A tale of two machines

Democrats need to stop shrinking the tent

A quick programming note: We’re working on an election mailbag for Friday, and this post will double as today’s discussion thread and as a space for paid subscribers to submit mailbag questions.

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Over the past few months, I’ve been following the small drama surrounding a bipartisan bill from Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso called the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024.

This bill passed out of committee with strong bipartisan support, then stalled out without getting floor votes in the House or the Senate. The bill was written to facilitate the construction of new renewable energy infrastructure — notably, the kind of long-distance transmission lines needed to bring renewable energy from windy and sunny locales to where the demand is — and, in exchange, would also facilitate the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure. The upshot was that the bill would lower carbon emissions relative to the current policy baseline. If you start with a 1.5 degree climate target, though, and reason backward to policy specifics, this level of fossil fuel infrastructure is inconsistent with the target. So, environmental groups were split on EPRA, not in the sense that some favored it and others were opposed, but in the sense that some were opposed and others were silent.

I think that was a dumb error. Any bipartisan bill that boosts economic growth and reduces pollution deserves support.

Frustratingly, neither Chuck Schumer nor the Biden Administration (or the Harris campaign) wanted to champion the bill. This reluctance was, to an extent, understandable — they didn’t want to make it partisan and scare off Republicans. But they could have quietly moved a bipartisan bill to the floor without doing that or signaled support for it, even while expressing some reservations. The real issue was that they didn’t want to divide their own coalition before the election. Schumer was telling people as recently as last week that he thought Democrats could hold the Senate and the White House and take the House. Environmental groups were saying there was no need to accept a bill with so many compromises when they could run the table and do a sort of IRA 2.0 in 2025.

It would be genuinely absurd to say that the intransigence and fuzzy thinking around this obscure bill played a role in the fiasco we saw on Election Day. This bill was closely followed in my little world, but almost nobody else had even heard about it. But I do think that the ideological rigidity and hubris featured in the decision-making is relevant to understanding what happened. There now obviously isn’t going to be an IRA 2.0. The question is whether any shreds of Biden’s climate policies will survive. And environmental groups and their allies ought to be asking why they thought it made sense to make such a risky bet.

More broadly, though, this has been the story of the Democratic Party in the Trump years: Saying that his criminality and abuses are a national emergency that must be stopped at all costs, but acting like they’re actually a huge opportunity to shoot the moon.

Why Harris lost

To understand narrowly why Trump won, we need to start with the international context — post-Covid incumbent parties have been falling left and right.

Back in May, I pre-registered my election recriminations in a post titled “Why Biden Lost” (at the time, Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic Party nominee), and I said the reason was inflation. The inflation was not all Joe Biden’s fault; I don’t even think it was mostly Joe Biden’s fault. But it was partially his fault, in the sense that ARP contributed to it. The real problem, though, is that Biden was very slow, both politically and substantively, to pivot to policymaking appropriate for an inflationary climate. In particular, Democrats did well in the 2022 Senate races, which led the Biden Administration to declare victory in the midterms rather than executing the traditional post-midterm pivot.

The nominee ended up being Kamala Harris rather than Biden.

Harris ran a good campaign and proved herself to be a more skilled politician than years of negative takes would lead you to believe. But she opted against a hard shake of the etch-a-sketch in favor of broad policy continuity with Biden Administration proposals. When she picked Tim Walz, I said it was “a safe, low-upside pick — a missed opportunity for Harris to either moderate her image or secure gains in a swing state.” When I wrote my “27 Takes on the 2024 Election” last week, I again nodded to this theme of risk aversion:

I do think I understand why Harris hasn’t wanted to give Biden any sharp elbows or throw him under the bus in a major way. But if she loses in a week, isn’t everyone — frankly, including Biden and his inner circle — going to think it’s unfortunate that she didn’t spend the past few months saying he was too slow to pivot on inflation and asylum?

