If Pelosi drove China policy from 1991, hundreds of millions of Americans and Chinese would both be poorer. And China would not have changed its behavior.
I'm not sure what Matt's alternate China history looks like. To me, it sounds like unaffordability here and poverty over there.
could her positions on China be a reflection of her constituency? SF's Chinatown is the oldest and most prominent in the US and I'd imagine by 1990 Chinese-American voters formed a visible bloc that could shape their representative's views on China.
I hate to be that buzz kill but she also had the opportunity to hold a floor vote for an insider trading bill and did not do so. A (sort of) minor blemish on an otherwise historical record
> "A lot of people arguing about politics these days are younger than I am and don’t have much political memory before the mid-Obama years.... The leader represents the caucus, so Pelosi’s politics over the past 18 years have been the politics of Democratic Party consensus... That makes her a bit of an anomaly representing (until this past redistricting) basically the city of San Francisco in Congress."
House Speaker Tip O'Neill (1977-1987) represented the liberal 11th district of Massachusetts. House Speaker John W. McCormack (1962-1971) was also from Massachusetts. House Speakers tend to come from safe seats and safe seats are not swing seats. (I'm sure Matt knows this, but other readers may or may not.)
He wrote it when she stepped down as leader, a few years ago - this is a re-post (which is why the video says she went to Tiananmen Square 28 years ago, not 34 years ago).
I was not familiar with that sketch! This episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show is the only pop culture reference I know to pre-written obituaries: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642803/
Good post but if anything Matt undersells Pelosi, whatever you think of her personally she's one of the most powerful and effective Speakers in history (and also obviously the most liberal). The only real rivals to "doing the job effectively" would be Joe Cannon who ruled the House of Reps with an iron fist in the early 20th Century or Thomas Brackett Reed the guy who basically invented the job in the late 19th century (before then the job was more like the Speaker of the House of Commons, a largely ceremonial job devoid of much real influence). And note that other Speakers who have tried to ascend to these heights have often gone full Icarus, see Jim Wright or Newt Gingrich (and Newt in many ways helped to create the modern dysfunctional Republican Party and it's obsession with institutional destruction and a means of power so he gets two Fs in my book.)
She’s the most consequential politician of the era and the greatest speaker in maybe a 100 years. His post is oddly very narrow about all that she accomplished and how incredible she was in her job is unique. Anyone who worked in Congress would agree. Matt’s post majorly undersells the most important politician in maybe 50 years
Fair, but that's because almost all of our take writers overemphasize the presidency (which is prominent and interesting) and underemphasize Congress (which is less prominent and boring) the same way few people post much about county government but it's important in all sorts of ways
Pelosi more than most is responsible for the mindless careerist bot politicians the Democratic party has cultivated in the past 30 years.
Nancy Pelosi's main contribution to the party is it's strategy of candidate recruitment focused on
- The ability to spend your own money to get elected
- Once elected, the ability to recoup ROI via pay for play billionaire access and congressional stock trading
She became leader only because of her "fund raising" ability from SF finance big wigs. As a result the party's power centers concentrated on the coasts and devastated the rural working class.
All in all, Pelosi and everyone from her generation are a massive massive net negative given that during their reign
- Dems spent more time in the opposition than in power in the house.
- We spent trillions on the Iraq and Afghan wars
- We lost the battle on climate change
- SCOTUS is gone for a generation if not more
- Fascism rose again in America
- There is no conceivable path for a rural revitalization of the party
Her retirement sadly will not lead to any reforms either because the power just moved from SF to New York and to the even less charismatic and utterly talentless Hakeem Jeffries.
Sure but as a voter, I still get to complain that the ones working in actual politics and wasting billions and billions of $ on TV ads while driving straight into fascism are doing a very very poor job.
By what metric? No one expects global warming to remain below 2.0 degrees C this century let alone the original target of 1.5 degrees C.
So even setting aside issues of fairness, on the raw numbers we failed.
If you consider issues of fairness we failed doubly.
1990s-2000s: Polluters should pay for the negative externalities they create and the price of fossil fuel consumption should reflect that via a carbon tax or cap-and-trade.
2010-2025: Let's hope technology saves us as polluters are too powerful as consumers prefer "pollute now pay later maybe".
Hope and pray climate tipping points don't exist and we will use geo-engineering if necessary can be redefined as "winning" I suppose.
We're not hitting the specific targets people have ever written, but the total expected amount of greenhouse gas emissions over the next century has generally been going downwards. That's what I mean by winning.
