AOC is head and shoulders above the rest of the rest of the Squad in terms of talent and effectiveness. This is especially apparent watching her on committee hearings - she's always sharp, knows what she wants to achieve, and rarely grandstands. It was her questioning of Michael Cohen that pointed Manhattan prosecutors to where Trump's financial fraud lay. I can tell she's frustrated with establishment Democrats not knowing how or how hard to press political advantages (a la Beutler) but as you perfectly state in this article, she is fundamentally a team player who knows when to shut up and support the team.
All of which to say is I am a big fan of hers as a member of my coalition if not my specific faction. I wish I had someone as effective in my faction (Jamie Raskin perhaps?) I would have said a Chris Murphy is my boy, but honestly his whole anti-neoliberalism crisis of masculinity schtick gives me some JD Vance style willies. I love Murphy on foreign policy, wish he kept pushing for a secretary of state job instead of obviously pivoting to presidential ambitions .
Also, not for nothing, AOC talks and acts like a normal person. She could be a strong asset to the Biden campaign as a surrogate focused on pulling the left back in.
I think this is about right. Just as someone has to be the furthest right member of the caucus someone has to be the furthest left and it is better if that person has good instincts, which I think AOC mostly does, and is not a fool or obvious weirdo, which she is definitively not. The rest of the squad always strike me as pretty shallow and inconsequential but not AOC at all.
Omar and Tlaib represent a constituency that is otherwise unrepresented. I think they would be much better in a political system that didn't force them to pretend to be Democrats while doing so.
Omar is the left of me but I actually think she get's a bit of bad rap. I remember her grilling Elliot Abrams and I remember a lot of the chatter afterwards was criticizing her for being so "disrespectful" to Abrams and I'm thinking "screw this polite elite deference. Abrams is a scumbag who deserves all the opprobrium he can get for this role in all sorts of awful stuff in central America in the 80s. She's right about this".
And that "All about the benjamins" comment. It was clearly her attempt to be funny and it was definitely ill considered and at the very least cringe. But the blowback was unbelievably over the top and considering how much worse stuff has come out from other politicians. I'm sorry, this from Mike Collins is miles worse than that Omar tweet. https://news.yahoo.com/gop-rep-mike-collins-standing-201842245.html
I think the "normal person" part is what makes most of the difference. Omar and Tlaib are career organizers, but average talents at best -- they're never going to parlay that schtick into a competent presidential run like Obama could; they simply don't have the oratory skills nor the leadership.
AOC, by contrast, is a regular old bartender who got fed up, did some organizing on the side, and found out she was pretty good at politics. She'll probably end up like Matt, where her politics don't so much shift rightward as she ages, but the world progresses and moves left such that she eventually finds herself close enough to the center that she can win a run for president.
My only quibble with Matt today is that I don't think she'd run in 2028. She's only 34 right now, and I think if you put a gun to her head she herself would tell you that she wants to take more time before really going for the presidency. If Schumer dies or retires in the next decade, she'll probably run for his seat first, do two terms, and THEN pivot to the presidency, assuming that she decides she doesn't want to shoot for Speaker in the first place.
Addendum: Omar and Tlaib speak "Group-ish" because they're ultimately at home in The Groups. AOC really *doesn't*. Like, she speaks "PC" because she's a college-educated Millennial and ALL of us college-educated Millennials grew up learning PC language, but she was never truly a creature of The Groups, so she doesn't have that Gollum-esque quality that alienates her from normies and leaves her unable to ever simply leave The Groups behind (like she's doing now).
Now I'm imaging Tlaib addressing AOC: "Oh, you think the Groups are your ally? But you merely adopted the Groups; I was born in them, molded by them. I didn't see the center-right until I was already an adult natal female, by then it was nothing to me but FASCISM!"
I think you may be onto something with this. I'm an old millennial (or what I now at times hear called a xennial). I was in high school and college during the post PCU nadir of the influence of political correctness. Much like I find the fanatical love the cohorts immediately behind me have of Harry Potter to be totally baffling I find the group speak alienating and cult like. As you note AOC has her tics but she never comes off as brainwashed. Just maybe a friend or person at the bar you have some political disagreements with, not someone you can't understand or could never hope to get along with.
AOC knew she wanted to run for office early-enough in life that she kept a healthy distance from the Groups, yeah, and exploits them more than she lets them use her.
Yeah I think AOC taking over Schumer's seat is way more likely scenario. Schumer is now spring chicken; he's 73 and will be 77 by 2028. Like sort of perfect time to retire and let new blood take over.
Back in 2020, Matt suggested an alternative office she should consider running for: "If we want big things to happen in state government, then we... need to make it the case that the road to stardom for someone like Ayanna Pressley or AOC is to run for governor and try to enact these policies in states where success might actually be possible." (https://www.slowboring.com/p/make-blue-america-great-again)
One of the biggest problems facing blue states right now is that the legislatures can't overcome entrenched interests NEARLY fast enough to enact good policies.
If AOC ran for NYS Senate, she'd probably get a nice, solid YIMBY bill passed well within 5 years, instead of whatever crappy one that the state party's C-team is timidly negotiating right now with a bunch of fucking upstate car dealers on the other side.
I agree with your point. Alas she'd have to start over in terms of seniority, which is an unfortunate fact when it comes to switching between state and federal offices. I guess as governor she'd also be somewhat disadvantaged by not having deep relationships in Albany, but there are cases where former members of Congress have managed to make it work (Mike DeWine is the first to come to mind, though he was state AG in between).
