* First, I'm a genuine moderate, so I disagree with "Abdul" as much as Rogers on issues. I actually prefer the Republicans to hold the Senate, but lose the House. I think of how many times in the last 15 years both GOP and Dems have put up bills that made me go "THANK GOD THE FILIBUSTER WILL STOP THAT." Until the ideological fervor cools down in both parties I don't want them doing anything permanent to our country.
* Abdul is childish and immature in his public persona. I'm from Washtenaw County, and the combo of Ann Arbor Smug with 2026 Progressive Cool-Kid is a visceral turn off. And you have the ubiquitous mockery of Stevens's accent among El-Sayad's followers. I masked my own accent for years when I lived and worked professionally in NYC. Now that I have moved back I don't want people passing laws for me who have contempt for me. And El-Sayad and a lot of his followers drip with contempt for people who are outside of their clique, which seems to be most native Michiganders.
* I don't want to reward Democrats for making bad choices. And it's a miracle the hot mess Michigan GOP could produce a Senate candidate as normal as Rogers. I feel like rewarding that with a vote, even if I hate MAGA.
* The "tying Rogers to Trump" attempts are silly. He is a moderate 8 term congressman from one of the tightest swing districts in the country. I've met Mike Rogers. A lot of people around here have. No one is going to fool people over 40 from the Detroit suburbs into thinking he's suddenly become Trumpy McTrumperson because he engages in survival diplomacy with the Great Orange Oz.
* McMorrow was the worst candidate, by far. She was a progressive Pick-Me girl from Jersey. I think I would just say "f*ck off" as a reflex when I saw her face on TV, and then take another sip of Oberon. She should move to a more fashionable state and run for Senate there.
* Medicare for All terrifies me. Like many Michiganders, we have friends in Canada. And they've had to come occasionally to the US to get medical procedures done because of wait times and just unavailability where they live. My husband had cancer for 8 years, and was an immunotherapy miracle at MSKCC. People with his cancer in the UK and Canada just survive a little while on outdated treatments from 20 years ago, and die. America's medical systems have problems, but we don't need solutions that destroy what is amazing about health care here.
* I think Netanyahu veered into Bad Guy territory some time ago. And the behavior of settlers should be called out as the terrorism it is. But I do not think either negate the right of Israel to exist as a democratic Jewish State. The hysterical, brainwashed tone of the "Free Palestine" movement is scary. I don't want to put people that emotional, misinformed, callous towards the suffering of victims of terrorism, and generally single minded in positions of power, ever.
In Britain we’ve got a Muslim mayor of London who destroyed his Reform opponent despite all the no go areas the only British no go areas were in Ulster,manned by blokes with Armalites.
When people say the left should listen to MY, this is what they should mean. Notice Matt isn’t telling moderates to shut the fuck up and they’re traitors to democracy if they don’t vote for him (like moderates do when they win). He’s making demands. He’s saying “I’ll vote for you if you bring up how much you dislike trans women and void the phrase Medicare for all of any meaning.” The latter demand would also invalidate the only advantage the left has, conveniently enough. Play politics. Bend them to you or stay home.
Strategically pretending to believe things, for general election purposes, that he doesn’t actually believe, is just not going to be worth it.
The party needs to rediscover its purpose and soul, and stop making everything a matter of which short term compromise gives the greatest short term return.
I guess I'm taking crazy pills. Sure, El-Sayed has some good policy views but he's an antisemite. Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable that Yglesias would have backed someone with his views. Is there any antisemitic remark that El-Sayed could make--beyond the many that he's already made--that would keep Yglesias from supporting him?
If El-Sayed moved from saying, as he has, that Israel doesn't have the right to exist as a Jewish state to saying that Israel needs to be eliminated and its Jewish population expelled, would Yglesias still back him? Hasan Piker has adopted that position and El-Sayed still supports Piker and campaigns with him.
Just as a point of practical politics, normalizing the inclusion of antisemites in the Democratic coalition isn't just bad for the country, in the long run it's bad for the party. Trump has given the Republicans some victories, although I'm not certain that Rubio, Haley, or DeSantis couldn't also have capitalized on the working and rural classes drifting away from the Democratic Party on cultural grounds. But I'm pretty sure that 10 years from now Republicans will look back on Trump as a large net negative for the party.
Democrats are likely to think the same about normalizing people with El-Sayed's views. Or, at any rate, I hope so.
Does anyone know what the odds are that people in the el sayed campaign are reading this? I'm curious to know where the lefty campaigns are listening to feedback from.
Free post and all, so comments are a little extra today, but two things:
1. He's one senator. We just need enough Dem senators to stop Trump's remaking of the judiciary and not rubber stamp every wacko appointment he's making. Even if his ideas are unworkable or disagreeable in whatever area you find them to be unworkable or disagreeable, find me a senator who doesn't have one or two ideas that aren't also unworkable/disagreeable. And even if he convinced every other Democrat in the senate to go along with him, what 10 Republicans are going to sign on? For the next two years, Trumpist MAGA-ites are the immediate threat; you can dump on the DSA in 2028.