I'm not declaring one number to be the goal, such that everything above that number is a loss and everything below that number is a win. I'm declaring moving downwards to be the direction of winning, and we have been gradually moving in the winning direction for a while.
>but the total expected amount of greenhouse gas emissions over the next century has generally been going downwards.
This assumes none of the positive feedback tipping points are triggered on the current worst than business as usual trajectory.
>I'm not declaring one number to be the goal, such that everything above that number is a loss and everything below that number is a win.
That number was not arbitrary. It was chosen because the expected sea level rise beyond 1.5 degrees would be devastating to many small island nations and coastal areas not to mention risks to planetwide biodiversity. That is now pretty much guaranteed.
When a process occurs slowly it allows one to constantly move the goal posts relative to what one wanted at the outset. Maybe that's OK, but we should not pretend that we achieved our goals.
The current trajectory is not worse than the “business as usual” trajectory from any forecast.
1.4 degrees is also devastating, but slightly less so, 1.6 degrees is also devastating, but slightly more so. 1.5 is in fact an arbitrary target (and was itself a moved goalpost - 2 degrees had been a goalpost for a long time).
Obviously we should continue trying to do better, but there is no precise number that is a “win” or “loss” here (though as you mention, there may be some positive feedback loop tipping points that would make certain points on the scale non-arbitrarily a lot worse than numbers just below - but we haven’t identified precisely what point any of those might occur at).
People set specific targets not because they do not realize that real numbers form a continuous line but because setting specific targets focuses the mind and achieving the specific targets is how we measure success or failure which is a binary construct psychologically. Obviously it would be silly to call 1.49 "success" and 1.51 "failure" but it is also very silly to redefine 2.0 or 2.5 as "success".
Yes. It it indeed high time to blame the meteoric rise of Chinese and Indian C02 emissions where it belongs, at the feet of a lawmaker from San Francisco.,
Your argument fails the very basic per-capita emissions fairness test but I don't expect to convince people that do not see that breaking up a world wide collective action problem along jingoistic nationality lines makes little sense of anything.
I mean, Pelosi got a cap and trade bill through *her* chamber! You really are quite a hater, lol.
But in any event I appreciate the fact that your comment acknowledges (however reluctantly and obliquely) the increasing non-centrality of rich countries with respect to climate change. "Fairness test" indeed.
I disagree with you, but the end point is the biggest thing - bluntly, there is no conceivable path for a rural revitalization of the party because rural America does not want multiracial, multicultural democracy and to be in a coalition with feminists, African-American women, LGBT folks, and college graduates.
Which is fine, I don't want to be in a coalition with evangelicals, etc.
It's fine to disagree. I also disagree on principle with people that want to write off anyone especially when the people being written off are poorer than they are.
Liberalism does not emerge naturally in humans that are under economic stress. Stress makes us all more conservative. If I were in their situation leading a life devoid of agency, I would probably be conservative too. Obama's insight on "clinging to guns and religion" applies not just to the rural folks you wish to write off here in the USA but it is a world wide phenomenon, common to all humans.
The only set of people I condemn unequivocally are the wealthy reactionary conservatives who have the luxury of leading a stress free life but still subscribe to racist and sexist ideologies.
I know some factions in the democratic party do not want to reach out to poor rural voters, I am not one of them. I want to help improve their economic lot so that liberalism can emerge over time.
Conservative rural people have legitimate socially conservative views they care about more than receiving economic help. Their towns, areas, etc. would be much better of with basically open borders and being more open to various races, colors, and creeds, but they don't want that.
They want it to be 1975 or whatever, forever.
I want to help rural people too, but the only way they'll accept help is if we attack people within our coalition and make their lives worse.
I grew up for most my life only w/ a single Mom on SSI and food stamps. So, as somebody who actually grew up among non-educated college poor and working class, they don't want economic help if it doesn't help the people they dislike.
I'm not going to write off poor rural voters, but I'm not going to appease them by kicking other people I care about in the teeth to get their vote. If rural poor people actually want and cared about economic populism, they'd stop caring about abortion and LGBT people, but they legitimate care about those issues, so they can continue to rail against baby killing and get all they help they deserve from the politicians they support.
Obama: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, and they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Obama was not saying that "Conservative rural people have legitimate socially conservative views they care about more than receiving economic help" he was saying, their conservative resentments are downstream of economic dislocation.
>They want it to be 1975 or whatever, forever.