AIUI seniority for majority leader positions is mostly a proxy for viability to challenge the leader, not a strictly relevant factor in its own right.
IE, she can challenge whenever she wants. Sure, she have might lost the first time or two if she'd started her entire career in the NYS Senate. But now that she's already in the House, she has a platform to basically blow whoever the current dipshit is out of the water. And if she doesn't, she can make a name for herself just by making a go of it every single election and pounding the dipshit over any refusal to pass her YIMBY bill.
I don't think she'll run in 2028 either. If she does and loses, she's out of the game. Since Congress ia all about seniority to get power, she'll wait things out, get more power legislatively, strenghthen the resume and then go for it.
AOC has talked being afraid during Jan. 6th that she'd get killed before having the chance to be a mom. Presumably that's a life goal she'll want to pursue soon, and I doubt she'll run for President while she has a kid or kids under the age of 5. (I realize some men do, but they shouldn't either. Staying in the House or even running for Senate is one thing but the rigors of a presidential campaign are on another level.)
Well, I mean, imagine we get 4 more years of Biden's eminently-competent presidency. Lots of incremental progress gets made -- probably a border compromise, maybe another gun bill, probably some more stuff to loosen up implementation of the IRA (like whatever that followup they were gonna do on green energy permitting).
The next president is probably a Republican just on thermostatics, but maybe not, if Trump dies in the interim. Either way, the filibuster starts getting eroded by pushes to make exceptions on a national abortion bill, and continues getting eroded to the point that the next Democrat after that (2028-2032ish) probably finally manages to pass an M4A bill.
In that scenario, AOC probably looks like the center-left of the party, because most of her original platform will have been accomplished -- just not in the ways she ever envisioned it. The economy will be well into the green energy transition, we'll have M4A, etc. The only thing left is... what, reforming student loans? Wrapping up various culture war fights that the liberals will have won by that point (IE shoring up LGBT protections)? It's not much for her to get out over her skis on.
I'm not saying all of that is GOING to happen that way. I'm just saying that the natural march of progress can EASILY catch up to her before she even hits 50. At that point, if no other Millennials have seized the spotlight, she's a shoo-in.
I feel like if beto couldn't beat Ted Cruz in Texas, there's no way Pete could have won in Indiana vs generic Republican Senator. Anyway, he's a Michigander now!
I mean, he could have used the same strategy I mentioned for AOC in the state house - use your national platform and resources to reshape your state house from within and dominate the insiders. Basically, you run the Trump play on a smaller scale and without the rank authoritarianism.
It’s amazing the degree to which she’s matured into the job. Her talent is obvious and she’s proven she has good instincts and can adjust to political realities. She is going to be a major player in Democratic politics for many years to come.
AOC is a very talented communicator, and that is a valuable thing to have in the party. I'm also very glad she's smart enough not to tank Democratic presidential nominees. But I'm reading these glowing comments with a measure of disbelief. AOC has toxic positions ("defund the police means defund the police"), terrible legislative strategy (forcing a vote on a nonexistent Green New Deal), a huge dose of millennial narcissism (Met Gala, livestream manicures), and no understanding of the broader electorate (lecturing Conor Lamb on how to win suburban Pittsburgh). She has generally seemed more interested in being a progressive social media celebrity than a legislator.
I do not think AOC is dumb, not at all. But for a 28-year-old political newbie, she did WAY too much Twitter and TV. She was uninformed, and it showed.
I broadly agree with you on all your criticisms, i.e. last two sentences of paragraph one. Especially the millennial narcissism (see also e.g. Beto), whereas to my ongoing astonishment Trumpian narcissism ("people tell me it's the greatest form of narcissism ever") continues somehow to gain power.
Unfortunately, to sentence 1 of graf 2 (also I agree), I think/fear that she is entirely correct that being a social media celebrity who has a seat in Congress gives her far more leverage (net present value of a discounted future influence stream) than actually influencing/passing legislation, to the degree that those two objectives conflict.
All of which is what she explicitly campaigned in both her primary and general election, she I seem to recall people around here getting mad at Kirsten Sinema for that exact kind of thing. When you campaign one way and govern a completely different way, people get mad, and they should.
She campaigned explicitly not to play play ball with establishment Dems. Go Google! I don't know why it's so hard for you to say "I myself am a centrist so I'm glad she's become a centrist."
Campaigned that way to beat Joe Crowley in 2018? No question.
In 2022 the district knew what it had though, I'd say. And you can say "oh, but incumbency advantage" but tell that to Joe Crowley.
Ultimately AOC has been running for president for several years now, into the same lane roughly 12 Dems tried to squeeze into in 2020 only to find there weren't any votes there.
Not to pile on but "internet leftists writ large" is not her constituency. All evidence that I can find points to that AOC actually remains popular in her own district. There's not a ton of public polling for her district but, as of 2019, her favorability was measured at +19. [1] She won her 2020 Primary with 75% of the vote and didn't even face a primary challenge in 2022. [2]
Kirsten Sinema, on the other hand, is so unpopular she decided not to seek reelection. There's really no comparison.
What does exactly does getting mad accomplish, Freddie?
It seems like a good media strategy, and the sort of exaggeration of hypocrisy and false equivalency can all be a good cottage industry, but what does getting mad in politics do?
The main problem for the left is most of the Dem party voters are okay with the party establishment whereas Republicans have an actual mobilized activist base to distrust theirs.
I don’t know, there were a lot of people who repeated the name “Debbie Wasserman-Schulz” about a million times after the 2016 primary. I don’t think any of those people were fans of her.
