Conservatives Have The 'Cool Kid' Advantage
People Are Far More Forgiving Of Discretions From The "In Crowd"
Last month, before I left on my annual autumn trek to Maine, I was talking to a friend of mine, Mark, who is working on the ground in New Jersey for the recent state legislative elections. He was canvassing in a district Biden won by over 10 points in 2020, focusing mainly on independent and Democratic voters1. After several days of canvassing, he confessed that he was on the verge of quitting because of what he was hearing. He met at least ten Biden voters who said they would never vote Democratic again.
They had a myriad of reasons; crime, the upcoming congestion pricing program in New York City that has made New Jersey citizens who drive to Manhattan irate, inflation, the indictment of Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, and even, according to Mark, the whole hullaballoo over what Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman wears on the Senate floor. One issue kept coming up over and over again that confused Mark; COVID mandates and school closures.
“It’s been over two years since all the restrictions have been lifted,” Mark said. “How are they still mad about this?”
As we were talking, I brought up, as I do often in political discussions, my experience growing up in a conservative-leaning white working-class part of Queens. It was the 1990s, and I regularly heard some of the adults around me complain about liberals and the Democratic Party by invoking Jane Fonda’s visit to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and the Chappaquiddick incident, where Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts drove his car off a bridge into a tidal pond, leading to the drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne, and allegedly tried to cover it up.
Both of these things happened decades before my childhood. Yet, for the adults around me, working-class people who had union jobs, who should be the base of the Democratic Party and liberal politics, they were still defining reasons to dislike them.
“Why?” Mark asked me. “How is it possible that these people can’t forget something bad a Democrat did decades ago, but they memory-hole an even worse thing a Republican did last week?”
This is a question I started asking myself around 2010. Two years after throwing out the Republican Party in one of the biggest landslides in the 21st Century, voters swept them back into power with their largest House majority since the 1920s. All of the bad things Republicans had done to lose the faith of the American people – The Iraq War, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the mortgage crisis –all of it was forgotten about, and yet even in the year 2010, the year after Ted Kennedy died, I was still hearing the name, Mary Jo Kopechne. I still heard people call then-President Barack Obama “a Jane Fonda Democrat.” I know for a subset of voters who might have been Democrats before 2020, COVID mitigation will forever be a black eye on the reputation of the Democratic Party, while they will forgive and forget stuff like January 6th and the Dobbs decision.
Why?
I’m not a philosopher, but I find my calling in trying to analyze why people act and feel a certain way, especially when it comes to politics, so this question – why Republicans can get away with political mistakes Democrats can’t – has occupied space in my mind for a long time. I have concluded that it is all about vibes stemming from the social hierarchies we all learned as children.
You have to look at this question through the lens of high school politics. Remember how the popular kids and the jocks got away with everything? I do. I remember getting points off for not completing my homework while the football player who didn’t do it got excused because he was at practice until 6:30 p.m. the night before and was “sore.” I remember how the pretty girls flirted their way to extra credit. I remember how if you were in the “in” crowd, excuses were made for you, and special considerations were offered.
The Republicans for the last few decades have typically been “the cool kids.” They are the jocks and the bad boys and the rich kids. They are the ones everyone looks up to and aspire to be. They don’t break the status quo or try to undermine what’s considered normal. They’re a safe choice.
The Democrats and liberals, on the other hand, are the outcasts; the geeks, the loners; the Goth kids; and the weirdos. They are the ones who want everyone to change, and want to tear down the “normalcy” we’ve all become adjusted to and come to see as our security. They want to take away the privileges we aspire to have. They were the betas to the Republican alphas. As one Twitter user put it, “The left will never win because they are pathetic dorks. Not only do they fail the cool test, and they’re becoming increasingly uncool due to their hysterical overreactions to everything, but they inevitably spark a backlash through their constant failures.”
Look at the only Democratic presidents we’ve had since 1980. One was a saxophone-playing playboy, the second was a smooth-talking black guy from Chicago and the third was a smart-talking dude bro. The Democratic Party’s most successful political candidates in recent history came from “cool” backgrounds: they included soldiers like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg; Reps. Jared Golden of Maine; Ruen Gallego of Arizona; Mikie Shirell of New Jersey and Seth Moulton of Massachusetts. Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia was a spy. Rep. Colin Allred of Texas was an NFL player. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona was an astronaut. Rep. Sharice Davids of Kansas was a MMA fighter. Sen. Jon Tester of Montana is a rugged Montana farmer with seven fingers, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer can chug a beer and Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez of Washington State fixes trannies. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is an avid League of Legends player and Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff is a Star Wars fanatic. Ok, those things are a little nerdy, but in a relatable way. Even Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota appeared in a Maroon 5 video.
The only time liberals are ever successful is when they can “out-cool” the right, and moments like that are rare simply because progressivism does not attract the “cool kids.” How could it? If you’re part of the “in” crowd, you’d want to protect that social structure and that would typically make you default to being a conservative. You will also need “lower” kids to bully to secure your place in the pecking order, which makes a movement that picks on minorities and poor people more attractive to you. If you’re a social outcast, you’d want a fairer world and be attracted to progressive politics.
Now I know what you’re going to tell me. Republicans? Cool kids? They want to ban books and are angry about drag queens.
Well, yes, that’s true, but that also ended up being a bust for them nationally. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has seen his presidential ambitions faceplant by focusing on “wokeness,” but his political fortunes rose being the face of the COVID rulebreaker. He gained some political clout giving metaphoric swirlies to Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public health experts during COVID, but blew his cool kid cred going after Disney and LGBTQ people.
And that’s why he, and perhaps even Joe Biden, are losing to a bully who shamelessly breaks all the rules and somehow gets away with it. Who doesn’t aspire to that?
Republicans swept the district on Election Day, but Democrats did pick up six seats in the New Jersey Assembly and one in the State Senate, all in Central and South Jersey.
I absolutely do not see the cool v uncool framing as relevant in any way. I do agree that Clinton and Obama were particularly “cool” - and that generally the “cooler” presidential candidate usually wins - but that is not really an R and D thing. That’s mostly the “having a beer with” point.
Just about no one in politics or in the political sphere is seen as cool by anyone. There is absolutely no way that the Ds unhappy with Biden think that Trump or Rs are “cooler.” People get angry with the status quo and a fairly small number bounce back and forth.
Rs totally underperformed in the 2022 election, as they did in 2023. Biden’s problems have been well explained elsewhere, and they have nothing to do with being a “cool kid” or not.
Perhaps the “free-market, small government” conservative embody “cool” to the extent that coolness is understood as a combination of apathy and anti-authoritarian rebelliousness. Remember Ron Paul’s popularity with young people?
Meanwhile, social conservatives care A LOT and are scolds. See Pence or the Claremont crowd. Nobody thinks they are cool ...