Re Point 1, it's unclear to me, and might likewise be unclear to your relatives, to what extent the strength of the recovery is due to changes effected or promoted by the Biden administration.
This post prompts me to reflect. My temperament is not suited to making an attempt at persuasion. Plus I'm not good at it. So while I can explore an idea with someone if we are close, or listen and follow along if we're not, I don't really relate to the feeling of wanting to change someone's mind. I'm sort of fatalistic about people seeing things differently from me. If that's how it is, then that's how it is. And I find strong disagreement off-putting. But I do like to think about things, and can appreciate a strong argument when, for example, reading an essay. At a dinner table, though, mixing it up about politics? Like, I don't have any track record of enjoying that kind of conversation.
Good list. How about point # “0” though. Don’t bring up politics on thanksgiving. Probability of persuading a relative or friend to make a like-minded voting choice as a result of a Thanksgiving conversation... 5%. Probability of ruining Thanksgiving for everyone... the other 95. Happy Thanksgiving Matt.
We can agree that the homicide spike was caused by a collapse in urban policing and social order after the Floyd murder. You obviously can't pin that on conservatives. What you can pin on liberals is the collapse in charging individuals for petty theft which is why we now need to ask an employee to unlock the deodorant at CVS.
Also related, people are generally more persuadable on the low-key races at the bottom of the ballot that don't impact which party controls Congress, the White House, or the governor's mansion.
A simple example: In 2020, I had a friend who was not happy with either Biden or Trump and was planning to sit the election out. I figured his vote in the presidential race would be meaningless anyway (we don't live in a swing state), but at the bottom of the ballot was a tax to avoid big cuts in our city's bus service, which I knew he would care about because he didn't have a car at the time and rode the bus. Had I not said anything, he probably wouldn't have bothered to even open his ballot, but he did, and the measure to fund our bus service got one additional vote as a result.
This is the kind of political persuasion that actually accomplishes something. Convincing someone to flip their vote between Trump and Biden is effectively impossible, but getting them to open their ballot and vote with you on some city council race or citywide ballot initiative is much easier. And, it will have greater impact, as voter turnout on these downballot races is much lower, so each vote matters more.
Rather tangential, but i'd be super duper curious to know if there is any correlation between how far left people are and their family's political background. I just wish we had more data about the minority of hard core "progressives". We know they are more college educated and whiter than the median Democrat, but are they also more likely to come from right-wing families? It occurs to me, as a purely intuitive hypothesis, that part of what the generation-gap in the US is doing is radicalizing people further by the constant tension with, and need to "rebel" against their conservative elders. Each side then double down into its own side adopting ever more extreme positions. Being exposed to old school racism at home may also make one psychological prone to accept the "antiracism" nonsense. Of course I may be entirely wrong.
Anecdotally, the most radical left people I knew in grad school came from very conservative families. In those cases, it seemed less like rebelling and more like wanting to embrace an identity that validated horizon-expanding experiences that had alienated them from the often very circumscribed upbringings they’d had.
Yes, this is true to some extent - “horseshoe theory” - but I think it’s very difficult to see this rapprochement from inside either end of the horseshoe. I also think that something that’s underrated is the extent to which social or familial alienation sends people looking for ideological explanations for that alienation. I don’t mean that as a criticism; it’s actually quite human.
The point is, if you were raised e.g. to see Black people as the "other" it's much easier to adopt woke ideology which *still* sees them as the "other" and finds merit in it (!) than maiinstream political liberalism that aims at a post racial society and seespeopel aas individuals first.
Someone has yet to do the definitive anthropological/sociological stud(ies) of the new left, or social justice progressivism, or wokeness, or whatever you want to call it. I think there’s definitely something to this argument regarding the logical extension of mainline Protestant theology; I think there are also other separate vectors into that ideology.
What really remains to be seen, and will only be possible to determine in retrospect, is to what degree the development of wokeness is world-historical. I think what’s for sure is that there is widespread exhaustion with liberalism, and fewer and fewer people are willing to stick up for it.
Ideology is complicated - it’s as much psychological as it is philosophical!
Trump voter here (very reluctant the 2nd time) and I agree with most of the things on the list. In a few ways Biden has done things that Trump should have done.
But I can't agree with it all.