Sanders has been much more conciliatory to the Democratic party than Trump would be to the GOP if he narrowly lost the primary. That's partly because Sanders understands he is in a party of many interest groups rather than a party with a big ideological activist base he can threaten to hold hostage as leverage. The idea of a break-off MAGA party is a massive spoiler threat. The idea of a break-off DSA-style party is not.
The Left wants to act as the actual mobilized activist base who despise the Party establishment. The problem is that the Left disagrees with most of its own voters on policy, so the "progressive" faction never really lets the Left off the leash for fear of losing.
Which I actually think speaks well of her. She's seems at least somewhat willing to change her stances on issues based on learning new info or learning more about topic.
My recollection is she misread the situation, thought Amazon would be much more willing to concede than they were, and killed a winnable deal, not that she knowingly sank the ship.
But that was also quite a while ago, and it seems plausible that she's learned since then.
The arguments she marshaled against the project were either dishonest or foolish. It’s possible in her heart of hearts she is actually advancing some principled stance against race to the bottom locality shopping by large companies or was playing brinkswoman to drive a better deal and don’t mean to kill it, and didn’t really think that tax abatements (I.e collecting less tax than you would with Amazon by no abatements, but more than you would with no Amazon at all) are the same thing as revenue expenditures etc., but based on her level of apparent economic sophistication I think she believes them. She thinks a lot of wrong things about economics and monetary policy and antitrust and a host of related issues, so not surprising she got this wrong in a foolish way.
That said, for someone of those beliefs she could certainly be much worse.
Tax abatements are potentially the worst form of crony capitalism by nakedly giving away taxpayer money relative to a non-race-to-bottom equilibrium to particular, favored firms while other firms don’t get such consideration.
While I admit there are conceivably situations in which subsidizing particular nascent firms or industries might be desirable, for a company like Amazon this was, as Charles indicated, just a giveaway. The only winning move in that context is not to play.
Agree, she's become a capable and reliable legislator and politician. She has not demonstrated a sufficient understanding and sophistication of policy and economics. Unless and until she does she isn't ready to be a real leader, and by no stretch of the imagination President.
Agree 100%. She beat Crowley because she may possibly be a generational talent. I was so frustrated with the stupid questioning of Cohen before AOC did what was needed.
I still remember her ditching her Justice Democrat chief of staff because she knows how to be independent. I don't know if she wants to go for the presidency or become the next Pelosi but she has a long career and that I'm sure she's already planning out.
Agreed. I certainly disagree with AOC about a lot of things, but she's always understood what her job is and when to be a team player.
Unfortunately a lot of leftists want the Squad to act like the Freedom Caucus (never give an inch, blow up deals if they're not 100% perfect). Which is not only bad politics on its own merits, but wouldn't work for the far left because it's a much smaller constituency than the far right!
The structure of Congress is uniquely designed to not get things done; something that Matt points out all the time and why he was pretty early proponent of getting rid of the filibuster because there are so many other veto points in the system. Which also means if you're whole schtick is to be sabotage artists (which appears to be the Freedom caucus central conceit) the system is set up to help you.
If you're AOC and you're someone who wants to see fundamental change to American society and policy, trying to implement that change on your own with no compromise is just never going to happen given the way Congress works. Which is sort of the point Matt is trying to make. If you're interested in actually moving policy at least the direction you want it to go you have to be willing to compromise in a way that Freedom Caucus just doesn't for the reasons I laid out above.
I would question whether the Freedom Caucus “governs” at all. The disappointment with AOC has to do with failing to deliver enough performative outrage to those starved for such entertainment.
They vote* like they campaigned, the actual governing gets them a tiny bit less spending vs their "small enough to drown it in a bathtub" rhetoric. Plus they're an order of magnitude bigger than the Squad, are associated with more popular ideas, etc.
Unfortunately I highly doubt that. Even if god forbid they get their way and force a debt default, given the way public opinion works and media works the blame will likely fall entirely on the President whether that's Biden, Trump or some other person no matter what they tried to do.
It's basically the central insight of McConnell (or someone on his staff) that not working with President on anything actually helps you if you're in the opposition party because swing voters will just automatically blame the President (as well as too many reporters who still somehow believe that President can change things with a great speech ala Michael Douglas).
I think a lot of the people protesting AOC want to support a witness party; they don't actually want political power, or, at least, they will only accept it if utterly undiluted by compromise.
The Netherlands originated the concept that political scientists call the "witness party". It's a political party that doesn't seek to obtain political power, but to represent the views of a narrow, well-defined constituency. The original witness party was, unsurprisingly given the name, a religious party, the SGP ("Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij" - Political Party of the Gereformeerde [Gemeenten], ie the "Reformed Congregations", a hardline Calvinist church - note that the mainline Dutch Reformed Church calls itself "Hervormde", which also means "Reformed" but represents a distinction in Dutch that is lost in English).
They aren't interested in votes from people who aren't members of the correct church, they don't seek to widen their appeal, they don't compromise, they never enter government, they vote on each issue as it comes before parliament in accordance with their strict set of religious beliefs (so strict that, for instance, they shut down their website on Sundays and refuse to appear on TV).
There are other parties that are witness-like in Dutch politics, one of which is the PvdD ("Partij voor de Dieren" - Party for the Animals), which takes a very strict animal-rights and environmentalist position and is similarly uninterested in government or compromise.
These should be contrasted with parties that seek to represent a minority group but to get into government - like the Israeli religious parties, or the Dutch DENK (a party for Turkish and other Muslim Dutch voters) or CU (the other orthodox Calvinist party, which is less strict than the SGP and also significantly to the left on economics).
