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Suppose there are two political parties, the Blues and the Reds, each pursuing a demographic strategy to maximize its vote: “targeting” voters exclusively by race and sex. To make it simple, there are two racial categories, “white” and “minority.” Imagine that no other demographic features are relevant, 100% of the electorate turns out, and everyone votes as the parties want them to: The Blues get all the female and minority votes; the Reds get all the white and all the male votes.
Your imagination runs out right there. All the white men will vote for the Reds, all the minority women for the Blues. But are white women and minority men supposed to vote their sex or their race? Unless we can split individual voters into fragments of themselves, the scenario is impossible. Both parties are pursuing an impossible result.
Yet our actual political parties are pursuing something close to these strategies. Democrats have argued for years that demographic shifts would give them an enduring majority any minute now. Hillary Clinton’s campaign was obsessed with demographics, formulated explicitly as an appeal to “women and minorities.” The Trump campaign ran on a barely masked appeal to white people and men, under the auspices of advisers like Steve Bannon.
When both parties are dedicated to maximizing race and gender gaps, they are stuck in a paradox. To expand their electorate is almost inevitably to shrink it in equal measure. In the long run these strategies can only produce a standoff.
Why not expand the universe of demographic categories? After the Democrats won big in November 2017, a story in the New York Times took that approach: “If the 2016 presidential election reflected a primal roar from disaffected white working class voters that delivered for President Trump and Republicans, Tuesday’s results showed the potential of a rising coalition of women, minorities, and gay and transgender people who are solidly aligning with Democrats.”
Such a coalition is impossible. It would include fractions of many divided persons, such as one-fourth of each working-class, white, gay man. It’s a good thing we have only two viable political parties; otherwise, you’d be called upon to distribute slices of your selfhood as though you were dealing hands of poker.
The goal of both sides, meanwhile, is to pull groups of Americans apart and set them against each other, and to pull each of us apart internally [JB emphasis]. The logical failure of the political parties is driven by their ethical failure.
Mr. Sartwell, an associate professor of philosophy at Dickinson College, is author of “Entanglements: A System of Philosophy” (State University of New York, 2017).