I think Matt's anecdote about some old folks in Bavaria doesn't track the reality that AfD experiences enthusiastic and deep support from their voters in their stronghold regions. Indeed, what's proposed here is kind of the null hypothesis about nationalism in Germany, which is that there isn't much but the conservatives ain't conservative enough so the nationalists are getting a bunch of 'just conservative' votes. I think most observers of German politics, and the other things I've read about it, would cause one to reject that hypothesis, and I'd encourage the readers of this blog to be less credulous of this view. It's important to remember that in Germany people who support AfD are asking for less _legal_ immigration, in addition to the (many) other nationalistic things AfD aims to do, whereas in America it's less clear where our population lies on that point because there's so much abuse of the asylum system and illegal immigration, which people are pretty agitated about. It's hard to even talk about legal immigration in America, because that process is so restricted that conservatives and liberals can smell that it's not a relevant part of the migration to this country at this time.
More broadly, I think at some point Matt is going to have to accept that his opponents are actually nationalists, in the bad old sense, and trying to pick some voters off them by moderating on _their_ strong issues is actually the same thing as becoming more nationalistic. Or in other words, becoming the monster you seek to slay as you prepare to slay it. I'm hoping he can come up with some more creative ways to slice votes out of the middle right, because the Authoritarians absolutely are winning, especially if the opposition party becomes an Authoritarian party too. Like do we infer from the national discourse on speech after the murder of Charlie Kirk that liberals could extract right-leaning votes by illiberally targeting speech critical of Kirk?
Sooo… Clinton’s championing of opening trade, building more prisons, longer sentences, and keeping electric chairs warmed up has generally been seen as disastrous for African Americans, and not just by rote progressive lefty types. For an academic analysis of the impact of Clintonism see Musa Al Gharbi: https://musaalgharbi.com/2024/04/03/bill-hillary-clinton-revolutionized-democratic-party-twice/
"If decent people decide to shun everyone who fails to embrace certain progressive cultural values, then we end up with a bunch of very indecent people winning elections and everyone standing around wondering what happened" - touché
“ Populist movements are also associated with, well, populism — a general disrespect for established institutions and hierarchies of knowledge and authority.” That’s what I observed from Progressives.
“… and are associated with odd ideas about vaccines and blowing off normal economics wisdom about things like tariffs and central bank…” Say Modern Monetary Theory.
“ Many of these movements appear to be hostile to the basic principles of constitutional liberalism and electoral democracy….” I noticed a concerted effort to suppress mis-, mal-, and dis-information, known by many by illiberal name censorship, pressed by the left for years.
“ But if deeply illiberal people come to power and trash the basic institutions of Western democracies, that’s not just something we come back from.” Obama, Trump, Biden all, aggressively pushing their preferences by ignoring (sometimes acknowledged by the perpetrator) the Constitution and/or Supreme Court decisions.
“ The only way to beat authoritarianism, though, is with actual democratic politics. And I think that requires elected officials who take the vocation of politics seriously enough to represent the authentic values of the electorate, rather than ceding all power to people who disdain democracy.” Amen.
GOP: Exploit social divisions to transfer maximal resources to the wealthy
Hillary-neoliberals: Exploit wokeism to transfer slightly less resources to the wealthy
The left: Exploit wokeism to transfer material resources to the poor
No-one: Exploit social divisions to transfer material resources to the poor (although Trump said something like this in 2016)
Slow Boring: Exploit social divisions to transfer slightly less resources to the wealthy
I suppose Matt Y is calling for the resignation of Jeffries and Schumer with this post because I cannot think of two leaders (other than Biden) who were more responsible for the immigration failures that led to Trump-2.0.
It is crazy to hear some of the comments here defend that Biden was seriously doing something about the border. The people who were caught crossing the border were given a court date something close to infinity number of years down the road and most did not show up and just stayed here illegally.
And then once again some commenters pull out the race card. There are racists opposed to immigration, but the majority of people are concerned for other reasons. So here comes Donald Trump. I firmly believe that Democrats gave him power, not Republicans. Do you have to be that unlikable?
In europe, they do understand that the voters basically dislike the cultures that their migrants are coming from. But they need fhe labor for thr pensions.
They are increasingly taking more immigrants from africa which has above replacement level, but the muslim africans tend to poorly integrate.
I’d like to see polling of democrats in blue cities and states that asks how long should we expect and except total failure? Why do the constituents accept total failure on everything except providing abortions. Why don’t voters in Portland, Oakland, LA, say: we’ve had enough?