The difference is that the SGP and the PvdD get actual seats in the Tweede Kamer since it’s not like in America where your party needs a plurality of votes in a single given district to be represented in Congress. A very special-interest party can get *some* national political power in the Netherlands but in America’s system it’s impossible.
Oh absolutely - the SGP might win a seat or two with districts as they are very geographically concentrated, but that's not really relevant. My point was more that, in a political system that accommodates this kind of desire, these people get what they want and are relatively content with that; in a system like the US one that doesn't, these people become understandably frustrated.
After all, Americans aren't that different from Dutch people. Freddie de Boer lives (or lived, he's written that he's moving) in AOC's district and wants a bomb-throwing left candidate and thought that was what AOC promised (I think it's less clear than he thinks it is that she promised that) and that's a fair enough thing to want, but the American political system isn't set up to deliver a small group of bomb-throwing leftists (or rightists for that matter; the Freedom Caucus isn't small, and they couldn't operate like that when there were very few of them). I think that's better understood as a criticism of the American political system than of AOC. I thought the whole point of Marxism was not to criticise individuals for operating within the system of incentives they have, but to change the system of incentives.
Notably, the original Marxist party, the pre-WW1 Social-Democratic Party in Germany, was built on the same model. They would get into office, vote yes on bills that were good for the labor movement, and vote no on literally everything else, including mundane stuff like funding the government. When you asked them why they wanted to shut down the government for lack of funding, the answer was simple: they're revolutionaries! If the government shuts down, it's easier to rise up and overthrow it.
Yes, I considered mentioning them, but all the ones I can think of want to be in government (or at least say they do), but are excluded by the non-Arab parties.
These parties only work in parliamentary systems. Which is fair, because I suppose most of the people we are talking about want America to switch to a parliamentary system. Which is all well and good, except for the minor nitpick that doing so isn't possible. Sure would be nice if we stopped wasting our time wishing for impossible things to happen.
No, they don't. They work much better with proportional voting systems (which is not the same thing), but presidential vs parliamentary has almost nothing to do with it.
Most of Latin America has proportional voting for their congress, but a president elected separately like the US. And it has lots of small parties that either run presidential candidates with no hope of them winning (like US third parties) or which back a major party presidential candidate, while still running independently in congressional elections.
And switching the US to proportional voting (within states) is not impossible at all. State-internal elections (state legislatures, city councils) are just a matter of state-level legislation.
The US House is a bit more complicated; there's an Act of Congress that bans at-large multi-member districts but it's never actually been tested in court whether that's constitutional (Congress' powers over its own elections are limited outside of the 15th Amendment, which it would be hard to invoke for PR), and anyway, repealing/amending that Act of Congress is definitely easier than dismantling the presidential system and imposing a parliamentary one.
Obviously, the Presidency and the Senate could not be subject to this, but you could definitely have political parties that don't seriously attempt to win those offices.
Mostly agree - if given my druthers I'd probably want a German-style MMP system.
In some cases though, e.g. for Congress and maybe Governor (or EC votes), RCV-IRV - the slightly better than FPTP system in place in ME and AK, possibly after this November in NV as well - is both reachable (probably mostly only in blue to purple states) and gives us a few percent net improvement IMHO and given the basic form of the electoral coalitions.
Likewise in what are basically single party states, WA/CA style top two produces on the whole - I *think* - more net moderation versus partisan primaries and pure FPTP in November.
State legislatures could switch (presumably by state constititutional amendment) to being elected by a proportional system. The problem is that you'd have to either get the politicians elected by FPTP to switch, or you'd have to pass an initiative on exactly the sort of thing that most voters are (rightly) suspicious of.
I'm not actually sure a state *could* switch to proportional for the legislature if they wanted to. I'm sure such an attempt would be challenged in Federal court, and you have at least a colorable case that Baker v. Carr could override.
I assume in a MMP system like Germany or NZ the constituency seats would be subject to the same VRA rules as state legislative seats do now - not sure how the hypothetical proportional seats would or would not be affected by the VRA (generally speaking at large voting e.g. for city council and county supervisor seats has survived VRA challenges IIUC).
Whereas RCV-IRV has survived multiple court challenges. AFAIK it has always been by initiative (certainly at least in ME, AK, and if it happens NV).
I feel like in a blue sky kind of vision there's something a lot more appealing about a say what you actually believe and officially compromise in public makes a lot more sense to me than the kind of everyone in the party should have to try to pretend to appeal to the median voter.
Like it used to be the case that there was a kind of bright line between governing and like activists but because of the internet and educational polarization that line has gone away so now we have no place where you can express your fringe the police are bad type view that isn't really intended to win votes but to be a witness as it were.
During the 15-round Speaker election a year ago, Lauren Boebert said she wanted Republicans to be the minority in the House so she could protest against the "establishment" more.
The Squad has often been lumped together as if they are all the same, but you can clearly see differences in the approach of AOC or Pressley. Pressley is going to be a Senator someday and she's been far more strategic than other members like Omar or Bush.
I think the fact that the Very Online Left has turned on AOC so quickly, reminding me of when the DSA Roses on Twitter kept tweeting Snakes in 2020 when talking about Warren, shows how fundamentally narrow and unserious their project is.
I was wondering whether Pressley would be mentioned in this thread. You beat me to it. And you're right. She's smart, and strategic. I hate to see her lumped in with the other non-AOC members of the Squad.
"I think the more contemporary idea that politics should be exciting and flash is unhealthy, because fundamentally, the work of politics is kind of boring"
This is the key passage to me. These people who see AOC as a sellout have an unhealthy obsession with their far-left brand of politics and need to go touch some grass.