Some exceptions
The immigration point misses the mark completely. Absolutely no reason for Biden to have changed the "remain in Mexico" policy. Vast majority of these "asylum" claims are BS. The wall Biden wants to build is a political ploy. And Mayorkas has been a disaster.
Inflation claims largely miss the point. Rent has gone up MUCH faster than inflation in many markets and this has been massaged out of inflation stats. And high interest rates have a chilling effect even for those not current paying them. Many banks with lots of exposure to commercial paper coming due for refinance are worried as are those buildings and businesses who are paying these rates. We're looking at lots of commercial real estate foreclosures and office buildings are in especially bad shape.
The point about murder misses the cumulative effects of Democrats decision to stop prosecuting shoplifting which is hurting businesses and individuals and contributing to a general sense of malaise and disorder. I'm very upset about this one because it threatens to reverse decades of urban revival and Democrats continue to gaslight on it. Any political party that elevates the concerns of criminals or the welfare of "urban youth" and "school to prison pipeline" above public order and safety doesn't deserve the govern even if it's technically right on other issues.
I know you aren’t trying to write a treatise defending your views here, but some of what you are saying makes no sense to me.
For example
> The wall Biden wants to build is a political ploy
Biden doesn’t want to build any more wall. He lost a legal case about it and now has to. He is taking no public credit for it, so how could it be a “political ploy”?
> Rent has gone up MUCH faster than inflation in many markets and this has been massaged out of inflation stats
Massaged out of the stats? What does that even mean?
> Democrats decision to stop prosecuting shoplifting
Has shoplifting ever really been prosecuted? I doubt that very much. It seems more like what has happened is that social media has made word get around that shoplifting is never prosecuted so more people are doing it now.
Let's do the crime and immigration first because they are more straightfoward.
Yes, social media (and regular media) has broadcast to the whole world hither and yon that the new "compassionate" approach to law and border enforcement is to give far greater weight to the disparate impact enforcement would have on black and brown people...and of course, black and brown people respond to the new incentives.
The word gets out that they won't punish you (esp if you're young and African American) for theft, larceny, car jacking, even reckless driving---and you can probably literally get away with murder if you're lucky. The message is strong and consistent up from progressive DAs, liberal mayors, school principals, police chiefs on up to liberal justice departments that we need to be much more lenient and forgiving of black youth--...it's been an abject disaster. Liberals are openly advertising they don't have to guts anymore to enforce laws or maintain public order.
Similarly the border...yeah tell everyone and their mother in Latin, South America or wherever else all they need to do is make the trip and show up at the border with kids and a sob story and they not only won't be sent back they'll even get fed clothed and housed--free medical care too. Of course you're going to get a surge of phony asylum claimants willing to take take take what liberals are giving.
If Biden doesn't want to build the wall why is Matt telling people to use the phony Biden wall as a reassurance to your crazy right wing uncle that he really doesn't want an uncontrolled immigration surge?
You literally didn't answer any of my questions, but you sure do have strong opinions about black youths and people from south america!
> If Biden doesn't want to build the wall why is Matt telling people to use the phony Biden wall as a reassurance to your crazy right wing uncle that he really doesn't want an uncontrolled immigration surge?
honest question: are you an idiot? that is the only possible conclusion I can reach from this statement
I get the same vibes on a lot of these points, but I'm not sure how much they are true? I think the point about lack of enforcement is fair, but I don't know about the border. Can you point to specific examples where the administration is broadcasting a more compassionate approach to the whole world? (I do feel that Biden doesn't do enough to signal in what ways they are cracking down, like they are embarrassed or something.)
Ok check this out..this is a scholarly paper that documented the effects of Obama era justice department policies...and their obsession with racial disparities...have hamstrung local le.
Granted this is Obama and not Biden but every reason to think Biden justice department has accelerated those policies...same people in charge
Ah, I see you were referring to both law enforcement and border enforcement in the same statement. That's an interesting idea (that recommendations at the federal level influenced local tactics), although I would assume local policies matter much more.
Local policies do matter but there's been a bunch of soft on crime lefties who have taken over DA offices in many major cities. This is a basic problem for liberals: over time they are too weak to police their own left wing. This is exactly the same dynamic that happened to the party in the 70's and 80's and I see it well on its way for a reprise now.
How much is specifically Biden's fault in a sense doesn;t matter. The dopey old man has lost the energy in the party to lefties and clearly can't control them. I mean even Kamala is scared to talk about her background as a DA because she's cowed by progressives.