2. If you are worried about religious beliefs leading that one senator down the path to theocracy, take a second look at the Christian Nationalist/7 mountains/evangelical weirdos that are already all over Congress, the cabinet and state governments around the country. The current Speaker of the House and Secretary of Defense (sorry, Secretary of Waaaaaarrrrrrrr) are in that theocracy-friendly camp. Sharia law is not the problem; when it comes to the danger of theocracy in the good ole US of A, the calls are coming from inside the House of Representatives.
Seems like everything has devolved down to a religous flame-war.
I recently said that the horseshoe theory can be explained by the underlying religiousness of the ends of the horseshoe, but it’s pretty clear that its a basic “feature” of humans because I’m seeing it coming from self-declared moderates as well “I’m a moderate but if you don’t agree with me, get out of here”.
(By religiousness I mean they believe their beliefs are the true ones.)
"Why are today's comments much more towards the median of Substack's weird anti-woke centrer-to-right-wing ism?"
Ah, it's a free post.
See, to the other regulars - the is the difference. While I heavily disagree w/ many of you, you're largely all fighting for the same thing. The drive-by comments today....not so much.
Eh, there's been other posts on 'cultural issues' that were free where a healthy chunk of the comments ended up sounding like a slightly more erudite version of Fox News.
Yes it's like, holy crap you guys are proving the far-left correct. Supposedly comments from AES about the Palestinian attacker are supposed to be enough not to support him. Hilarious.
Hmm, I just double checked on another browser where I'm not signed into Substack and it said you needed to be a subscriber. So, weird. Guess it being a free post still gets more attention from the less reasonable people despite the limits somehow.
You can upvote comments if you're not a subscriber, so you're *seeing* more insane comments because they get pushed to the top (and thereby get more engagement).
Yeah, just responded to you upthread - guessing also the free posts as I said, lead to people signing up and getting the free 7-day trial to comment, saying their dumb crap, just disappearing when they get pushback.
Yes -- as a lefty, whenever I read these comments I get so negatively polarized against the center. Matt is always making some reasonable critique of my faction. Then the commenters all seem like people who, like Republicans, are so completely at odds with my values and worldview that it's hard to feel comfortable sharing a country with them, let alone a party.
“It’s hard to feel comfortable sharing a country with them.”
Wow—that sounds insane to me. You could just lighten up about politics.
I don’t post often (Jesse there is nothing weird about being anti-woke...in fact it's the norm.... wokeness is the weird thing), but I’ve been here almost from the beginning making anti-woke arguments that are now widely accepted—even by AOC, apparently. Early on, I frequently pushed Matt to acknowledge simple things, like how Kendiism was dumb and counterproductive I (of course he ignored me). Now Matt openly makes many of the same arguments, so there’s less for me to say.
Great job on the Coleman Hughes podcast, Matt. You’re making a lot of sense these days.
I'd say the most salient criticism of this article is that it's essentially a call for "Blue no matter who" without really saying it. The attempt to paper over the real differences is unconvincing to the people who lost. The call to make amends seems ill targeted to persuade El Sayed or those around him though I'd like to be wrong about that. Matt is a capital P Partisan Democrat so I can't say I'm really surprised by the content, but I am skeptical it's persuasive to any of the people who need persuading.
Points for being "the man in the arena". Hopefully some of the punches land.
Sure, Yglesias pretty clearly prefers Democrats to Republicans, but also centrist Democrats to progressive or socialist Democrats, and pro-abundance centrist Democrats more than anyone else.
I don’t really think this is true though. He’s explicitly asking the candidate, the people who support him, and the people who have misgivings about him to all make movements toward compromise and shared interest. Blue no matter who means something fundamentally different than that.
JFC, you guys! Matt Y writes a thoughtful article that I mostly agree with, and the comments section is a storm of “Fuck El-Sayed, he’s a Marxist Communist Hamas apologist!!!”
To use an analogy from “Cobra Kai” seasons 4 and 5: yes, Daniel and Johnny disagree on a lot of things, but they both need to pull their heads out of their asses and realize that working together is the only way to defeat Cobra Kai, which is led by a complete psycho.
Sorry, it was not a thoughtful article. It was based on the premise that there's 97% agreement on non-Israel issues between mainstream Democrats and progressives. There simply isn't.
The the things being categorized as "Israel" issues aren't just about Israel, but also about his relationship with the Jewish community of Michigan.
I've been a lifelong loyal Democrat. If the Democratic party wants me to still be in the party (which I'm not sure they do), they're going to have to do better than "Trump is Cobra Kai, so you'd better tolerate a candidate that supports a bad and threatening ideology."
Progressives and the establishment have pretty similar views on almost all of those. Establishment Democrats typically just go along with the progressives when forced to specify a position or take a vote, and though they may keep vague about it in the meantime. It's moderate Dems who are the outsiders standing apart from either of those factions, serving as the constraint on policy. Under Biden, this was Manchin/Sinema. Today, it would be Gallego/Slotkin/Ossoff/Warnock.