For me personally, I like keeping up with political policy and politics in general (hence why I'm here), but I have work, I have a family, and I have other hobbies, so it's easy enough to pull back from politics if I feel like I need to do so. It seems like some of these folks really need to invest some time in other parts of their lives.
With incentivizes you can use positive and negative reinforcement, a carrot and stick. With the American left ecosystem there only sees to be negative reinforcement. Fail to do what they want and they will work to get Republicans elected. Make concessions, then you might alienate other voters groups and they still will punish you and work to get Republicans elected. Embrace their agenda fully, and they will move goal posts and punish you.
No matter what Democrats do it’s the same threatening response with these people.
Just absolutely a lie. 100% a lie. The Bernie left has done literally everything the Clintonite establishment of the party has asked them to since the 2016 primary.
I 100% promise you the Clintonite establishment (who are they btw?) never asked the Bernie left to sprint further leftward in 2019 from a pretty sensible public option to an unworkable, self-defeating, and stupid Medicare 4 All policy. I promise you that.
Ok I can't remember the timeline. I thought Bernie introduced is MFA bill in 2017. All I could find was he endorsed Clinton and called out her support for a public option in 2015. Either way, there's no doubt Bernie moved further left from 2015 to 2019 and I'd be shocked if that was at the request of the "Clintonite establishment".
I wonder if this is a divide between the economic left (which I think includes Freddie) and the identitarian left (which Freddie critcizes frequently). I view the identitarian left as more hostile, more like Dan Quail's comment, and, probably more importantly, louder in (social) media.
Hmm, the distinction between the two was first made salient to me by Garrison Lovely who is economic left and very reasonable and unhostile. I'm trying to think of like, the people who put guillotines in front of people's houses. That act feels like economic left but I'd associate that with antifa, who seems like they get big rallies during identitarian flashpoints. That could be just that media covers it when its identitarian or happens on prestigious campuses which are more identitarian. IDK the full activity list for antifa or if they are constantly doing stuff but only sometimes get put on the news.
I guess it depends on how broadly one views either group but I have found the opposite. The economic HARD LEFT which is what I think we are talking about here generally feels free to trash anyone who isn't pure because their goal is a total revolution in the economic system/political system so they sort of need the system not to work and incremental change can actually be counterproductive to the extent that it relieves pressure on the system. If they don't overlap with the Identitarian left, and many don't, they are frequently not very self-aware about their own biases and will target women and minorities frequently in misogynistic and racially insensitive ways. Their goal is to hurt the enemy and "traitors" are the worst kind of enemy and they don't really mind how they hurt them.
The Identitarian Left (which you would likely place me in if even if that isn't how I self-identify) can definitely turn on people through things like cancel culture but they are, in my experience, less likely to turn on their own or the rest of the Left or even Center Left as traitors unless they really cross a line. To the extent that they can turn on centerists or folks in the center right who feel like this is unfair because they don't think that they are really racist, that is a bit of a different issue. Their goals are frequently radical but they can in theory be achieved through gradual progress even if this pace feels very unjust. For example lots of leading candidates including Clinton in the 2016 Dem primary put their foot in it by saying "all lives matter" but they all walked it back and expressed an understanding and sympathy for the need to express that Black Lives Matter. There wasn't any movement among BLM to not vote for Clinton because of this and a clear sense that while she wasn't perfect she was way better than Trump. While there was a faction of disappointed Bernie Bros who seemed very comfortable in voting third party over Clinton and talking about her in nasty and misogynist ways when she was the leading candidate.
I think the Gaza thing has been a bit an interesting outliner on this. (To extent anything as heartbreaking as this conflict and its fall out could be considered interesting.) The pro-Gaza faction is using a lot of language of the identity and I am seeing it show up in identitarian circles. But it's focus on Nationalism vs equity within pluralistic societies is a bit unique. The whole settler-colonialism lense that is being used by many of these groups is kind of a hybrid that describes a system of erasing native peoples to allow for economic exploitation of land and neo-liberal capitalism so it is at core very much an anti-capitalism argument.
At the one problematic rally that I checked out in Seattle, there were zero people wearing BLM t-shirts or pride colors and a shit ton of folks carrying posters that were explicitly pro-socialist or even pro-communist. There were literally folks with hammer and sickle flags, which is unusual even for Seattle. My daughter joked it felt like a USSR rally. I do think that there are quite a few economic leftist who still see this conflict through it's cold war framing and in some ways are using new identitarian language to recode that into a message with wider appeal to the whole left. I think that is also part of why there has been so much rampant antisemitism since there is also a decent portion of the economic hard left that shares a jews=banks=capitalism=evil conspiracy theory mindset. They have offered up that a jews steal from brown people narrative to the most conspiracy minded folks in the identitarian left and the results have been pretty toxic.
What found the most intellectually confusing was that I was watching this rally unfold on the unceded territory of the Duwamish people from whom it was stolen in an actual classic settler colonial genocide. It did not appear that there we any significant number of Native people there and that most of the crowd could most clearly support their stated goal of displacing colonists and returning land to indigenous people by packing a bag, moving back to Europe, and gifting their land to the Duwamish so they could retake Seattle from the Lake to the Sound and there didn't seem to be any big move to do that.