Not in a vacuum. Any population, has both innate liberal and conservative tendencies. When they lose economic means of finding meaning and agency in life, people revert to pre-enlightenment instincts to find meaning instead.
Both Obama and MLK observed the same thing about rural whites.
MLK: "In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: There are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike."
The Clintons shifted Democrats from the MLK-Obama frame of dealing with rural resentments to the "Deplorables" frame which in my view is morally inadequate.
Yes one of the great disappointments with Obama is that he clearly understood the moral calculus but because he was inexperienced in government and was spooked by the GFC as he came into power, his administration got taken over by the corrupt Clintonites and he never again displayed the audacity or vision he ran on. He ended up with an utterly unremarkable Presidency easily forgotten but for his achievement of winning the election itself.
Much of the rural resentments are based on cultural change that was good and righteous and continues to be good and righteous and many of them are deplorable in their opposition to said change.
I want to help rural poor people, but I also want to help rural women who want abortion access even as other rural people think its murder. I want to help rural minorities even as other rural people want to take away their basic civil rights. I want to help rural LGBT people even as other rural people think they're lesser people.
You seem to think the only rural people that 'count' that should be chased after and appealed too are cultural conservatives who can be bought off if we're just economically populist enough. But they can't - yes, they'll be OK with more economically liberal policies, as long as it comes with social reactionary policies, which Democrats used to be OK with.
>"I want to help rural poor people, but I also want to help rural women who want abortion access even as other rural people think its murder. I want to help rural minorities even as other rural people want to take away their basic civil rights. I want to help rural LGBT people even as other rural people think they're lesser people."
Unless you wish to overthrow democracy and impose progressive rule by fiat, how do you aim to achieve this? The only way to help rural women is by making other rural men and women more supportive of abortion rights. In a democracy, you have to pay power it's due and rural voters have power via their geographic distribution and the way the Senate is designed. You cannot impose what you wish by fiat, you have to actually change their minds.
>"You seem to think the only rural people that 'count' that should be chased after and appealed too are cultural conservatives who can be bought off if we're just economically populist enough"
It's not just me, even MLK and others believed this and they were not naive. MLK was willing to work with rural whites on poverty even as they were much more openly racist back then. He did not say "I will only work with the rural white man if he respects me as their equal" because he understood human nature for what it is. The only progressive change possible is the one subject to the rural veto because our Democracy gives them disproportionate power. We do not have the luxury of ignoring that fact.
What a role model. I love that video of her from so many years ago. I don't think I've seen older clips of her like that. She was very pretty in that video.
While I wish she would have retired 5 or 6 years ago, I think she has been one of the finest Speakers and Congressional leaders in recent history. Thanks for your hard work, Nancy, also thanks for being a real one on China for decades, voting against the Bush wars and helping pass the ACA and understanding how to keep a caucus together to win elections. We need more like you. It's a shame that Golden is retiring, I was hoping he'd get more of a leadership role in Congress. But it sounds like his family has been through a lot...
"She broke with Bill Clinton on the Permanent Normal Trade Relations issue in 2000 and criticized the continuation of that policy into the Bush era even more vehemently."
We could honor Pelosi by calling it by its real name, Most Favored Nation. The people sucking up to Communist China changed the name to "Normal Trade Relations" as part of the spin.
But MFN *was* normal trade relations. I worked in trade policy at the time, and there was a sincere belief among most policy people that bringing China into the WTO regime would promote political and economic reform. History may have proven Pelosi correct, but this was a minority view at the time.
It was CALLED "Most Favored Nation", and the only reason the name was changed was because people who favored freely rewarding a murderous Communist regime with our highest level of trade preference thought it sounded bad to admit they were giving these evil bastards "most favored" treatment. So they changed the name to spin their grossly immoral decision.
And no, sorry, it wasn't "sincere". Not saying nobody believed in it, but they believed in it in the Upton Sinclair sense that there was a ton of money on the side of believing it. Everyone knew what Communist China was back then. We all knew about Tiananmen Square, the ethnic cleansing of Tibet, the repression of Falun Gong, the sale of the harvested organs of executed political prisoners, and the complete represssion of any political opposition to their dictators.
But a lot of people wanted to make a lot of money, so they pretended all that would magically change if we gave the Communist murderers favored treatment.
So yes, those who supported it should live with the shame of "Most Favored Nation".
Wonderful. So we stick it to China, resulting in the continuous impoverishment of hundreds of millions of Chinese people. And American poor are poorer because they can't afford nearly the same quality of life.