Isn't rent the piece of inflation that can least be blamed on the president (since it's a long-term issue and fairly obviously caused by state and local policies)?
Yes but the party in power is going to be blamed for bad macro effects.
But Biden doesn't get a pass there.
Does Biden have anything to do with the fact interest rates have roughly doubled since he took office--an abrupt shift after a 40 year clear downward trend?
I do blame Biden for making inflation worse with the Orwellian-named "Inflation Reduction Act", but your comment calls out rent specifically as the worst part, and I think rent is actually the part that's most clearly not his fault.
Sort of...does Biden have anything to do with massive reversal in interest rate trends to roughly doubling after more than 40 years of downward decline? Yes!
Do rent hikes have to do with interest rates when these apartment buildings are now expecting to have to refinance at much higher rates in near future?
Why ruin Thanksgiving?? Who seriously thinks they're gonna change someone's opinion about climate change, or marginal tax rates over turkey and yams with marshmallows?? I don't want to talk about stuff like that, and I don't have time for drama or nonsense. Keep the conversation light and talk about the weather, work, sports, movies, any vacations you've gone on, plans for Christmas or what other family members are doing. Lastly, be the kind of person who people want at Thanksgiving, and don't be a blowhard. I don't have a large extended family, so I don't have these problems, but I truly don't understand why people can't act normal.
Because in some families, there are people who _will_ pick fights with relatives they perceive as ideologically misguided or just wrong, so it helps to be prepared.
I really don’t think the message here is “go forth and evangelize”; I think it’s “if these topics come up, here are things you can say.” If you don’t want to talk about those things, don’t bring them up! But for those who have the experience of being ambushed by relatives looking to do some pwnage, it’s nice to have a list of stuff in your back pocket to do some parrying and thrusting.
Great arguments, but they fail the basic test of persuasion, which is to address the strengths of the opposition, namely, (1) racial resentment -- not racism but resentment at the underperformance of especially African-Americans and the burdens that underperformance places on the normal- and over-performing parts of the population; (2) the leftist culture of self-pity, hyper-sensitivity, and self-righteous historical moralism; (3) the pretense that government by Democrats represents genuine social progress when in fact it panders to the votes of the lower classes, the money of the liberal upper class and the inefficiencies of government and organized labor; (3) the correct sense that an evidence-based dictatorship (as opposed to the pathological dictatorship that by default they have chosen to follow) would be a vast improvement over the carnival show which passes for American capitalist democracy. Even though the Right-wing relative mistakes the Democratic program for "socialism" and denies the catastrophic implications of climate change, socialists fail to recognize that reducing economic inequality and spreading prosperity is the primary reason for the decline in the planet's health (see China). The only real solution is politically impossible, -- in fact, it is generally repellent -- that is, the organization of the planet, wherein the earth's population reduces itself to fit the existing mass of prosperity and applies the moral philosophy of humanism which in the present world is culturally dominant but in fact is premature and inapplicable, and therefore inevitably frustrating, despite its dominance.
You've provided rebuttals to every possible talking point Republicans / Conservatives / MAGA folks you can imagine...except the ones they will actually use. I wonder if Matt has ever met these people in real life. I have, and to be fair, all of what follows does have rebuttals, but they aren't obvious and they aren't pithy and they aren't 100% dispositive:
- Biden's old -- Jeez, did you see him fall at the Air Force ceremony? He's got dementia and that's why he won't do press conferences.
- Inflation is out of control. I mean, my grocery bill is 40% higher than before he got in office.
- Have you seen the weirdo guys dressing up as girls and gyranting in front of kids? That's messed up.
- Biden gets in office, we turn over Afghanistan to the f'ing Taliban, Russia invades Ukraine and Hamas starts killing Jews again. That didn't happen with Trump
- The border is out of control. God knows who is crossing the Rio Grande these days. And Biden just wants to give them a summons and say come back to court in 6 months? They will never show up!
- Trump says a lot of bad things, but he kept us out of new wars and business was good...at least until the Democrats and Fauci shut down the country because of the flu. I'll take the bad tweets to get back to those days.
They won't engage in the obvious authoritarian tendencies and promises for retribution. They won't lament the erosion of the rule of law, the coarsening of our society, the lies, the corruption, the utter ineffectiveness. But they will come back to the list of points over and over.