1. Many mainstream Democrats signed on to the Medicare for All Act. M4A as a concept is super-popular among Dem voters. Still, El-Sayed and other progressives have explicitly said they will vote for incremental health care expansion that can pass a majority (which they acknowledge Medicare for All Act cannot do). So policy difference is zero.
2. On wealth taxes, I agree the progressive faction stands apart. They may try to push this specifically because Dem voters love it.
3. Progressives in Congress introduced bills to expand/update existing social housing programs, but just basic changes any mainstream Dem would get behind, to my knowledge. Nothing dramatic (along the lines of what leftist/DSA activists call for).
4. Establishment Dems were on board with the GND, leading to climate as the consensus priority in '21-'22 and resulting in actual legislation! (It was bargained down a lot by moderate Dems.) Since then, both the establishment and progressives have dropped GND as an idea.
5. Mainstream Dems remain captive to progressive climate activists' demands. Biden tried to stop a lot of oil and gas initiatives.
6. The Dem establishment also remains captive to progressive immigration activists, refusing to articulate any concrete changes to the Biden admin's policies. "Abolish ICE" (whatever that is supposed to mean) is popular among a vast majority of Democrats.
7. Elected officials mostly eschewed "Defund the Police" during its entire rise and fall, both mainstream and progressive. Progressives who expressed support at its apex have definitively reversed course, e.g. Mamdani.
8. All Dems broadly oppose sending our military abroad while also support aiding Ukraine materially. Iran War is universally opposed. Maybe they quietly disagree on Taiwan?
9. Both factions supported Biden's debt relief, and both factions would support universal free college if they got the chance to pass it.
10. I'm not aware what proposals there are to expand SS. The real question at hand is how to prevent the imminent insolvency, which both mainstream and prog Dems would do by raising the payroll tax on higher earners.
11. Mainstream Democrats support universal child care. This got blocked by the moderate Dems in '21-'22.
12. Mainstream Dems enacted these stipulations in infrastructure spending under Biden!
13. Trump has pretty successfully polarized all Democrats against tariffs. AES supporting tariffs would be right in line with any other Dem from the auto industry state. Nationally, both progressives and mainstream Dems have selectively defended tariffs at the behest of unions, including under Biden. But that particular transactional relationship is quickly declining in relevance due to labor force trends.
Matt has done his part to try to get to "yes" with El-Sayed. Now, El-Sayed has an opportunity to do his own part to close that deal by moving right on the issue on which he receives the most vocal criticism.
Very much agreed. It does seem like many of the anti-Wl Sayed commenters have made up their minds about who they think he is truly is. That didn’t work well for the woke left.
True that explains why the top two comments are Ross and our resident Republican in all but name regular, but it doesn't explain the one-off people showing up and commenting. Maybe it's just people signing up for their free trial and commenting, then disappearing into the ether once they get pushback from the regulars, even the ones more toward the center.
I've noticed an uptick in anti-woke extremism on Substack as of late. I thought it was just my feed, but I'm wondering now if it is everyone. Damn Republicans may govern like morons, but they are masters of propaganda!
Something that I annoys me about the Substack algorithm is that the minute I try to read something that seems like a thoughtful piece by a moderate conservative, suddenly my feed turns into a combination of absolute chuds and theocrats arguing with each other over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If I read a piece by a conservative entitled "I'm worried about rising anti-Semitism on the left and right," and then that immediately gets my feed flooded with right wing anti-Semitism, there is something wrong with the algorithm.
I don't mind occasionally criticizing the excesses of woke or far-left socialism or whatever as I consider myself a left-leaning centrist anyways. But holy crap, just because I agreed with some moderate about the excesses of #MeToo or something does not mean I'm some kind of Neo-Catholic repeal the 19th jackass.
This is really starting to ruin Substack for me. I just got two comments from conservative chuds telling me that Trump is a hero because 800,000 unborn children are murdered a year by Democrats. Like WTF? Go back to Truth Social.
I think Substack's days are numbered. We are being chuddified.
“And if El-Sayed maintains that political profile, my recommendation would be to vote for him but to save your donation money for more-aligned, more strategic candidates.”
Uhhh… you’re way, way overthinking this.
It’s a supposedly coin toss Senate race. What on earth could possibly make that a bad investment???
It’s a bit marginal, but Nate Silver’s FLIPR model assesses that Ohio, Maine, and Iowa’s senate races are all equally or more likely to be the tipping point state for control of the senate, and all of them have a higher voter power index than Michigan, which means ad dollars go father in those states. Seems wise to direct your donations to those three races first, followed by Texas, Michigan, and Alaska in second tier
Interesting. Well, I don't have any flippin' money anyway.