I lived in China for a long time. There's a lot of bad stuff going on there, but trying to make them poorer is a bad policy. And it's plenty hypocritical when we have lots of Middle Eastern friends who are as bad or worse.
A better way of looking at it is we had one chance, in the period from around 1985-2002 or so, to use our leverage to force China, which desperately wanted foreign trade, to implement serious reforms to their government. It probably would have worked, because as I said we had the leverage and China needed us. And that would mean that China would not be poorer now-- they'd probably be richer, because their governmental system produces all sorts of mistakes and inefficiencies.
Instead, we decided to just make all the money we could and screw ever having any sort of decent Chinese government.
"to use our leverage to force China, which desperately wanted foreign trade, to implement serious reforms to their government."
I don't actually think this is true. China was developing in all kinds of ways and was experiencing high GDP growth in the 90s before it had MFN status. It would have taken them longer, but they would have industrialized anyway, and with the population they have (larger than Europe and N. America combined), they are an enormous economy in and of themselves.
It was very convenient for everyone who wanted to make money to presume that we could not demand anything of the Communist murderers.
Notably WE DIDN'T ASK. It's not like we tried for a decade to get them to democratize and liberalize and gave up. We caved IMMEDIATELY-- indeed we rewarded them for the massacre at Tiananmen Square and then went out and lied that there was nothing we could do.
It was all a money driven lie and a capitulation to Communism.
I think the changing of the name itself is really damning for supporters of the policy. Because if one really thought China was liberalizing, there'd be no problem with granting them Most Favored Nation status. Of course! They're liberalizing, so we grant them Most Favored Nation to encourage liberalization.
It was precisely because everyone actually knew this was about the money and this was an evil, brutal dictatorship and was going to continue to be one that they had to change it to "Permanent Normal Trade Relations".
<raises hand> I favored it. Because as lindamc says, I really did think that China would moderate and liberalize as they joined the international trading system. In the late 90s, I did not foresee the creation of the great firewall and expected exposure to American culture would influence China the way it had Japan, S. Korea, etc.
Realized I was wrong in the early teens and have thought since that we should be creating a new coalition of trading partners that attempts to exclude them again.
I think if you believe your opinion was in no way influenced by the big money and the zeitgeist in our government and Democratic Party produced by that money, you need to seriously ask yourself why you believed a Communist dictatorship that was imprisoning masses of political prisoners, executing some and selling their organs, arresting people for religious demonstrations, had done the Tiananmen Square massacre, and had photos of Mao everywhere was planning on liberalizing.
I knew what the score was, as did Pelosi, and I'm really pissed at the people who didn't, because we lost our only chance to turn China into a better global citizen.
"But a “message bill” in that era didn’t mean “just ignore the Senate vote count and do the groups’ whole laundry list.” The idea of a “message bill” was to set up the message for the next election, putting Democrats’ most popular ideas on the floor and daring Republicans to block them in order to give candidates something broadly appealing to talk about."
I really wish congressional Democrats would remember this.
My favorite seen is Hank Paulson (then Secretary of the Treasury) is so stressed out he's literally dry heaving into a waste basket. He comes over and gets on his knees to beg Nancy to pass the emergency bailout. And Nancy says, "Hank, we're not opposing this, your side is."
You'll recall that day when there was a vote and it failed and the stock market went into free fall collapse*. The holdouts panicked and the bailout passed on a revote later that day.
* CNBC had the market indexes on one side of the screen and the vote total
screen from the House. The second it showed the vote failing the bottom fell out of the market with across the board panicked selling.
During Obama’s second term, her allocation of campaign funds seemed more aimed at protecting frontline incumbents than creating a majority. When you are in the minority, frontline incumbents should get less than those challenging vulnerable incumbents. If the environment is good enough for the challengers to win, the incumbents can hang on with moderate funding. So I don’t really think she played to win. But, she did play to win more than any of her progressive contemporaries other than Obama.
A nice piece would be a deep comparison of pelosi and Ryan.
If Pelosi drove China policy from 1991, hundreds of millions of Americans and Chinese would both be poorer. And China would not have changed its behavior.
I'm not sure what Matt's alternate China history looks like. To me, it sounds like unaffordability here and poverty over there.
thank you for this article! Very interesting
could her positions on China be a reflection of her constituency? SF's Chinatown is the oldest and most prominent in the US and I'd imagine by 1990 Chinese-American voters formed a visible bloc that could shape their representative's views on China.
This has long been my assumption about what’s going on here!