These all sound like talking points from deeply partisan Republicans and thus there's no way to talk them out of their position. If you were canvassing you'd just mark them as a 5 and move on as there's no point of having them in the "universe" of voters you'd contact on the campaign. Instead focus more on the softer Trumpers who admit that Trump is also old and says crazy things and claims that gas is now 8 dollars a gallon just aren't true.
Don't you know any normies? I've heard variations on most of John's hypothetical points from people that voted for Obama, then Trump, and then Biden (in succession).
I've been living and traveling exclusively in the Northeast for the last few years where immigration is less salient, so i haven't heard point 5 in a while, but I have no problem believing it's true in e.g., Florida.
If you don't know many people like that irl but have access to the NYT, take a look at their articles interviewing twelve random people, and you should get a sense of it. I think you'll be shocked by their seeming ideological inconsistency.
The specific wording on some of John's examples were partisan ("Democrats and Fauci" would probably only come from a Republican partisan, or maybe a heavily-Red-leaning independent), but I've heard many independent (even blue-leaning) voters express every one of those points.
The foreign policy point doesn't make any sense to me either, but I hear variations on it often enough.
The thesis is that because he was seen as unpredictable and a little crazy, despots didn’t want to take the chance. It isn’t unreasonable since it happens in real life. If you see an unhinged person in the street ranting about the world, people avoid a confrontation.
It isn’t the ringing endorsement they think it is.
Other countries that did not respond with stimulus had worse inflation. And we would have had inflation as a result of huge tax cuts for the wealthy had republicans been in power.
While this is well-intentioned, I'm not sure this is how these things tend to go. The last time I discussed politics with a conservative relative at Thanksgiving - as it happens, about ten years ago - it was started with me pretty calmly trying to explain some bit of factual information about the Affordable Care Act and wound up turning into a shouting match after said relative decided to start condescendingly lecturing me about how I was too young to understand how the world works (of note, I was about 30 at the time, so relatively young but hardly a kid). His response to me was not only condescending and aggressive, it literally made no sense and was totally irrelevant to the point I was trying to make.
I suspect this is how these sorts of things normally go.
Matt is talking about dialogue, not debating. If you owned your aunt and embarrassed her and now she is even more dug into her crazy beliefs, you have lost. If you give them pause and make them think it’s less crazy to support Biden than they had thought, that’s a good thing.
It also depends on the family of course. My family loves to debate and hash out disagreements. But if politics talk means yelling and divisiveness, by all means stick to more unifying topics.
I think if even 1% of one’s focus on Thanksgiving dinner is to increase support for Biden, I think one needs to expand their life experiences. More important shit in life
How about giving some focus to not having your family members have a distorted view of the state of the country? Or maybe it will turn out you have a distorted view of the world and you can learn from them. Again, depends on your family dynamics: it's not a one-size-fits-all proposition.
I don’t look at different people as having “distorted views”. Just different perspectives. I always prioritize learning from others’ perspectives. Our TG dinner conversation was great, 0% politics. because most of what makes life worth living is NOT politics.
If you think that some family member there is going to bring up politics and make things unpleasant, a natural focus is to figure out how to keep it positive, and how to figure out how to turn this to possible benefit.
Obviously better to stay away from things that will cause arguments, but if you are confident they're going to happen, you might as well prepare to make them more productive.
Re point 7, if your Republican relatives read the Wall Street Journal they might counter by bringing this to your attention: https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamacare-medical-loss-ratio-elizabeth-warren-mike-braun-letter-healthcare-pbm-af77e284?st=17n7rn0b7w28sx6&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Re Point 1, it's unclear to me, and might likewise be unclear to your relatives, to what extent the strength of the recovery is due to changes effected or promoted by the Biden administration.
This post prompts me to reflect. My temperament is not suited to making an attempt at persuasion. Plus I'm not good at it. So while I can explore an idea with someone if we are close, or listen and follow along if we're not, I don't really relate to the feeling of wanting to change someone's mind. I'm sort of fatalistic about people seeing things differently from me. If that's how it is, then that's how it is. And I find strong disagreement off-putting. But I do like to think about things, and can appreciate a strong argument when, for example, reading an essay. At a dinner table, though, mixing it up about politics? Like, I don't have any track record of enjoying that kind of conversation.
