Medicare and 'Free College' – Why Are Democrats So Split?

And liberals and conservatives have different ideas of what is fair, Ditto said.

“Liberals tend to emphasize equality — people should all be treated the same. And very often conservatives, when they think about fairness, think more about their equity or proportionality,” he said.

So for a liberal, Ditto said, classic unfairness “might be discriminating against somebody based on the color of their skin,” while “conservatives may think more about, ‘freeloaders,’ like welfare, people who get money from the government not given anything back.”

And that gets us to another theory: That all of this division is actually driven by racial bias.

The Rise of Dog Whistle Politics

That’s the argument made by two admittedly liberal researchers: political messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio and UC Berkeley Law Professor Ian Haney López.

Both Shenker-Osorio and Haney López contend that opposition to government programs like Medicare for All or free college are rooted in 50 years of a racial narrative first promulgated by Republicans but also embraced at times by Democrats.

Haney López notes that five decades ago, public colleges were largely free in California — and that Democratic President Lyndon Johnson overwhelmingly won a reelection victory in 1964 promising to eradicate poverty.

“People then widely supported the idea that government had not just the ability, but the duty to intervene in the economy in ways that redistributed the wealth downwards, that created routes of upward mobility,” Haney López said.

He said that today’s proposals “are small fry in comparison to what Johnson was proposing.”

“So the real question is why did so many Americans in a landslide support Johnson in ’64? And yet things that are far less ambitious seem radical in 2020? And what’s the answer? I think more than anything else, the answer is race,” he said.

Haney López argued that Johnson’s opponent, Republican Barry Goldwater, led a new faction of the GOP that “came to understand that they could use rising racial resentment as a way to break the Democratic coalition of African Americans, the white working class and liberals.”

Goldwater didn’t do this by aligning with white supremacists or attacking the civil rights movement or people of color, Haney López said: He did it using coded language, like “states rights.”

“It became a way to mobilize racial resentment, but even more. It provided him a way to demonize government itself,” he said.

“What he ended up saying was, ‘Look, government programs that supposedly help everyone — they’re actually giveaways to undeserving minorities.’ Now, Goldwater would lose big. But over the next 12 years, in part through the campaign of Richard Nixon, this sort of politics would become very, very powerful.”

Haney López said the master of this was President Ronald Reagan, who beat Democrat Pat Brown in the 1966 California governor’s race, then went on to campaign for president a decade later with his “welfare queen” narrative, which relied on the idea that hard-working white people were having their money taken by government and given to lazy minorities.

Of course, Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, would also embrace a similar strategy in the 1990s with the war on crime and illegal immigration, Haney López said.

In California, Shenker-Osorio also sees proof of this in the language used to promote the 1978 anti-tax measure Proposition 13, which she said relied on an “us versus them” narrative that demonized Mexican immigrants and started the tax revolt across the nation.

Shenker-Osorio, who does empirical research on political messaging, said some of this is probably embedded in our DNA as both Americans and, to a greater extent, Californians.

“The puritan work ethic, the idea that people should have to endure and suffer, that it’s character building … and that people who don’t pay are getting away with something,” she said.

But there’s more at play, she argued, noting that the countries with the most generous social welfare policies tend to also be the most homogeneous racially.

“People would accept and vote for increase in whatever public program we are talking about if it did not apply to people outside their race,” she said.

But she and Haney López say that these messages have become so embedded in our collective consciousness that it isn’t just white people who hold these views.

“Let’s be a little more sophisticated about how we understand race,” Haney López said. “This rhetoric affects people of all different races … The story we’re being offered by the right is, ‘The reason some people are rich is because they work hard … And the reason so many are poor is because there’s something wrong with them. They didn’t work hard or they’re lazy or they’re cheaters or they have an entitlement mentality.’ ”

That doesn’t mean, said Haney López, that Americans can’t have a legitimate debate about what programs we should offer, or even who should qualify for them. But, he said, those having the conversation should take into account what deeply embedded biases might be informing their viewpoint.

He pointed to anger over the idea of making college free for future generations — the divide was perhaps best exemplified at a recent Elizabeth Warren event in Iowa, where a man confronted the Massachusetts senator, asking why she wants to pay for college for people who didn’t save their money while people like him, who did save, “are getting screwed.”

Haney López said that conversation is “undergirded by a view of demographic change. It’s a view that rests on a statement like, why should I pay for other people’s children? Well, why are they other people’s children? Why aren’t they our children? Why isn’t there a collective sense that as Americans, we’re all in this together?”

Of course, even people who like the idea of a single-payer health care system may be grappling with another hurdle, said Shenker-Osorio — their personal experience.

“People are incredibly risk averse, and their lived experience is health care only getting worse,” she said. “We know the current system is bad, but we have absolutely no lived experience that change can make it better.”

Peter Ditto, the UC Irvine professor, said showing people that something new works is the easiest way to change their minds — he pointed to how relatively quickly gay marriage has become more broadly acceptable over the past decade.

But, it’s not easy to convince people of a collective good, he said.

“The natural state of people is to break up into groups and dislike each other — that’s human history. You know, the American government is pushing against the grain of a million years of human evolution and try to say, yeah, you should get along with people who disagree with you,” he said.

It’s easier to try to drive people apart — a strategy that President Trump has embraced to devastating effect, Ditto said.

And countering that, no matter which flavor of candidate voters choose, might be the biggest challenge facing Democrats this election year.