I have a hard time squaring this with the wild swings of polling on immigration. It seems much less likely to be true that people are expressing some common, long-held feeling about immigration and the reality of it in the US, than they are expressing whatever the current media cycle is feeding them.
If anything, the polling indicates that the recent panic over immigration is fading, and we're going back to the "immigration is broadly popular" baseline.
I certainly take your point but it's still significant that throughout all of the fluctuations, "decreased" has never really been a distant 3rd. It seems to have the most sustained popularity.
Polls I've seen that extend back farther in time typically show "decreased" winning by even larger margins. And if you go way, way back in time you find the big immigration-blocking bills of the 1920s.
I do think these things could change in the future, and public attitudes about immigration are by no means written in stone, but at current levels it does seem like "increased" is the tougher campaign promise to win on.
I agree, which is why I'm not at all convinced that chasing popular opinion on this particular issue makes sense.
I think you could have a very popular candidate run with a "immigrants are great but we need an orderly pathway and we're going to devote energy to making sure the people who come here do so legally and don't have to wait a decade to do so" or something like that that's broadly pro-immigration but also seems sane to most people.
The trick is getting people to trust that you actually believe what you're saying.
I think ultimately the public just has very conservative intuitions on the issue. Even in the midst of thermostatic backlash, it’s still Trump’s best issue.
The party brand needs to recover to where it was 15-20 years ago on the topic where they favor border security and orderly legal immigration, and then just avoid the issue as much as possible.
In some ways this article works as a defense of our 2-party system that is so regularly criticized.
There have always been dismissive comments you would hear along the lines of, "The GOP makes even the most right-wing European conservative parties make our look sane and reasonable".
perhaps it's only because in our system, the "distasteful", or perhaps, "deplorable" voters are forced into a single pole of the 2 party axis and make their preferences known sooner. It forced our system to metabolize them sooner than in many European countries where their impact was more diffuse?
I basically agree with Matt's argument for what Democrats should do and why, but he's giving a bit of short shrift to why they (and their European contemporaries) don't.
Immigration and, more recently, crime, have come to be seen as moral issues. That's why the "wrong" position on them is so easily coded with a moral slur: "racist.". And we know from both common sense and psychological research that compromising on moral issues, even, or especially, for the sake of practical gain feels wrong. Its "selling out.".
Matt senses this, of course, which is why he's trying to argue that chasing voters over to the dark side is morally worse, and also, that politicians should recognize that they are in the business of politics. That is, they are not spiritual leaders. Both are true. But They're still not addressing the point. If someone thinks that taking a hard line on immigration is the modern equivalent of supporting racial segregation in the U.S. prior to 1964, no electoral math or appeal to politics as usual is going to convince them to change.
The question is, do liberal politicians believe that the people on the land now -- current citizens -- have a moral right to decide who else comes onto that land? Yes or no? I believe, and I think Matt's analysis here backs this up, that if liberal politicians simply came out and said this, just stated it as a moral principle, they would be able to pull over a sufficient number of medianish voters. Of course, entailed in this would be the idea of a rational discussion of immigration levels and rational processes, including punishment in some cases, for people who violate that process.
But whether liberal politicians believe this in their hearts or not, they tend not to say it because they know that a substantial portion of liberal voters do not, or, are too scared to say that they do not. And with good reason. The argument that ICE and border patrols are segregationist and dehumanizing is obvious on its face. Trump has actually made that transparently clear.
To sum up... The progressive left has moral clarity on this issue, and so does the maga right. But the center doesn't. And so the best it can do is offer amoral pragmatism, which is easily exploited by the extremes.
What the fuck does Matt expect? He already concedes that most of the perception of the Democratic party does not come directly from Democratic politicians but instead academics and cultural media that are broadly understood be affiliated with Democrats because no shit, it's the only electorally viable left-wing party of course they're going to try to influence it. Does Matt expect all these people to live their whole lives perpetually lying about their moral convictions; does he expect them to voluntarily thought-police themselves in obedience of majoritarian values?
If there's going to be a 21st century confrontation between right-wing authoritarians and liberal progressives, by God it's just gonna happen. This ain't fucking Tenet, causality only goes one way. You can't just force everyone to reset their brains to 1995. Sometimes history deals you a shit hand and you just gotta meet the moment head-on.