I think it's reasonable to disagree with Silver's analysis - we are really talking about marginal differences, and saying "Iowa is more important than Michigan" as some kind of objective, conclusive analysis is putting more faith in the polling than we probably should. It's okay for people to use their subjective judgements in a case like this (although they should try to avoid pundit-fallacying, of course.)
And, you know, if somebody thinks El-Sayed would be a more influential Senator who could bring real merit to the government and "attentionality" - as Ezra calls it - to the party, that could outweigh a slightly better chance of getting a less attention-grabbing Senator in office. (Of course, El-Sayed could also end up a toxic millstone. I think the truth will be somewhere in between, and personally this element would not be part of my consideration.)
One thing to consider is that it might be more likely to win back the Michigan seat in six years (especially if we decided to deploy the Buttigieg Bomb) than to get another shot at flipping ME or (especially) OH and IA. But that's a pretty long-term way to look at things when political winds can shift more quickly than we anticipate.
I think the lesson of today’s posts and comments is that the reason there had to be a book called “Getting to Yes” is that almost nobody wants to do it.
I just don't know. Suppose a Ukrainian terrorist tried to murder a bunch of Russian children in the US and a YIMBY politician I liked who sympathized, like me, with Ukraine's situation, said that while it's bad this guy tried to murder children, you have to understand that what's happening to Ukraine is really awful. I feel like while I really appreciate that they support single stair reforms or land value taxes, I'd be pretty alarmed at any attempt to equivocate about murdering children. There are certain basic tenets of liberalism that I can't really paper over, e.g. trying to overthrow fair elections. Trying to explain the actions of someone holding children of the same ethnicity to collective guilt for crimes of a separate government of the same ethnicity...oof. And then if that YIMBY politician kept doubling down on the comparison. I don't think I could support them.
I'm an agnostic, yet I'm pretty comfortable with "don't attack innocent people attending religious services" as a non-negotiable red line for me. If you're running for office, this shouldn't be hard.
The point about the (relative absence of) normie Muslim politics got me thinking about the coalitional politics before Woke 1.0.
Against a backdrop polarized on GWB vs Obama, with GWOT-era Islamophobia, the median Muslim was not welcome in a camp of pro-war evangelical Christians, and so they joined the coalition of inclusive cultural progressives. And so within the context of that coalition, progressives and Muslims alike found it valuable to de-emphasize the religious conservatism of many Muslims and regard it as an Islamophobic slander that the typical Muslim might hold different cultural views than the typical Christian. Recall how many conservatives and New Atheists were justifying avenues of discrimination against Muslims on the grounds that Islam was a fundamentally more radical and inherently sexist religion, and so liberal Muslims were held up as the living counterproof.
If Woke 2.0 is all about Israel & Palestine, than it might be back to that same dynamic of pre-Woke-1.0. Someone like El-Sayed might feel like he can't cut against cultural progressives, without feeling like he is ostracizing his only allies at this time. And it would be entirely reasonable for his personal sense of self-actualization to be also wrapped up in these signifiers of departure from Islamophobic stereotypes. And this is all regardless of the actual number of Muslims with extremely conservative views.
In the US context, I think taking the bargain in which Muslim Americans abandon the conservative political views of their parents has been an important force for assimilation and building a palatable Muslim American identity. For example, trying to build an urban anti-LGBT anti-feminist coalition would be a total conceptual dead-end. Whereas however unpopular white progressives are with the American public, conservatives Muslims are even less popular than that.
To do the move that Matt is talking about, it requires voters that may have skeptical opinions of Muslims to reward rather than punish signs of moderate religious conservatism - after all there is a huge amount of daylight between a deeply conservative religious Muslim and a hyper-woke progressive activist, all of which is closer to the median voter. But it's worth saying it requires developing a new political trope of what it means to be a Muslim American, one that might be actually true to the vast majority of Muslim Americans, but has never had played a politically salient role in American politics. But as the number of Muslim Americans steadily increase, it completely makes sense that Americans will have to become acquainted with reality of the culturally moderate Muslim American. And I think Matt is right to point out that the Moderate Black Democrat is the clear model for this.
As a Michigander:
* First, I'm a genuine moderate, so I disagree with "Abdul" as much as Rogers on issues. I actually prefer the Republicans to hold the Senate, but lose the House. I think of how many times in the last 15 years both GOP and Dems have put up bills that made me go "THANK GOD THE FILIBUSTER WILL STOP THAT." Until the ideological fervor cools down in both parties I don't want them doing anything permanent to our country.
* Abdul is childish and immature in his public persona. I'm from Washtenaw County, and the combo of Ann Arbor Smug with 2026 Progressive Cool-Kid is a visceral turn off. And you have the ubiquitous mockery of Stevens's accent among El-Sayad's followers. I masked my own accent for years when I lived and worked professionally in NYC. Now that I have moved back I don't want people passing laws for me who have contempt for me. And El-Sayad and a lot of his followers drip with contempt for people who are outside of their clique, which seems to be most native Michiganders.