You can sort of stack these layers to work out a causal scheme.

But the main thing I would say about the specifics of the 2024 outcome is that if you look at the 2020-2024 shift, Harris’s support held up much better in the seven swing states than it did on average nationally. To me, that’s pretty decent evidence that “the Harris campaign,” defined as a set of political operatives who stage rallies and make advertisements, performed pretty well. What performed poorly was the strategic positioning of the Democratic Party as background and the strategic positioning of Kamala Harris relative to that background.

Even though inflation was clearly a huge political problem, it’s not really a problem that bothered many centrist or center-left intellectuals in an emotional way.

This Tracing Woodgrains post about how he reluctantly voted for Harris but felt that she never actually connected with his experience resonates strongly with a lot of people I know. He describes feeling that it’s “frustrating, alienating on a deep level, to go to law school and watch prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters and people who want to tear gifted education down treated as sane and normal and respectable while knowing that if I don't voice perspectives sympathetic to the majority of the country, nobody will voice them at all.” This resonates so strongly, in fact, that I think it may be tempting to overstate the number of people who were genuinely driven by these kind of concerns, rather than the global backlash against expensive burritos.

I agree with him on the merits, just like I agree with myself about the merits of EPRA. But I also believe that honesty and facts matter, and clearly inflation and immigration were the main vulnerability points, more so than whatever I happen to be personally hung up on.

Democrats’ weird ruthlessness

I published a piece on January 5, 2021 called “Republicans’ Unhinged Moderation” about how the GOP was acting crazier than ever but also adopting somewhat more moderate positions on key policy issues. The next day was January 6 (extremely crazy), and by Election Day 2024, Trump was both promising to pardon the perpetrators of January 6 (even crazier) and also swearing he would veto any form of national abortion ban. That’s the unhinged moderation.

Back in August, Ezra Klein wrote a column saying “Trump Turned the Democratic Party Into a Pitiless Machine,” focused on party elites’ ruthlessness in getting Biden to step aside and quickly unifying around Harris.

I completely get what he meant, and there’s a lot of insight in that piece. But there was something very strange about the pitiless machine that the Democratic Party turned itself into. They were willing to force the incumbent President of the United States to stand aside because they were so desperate to win. But were they willing to say that the Supreme Court was right that discriminating against Asian college applicants is not an acceptable way to pursue social justice? To say that fair-minded treatment of transgender people can’t override female athletes’ interest in being treated fairly themselves? To execute a murderer?

Democrats ended up having a weird internal drama down the stretch about Lina Khan, because the FTC’s approach to acquisitions of startups had alienated much of the tech industry. Again, I don’t think it’s plausible to suggest that voters in rural Georgia turned on Harris because they shared this specific concern. But what’s notable about the whole thing is that starting in 2021, flush with victory over Donald Trump, the Biden Administration did go about systematically trying to alienate stakeholders in the technology industry, most of whom had been strongly sympathetic to Democrats.

An influential faction of Democrats moved very deliberately, and semi-successfully, to expel Wall Street and Silicon Valley Democrats from the coalition. This meant that when guys like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman became vocal Republicans, they had an easier job recruiting. Is that how a pitiless machine would behave?

The fact is, we have two different pitiless machines operating in tandem.

One, the machine Ezra was talking about, was relentlessly focused on the threat of Donald Trump and the need to defeat him.

But the other pitiless machine was relentlessly focused on shrinking the ideological tent, making it clear that troublemakers were at risk of being purged. This coalition-narrowing machine had a good amount of success vis-à-vis tech and Wall Street and very limited success in kicking “Zionists” out of the progressive tent. But it was at work across a broad suite of issues, and most elected Democrats responded to the tension between these two machines by ducking conflict wherever possible. By the time Harris got the nomination, throwing Khan under the bus to expand the tent would have been counterproductive. Why blow up the coalition like that? Democrats were already deeply worried about their left flank because of the Gaza war, so why risk even more problems by trying to address Jewish Americans’ concerns about Arab nationalist indoctrination happening in schools?