I hate to be that buzz kill but she also had the opportunity to hold a floor vote for an insider trading bill and did not do so. A (sort of) minor blemish on an otherwise historical record
> "A lot of people arguing about politics these days are younger than I am and don’t have much political memory before the mid-Obama years.... The leader represents the caucus, so Pelosi’s politics over the past 18 years have been the politics of Democratic Party consensus... That makes her a bit of an anomaly representing (until this past redistricting) basically the city of San Francisco in Congress."
House Speaker Tip O'Neill (1977-1987) represented the liberal 11th district of Massachusetts. House Speaker John W. McCormack (1962-1971) was also from Massachusetts. House Speakers tend to come from safe seats and safe seats are not swing seats. (I'm sure Matt knows this, but other readers may or may not.)
Matt had this column ready, is this a Gerald Ford Died Yesterday….situation?
He wrote it when she stepped down as leader, a few years ago - this is a re-post (which is why the video says she went to Tiananmen Square 28 years ago, not 34 years ago).
I don’t think you get the joke Kenny, but here’s a link.
https://youtu.be/1tX6jdoruH8?si=hbgyrtwvOuDXxpZ0
I was not familiar with that sketch! This episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show is the only pop culture reference I know to pre-written obituaries: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642803/
No mention of a pack of wolves.
He was Delicious!
Good post but if anything Matt undersells Pelosi, whatever you think of her personally she's one of the most powerful and effective Speakers in history (and also obviously the most liberal). The only real rivals to "doing the job effectively" would be Joe Cannon who ruled the House of Reps with an iron fist in the early 20th Century or Thomas Brackett Reed the guy who basically invented the job in the late 19th century (before then the job was more like the Speaker of the House of Commons, a largely ceremonial job devoid of much real influence). And note that other Speakers who have tried to ascend to these heights have often gone full Icarus, see Jim Wright or Newt Gingrich (and Newt in many ways helped to create the modern dysfunctional Republican Party and it's obsession with institutional destruction and a means of power so he gets two Fs in my book.)
Are you really going to just leave Sam Rayburn out of the equation?
He was a jovial fellow to drink bourbon with, I'll give you that, but he was not a main driven of events this the three above were.
She’s the most consequential politician of the era and the greatest speaker in maybe a 100 years. His post is oddly very narrow about all that she accomplished and how incredible she was in her job is unique. Anyone who worked in Congress would agree. Matt’s post majorly undersells the most important politician in maybe 50 years
Fair, but that's because almost all of our take writers overemphasize the presidency (which is prominent and interesting) and underemphasize Congress (which is less prominent and boring) the same way few people post much about county government but it's important in all sorts of ways
But this is supposed to be slowboring, not the desperate tv take writers
She and Dick Cheney retiring at the same time!
Pelosi more than most is responsible for the mindless careerist bot politicians the Democratic party has cultivated in the past 30 years.
Nancy Pelosi's main contribution to the party is it's strategy of candidate recruitment focused on
- The ability to spend your own money to get elected
- Once elected, the ability to recoup ROI via pay for play billionaire access and congressional stock trading
She became leader only because of her "fund raising" ability from SF finance big wigs. As a result the party's power centers concentrated on the coasts and devastated the rural working class.
All in all, Pelosi and everyone from her generation are a massive massive net negative given that during their reign
- Dems spent more time in the opposition than in power in the house.
- We spent trillions on the Iraq and Afghan wars
- We lost the battle on climate change
- SCOTUS is gone for a generation if not more
- Fascism rose again in America
- There is no conceivable path for a rural revitalization of the party
Her retirement sadly will not lead to any reforms either because the power just moved from SF to New York and to the even less charismatic and utterly talentless Hakeem Jeffries.
Clearly you don’t work in actual politics
Sure but as a voter, I still get to complain that the ones working in actual politics and wasting billions and billions of $ on TV ads while driving straight into fascism are doing a very very poor job.
Haven’t we been winning the battle on climate change, despite her cap-and-trade bill getting shot down in the senate thanks to deepwater horizon?
By what metric? No one expects global warming to remain below 2.0 degrees C this century let alone the original target of 1.5 degrees C.
So even setting aside issues of fairness, on the raw numbers we failed.
If you consider issues of fairness we failed doubly.
1990s-2000s: Polluters should pay for the negative externalities they create and the price of fossil fuel consumption should reflect that via a carbon tax or cap-and-trade.
2010-2025: Let's hope technology saves us as polluters are too powerful as consumers prefer "pollute now pay later maybe".