* I don't want to reward Democrats for making bad choices. And it's a miracle the hot mess Michigan GOP could produce a Senate candidate as normal as Rogers. I feel like rewarding that with a vote, even if I hate MAGA.
* The "tying Rogers to Trump" attempts are silly. He is a moderate 8 term congressman from one of the tightest swing districts in the country. I've met Mike Rogers. A lot of people around here have. No one is going to fool people over 40 from the Detroit suburbs into thinking he's suddenly become Trumpy McTrumperson because he engages in survival diplomacy with the Great Orange Oz.
* McMorrow was the worst candidate, by far. She was a progressive Pick-Me girl from Jersey. I think I would just say "f*ck off" as a reflex when I saw her face on TV, and then take another sip of Oberon. She should move to a more fashionable state and run for Senate there.
* Medicare for All terrifies me. Like many Michiganders, we have friends in Canada. And they've had to come occasionally to the US to get medical procedures done because of wait times and just unavailability where they live. My husband had cancer for 8 years, and was an immunotherapy miracle at MSKCC. People with his cancer in the UK and Canada just survive a little while on outdated treatments from 20 years ago, and die. America's medical systems have problems, but we don't need solutions that destroy what is amazing about health care here.
* I think Netanyahu veered into Bad Guy territory some time ago. And the behavior of settlers should be called out as the terrorism it is. But I do not think either negate the right of Israel to exist as a democratic Jewish State. The hysterical, brainwashed tone of the "Free Palestine" movement is scary. I don't want to put people that emotional, misinformed, callous towards the suffering of victims of terrorism, and generally single minded in positions of power, ever.
Anyway, that's why I'm not voting for El-Sayad.
I will be voting for Benson.
In Britain we’ve got a Muslim mayor of London who destroyed his Reform opponent despite all the no go areas the only British no go areas were in Ulster,manned by blokes with Armalites.
When people say the left should listen to MY, this is what they should mean. Notice Matt isn’t telling moderates to shut the fuck up and they’re traitors to democracy if they don’t vote for him (like moderates do when they win). He’s making demands. He’s saying “I’ll vote for you if you bring up how much you dislike trans women and void the phrase Medicare for all of any meaning.” The latter demand would also invalidate the only advantage the left has, conveniently enough. Play politics. Bend them to you or stay home.
It would be better in the long term if he lost.
Strategically pretending to believe things, for general election purposes, that he doesn’t actually believe, is just not going to be worth it.
The party needs to rediscover its purpose and soul, and stop making everything a matter of which short term compromise gives the greatest short term return.
I guess I'm taking crazy pills. Sure, El-Sayed has some good policy views but he's an antisemite. Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable that Yglesias would have backed someone with his views. Is there any antisemitic remark that El-Sayed could make--beyond the many that he's already made--that would keep Yglesias from supporting him?
If El-Sayed moved from saying, as he has, that Israel doesn't have the right to exist as a Jewish state to saying that Israel needs to be eliminated and its Jewish population expelled, would Yglesias still back him? Hasan Piker has adopted that position and El-Sayed still supports Piker and campaigns with him.
Just as a point of practical politics, normalizing the inclusion of antisemites in the Democratic coalition isn't just bad for the country, in the long run it's bad for the party. Trump has given the Republicans some victories, although I'm not certain that Rubio, Haley, or DeSantis couldn't also have capitalized on the working and rural classes drifting away from the Democratic Party on cultural grounds. But I'm pretty sure that 10 years from now Republicans will look back on Trump as a large net negative for the party.
Democrats are likely to think the same about normalizing people with El-Sayed's views. Or, at any rate, I hope so.
Does anyone know what the odds are that people in the el sayed campaign are reading this? I'm curious to know where the lefty campaigns are listening to feedback from.
I live in the Land of Wonders that is Ann Arbor, and no, they are not listening.
Free post and all, so comments are a little extra today, but two things:
1. He's one senator. We just need enough Dem senators to stop Trump's remaking of the judiciary and not rubber stamp every wacko appointment he's making. Even if his ideas are unworkable or disagreeable in whatever area you find them to be unworkable or disagreeable, find me a senator who doesn't have one or two ideas that aren't also unworkable/disagreeable. And even if he convinced every other Democrat in the senate to go along with him, what 10 Republicans are going to sign on? For the next two years, Trumpist MAGA-ites are the immediate threat; you can dump on the DSA in 2028.
2. If you are worried about religious beliefs leading that one senator down the path to theocracy, take a second look at the Christian Nationalist/7 mountains/evangelical weirdos that are already all over Congress, the cabinet and state governments around the country. The current Speaker of the House and Secretary of Defense (sorry, Secretary of Waaaaaarrrrrrrr) are in that theocracy-friendly camp. Sharia law is not the problem; when it comes to the danger of theocracy in the good ole US of A, the calls are coming from inside the House of Representatives.
Seems like everything has devolved down to a religous flame-war.