"I do not personally favor longer prison sentences, reducing the volume of immigration, or scolding mothers for working too much. At the same time, were a government to come into office that cut immigration, increased prison sentences, and said vaguely encouraging things about tradwives, it wouldn’t be the end of the world."
I've noticed that none of the polices or strategies that Matt is willing to compromise on affect him directly. 😒
Why doesn't he want to compromise on raising taxes the wealthy, for example?
What compromise are you talking about. Higher taxes for the wealthy is the left wing goal. A compromise in this context is to back off on that goal which is not what I think you want. The whole point of compromising on the culture stuff is so we can achieve things like higher taxes on the wealthy.
My perception is that he does less to promote raising taxes on the wealthy, which is popular, than he does to promote strategies that throw women under the bus. Do you think he promotes raising taxes on the wealthy as much as he does for eliminating DEI? Or promoting women like CHH who troll people on gender issues and write about how feminism goes too far?
Women are half the population. People in families making more than $400,000 per year make up fewer than 2% of the population. Why irritate 50% of the population more than 2%?
I thought he talks more about increasing taxes on people making above $100,000 than he does about anything as extreme as ending DEI! (Though he talks more about curbing certain kinds of excesses of DEI than about taxes.)
(He’s also very clear that we need broader re-balancing of taxes, rather than narrow things that exempt anyone who makes under $400,000.)
The simple answer is that today's article was about how the Dems are losing the culture, which is preventing them from winning on other aspects of governance. So they should compromise on cultural things.
Here's Matt talking about raising taxes on the wealthy right here at SB:
No, it's not one of the usual "culture war" political arguments. I don't know if there's always a firm dividing line, but people usually talk about "culture war issues" as one end of a spectrum and "pocket book issues" as the other end. Raising taxes is firmly pocket book, and my impression is Matt cares about those much more than the culture war issues, so he'd rather compromise on culture to win "pocket book" debates.
And I think Matt has pretty standard liberal opinions on pocket book stuff - more government healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy. But today he was writing about how Dems are losing voters due to culture war issues.
No, and I think Yglesias would say that's why Democrats have been losing so many elections, especially in the Senate and Presidency, over the last 10 years or so.
The way I understand him, Matt Y has been saying that today's divisive cultural issues tend to favor Republicans, so ceding some symbolic or less consequential territory in those areas would be smart electoral politics.
Maybe he should talk about tax issues more? He might not have many takes on that, though. I've been reading him since he was Slate's Moneybox writer, and for as long as I remember he's been writing about Housing Abundance and NIMBY issues, with less frequent takes on health, taxes, crime and education.
Over the past 5 years he writes much more frequently on how Dems can win more elections, and his thesis is moderate on cultural issues. From what I've seen of the evidence, Dems have some advantages over Rs on kitchen table issues, while they get crushed on most culture war stuff, so I tend to think he's right.
Maybe he could write more on taxes, though - sounds like the seed of a good mailbag question.
Yeah, I know. I just wonder why he doesn't talk about it more. My perception is that he talks less about raising taxes on the rich than he does moderating on cultural issues. Why?
First I think he quite often talks about how he supports progressive income taxation and that addressing both the deficit and the impending social security crisis by increasing revenue, particularly in the form of ending loopholes used by the wealthy and lifting/abolishing the income cap on social security taxes.
But second, I think cultural issues get a lot of attention here when talking about electoral strategy because that’s the main way that the Democratic Party is out of step with the median voter and is preventing them from winning elections. The median voter favors increasing taxes on the wealthy so that’s not an issue.
In an ideal Democratic party, we could bring back blue dogs as a restrictionist immigration, tough on crime wing of the party and give them full blessing and support to run in red districts. I think there's a lot in the Democratic activist base who would prevent this from happening to a significant degree, though.
I think Matt's anecdote about some old folks in Bavaria doesn't track the reality that AfD experiences enthusiastic and deep support from their voters in their stronghold regions. Indeed, what's proposed here is kind of the null hypothesis about nationalism in Germany, which is that there isn't much but the conservatives ain't conservative enough so the nationalists are getting a bunch of 'just conservative' votes. I think most observers of German politics, and the other things I've read about it, would cause one to reject that hypothesis, and I'd encourage the readers of this blog to be less credulous of this view. It's important to remember that in Germany people who support AfD are asking for less _legal_ immigration, in addition to the (many) other nationalistic things AfD aims to do, whereas in America it's less clear where our population lies on that point because there's so much abuse of the asylum system and illegal immigration, which people are pretty agitated about. It's hard to even talk about legal immigration in America, because that process is so restricted that conservatives and liberals can smell that it's not a relevant part of the migration to this country at this time.