Are you just preaching or actually having a discussion.
If a discussion you need to really listen too and see where you yourself might be wrong
1. Good and useful piece. Thanks for it. But . . .
2. "Southern border wall?" Like that is a thing?
Good list. How about point # “0” though. Don’t bring up politics on thanksgiving. Probability of persuading a relative or friend to make a like-minded voting choice as a result of a Thanksgiving conversation... 5%. Probability of ruining Thanksgiving for everyone... the other 95. Happy Thanksgiving Matt.
We can agree that the homicide spike was caused by a collapse in urban policing and social order after the Floyd murder. You obviously can't pin that on conservatives. What you can pin on liberals is the collapse in charging individuals for petty theft which is why we now need to ask an employee to unlock the deodorant at CVS.
Doesn't matter who you can pin what on - what matters is who is doing things to actually repair the problem.
This!!
Also related, people are generally more persuadable on the low-key races at the bottom of the ballot that don't impact which party controls Congress, the White House, or the governor's mansion.
A simple example: In 2020, I had a friend who was not happy with either Biden or Trump and was planning to sit the election out. I figured his vote in the presidential race would be meaningless anyway (we don't live in a swing state), but at the bottom of the ballot was a tax to avoid big cuts in our city's bus service, which I knew he would care about because he didn't have a car at the time and rode the bus. Had I not said anything, he probably wouldn't have bothered to even open his ballot, but he did, and the measure to fund our bus service got one additional vote as a result.
This is the kind of political persuasion that actually accomplishes something. Convincing someone to flip their vote between Trump and Biden is effectively impossible, but getting them to open their ballot and vote with you on some city council race or citywide ballot initiative is much easier. And, it will have greater impact, as voter turnout on these downballot races is much lower, so each vote matters more.
Rather tangential, but i'd be super duper curious to know if there is any correlation between how far left people are and their family's political background. I just wish we had more data about the minority of hard core "progressives". We know they are more college educated and whiter than the median Democrat, but are they also more likely to come from right-wing families? It occurs to me, as a purely intuitive hypothesis, that part of what the generation-gap in the US is doing is radicalizing people further by the constant tension with, and need to "rebel" against their conservative elders. Each side then double down into its own side adopting ever more extreme positions. Being exposed to old school racism at home may also make one psychological prone to accept the "antiracism" nonsense. Of course I may be entirely wrong.
Anecdotally, the most radical left people I knew in grad school came from very conservative families. In those cases, it seemed less like rebelling and more like wanting to embrace an identity that validated horizon-expanding experiences that had alienated them from the often very circumscribed upbringings they’d had.
Except far left worldview has more in common with far right worldview than they’d like to admit as this classic skit shows brilliantly:
https://youtu.be/Ev373c7wSRg?si=8IZl1NbUczkJVE4V
Yes, this is true to some extent - “horseshoe theory” - but I think it’s very difficult to see this rapprochement from inside either end of the horseshoe. I also think that something that’s underrated is the extent to which social or familial alienation sends people looking for ideological explanations for that alienation. I don’t mean that as a criticism; it’s actually quite human.
The point is, if you were raised e.g. to see Black people as the "other" it's much easier to adopt woke ideology which *still* sees them as the "other" and finds merit in it (!) than maiinstream political liberalism that aims at a post racial society and seespeopel aas individuals first.
Someone has yet to do the definitive anthropological/sociological stud(ies) of the new left, or social justice progressivism, or wokeness, or whatever you want to call it. I think there’s definitely something to this argument regarding the logical extension of mainline Protestant theology; I think there are also other separate vectors into that ideology.
What really remains to be seen, and will only be possible to determine in retrospect, is to what degree the development of wokeness is world-historical. I think what’s for sure is that there is widespread exhaustion with liberalism, and fewer and fewer people are willing to stick up for it.
Ideology is complicated - it’s as much psychological as it is philosophical!
Trump voter here (very reluctant the 2nd time) and I agree with most of the things on the list. In a few ways Biden has done things that Trump should have done.
But I can't agree with it all.
Some exceptions
The immigration point misses the mark completely. Absolutely no reason for Biden to have changed the "remain in Mexico" policy. Vast majority of these "asylum" claims are BS. The wall Biden wants to build is a political ploy. And Mayorkas has been a disaster.