To be fair the Northwest Treaty Tribes have been pretty clear that their own "land back" demands are not actual demands that their non-indigenous neighbors actually fuck off and go back to Europe. They have a mix of requests that range from receiving a portion of the value of the land each year in perpetuity to support tribal services, recognition of their sovereignty on lands they still possess, right of first refusal and reasonable pricing to repurchase lands of cultural and environmental significance, and compensation for damage to natural resources that they rely upon, and a strong voice in decisions around land use and environmental stewardship. This based in part on a nuanced understanding of the ways land ownership and value of land differ between Salish People and Western economic models.
I actually think part of what makes the issue in the Levant so hard to untangle is the fact that the land in question here also has unique non-market value to the participants involved. You can't give Israelis the market value of their property and have them set up a new homeland in another area because that will never be their holy land. Similarly, Jerusalem is an irreplaceable holy area for Islam and unfettered access to it is of deep religious concerns. Both groups have legitimate claims to be its indigenous people and having cultural ties to the land that go beyond it's "rational" value. I suspect that whatever long term peace can be achieved in the area is probably going to require a more nuanced approach that anyone seems to be attempting to envision right now.
Considering how much he just projected and lied right there, yes.
Bully logic flipping transgressive agency to “Clintonites,” some parroted script about “the establishment,” and a basic debasement of language with the word “lie” when we have two MattY articles in a row that support the constant negativity and threats coming from the “left.”
It’s silly. He knows lots of Bernie staffers have made a cottage industry out of lambasting Democrats.
Eh, it's been very much a thing on the left for a long time to claim that being outspent in a campaign is "rigging" the election, so it's not really a new definition. Where she slipped up is that in the last eight years (for obvious reasons) claims that an election was "rigged" has taken on a dramatic right-left political valence that they didn't have before, so leftwingers are less likely to make that claim these days.
"Stepping back from Porter's churlishness, recall that her whole strategy to win this race was to trick Republicans into voting for her in a second-round matchup with Schiff because he played a big role in impeaching Trump.
I won't say she was trying to "rig" anything, she was playing by the rules of a dumb top-two system.
But her loss has avoided a large amount of Dem money being wasted on a dishonest longshot gambit."
Ah, I wasn’t following that context! It explains why I was seeing ads saying “Steve Garvey is too conservative for California, he always supports Trump and won’t support Pelosi’s progressive agenda!” which were obviously intended to get Republicans to vote for him. Presumably that was Schiff angling for the right opponent.
It was Schiff angling for the right opponent, there was no secret about that, Porter complained about it during the campaign. Smart politics from Schiff, and it succeeded.
Initially and primarily yes (see relatively bankrolls), but Porter then went "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" on a rather smaller and late to the party scale.
I disagree with Matt. Yes, she should have restrained herself and not made the sour grapes remarks. Schiff's gambit with Garvey was a bit gross, but politics is a contact sport. I don't hold that against him, but Porter would have been a better Senator than Schiff. Her economic populism sometimes misfires, but it is a potential path forward in competing with Trump republicans. My impression of Schiff is that he combines a Sinema-like deference to the finance industry, with "resistance democrat" celebrity from an arguably pointless impeachment. Maybe that's unfair but I would have liked to see a better outcome than a replacement level democratic senator.
She didn't run a good campaign. But it's a shame she lost to Adam Schiff, who lied non-stop about what information he had[1] while on the House Intelligence Committee. He'll probably win the Senate seat this November, but he's such a piece of work. I would've easily voted Porter in the jungle primary over him.
I'm only half joking when I say that I presume Schiff gets a certain number of votes based on people thinking they are voting for the NYC District Attorney from "Law & Order".
Well, either they're wrong or they're right. Are they wrong that Schiff lied about what he knew and could not share from the House Intelligence Committee? I'm open to a rebuttal! Share what you have!
Considering how the Bernie left has claimed the 2016 primary was rigged, I don't think this is a Trumpism thing but rather a sore loser thing (which yes, Trump is).
"When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn to see Dune Part 2, a small group of protesters yelled at her, complaining “you refuse to call it a genocide.”"
There is a reading of this sentence that make it seem like the protesters were mad that AOC refused to condemn the movie Dune Part 2 and if that is in fact the case I agree with them.
Refusing to call out the genocide in Dune? Do you think they are they accusing her of being a Maud’Dib apologist? Or do you think that she didn’t condemn colonialism of CHOAM?
This guy believes Karl Urban is a better actor, and more wildly a bigger *star*, than anyone in Dune. He's either trolling or abso-fuckin-lutely deranged.
I haven't read the book so I can't say it was a bad adaptation but if they did stray from the book maybe they should have stuck to it more because what they came up with was awful.
One inevitable and vexing question in politics is “why should political elites have higher status and more power than me?” I certainly like my own policy ideas more than theirs. If I could only get my hands on enough power, the world would, judged by my criteria, be a much better place. I know more about history and economics than most of the grubby politicians in Congress. I’m more erudite yet they have more power. Booooooo!
Of course, successful politicians are much better at reading the room, maintaining message discipline and accessing paid and earned media than I am. Vanity and jealousy make it tempting to denigrate these skills, and it’s easy make better arguments than politicians who must maintain primary and general election majorities. Thus the temptation to tweet out one’s rage at the brokers of compromise.
I think it is valuable to contrast, and note the contrast, between asserting that one wants power versus the reality of one wanting attention. I think there are many who believe they want power but in reality (and action) want attention. Often, the two are in conflict, and folks will default to choosing the attention path, not realizing it closes out the power path.
Every time there is an open seat on the Seattle City Council or open State House seat in my area, I get a lot of calls from people asking me if I am going to run. I am never going to run. When people ask whether I think I have as good or better answers that the other candidates I admit that I do. But to run and win an election, one has to be more than smart, thoughtful, knowlegable or compassionate. One has to be likable and likable is a hell of a lot of work, especially for a woman and I have no interest in putting that kind of work into that kind of goal.