Hope and pray climate tipping points don't exist and we will use geo-engineering if necessary can be redefined as "winning" I suppose.
We're not hitting the specific targets people have ever written, but the total expected amount of greenhouse gas emissions over the next century has generally been going downwards. That's what I mean by winning.
I'm not declaring one number to be the goal, such that everything above that number is a loss and everything below that number is a win. I'm declaring moving downwards to be the direction of winning, and we have been gradually moving in the winning direction for a while.
>but the total expected amount of greenhouse gas emissions over the next century has generally been going downwards.
This assumes none of the positive feedback tipping points are triggered on the current worst than business as usual trajectory.
>I'm not declaring one number to be the goal, such that everything above that number is a loss and everything below that number is a win.
That number was not arbitrary. It was chosen because the expected sea level rise beyond 1.5 degrees would be devastating to many small island nations and coastal areas not to mention risks to planetwide biodiversity. That is now pretty much guaranteed.
When a process occurs slowly it allows one to constantly move the goal posts relative to what one wanted at the outset. Maybe that's OK, but we should not pretend that we achieved our goals.
The current trajectory is not worse than the “business as usual” trajectory from any forecast.
1.4 degrees is also devastating, but slightly less so, 1.6 degrees is also devastating, but slightly more so. 1.5 is in fact an arbitrary target (and was itself a moved goalpost - 2 degrees had been a goalpost for a long time).
Obviously we should continue trying to do better, but there is no precise number that is a “win” or “loss” here (though as you mention, there may be some positive feedback loop tipping points that would make certain points on the scale non-arbitrarily a lot worse than numbers just below - but we haven’t identified precisely what point any of those might occur at).
People set specific targets not because they do not realize that real numbers form a continuous line but because setting specific targets focuses the mind and achieving the specific targets is how we measure success or failure which is a binary construct psychologically. Obviously it would be silly to call 1.49 "success" and 1.51 "failure" but it is also very silly to redefine 2.0 or 2.5 as "success".
Yes. It it indeed high time to blame the meteoric rise of Chinese and Indian C02 emissions where it belongs, at the feet of a lawmaker from San Francisco.,
Your argument fails the very basic per-capita emissions fairness test but I don't expect to convince people that do not see that breaking up a world wide collective action problem along jingoistic nationality lines makes little sense of anything.
I mean, Pelosi got a cap and trade bill through *her* chamber! You really are quite a hater, lol.
But in any event I appreciate the fact that your comment acknowledges (however reluctantly and obliquely) the increasing non-centrality of rich countries with respect to climate change. "Fairness test" indeed.
I disagree with you, but the end point is the biggest thing - bluntly, there is no conceivable path for a rural revitalization of the party because rural America does not want multiracial, multicultural democracy and to be in a coalition with feminists, African-American women, LGBT folks, and college graduates.
Which is fine, I don't want to be in a coalition with evangelicals, etc.
It's fine to disagree. I also disagree on principle with people that want to write off anyone especially when the people being written off are poorer than they are.
Liberalism does not emerge naturally in humans that are under economic stress. Stress makes us all more conservative. If I were in their situation leading a life devoid of agency, I would probably be conservative too. Obama's insight on "clinging to guns and religion" applies not just to the rural folks you wish to write off here in the USA but it is a world wide phenomenon, common to all humans.
The only set of people I condemn unequivocally are the wealthy reactionary conservatives who have the luxury of leading a stress free life but still subscribe to racist and sexist ideologies.
I know some factions in the democratic party do not want to reach out to poor rural voters, I am not one of them. I want to help improve their economic lot so that liberalism can emerge over time.
Except Obama was basically correct.
Conservative rural people have legitimate socially conservative views they care about more than receiving economic help. Their towns, areas, etc. would be much better of with basically open borders and being more open to various races, colors, and creeds, but they don't want that.
They want it to be 1975 or whatever, forever.
I want to help rural people too, but the only way they'll accept help is if we attack people within our coalition and make their lives worse.
I grew up for most my life only w/ a single Mom on SSI and food stamps. So, as somebody who actually grew up among non-educated college poor and working class, they don't want economic help if it doesn't help the people they dislike.
I'm not going to write off poor rural voters, but I'm not going to appease them by kicking other people I care about in the teeth to get their vote. If rural poor people actually want and cared about economic populism, they'd stop caring about abortion and LGBT people, but they legitimate care about those issues, so they can continue to rail against baby killing and get all they help they deserve from the politicians they support.
Obama was correct and he would disagree with you.