Inflation claims largely miss the point. Rent has gone up MUCH faster than inflation in many markets and this has been massaged out of inflation stats. And high interest rates have a chilling effect even for those not current paying them. Many banks with lots of exposure to commercial paper coming due for refinance are worried as are those buildings and businesses who are paying these rates. We're looking at lots of commercial real estate foreclosures and office buildings are in especially bad shape.
The point about murder misses the cumulative effects of Democrats decision to stop prosecuting shoplifting which is hurting businesses and individuals and contributing to a general sense of malaise and disorder. I'm very upset about this one because it threatens to reverse decades of urban revival and Democrats continue to gaslight on it. Any political party that elevates the concerns of criminals or the welfare of "urban youth" and "school to prison pipeline" above public order and safety doesn't deserve the govern even if it's technically right on other issues.
> Rent has gone up MUCH faster than inflation in many markets and this has been massaged out of inflation stats.
In a few markets maybe, but I don't think it was widespread? And in many places it's now flat or even declining: https://www.zumper.com/blog/rental-price-data/
These numbers seem roughly in line with inflation, maybe a tiny bit higher: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273418/unadjusted-monthly-inflation-rate-in-the-us/
I know you aren’t trying to write a treatise defending your views here, but some of what you are saying makes no sense to me.
For example
> The wall Biden wants to build is a political ploy
Biden doesn’t want to build any more wall. He lost a legal case about it and now has to. He is taking no public credit for it, so how could it be a “political ploy”?
> Rent has gone up MUCH faster than inflation in many markets and this has been massaged out of inflation stats
Massaged out of the stats? What does that even mean?
> Democrats decision to stop prosecuting shoplifting
Has shoplifting ever really been prosecuted? I doubt that very much. It seems more like what has happened is that social media has made word get around that shoplifting is never prosecuted so more people are doing it now.
Let's do the crime and immigration first because they are more straightfoward.
Yes, social media (and regular media) has broadcast to the whole world hither and yon that the new "compassionate" approach to law and border enforcement is to give far greater weight to the disparate impact enforcement would have on black and brown people...and of course, black and brown people respond to the new incentives.
The word gets out that they won't punish you (esp if you're young and African American) for theft, larceny, car jacking, even reckless driving---and you can probably literally get away with murder if you're lucky. The message is strong and consistent up from progressive DAs, liberal mayors, school principals, police chiefs on up to liberal justice departments that we need to be much more lenient and forgiving of black youth--...it's been an abject disaster. Liberals are openly advertising they don't have to guts anymore to enforce laws or maintain public order.
Similarly the border...yeah tell everyone and their mother in Latin, South America or wherever else all they need to do is make the trip and show up at the border with kids and a sob story and they not only won't be sent back they'll even get fed clothed and housed--free medical care too. Of course you're going to get a surge of phony asylum claimants willing to take take take what liberals are giving.
If Biden doesn't want to build the wall why is Matt telling people to use the phony Biden wall as a reassurance to your crazy right wing uncle that he really doesn't want an uncontrolled immigration surge?
You literally didn't answer any of my questions, but you sure do have strong opinions about black youths and people from south america!
> If Biden doesn't want to build the wall why is Matt telling people to use the phony Biden wall as a reassurance to your crazy right wing uncle that he really doesn't want an uncontrolled immigration surge?
honest question: are you an idiot? that is the only possible conclusion I can reach from this statement
Dude. Not appropriate for this comment section. Save the low-blow ad hominems for X.
Nah
Do you seriously think Matt's point about Biden and the border wall acquits Biden's whole approach to immigration?
I get the same vibes on a lot of these points, but I'm not sure how much they are true? I think the point about lack of enforcement is fair, but I don't know about the border. Can you point to specific examples where the administration is broadcasting a more compassionate approach to the whole world? (I do feel that Biden doesn't do enough to signal in what ways they are cracking down, like they are embarrassed or something.)
Ok check this out..this is a scholarly paper that documented the effects of Obama era justice department policies...and their obsession with racial disparities...have hamstrung local le.
Granted this is Obama and not Biden but every reason to think Biden justice department has accelerated those policies...same people in charge
https://reason.com/volokh/2020/06/11/policing-the-police-the-impact-of-pattern-or-practice-investigations-on-crime/
Ah, I see you were referring to both law enforcement and border enforcement in the same statement. That's an interesting idea (that recommendations at the federal level influenced local tactics), although I would assume local policies matter much more.