I prefer to work by day job and in my off hours give my elected officials lots of information and advice, apply some occasional private pressure, and do a rare turn testifying at a hearing or two if asked. I have had some good luck changing some thinking and language my local electeds use and their policy positions but it is nice to get to say "well, now that I have convinced you that this the right thing to do, I am going sit back and let you figure out how to sell that widely and negotiate with others to try to get as close a possible to that goal. Good luck with that."
This seems like between educational polarization and the realities of the modern media we're in for a long haul of this in a way that I don't think was as common in the recent past. The inability to suppress viewpoints and paper it over with a kind of lay ignorance of what voting for cloture and against the bill means has a real price to be paid.
The typical swing voter is a blissfully ignorant of senate procedure. The gaggle on amateur pundits is the biggest novelty, and I doubt we matter much.
So I’ve long been of the opinion that AOC must either be an idiot or a grifter. She constantly says things that are not only u true (what politician doesn’t) but that are extremely easily disproved or just flat out don’t make sense. All the major fact check sites are chock-full of examples but to point to some specifically:
1. She claimed that unemployment numbers were only low because “everyone has two jobs”. The unemployment rate is not calculated by dividing people by jobs - and she should know that.
2. A deal was being considered where Amazon would set up in NYC in return for tax breaks. Amazon had a number of options for where to move and would only move to MUC if offered the tax breaks. AOC opposed the deal suggesting NYC should just invest the money in creating jobs directly. This misunderstands that a tax break forgoes potential future income and is not equivalent to cash in the bak today.
2. When it was revealed that the Pentagon upon audit has $21T of pentagon accounting errors (very concerning), AOC implied this was the same as the pentagon having lost $21T and thus proof we could easily have paid for her Medicare for all proposal (estimated to cost $32T).
Clearly based on this article, many people disagree with me so I am asking people to convince me I am wrong.
AOC was right about Amazon, though maybe not for the right reasons. Giving tax breaks to attract a giant corporate campus makes sense for a dying city like Detroit, but not for New York where land is already scarce and overpriced.
The issue here is NIMBYism, in other words. New York doesn't need "more jobs"; what it needs is apartments for people who already have jobs there. All that underutilized warehouse space in Queens that was going to be offered to Amazon needs to be redeveloped as housing instead. (No corporate welfare required; the city just needs to get out of the way.)
OK, fine, you go tilt at that windmill. But that still doesn't make this a useful argument about AOC, who isn't exceptional or unusual in this respect.
“Sure she said a bunch of dumb and false things about the Amazon deal, but there are good unrelated reasons to oppose it, so she gets a pass on her bananas takes”. Ok!
It didn't seem to me like Jeff was saying she should get a pass. It seemed like he was taking the opportunity to making a comment about the Amazon thing.
The entire comment section could be dedicated to the lies of politicians. She is smart and savvy. I think she will be the jr senator of NY some time soon.
People can reasonably accuse Barack Obama of being insufficiently careful with his words. But it was no lie. Obama didn't say "100% of Americans will have a legal right to keep their current doctor" because that would be a self-evidently absurd thing to say: Doctors retire. Doctors move. Doctors die. No law can change these basic realities. In fact the ACA didn't directly affect the provider arrangements of the vast majority of Americans, so most people indeed kept their doctors. Obama was quite truthfully pointing out that nothing in the legislation required MDs to drop patients (or patients to drop doctors). I get that politics ain't beanbag, and so the right found a juicy "gotcha" by implying the ACA promised a *guarantee* of uninterrupted provider arrangements. Fair enough! They made some political hay with that. Good on them.
But I hate to see this bad faith interpretation go unchallenged in a serious forum like SB.
My wife was on a grandfathered pre-Obamacare plan until it finally got cancelled by the insurance company last year.
She was able to keep her plan for more than a decade after Obamacare passed, yet the majority of both democrats and republicans believe the canard that Obama lied or exaggerated about this. His only mistake was not including a three paragraph disclaimer about all the reasons not having to do with Obamacare why a plan might get cancelled.
Ironically, "you can keep your Dr" is only true under a universal health insurance system. As long as we have a system where plans come and go, its always possible you will need to get a new doctor
“ Biden told an audience in Colorado that Beau “lost his life in Iraq.” Just weeks later, he said “I’m thinking about Iraq because that’s where my son died,” during a speech in Florida. In reality, Beau died in 2015 after battling stage four glioblastoma—a diagnosis that the president has previously attributed to the “burn pits” in Iraq, which the military used to destroy trash while Beau was deployed from 2008 to 2009.”
Amazon's HQ2 move was a sham from the start. Good for her for recognizing it. Just like Boeing's bullshit Chicago move that brought all of like 500 accounting positions which then then shut down as soon as the tax breaks ended to move to D.C..
I took the claim to be that AOC is worse than other politicians, more of a grifter. If that’s the case than what you call “whataboutism” is actually responsive, since it suggests that her behavior is par for the course, even if we don’t like that course.
Why aren’t they a problem? Do you deny that they are significantly changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere in ways that affect the climate?
I assumed you were using "cow farts" in the way that people who are dismissive of the role of agriculture in climate change use it, as a shorthand for the problem of methane emission from domesticated cattle. I didn't think you were quoting her using that term intending it to be a precise statement of the problem.