Obama: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, and they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Obama was not saying that "Conservative rural people have legitimate socially conservative views they care about more than receiving economic help" he was saying, their conservative resentments are downstream of economic dislocation.
>They want it to be 1975 or whatever, forever.
Not in a vacuum. Any population, has both innate liberal and conservative tendencies. When they lose economic means of finding meaning and agency in life, people revert to pre-enlightenment instincts to find meaning instead.
Both Obama and MLK observed the same thing about rural whites.
MLK: "In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: There are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike."
The Clintons shifted Democrats from the MLK-Obama frame of dealing with rural resentments to the "Deplorables" frame which in my view is morally inadequate.
Obama didn’t help their lot much either.
Yes one of the great disappointments with Obama is that he clearly understood the moral calculus but because he was inexperienced in government and was spooked by the GFC as he came into power, his administration got taken over by the corrupt Clintonites and he never again displayed the audacity or vision he ran on. He ended up with an utterly unremarkable Presidency easily forgotten but for his achievement of winning the election itself.
Much of the rural resentments are based on cultural change that was good and righteous and continues to be good and righteous and many of them are deplorable in their opposition to said change.
I want to help rural poor people, but I also want to help rural women who want abortion access even as other rural people think its murder. I want to help rural minorities even as other rural people want to take away their basic civil rights. I want to help rural LGBT people even as other rural people think they're lesser people.
You seem to think the only rural people that 'count' that should be chased after and appealed too are cultural conservatives who can be bought off if we're just economically populist enough. But they can't - yes, they'll be OK with more economically liberal policies, as long as it comes with social reactionary policies, which Democrats used to be OK with.
>"I want to help rural poor people, but I also want to help rural women who want abortion access even as other rural people think its murder. I want to help rural minorities even as other rural people want to take away their basic civil rights. I want to help rural LGBT people even as other rural people think they're lesser people."
Unless you wish to overthrow democracy and impose progressive rule by fiat, how do you aim to achieve this? The only way to help rural women is by making other rural men and women more supportive of abortion rights. In a democracy, you have to pay power it's due and rural voters have power via their geographic distribution and the way the Senate is designed. You cannot impose what you wish by fiat, you have to actually change their minds.
>"You seem to think the only rural people that 'count' that should be chased after and appealed too are cultural conservatives who can be bought off if we're just economically populist enough"
It's not just me, even MLK and others believed this and they were not naive. MLK was willing to work with rural whites on poverty even as they were much more openly racist back then. He did not say "I will only work with the rural white man if he respects me as their equal" because he understood human nature for what it is. The only progressive change possible is the one subject to the rural veto because our Democracy gives them disproportionate power. We do not have the luxury of ignoring that fact.
What a role model. I love that video of her from so many years ago. I don't think I've seen older clips of her like that. She was very pretty in that video.
While I wish she would have retired 5 or 6 years ago, I think she has been one of the finest Speakers and Congressional leaders in recent history. Thanks for your hard work, Nancy, also thanks for being a real one on China for decades, voting against the Bush wars and helping pass the ACA and understanding how to keep a caucus together to win elections. We need more like you. It's a shame that Golden is retiring, I was hoping he'd get more of a leadership role in Congress. But it sounds like his family has been through a lot...
"She broke with Bill Clinton on the Permanent Normal Trade Relations issue in 2000 and criticized the continuation of that policy into the Bush era even more vehemently."
We could honor Pelosi by calling it by its real name, Most Favored Nation. The people sucking up to Communist China changed the name to "Normal Trade Relations" as part of the spin.
But MFN *was* normal trade relations. I worked in trade policy at the time, and there was a sincere belief among most policy people that bringing China into the WTO regime would promote political and economic reform. History may have proven Pelosi correct, but this was a minority view at the time.
It was CALLED "Most Favored Nation", and the only reason the name was changed was because people who favored freely rewarding a murderous Communist regime with our highest level of trade preference thought it sounded bad to admit they were giving these evil bastards "most favored" treatment. So they changed the name to spin their grossly immoral decision.
And no, sorry, it wasn't "sincere". Not saying nobody believed in it, but they believed in it in the Upton Sinclair sense that there was a ton of money on the side of believing it. Everyone knew what Communist China was back then. We all knew about Tiananmen Square, the ethnic cleansing of Tibet, the repression of Falun Gong, the sale of the harvested organs of executed political prisoners, and the complete represssion of any political opposition to their dictators.
But a lot of people wanted to make a lot of money, so they pretended all that would magically change if we gave the Communist murderers favored treatment.