More broadly, I think at some point Matt is going to have to accept that his opponents are actually nationalists, in the bad old sense, and trying to pick some voters off them by moderating on _their_ strong issues is actually the same thing as becoming more nationalistic. Or in other words, becoming the monster you seek to slay as you prepare to slay it. I'm hoping he can come up with some more creative ways to slice votes out of the middle right, because the Authoritarians absolutely are winning, especially if the opposition party becomes an Authoritarian party too. Like do we infer from the national discourse on speech after the murder of Charlie Kirk that liberals could extract right-leaning votes by illiberally targeting speech critical of Kirk?
Free Mickey Kaus
Sooo… Clinton’s championing of opening trade, building more prisons, longer sentences, and keeping electric chairs warmed up has generally been seen as disastrous for African Americans, and not just by rote progressive lefty types. For an academic analysis of the impact of Clintonism see Musa Al Gharbi: https://musaalgharbi.com/2024/04/03/bill-hillary-clinton-revolutionized-democratic-party-twice/
"If decent people decide to shun everyone who fails to embrace certain progressive cultural values, then we end up with a bunch of very indecent people winning elections and everyone standing around wondering what happened" - touché
"The ‘90s were a long time ago, but they’re not ancient history."
And yet, day by day, it is borne back ceaselessly into the past (to borrow Fitzgerald's phrasing).
“ Populist movements are also associated with, well, populism — a general disrespect for established institutions and hierarchies of knowledge and authority.” That’s what I observed from Progressives.
“… and are associated with odd ideas about vaccines and blowing off normal economics wisdom about things like tariffs and central bank…” Say Modern Monetary Theory.
“ Many of these movements appear to be hostile to the basic principles of constitutional liberalism and electoral democracy….” I noticed a concerted effort to suppress mis-, mal-, and dis-information, known by many by illiberal name censorship, pressed by the left for years.
“ But if deeply illiberal people come to power and trash the basic institutions of Western democracies, that’s not just something we come back from.” Obama, Trump, Biden all, aggressively pushing their preferences by ignoring (sometimes acknowledged by the perpetrator) the Constitution and/or Supreme Court decisions.
“ The only way to beat authoritarianism, though, is with actual democratic politics. And I think that requires elected officials who take the vocation of politics seriously enough to represent the authentic values of the electorate, rather than ceding all power to people who disdain democracy.” Amen.
GOP: Exploit social divisions to transfer maximal resources to the wealthy
Hillary-neoliberals: Exploit wokeism to transfer slightly less resources to the wealthy
The left: Exploit wokeism to transfer material resources to the poor
No-one: Exploit social divisions to transfer material resources to the poor (although Trump said something like this in 2016)
Slow Boring: Exploit social divisions to transfer slightly less resources to the wealthy
I suppose Matt Y is calling for the resignation of Jeffries and Schumer with this post because I cannot think of two leaders (other than Biden) who were more responsible for the immigration failures that led to Trump-2.0.
It is crazy to hear some of the comments here defend that Biden was seriously doing something about the border. The people who were caught crossing the border were given a court date something close to infinity number of years down the road and most did not show up and just stayed here illegally.
And then once again some commenters pull out the race card. There are racists opposed to immigration, but the majority of people are concerned for other reasons. So here comes Donald Trump. I firmly believe that Democrats gave him power, not Republicans. Do you have to be that unlikable?
In europe, they do understand that the voters basically dislike the cultures that their migrants are coming from. But they need fhe labor for thr pensions.
They are increasingly taking more immigrants from africa which has above replacement level, but the muslim africans tend to poorly integrate.
https://open.substack.com/pub/yawboadu/p/the-future-of-immigration-policy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=garki
I’d like to see polling of democrats in blue cities and states that asks how long should we expect and except total failure? Why do the constituents accept total failure on everything except providing abortions. Why don’t voters in Portland, Oakland, LA, say: we’ve had enough?
I have a hard time squaring this with the wild swings of polling on immigration. It seems much less likely to be true that people are expressing some common, long-held feeling about immigration and the reality of it in the US, than they are expressing whatever the current media cycle is feeding them.