I recently said that the horseshoe theory can be explained by the underlying religiousness of the ends of the horseshoe, but it’s pretty clear that its a basic “feature” of humans because I’m seeing it coming from self-declared moderates as well “I’m a moderate but if you don’t agree with me, get out of here”.
(By religiousness I mean they believe their beliefs are the true ones.)
Yglesias clearly thinks the DSA types will embrace him if he does enough sane washing for him
"Why are today's comments much more towards the median of Substack's weird anti-woke centrer-to-right-wing ism?"
Ah, it's a free post.
See, to the other regulars - the is the difference. While I heavily disagree w/ many of you, you're largely all fighting for the same thing. The drive-by comments today....not so much.
Ok this was weirding me out too, thank you
Easily the dumbest/most emotionally overwrought day of comments in Slow Boring history
You must have missed his argument on bringing back home-court advantage to the NBA.
Eh, there's been other posts on 'cultural issues' that were free where a healthy chunk of the comments ended up sounding like a slightly more erudite version of Fox News.
Yes it's like, holy crap you guys are proving the far-left correct. Supposedly comments from AES about the Palestinian attacker are supposed to be enough not to support him. Hilarious.
Is there *any* opinion not directly related to legislation that you would consider to be disqualifying?
No
Did Matt change the setting? Originally (like years ago) you still needed to be a full subscriber to comment.
Hmm, I just double checked on another browser where I'm not signed into Substack and it said you needed to be a subscriber. So, weird. Guess it being a free post still gets more attention from the less reasonable people despite the limits somehow.
You can upvote comments if you're not a subscriber, so you're *seeing* more insane comments because they get pushed to the top (and thereby get more engagement).
Yeah, just responded to you upthread - guessing also the free posts as I said, lead to people signing up and getting the free 7-day trial to comment, saying their dumb crap, just disappearing when they get pushback.
There should be a warning label when you click to read the comments on the free posts. Lordy not a good use of my time today.
Yes -- as a lefty, whenever I read these comments I get so negatively polarized against the center. Matt is always making some reasonable critique of my faction. Then the commenters all seem like people who, like Republicans, are so completely at odds with my values and worldview that it's hard to feel comfortable sharing a country with them, let alone a party.
“It’s hard to feel comfortable sharing a country with them.”
Wow—that sounds insane to me. You could just lighten up about politics.
I don’t post often (Jesse there is nothing weird about being anti-woke...in fact it's the norm.... wokeness is the weird thing), but I’ve been here almost from the beginning making anti-woke arguments that are now widely accepted—even by AOC, apparently. Early on, I frequently pushed Matt to acknowledge simple things, like how Kendiism was dumb and counterproductive I (of course he ignored me). Now Matt openly makes many of the same arguments, so there’s less for me to say.
Great job on the Coleman Hughes podcast, Matt. You’re making a lot of sense these days.
I'd say the most salient criticism of this article is that it's essentially a call for "Blue no matter who" without really saying it. The attempt to paper over the real differences is unconvincing to the people who lost. The call to make amends seems ill targeted to persuade El Sayed or those around him though I'd like to be wrong about that. Matt is a capital P Partisan Democrat so I can't say I'm really surprised by the content, but I am skeptical it's persuasive to any of the people who need persuading.
Points for being "the man in the arena". Hopefully some of the punches land.
Sure, Yglesias pretty clearly prefers Democrats to Republicans, but also centrist Democrats to progressive or socialist Democrats, and pro-abundance centrist Democrats more than anyone else.
I don’t really think this is true though. He’s explicitly asking the candidate, the people who support him, and the people who have misgivings about him to all make movements toward compromise and shared interest. Blue no matter who means something fundamentally different than that.
JFC, you guys! Matt Y writes a thoughtful article that I mostly agree with, and the comments section is a storm of “Fuck El-Sayed, he’s a Marxist Communist Hamas apologist!!!”
To use an analogy from “Cobra Kai” seasons 4 and 5: yes, Daniel and Johnny disagree on a lot of things, but they both need to pull their heads out of their asses and realize that working together is the only way to defeat Cobra Kai, which is led by a complete psycho.
Sorry, it was not a thoughtful article. It was based on the premise that there's 97% agreement on non-Israel issues between mainstream Democrats and progressives. There simply isn't.
The the things being categorized as "Israel" issues aren't just about Israel, but also about his relationship with the Jewish community of Michigan.
I've been a lifelong loyal Democrat. If the Democratic party wants me to still be in the party (which I'm not sure they do), they're going to have to do better than "Trump is Cobra Kai, so you'd better tolerate a candidate that supports a bad and threatening ideology."
What are the other big differences between mainstream and progressive Democrats?