So yes, those who supported it should live with the shame of "Most Favored Nation".
Wonderful. So we stick it to China, resulting in the continuous impoverishment of hundreds of millions of Chinese people. And American poor are poorer because they can't afford nearly the same quality of life.
I lived in China for a long time. There's a lot of bad stuff going on there, but trying to make them poorer is a bad policy. And it's plenty hypocritical when we have lots of Middle Eastern friends who are as bad or worse.
A better way of looking at it is we had one chance, in the period from around 1985-2002 or so, to use our leverage to force China, which desperately wanted foreign trade, to implement serious reforms to their government. It probably would have worked, because as I said we had the leverage and China needed us. And that would mean that China would not be poorer now-- they'd probably be richer, because their governmental system produces all sorts of mistakes and inefficiencies.
Instead, we decided to just make all the money we could and screw ever having any sort of decent Chinese government.
"to use our leverage to force China, which desperately wanted foreign trade, to implement serious reforms to their government."
I don't actually think this is true. China was developing in all kinds of ways and was experiencing high GDP growth in the 90s before it had MFN status. It would have taken them longer, but they would have industrialized anyway, and with the population they have (larger than Europe and N. America combined), they are an enormous economy in and of themselves.
It was very convenient for everyone who wanted to make money to presume that we could not demand anything of the Communist murderers.
Notably WE DIDN'T ASK. It's not like we tried for a decade to get them to democratize and liberalize and gave up. We caved IMMEDIATELY-- indeed we rewarded them for the massacre at Tiananmen Square and then went out and lied that there was nothing we could do.
It was all a money driven lie and a capitulation to Communism.
You're entitled to your opinion but you cannot know other people's motives.
I think the changing of the name itself is really damning for supporters of the policy. Because if one really thought China was liberalizing, there'd be no problem with granting them Most Favored Nation status. Of course! They're liberalizing, so we grant them Most Favored Nation to encourage liberalization.
It was precisely because everyone actually knew this was about the money and this was an evil, brutal dictatorship and was going to continue to be one that they had to change it to "Permanent Normal Trade Relations".
<raises hand> I favored it. Because as lindamc says, I really did think that China would moderate and liberalize as they joined the international trading system. In the late 90s, I did not foresee the creation of the great firewall and expected exposure to American culture would influence China the way it had Japan, S. Korea, etc.
Realized I was wrong in the early teens and have thought since that we should be creating a new coalition of trading partners that attempts to exclude them again.
I think if you believe your opinion was in no way influenced by the big money and the zeitgeist in our government and Democratic Party produced by that money, you need to seriously ask yourself why you believed a Communist dictatorship that was imprisoning masses of political prisoners, executing some and selling their organs, arresting people for religious demonstrations, had done the Tiananmen Square massacre, and had photos of Mao everywhere was planning on liberalizing.
I knew what the score was, as did Pelosi, and I'm really pissed at the people who didn't, because we lost our only chance to turn China into a better global citizen.
"But a “message bill” in that era didn’t mean “just ignore the Senate vote count and do the groups’ whole laundry list.” The idea of a “message bill” was to set up the message for the next election, putting Democrats’ most popular ideas on the floor and daring Republicans to block them in order to give candidates something broadly appealing to talk about."
I really wish congressional Democrats would remember this.
Nothing on the financial crises?
My favorite seen is Hank Paulson (then Secretary of the Treasury) is so stressed out he's literally dry heaving into a waste basket. He comes over and gets on his knees to beg Nancy to pass the emergency bailout. And Nancy says, "Hank, we're not opposing this, your side is."
You'll recall that day when there was a vote and it failed and the stock market went into free fall collapse*. The holdouts panicked and the bailout passed on a revote later that day.
* CNBC had the market indexes on one side of the screen and the vote total
screen from the House. The second it showed the vote failing the bottom fell out of the market with across the board panicked selling.
During Obama’s second term, her allocation of campaign funds seemed more aimed at protecting frontline incumbents than creating a majority. When you are in the minority, frontline incumbents should get less than those challenging vulnerable incumbents. If the environment is good enough for the challengers to win, the incumbents can hang on with moderate funding. So I don’t really think she played to win. But, she did play to win more than any of her progressive contemporaries other than Obama.
Did she allocate campaign funds? I thought that was more Obama and whoever he put in charge of the DNC to replace Howard Dean.
Was great twenty years ago is one of the democrats problems. I hope Chuck is listening.
Great point.