Local policies do matter but there's been a bunch of soft on crime lefties who have taken over DA offices in many major cities. This is a basic problem for liberals: over time they are too weak to police their own left wing. This is exactly the same dynamic that happened to the party in the 70's and 80's and I see it well on its way for a reprise now.
How much is specifically Biden's fault in a sense doesn;t matter. The dopey old man has lost the energy in the party to lefties and clearly can't control them. I mean even Kamala is scared to talk about her background as a DA because she's cowed by progressives.
Isn't rent the piece of inflation that can least be blamed on the president (since it's a long-term issue and fairly obviously caused by state and local policies)?
Yes but the party in power is going to be blamed for bad macro effects.
But Biden doesn't get a pass there.
Does Biden have anything to do with the fact interest rates have roughly doubled since he took office--an abrupt shift after a 40 year clear downward trend?
Yes he does.
I do blame Biden for making inflation worse with the Orwellian-named "Inflation Reduction Act", but your comment calls out rent specifically as the worst part, and I think rent is actually the part that's most clearly not his fault.
Sort of...does Biden have anything to do with massive reversal in interest rate trends to roughly doubling after more than 40 years of downward decline? Yes!
Do rent hikes have to do with interest rates when these apartment buildings are now expecting to have to refinance at much higher rates in near future?
Yes!
Why ruin Thanksgiving?? Who seriously thinks they're gonna change someone's opinion about climate change, or marginal tax rates over turkey and yams with marshmallows?? I don't want to talk about stuff like that, and I don't have time for drama or nonsense. Keep the conversation light and talk about the weather, work, sports, movies, any vacations you've gone on, plans for Christmas or what other family members are doing. Lastly, be the kind of person who people want at Thanksgiving, and don't be a blowhard. I don't have a large extended family, so I don't have these problems, but I truly don't understand why people can't act normal.
Because in some families, there are people who _will_ pick fights with relatives they perceive as ideologically misguided or just wrong, so it helps to be prepared.
I really don’t think the message here is “go forth and evangelize”; I think it’s “if these topics come up, here are things you can say.” If you don’t want to talk about those things, don’t bring them up! But for those who have the experience of being ambushed by relatives looking to do some pwnage, it’s nice to have a list of stuff in your back pocket to do some parrying and thrusting.
Great arguments, but they fail the basic test of persuasion, which is to address the strengths of the opposition, namely, (1) racial resentment -- not racism but resentment at the underperformance of especially African-Americans and the burdens that underperformance places on the normal- and over-performing parts of the population; (2) the leftist culture of self-pity, hyper-sensitivity, and self-righteous historical moralism; (3) the pretense that government by Democrats represents genuine social progress when in fact it panders to the votes of the lower classes, the money of the liberal upper class and the inefficiencies of government and organized labor; (3) the correct sense that an evidence-based dictatorship (as opposed to the pathological dictatorship that by default they have chosen to follow) would be a vast improvement over the carnival show which passes for American capitalist democracy. Even though the Right-wing relative mistakes the Democratic program for "socialism" and denies the catastrophic implications of climate change, socialists fail to recognize that reducing economic inequality and spreading prosperity is the primary reason for the decline in the planet's health (see China). The only real solution is politically impossible, -- in fact, it is generally repellent -- that is, the organization of the planet, wherein the earth's population reduces itself to fit the existing mass of prosperity and applies the moral philosophy of humanism which in the present world is culturally dominant but in fact is premature and inapplicable, and therefore inevitably frustrating, despite its dominance.
You've provided rebuttals to every possible talking point Republicans / Conservatives / MAGA folks you can imagine...except the ones they will actually use. I wonder if Matt has ever met these people in real life. I have, and to be fair, all of what follows does have rebuttals, but they aren't obvious and they aren't pithy and they aren't 100% dispositive:
- Biden's old -- Jeez, did you see him fall at the Air Force ceremony? He's got dementia and that's why he won't do press conferences.
- Inflation is out of control. I mean, my grocery bill is 40% higher than before he got in office.
- Have you seen the weirdo guys dressing up as girls and gyranting in front of kids? That's messed up.
- Biden gets in office, we turn over Afghanistan to the f'ing Taliban, Russia invades Ukraine and Hamas starts killing Jews again. That didn't happen with Trump
- The border is out of control. God knows who is crossing the Rio Grande these days. And Biden just wants to give them a summons and say come back to court in 6 months? They will never show up!
