But they just don’t care about all this stuff,” gesturing broadly at the increased interest in identity issues associated with the Great Awokening in American politics that was underway during Obama’s second term.
I, more left-wing at the time, sternly told him that indifference to the plight of nonwhite Americans was, in fact, racist, even if the people expressing it weren’t using slurs or calling for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act.
One could obviously argue the semantic point both ways. Certainly, if you want to say that anyone who could listen to Trump’s campaign message from 2016 and decide to vote for him likely has some kind of problematic ideas about race and gender, I’m not going to disagree with you.
But King’s framing of the question is ultimately more productive. Whether we’re talking about the election of 1968 or 2008 or 2012, the voters of Penobscot County were not so bigoted as to be unable to join forces with voters of color to advance an egalitarian economic agenda. In more recent cycles, these problematic voters have been outside the big tent — and both the Democratic Party and the cause of American liberalism have been worse off for it.
None of which is to say that liberals should endorse or promote bigotry. Just last week, POLITICO revealed that a group chat for twentysomething and thirtysomething Republican Party professionals was awash in racist and anti-semitic jokes. Vice President JD Vance has consistently defended the bigots by minimizing the actual content. One gets the sense that for many younger Republicans in particular, openness to racism is in fact the core appeal of the party. There is a world of difference between a political movement led by non-racists trying to exercise some restraint in how high it sets the bar and a movement willfully wallowing in bigotry.
The steady erosion of the multiracial working class from the Democratic Party hardly disproves the thesis that right-wing politics in the United States of America — and especially Donald Trump’s version of it — is tied up in problematic ideas about race and ethnicity.
But it does thoroughly debunk the notion that there is some idealized political coalition of perfect intersectional social justice warriors who could be mobilized to beat it. Political behavior, for most people, is a matter of group identity and perceived self-interest.
A Mexican-American construction laborer might vote Democrat because they want more generous health care funding and worry that draconian immigration enforcement will lead to racial profiling that has a negative impact on their life and their family. They are not necessarily standing up for advanced feminist thought or eager to welcome new arrivals from Haiti or even Venezuela.A central part of the long-term project of liberalism should, of course, be to propound liberal ideas and increase the share of the population that endorses them over time.
Trying to change people’s minds is very different from the predominant practice of the past decade, where progressives have frequently sought intracoalitional power by threatening people with cancellation or expulsion. And it’s not enough to hope that espousing left-economic populism will radicalize cultural conservatives on questions of gender, race, and sexuality.
According to Gallup, 69% of Americans and 41% of Democrats believe that transgender athletes should be required to play on teams that match their birth sex. In Pew Research Center’s data, the conservative position is slightly less popular overall but also less polarized, such that 45% of Democrats agree.
The fact that virtually no Democratic Party elected officials or associated elites publicly hold a view that is overwhelmingly popular with the public — and not particularly unpopular with their own base — is a testament to the power of progressive persuasion, successful intracoalitional politics, and, frankly, bullying.
Those who secretly hold less-progressive views and those who are sympathetic to the plight of trans people but are worried about winning elections are hesitant to speak more plainly for fear of being cast out of the tent. Instead, they quietly hope that someone else will solve this problem.
But among the mass public, this doesn’t work. If you tell people that not only are Democrats going to hold the unpopular view on this issue, but they will characterize people as a bigots who have no place inside the tent — exactly the message that has been explicitly delivered to Joe Rogan and others over the years — a large share of voters will take you up on the offer to leave and either stay home or vote Republican.
Because the substance of this issue is privately controversial even among high-socioeconomic-status Democrats, you easily get at least quiet agreement behind closed doors that the tent-shrinking approach to gender identity and sports has been a disaster. But the same logic applies on topics like immigration and gender roles where there is much more consensus among highly educated liberals about the merits.
There are plenty of legitimate qualms people have about various aspects of immigration policy, but it’s simply impossible to make sense of the landscape without acknowledging that a lot of people have irrational hostility toward foreigners — especially ones they perceive as ethnically distinct. And yet, telling people who feel that way that they are bigots who you can’t stand next to is ultimately nothing but a route to political self-marginalization. The left of center needs to care more about winning elections and acknowledging realities of public opinion than they do about being descriptively correct about the unsavory views of large swaths of the public.
There is always a question in politics of when the electoral costs of a principled stand do and don’t exceed the benefits, but it essentially never makes sense to actively show the door to people over a particular point of disagreement. In a large and diverse country whose political institutions require zero-sum competition between just two political parties, there is simply no way to win elections other than to secure the votes of lots of people who disagree with you about lots of things.
The entire game is to persuade them that because they do agree with you about lots of other things, they should vote for you anyway. That means trying to be chill and welcoming despite points of disagreement. Even with people you may think are bigots.
So, yes, I do want a tent so large it contains a lot of bigots. That’s the only tent that ever wins.
How do we live with each other?
Almost exactly 70 years ago, in the first issue of a very different magazine — National Review — founder William F. Buckley proffered his classic definition of conservatism: It “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”
yeah, besides that it's necessary for winning (and winning is necessary), another reason to let people with some shitty views inside the tent is that we're more likely to persuade them to a different view if we're both in there together
I hope the people who are always attacking you (Matt) from the left will read this piece in good faith: attentively, all the way through, registering the arguments on their merits.
As for the vexed issue of biological males in women's sports, there's a good reason so many Americans and even Democrats oppose it. The spectrum reaches from people who are literally transphobic, in the true sense of phobic, to people who have given the matter conscientious thought and concluded that it just doesn't make sense -- or justice -- to pit natal females against competitors with the advantages of natal males. Including that second set of people in the Democratic coalition is not even a question of including bigots (which, as you argue, is also necessary).