1. Medicare for All
2. Wealth tax
3. Social housing
4. Green New Deal
5. Domestic energy production
6. Immigration enforcement and restrictions
7. Cutting police funding
8. Military interventions abroad
9. Universal free college vs targeted debt relief
10. Expanding social security
11. Universal public child care
12. Infrastructure spending tied with social/climate spending
13. Free trade
Progressives and the establishment have pretty similar views on almost all of those. Establishment Democrats typically just go along with the progressives when forced to specify a position or take a vote, and though they may keep vague about it in the meantime. It's moderate Dems who are the outsiders standing apart from either of those factions, serving as the constraint on policy. Under Biden, this was Manchin/Sinema. Today, it would be Gallego/Slotkin/Ossoff/Warnock.
1. Many mainstream Democrats signed on to the Medicare for All Act. M4A as a concept is super-popular among Dem voters. Still, El-Sayed and other progressives have explicitly said they will vote for incremental health care expansion that can pass a majority (which they acknowledge Medicare for All Act cannot do). So policy difference is zero.
2. On wealth taxes, I agree the progressive faction stands apart. They may try to push this specifically because Dem voters love it.
3. Progressives in Congress introduced bills to expand/update existing social housing programs, but just basic changes any mainstream Dem would get behind, to my knowledge. Nothing dramatic (along the lines of what leftist/DSA activists call for).
4. Establishment Dems were on board with the GND, leading to climate as the consensus priority in '21-'22 and resulting in actual legislation! (It was bargained down a lot by moderate Dems.) Since then, both the establishment and progressives have dropped GND as an idea.
5. Mainstream Dems remain captive to progressive climate activists' demands. Biden tried to stop a lot of oil and gas initiatives.
6. The Dem establishment also remains captive to progressive immigration activists, refusing to articulate any concrete changes to the Biden admin's policies. "Abolish ICE" (whatever that is supposed to mean) is popular among a vast majority of Democrats.
7. Elected officials mostly eschewed "Defund the Police" during its entire rise and fall, both mainstream and progressive. Progressives who expressed support at its apex have definitively reversed course, e.g. Mamdani.
8. All Dems broadly oppose sending our military abroad while also support aiding Ukraine materially. Iran War is universally opposed. Maybe they quietly disagree on Taiwan?
9. Both factions supported Biden's debt relief, and both factions would support universal free college if they got the chance to pass it.
10. I'm not aware what proposals there are to expand SS. The real question at hand is how to prevent the imminent insolvency, which both mainstream and prog Dems would do by raising the payroll tax on higher earners.
11. Mainstream Democrats support universal child care. This got blocked by the moderate Dems in '21-'22.
12. Mainstream Dems enacted these stipulations in infrastructure spending under Biden!
13. Trump has pretty successfully polarized all Democrats against tariffs. AES supporting tariffs would be right in line with any other Dem from the auto industry state. Nationally, both progressives and mainstream Dems have selectively defended tariffs at the behest of unions, including under Biden. But that particular transactional relationship is quickly declining in relevance due to labor force trends.
Matt has done his part to try to get to "yes" with El-Sayed. Now, El-Sayed has an opportunity to do his own part to close that deal by moving right on the issue on which he receives the most vocal criticism.
Very much agreed. It does seem like many of the anti-Wl Sayed commenters have made up their minds about who they think he is truly is. That didn’t work well for the woke left.
Downside of it being a free post. All the usual Substack wackadoos get to show up.
They can't comment, but they can boost psychos like Brian Ross to the top
True that explains why the top two comments are Ross and our resident Republican in all but name regular, but it doesn't explain the one-off people showing up and commenting. Maybe it's just people signing up for their free trial and commenting, then disappearing into the ether once they get pushback from the regulars, even the ones more toward the center.
Please, name names. Inquiring minds are inquiring.
I've noticed an uptick in anti-woke extremism on Substack as of late. I thought it was just my feed, but I'm wondering now if it is everyone. Damn Republicans may govern like morons, but they are masters of propaganda!
Something that I annoys me about the Substack algorithm is that the minute I try to read something that seems like a thoughtful piece by a moderate conservative, suddenly my feed turns into a combination of absolute chuds and theocrats arguing with each other over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If I read a piece by a conservative entitled "I'm worried about rising anti-Semitism on the left and right," and then that immediately gets my feed flooded with right wing anti-Semitism, there is something wrong with the algorithm.
This 1000X!
I don't mind occasionally criticizing the excesses of woke or far-left socialism or whatever as I consider myself a left-leaning centrist anyways. But holy crap, just because I agreed with some moderate about the excesses of #MeToo or something does not mean I'm some kind of Neo-Catholic repeal the 19th jackass.
This is really starting to ruin Substack for me. I just got two comments from conservative chuds telling me that Trump is a hero because 800,000 unborn children are murdered a year by Democrats. Like WTF? Go back to Truth Social.
I think Substack's days are numbered. We are being chuddified.
It's more like Substack has become, basically by default, the most pro-Israel social media platform and that manifests here in any discussion of AES.
I try to block every pro-Israel propaganda poster but they just keep coming. Strangely, I find that they never engage with my arguments about Israel.
Who would have thought that a website that contains actually critical thinking in long form essays could have a more balanced take on Israel.