- Trump says a lot of bad things, but he kept us out of new wars and business was good...at least until the Democrats and Fauci shut down the country because of the flu. I'll take the bad tweets to get back to those days.
They won't engage in the obvious authoritarian tendencies and promises for retribution. They won't lament the erosion of the rule of law, the coarsening of our society, the lies, the corruption, the utter ineffectiveness. But they will come back to the list of points over and over.
These all sound like talking points from deeply partisan Republicans and thus there's no way to talk them out of their position. If you were canvassing you'd just mark them as a 5 and move on as there's no point of having them in the "universe" of voters you'd contact on the campaign. Instead focus more on the softer Trumpers who admit that Trump is also old and says crazy things and claims that gas is now 8 dollars a gallon just aren't true.
Welcome to my golfing buddies!
Don't you know any normies? I've heard variations on most of John's hypothetical points from people that voted for Obama, then Trump, and then Biden (in succession).
I've been living and traveling exclusively in the Northeast for the last few years where immigration is less salient, so i haven't heard point 5 in a while, but I have no problem believing it's true in e.g., Florida.
If you don't know many people like that irl but have access to the NYT, take a look at their articles interviewing twelve random people, and you should get a sense of it. I think you'll be shocked by their seeming ideological inconsistency.
The specific wording on some of John's examples were partisan ("Democrats and Fauci" would probably only come from a Republican partisan, or maybe a heavily-Red-leaning independent), but I've heard many independent (even blue-leaning) voters express every one of those points.
The foreign policy point doesn't make any sense to me either, but I hear variations on it often enough.
The thesis is that because he was seen as unpredictable and a little crazy, despots didn’t want to take the chance. It isn’t unreasonable since it happens in real life. If you see an unhinged person in the street ranting about the world, people avoid a confrontation.
It isn’t the ringing endorsement they think it is.
Other countries that did not respond with stimulus had worse inflation. And we would have had inflation as a result of huge tax cuts for the wealthy had republicans been in power.
Why would you call the killing it person "center right?" _I'm_ Center Right. :)
Absolutely, that T-shirt isn't "center right," it's "Biden derangement syndrome."
While this is well-intentioned, I'm not sure this is how these things tend to go. The last time I discussed politics with a conservative relative at Thanksgiving - as it happens, about ten years ago - it was started with me pretty calmly trying to explain some bit of factual information about the Affordable Care Act and wound up turning into a shouting match after said relative decided to start condescendingly lecturing me about how I was too young to understand how the world works (of note, I was about 30 at the time, so relatively young but hardly a kid). His response to me was not only condescending and aggressive, it literally made no sense and was totally irrelevant to the point I was trying to make.
I suspect this is how these sorts of things normally go.
This is deranged. We shouldn’t be coaching people how to win Thanksgiving meal debates.
Just have a nice meal with family and friends for fucksake.
Because soon you’ll be dead. No one will care that you “owned” Aunt Mildred on fiscal policy after you’re dead.
Jesus🤦♂️
Matt is talking about dialogue, not debating. If you owned your aunt and embarrassed her and now she is even more dug into her crazy beliefs, you have lost. If you give them pause and make them think it’s less crazy to support Biden than they had thought, that’s a good thing.
It also depends on the family of course. My family loves to debate and hash out disagreements. But if politics talk means yelling and divisiveness, by all means stick to more unifying topics.
I think if even 1% of one’s focus on Thanksgiving dinner is to increase support for Biden, I think one needs to expand their life experiences. More important shit in life
How about giving some focus to not having your family members have a distorted view of the state of the country? Or maybe it will turn out you have a distorted view of the world and you can learn from them. Again, depends on your family dynamics: it's not a one-size-fits-all proposition.
I don’t look at different people as having “distorted views”. Just different perspectives. I always prioritize learning from others’ perspectives. Our TG dinner conversation was great, 0% politics. because most of what makes life worth living is NOT politics.
If you think that some family member there is going to bring up politics and make things unpleasant, a natural focus is to figure out how to keep it positive, and how to figure out how to turn this to possible benefit.
Obviously better to stay away from things that will cause arguments, but if you are confident they're going to happen, you might as well prepare to make them more productive.