If anything, the polling indicates that the recent panic over immigration is fading, and we're going back to the "immigration is broadly popular" baseline.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigration-abated.aspx
I certainly take your point but it's still significant that throughout all of the fluctuations, "decreased" has never really been a distant 3rd. It seems to have the most sustained popularity.
Polls I've seen that extend back farther in time typically show "decreased" winning by even larger margins. And if you go way, way back in time you find the big immigration-blocking bills of the 1920s.
I do think these things could change in the future, and public attitudes about immigration are by no means written in stone, but at current levels it does seem like "increased" is the tougher campaign promise to win on.
I think most of the recent fluctuation is clearly due to thermostatic opinion and the public reacting against Trump I, Biden, and Trump II.
I agree, which is why I'm not at all convinced that chasing popular opinion on this particular issue makes sense.
I think you could have a very popular candidate run with a "immigrants are great but we need an orderly pathway and we're going to devote energy to making sure the people who come here do so legally and don't have to wait a decade to do so" or something like that that's broadly pro-immigration but also seems sane to most people.
The trick is getting people to trust that you actually believe what you're saying.
I think ultimately the public just has very conservative intuitions on the issue. Even in the midst of thermostatic backlash, it’s still Trump’s best issue.
The party brand needs to recover to where it was 15-20 years ago on the topic where they favor border security and orderly legal immigration, and then just avoid the issue as much as possible.
In some ways this article works as a defense of our 2-party system that is so regularly criticized.
There have always been dismissive comments you would hear along the lines of, "The GOP makes even the most right-wing European conservative parties make our look sane and reasonable".
perhaps it's only because in our system, the "distasteful", or perhaps, "deplorable" voters are forced into a single pole of the 2 party axis and make their preferences known sooner. It forced our system to metabolize them sooner than in many European countries where their impact was more diffuse?
interesting.
It seems like hardcore conservatives are willing to cut off their nose to spite their face. Why is that?
I basically agree with Matt's argument for what Democrats should do and why, but he's giving a bit of short shrift to why they (and their European contemporaries) don't.
Immigration and, more recently, crime, have come to be seen as moral issues. That's why the "wrong" position on them is so easily coded with a moral slur: "racist.". And we know from both common sense and psychological research that compromising on moral issues, even, or especially, for the sake of practical gain feels wrong. Its "selling out.".
Matt senses this, of course, which is why he's trying to argue that chasing voters over to the dark side is morally worse, and also, that politicians should recognize that they are in the business of politics. That is, they are not spiritual leaders. Both are true. But They're still not addressing the point. If someone thinks that taking a hard line on immigration is the modern equivalent of supporting racial segregation in the U.S. prior to 1964, no electoral math or appeal to politics as usual is going to convince them to change.
The question is, do liberal politicians believe that the people on the land now -- current citizens -- have a moral right to decide who else comes onto that land? Yes or no? I believe, and I think Matt's analysis here backs this up, that if liberal politicians simply came out and said this, just stated it as a moral principle, they would be able to pull over a sufficient number of medianish voters. Of course, entailed in this would be the idea of a rational discussion of immigration levels and rational processes, including punishment in some cases, for people who violate that process.
But whether liberal politicians believe this in their hearts or not, they tend not to say it because they know that a substantial portion of liberal voters do not, or, are too scared to say that they do not. And with good reason. The argument that ICE and border patrols are segregationist and dehumanizing is obvious on its face. Trump has actually made that transparently clear.
To sum up... The progressive left has moral clarity on this issue, and so does the maga right. But the center doesn't. And so the best it can do is offer amoral pragmatism, which is easily exploited by the extremes.
What the fuck does Matt expect? He already concedes that most of the perception of the Democratic party does not come directly from Democratic politicians but instead academics and cultural media that are broadly understood be affiliated with Democrats because no shit, it's the only electorally viable left-wing party of course they're going to try to influence it. Does Matt expect all these people to live their whole lives perpetually lying about their moral convictions; does he expect them to voluntarily thought-police themselves in obedience of majoritarian values?
If there's going to be a 21st century confrontation between right-wing authoritarians and liberal progressives, by God it's just gonna happen. This ain't fucking Tenet, causality only goes one way. You can't just force everyone to reset their brains to 1995. Sometimes history deals you a shit hand and you just gotta meet the moment head-on.
"I do not personally favor longer prison sentences, reducing the volume of immigration, or scolding mothers for working too much. At the same time, were a government to come into office that cut immigration, increased prison sentences, and said vaguely encouraging things about tradwives, it wouldn’t be the end of the world."