“And if El-Sayed maintains that political profile, my recommendation would be to vote for him but to save your donation money for more-aligned, more strategic candidates.”
Uhhh… you’re way, way overthinking this.
It’s a supposedly coin toss Senate race. What on earth could possibly make that a bad investment???
It’s a bit marginal, but Nate Silver’s FLIPR model assesses that Ohio, Maine, and Iowa’s senate races are all equally or more likely to be the tipping point state for control of the senate, and all of them have a higher voter power index than Michigan, which means ad dollars go father in those states. Seems wise to direct your donations to those three races first, followed by Texas, Michigan, and Alaska in second tier
https://natesilver.substack.com/p/nate-silver-2026-midterm-election-polls-model
Interesting. Well, I don't have any flippin' money anyway.
I think it's reasonable to disagree with Silver's analysis - we are really talking about marginal differences, and saying "Iowa is more important than Michigan" as some kind of objective, conclusive analysis is putting more faith in the polling than we probably should. It's okay for people to use their subjective judgements in a case like this (although they should try to avoid pundit-fallacying, of course.)
And, you know, if somebody thinks El-Sayed would be a more influential Senator who could bring real merit to the government and "attentionality" - as Ezra calls it - to the party, that could outweigh a slightly better chance of getting a less attention-grabbing Senator in office. (Of course, El-Sayed could also end up a toxic millstone. I think the truth will be somewhere in between, and personally this element would not be part of my consideration.)
One thing to consider is that it might be more likely to win back the Michigan seat in six years (especially if we decided to deploy the Buttigieg Bomb) than to get another shot at flipping ME or (especially) OH and IA. But that's a pretty long-term way to look at things when political winds can shift more quickly than we anticipate.
I think the lesson of today’s posts and comments is that the reason there had to be a book called “Getting to Yes” is that almost nobody wants to do it.
I just don't know. Suppose a Ukrainian terrorist tried to murder a bunch of Russian children in the US and a YIMBY politician I liked who sympathized, like me, with Ukraine's situation, said that while it's bad this guy tried to murder children, you have to understand that what's happening to Ukraine is really awful. I feel like while I really appreciate that they support single stair reforms or land value taxes, I'd be pretty alarmed at any attempt to equivocate about murdering children. There are certain basic tenets of liberalism that I can't really paper over, e.g. trying to overthrow fair elections. Trying to explain the actions of someone holding children of the same ethnicity to collective guilt for crimes of a separate government of the same ethnicity...oof. And then if that YIMBY politician kept doubling down on the comparison. I don't think I could support them.
That would make sense for a Russian politician, AES is trying to represent the victims.
I'm an agnostic, yet I'm pretty comfortable with "don't attack innocent people attending religious services" as a non-negotiable red line for me. If you're running for office, this shouldn't be hard.
The point about the (relative absence of) normie Muslim politics got me thinking about the coalitional politics before Woke 1.0.
Against a backdrop polarized on GWB vs Obama, with GWOT-era Islamophobia, the median Muslim was not welcome in a camp of pro-war evangelical Christians, and so they joined the coalition of inclusive cultural progressives. And so within the context of that coalition, progressives and Muslims alike found it valuable to de-emphasize the religious conservatism of many Muslims and regard it as an Islamophobic slander that the typical Muslim might hold different cultural views than the typical Christian. Recall how many conservatives and New Atheists were justifying avenues of discrimination against Muslims on the grounds that Islam was a fundamentally more radical and inherently sexist religion, and so liberal Muslims were held up as the living counterproof.
If Woke 2.0 is all about Israel & Palestine, than it might be back to that same dynamic of pre-Woke-1.0. Someone like El-Sayed might feel like he can't cut against cultural progressives, without feeling like he is ostracizing his only allies at this time. And it would be entirely reasonable for his personal sense of self-actualization to be also wrapped up in these signifiers of departure from Islamophobic stereotypes. And this is all regardless of the actual number of Muslims with extremely conservative views.
In the US context, I think taking the bargain in which Muslim Americans abandon the conservative political views of their parents has been an important force for assimilation and building a palatable Muslim American identity. For example, trying to build an urban anti-LGBT anti-feminist coalition would be a total conceptual dead-end. Whereas however unpopular white progressives are with the American public, conservatives Muslims are even less popular than that.
To do the move that Matt is talking about, it requires voters that may have skeptical opinions of Muslims to reward rather than punish signs of moderate religious conservatism - after all there is a huge amount of daylight between a deeply conservative religious Muslim and a hyper-woke progressive activist, all of which is closer to the median voter. But it's worth saying it requires developing a new political trope of what it means to be a Muslim American, one that might be actually true to the vast majority of Muslim Americans, but has never had played a politically salient role in American politics. But as the number of Muslim Americans steadily increase, it completely makes sense that Americans will have to become acquainted with reality of the culturally moderate Muslim American. And I think Matt is right to point out that the Moderate Black Democrat is the clear model for this.