Barack Obama championed charter schools and performance pay for teachers, but post-Obama Democrats didn’t want to fight about that stuff. Or really about anything.

If you tried to raise concerns about ideological direction, the pitiless election-winning machine would ask for specific proof that you were really losing voters over this. If a problem became an acute political crisis — the way “defund the police” or immigration did — you could persuade people to head for the safe waters. But absent a clear crisis, the safest water was not picking a fight with the second machine. Biden, and especially Harris, did a good job of not affirming the dopiest left-wing stuff out there. I don’t believe for a minute that Kamala Harris agrees with Tema Okun that being on time or writing stuff down is a form of white supremacy. But I do believe that the widespread use of schlocky, empirically bankrupt DEI material in certain corners of the nonprofit and public sector words is a problem. And I have no idea whether Harris agrees with me about that. The pitiless machine’s impulse is to duck whatever can be ducked, rather than be caught punching left.

The path forward

I’ve always said that Trump apologists are correct that the odds of him establishing an autocratic form of government are way less than 50 percent. The problem is that this is not the right bar. The odds should be dramatically less than five percent and they are not. And there’s plenty more I’m worried about where I think the odds very well may be greater than 50 percent:

• The fusion of Trump with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, poses perilous risks.

• I do not believe Trump’s gestures of moderation on abortion and fear what his appointees will do.

• Ukraine is facing disaster, and I worry that the entire free world might be facing a disaster as well. This election may have opened the door for the Chinese Communist Party to export its brand of authoritarianism globally over the course of the 21st century.

• I’m also an old-school Democrat whose primary worry is that Trump is going to unleash savage budget cuts on low-income people and cause enormous suffering to the most vulnerable Americans.

• Trump believes a lot of insane, non-standard things about trade. Some of his key staffers have insane beliefs about immigration, and he’s now incorporated a broad set of totally new insane ideas associated with RFK Jr into his coalition.

I don’t know what will happen going forward, but I strongly suspect the typical American pattern of electoral victory leading to hubris and legislative overreach and thermostatic reaction will recur. But unlike in 2018, I don’t know that the Democratic minority will have the power to halt ACA repeal or some new formulation of sharp Medicaid cuts. I’ve written many times that Trump’s policy agenda is inflationary, which is an odd cure for inflation, and will generate much more pressure on Republicans to get serious about welfare state rollback relative to his first term.

But Democrats continue to face the same core challenges I’ve been talking about since I started Slow Boring four years ago:

• The quality of the governance in the blue states is not high enough. They have slower GDP and population growth than the red states, primarily due to housing supply issues, and the public services are not uniformly better in a way that justifies the higher tax rates.

• The electoral tent is too narrow. Setting aside the question of toxically unpopular progressive positions, Democrats just have too many stances that are considered non-negotiable. Democrats’ formal campaigns emphasized abortion rights, health care, and a light smattering of left-populism (federal price gouging law, anyone?) on top of an upbeat, inclusive cultural positioning. But if you want to be seen as a party that’s obsessed with abortion rights and health care, then you have to welcome people who agree with you about that stuff as allies, even if they disagree about other stuff, not do purges over student loan reform.

These two approaches to moderation are distinct projects in terms of the target audience, and there is even, at times, some tension between them. The things that help Jared Golden win re-election wouldn’t necessarily make for a strong reform agenda for Massachusetts. But I think they are, on balance, mutually re-enforcing. Doing a better job of making California and New York growth-oriented jurisdictions will naturally make Democrats seem less like a party for rich snobs who don’t mind high taxes and bad services because they’re insulated from the struggles of daily life. And making the party more of a big tent for everyone who cares about poor people and about women’s rights means a healthier intellectual environment, one in which we can debate policy and reform institutions that need reforming.