I've noticed that none of the polices or strategies that Matt is willing to compromise on affect him directly. 😒
Why doesn't he want to compromise on raising taxes the wealthy, for example?
THAT'S also quite popular right now.
What compromise are you talking about. Higher taxes for the wealthy is the left wing goal. A compromise in this context is to back off on that goal which is not what I think you want. The whole point of compromising on the culture stuff is so we can achieve things like higher taxes on the wealthy.
Matt endorses raising taxes on the wealthy! It’s not a compromise for him, but a position he earnestly supports on the merits!
Yeah, I know he does.
My perception is that he does less to promote raising taxes on the wealthy, which is popular, than he does to promote strategies that throw women under the bus. Do you think he promotes raising taxes on the wealthy as much as he does for eliminating DEI? Or promoting women like CHH who troll people on gender issues and write about how feminism goes too far?
Women are half the population. People in families making more than $400,000 per year make up fewer than 2% of the population. Why irritate 50% of the population more than 2%?
I thought he talks more about increasing taxes on people making above $100,000 than he does about anything as extreme as ending DEI! (Though he talks more about curbing certain kinds of excesses of DEI than about taxes.)
(He’s also very clear that we need broader re-balancing of taxes, rather than narrow things that exempt anyone who makes under $400,000.)
Matt complains far more about the Left and The Groups in the past year than he has talked about raising taxes in the past year or so.
Btw, a slight majority of Americans DO support DEI in the workplace. I wrote a post about this.
https://open.substack.com/pub/elizarodriguez/p/the-majority-of-americans-still-support?r=16xusl&utm_medium=ios
The simple answer is that today's article was about how the Dems are losing the culture, which is preventing them from winning on other aspects of governance. So they should compromise on cultural things.
Here's Matt talking about raising taxes on the wealthy right here at SB:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/its-time-to-raise-taxes-on-the-rich
And not too long ago he wrote a similar op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
You don't consider taxing the wealthy do be a cultural issue?
No, it's not one of the usual "culture war" political arguments. I don't know if there's always a firm dividing line, but people usually talk about "culture war issues" as one end of a spectrum and "pocket book issues" as the other end. Raising taxes is firmly pocket book, and my impression is Matt cares about those much more than the culture war issues, so he'd rather compromise on culture to win "pocket book" debates.
And I think Matt has pretty standard liberal opinions on pocket book stuff - more government healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy. But today he was writing about how Dems are losing voters due to culture war issues.
Is that smart? Focusing on divisive cultural issues over popular and good economic platforms?
No, and I think Yglesias would say that's why Democrats have been losing so many elections, especially in the Senate and Presidency, over the last 10 years or so.
The way I understand him, Matt Y has been saying that today's divisive cultural issues tend to favor Republicans, so ceding some symbolic or less consequential territory in those areas would be smart electoral politics.
Maybe he should talk about tax issues more? He might not have many takes on that, though. I've been reading him since he was Slate's Moneybox writer, and for as long as I remember he's been writing about Housing Abundance and NIMBY issues, with less frequent takes on health, taxes, crime and education.
Over the past 5 years he writes much more frequently on how Dems can win more elections, and his thesis is moderate on cultural issues. From what I've seen of the evidence, Dems have some advantages over Rs on kitchen table issues, while they get crushed on most culture war stuff, so I tend to think he's right.
Maybe he could write more on taxes, though - sounds like the seed of a good mailbag question.
No, it's an economic issue.
Matt supports raising taxes on the wealthy.
Yeah, I know. I just wonder why he doesn't talk about it more. My perception is that he talks less about raising taxes on the rich than he does moderating on cultural issues. Why?
First I think he quite often talks about how he supports progressive income taxation and that addressing both the deficit and the impending social security crisis by increasing revenue, particularly in the form of ending loopholes used by the wealthy and lifting/abolishing the income cap on social security taxes.
But second, I think cultural issues get a lot of attention here when talking about electoral strategy because that’s the main way that the Democratic Party is out of step with the median voter and is preventing them from winning elections. The median voter favors increasing taxes on the wealthy so that’s not an issue.
I presume because his audience are democrats/left of center and almost all agree on wanting to raise taxes.
In an ideal Democratic party, we could bring back blue dogs as a restrictionist immigration, tough on crime wing of the party and give them full blessing and support to run in red districts. I think there's a lot in the Democratic activist base who would prevent this from happening to a significant degree, though.