Serious contender for president? No, but she will be a senator at some point. People like her, even the ones that “hate” her. She is conventionally attractive, charismatic and seems nice. She isn’t the Marjorie Taylor Green of the left and she’s not an actual antisemite like iIlhan Omar. Sandy is in a category of her own.
I agree that AOC will likely be a senator, but I tend to doubt that she will stop there: you and I might have somewhat different connotations/priors behind "Serious contender for president", but I'd say she's more likely to make a serious run (as serious as Warren 2020, for example - extrapolating from the current system out ten plus years, equivalent to getting delegates in at three primaries/caucuses) than any other D House member I can think of at the moment.
Great post, and an excellent addition and/or counterpoint to yesterday's.
Not only is AOC is a good politician, she is actually pretty brave. We here at Slow Boring think it's a no-brainer to punch at the progressives and The Groups, but they're not our people. But that's where AOC comes from and those are the people she's been closest to. It's no easy matter to disappoint or anger your friends. So good on her.
I wish her "allies" would learn about politics from her, that it's full of compromises and slow boring while keeping your eye on the prize. Instead for most of them it's endless rerunning of that classic movie title, "A Futile and Stupid Gesture" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33dztfqRu_k)
I think the disagreement that people on the left have with AOC's approach is about how to interpret "ought implies can". In particular, if we ought to ensure that everyone has health care and that Israel stops starving the children of Gaza, then they assume that therefore there must be a way to accomplish it. But really it goes the other way -- the large number of people with moderate and conservative opinions in the US are a real obstacle and what we ought to do is constrained by reality.
AOC has never left the northeastern cities and her online bubble. I think she genuinely doesn't understand the electorate. Remember when Conor Lamb nearly lost his seat after his opponent spammed voters with pictures of AOC and defund quotes? She publicly said his problem was failing to use her social media style campaigning. I grew up in that man's district - it is 80% old white people still pissed about the end of coal.
Everyone needs to do a hard season campaigning in suburban Wisconsin before being deemed the future of the Dems.
This is how election night 2019 went in Britain after the far-left got control of Labour:
"Corbyn was a disaster on the doorstep. Everyone knew that he couldn't lead the working class out of a paper bag...[the far left] developed this Momentum group, this party within a party, aiming to keep the purity...the culture of betrayal goes on, you'll hear it now more and more over the next couple of days as this little cult get their act together. I want them out of the party. I want Momentum gone. Go back to your student politics...The most disastrous result for the Labour Party, the worst result since 1935."
I hope not to hear a similar rant in November but it's all too easy to imagine I will
I think there's a lot of negative things you can say about Corbyn, but I do think the 2017 run genuinely did feature a decent amount of political acumen. Some of that was circumstantial (the specific dynamics of him running against Theresa May helped delay polarization around Brexit), but he also had a fair amount of message discipline; he was generally good at focusing on economic issues and he was actually able to pull off hurting the incumbent right-wing party after a terrorist attack!
2019 run was obviously very different, though I would say there was a lot of blame to go around there; in general, it's honestly shocking to me how much more incompetent Labour is vs the Dems).
Yes. The Conservatives have been in control for a shocking amount of time. Even the zombie continuation of Margaret Thatcher somehow won an election - 17 years, the whole 80s and most of the 90s. Labour in power for 14 years after that was an anomaly, and Tony Blair gets no credit because of Iraq.
When leftists have gained power, it has generally been because the center right has destroyed itself, a la Britain in World War Two, Tsarist Russia or the Hoover administration. (What counts as center right is context dependent). The Great Society was a notable exception, but it was discredited by the Vietnam War. “The worse the better” is a rational strategy if you have the status quo enough to endure upheaval.
While I enjoy a little red-baiting like any red-blooded American, it seems a tad unfair to directly compare UK Labour and FDR to the Bolsheviks. The common thread in all communist revolutions is they take place in non-democracies. Marx's prediction of the industrial UK and US being prime revolutionary soil never really materialized; it was the agrarian feudal societies where his project did happen.
Screwed uppedness is ultimately too subjective for me. Procedural democracy by contrast, is much more accessible to see and define. This is why when I read Daniel Ziblatt's book on the Tories and German Conservatives, I conclude the GOP is much more like the early 20th century Tories than their German counterparts. You can see if people have to actually face competitive mass elections. It's not easily faked or debated out of.
Oooh I just finished that last month! Good book, glad to see someone else has read it.
The more I read about how very weak political parties controlled by ideological factions lead to autocracy, the more I look nervously at the current US....
Hoover was better than Nicholas II, ergo FDR was better than Lenin. Hoover and Chamberlain were about equally bad (though in very different ways) so Atlee and FDR were about equally good.
Vichy was pretty bad (though considerably better than tsarist Russia) so post war French politics were somewhat less stable than the US or British versions.
I think this point is underrated. By far the most effective left-wing leader in America right now is Shawn Fain of the UAW. He probably could have never won a normal election, because his membership isn't as left wing as him. But he took power because his predecessor literally went to jail. Now he won a pretty damn good contract with the Big 3, is making credible efforts to unionize non-union car plants (including Tesla), and is pushing far-left positions like a 32-hour workweek and cutting off funding to Israel. The story of his career is still yet to be written, but he's certainly an exciting figure for those of us on the left.
His story is instructive because he was in a marginal reform caucus that had no path to power until circumstances changed and suddenly he had one.
"Now he won a pretty damn good contract with the Big 3, is making credible efforts to unionize non-union car plants (including Tesla), and is pushing far-left positions like a 32-hour workweek and cutting off funding to Israel." I'm really not seeing the point that all of these things are related. The last doesn't seem to have much to do with union organizing.
Leftists see the labor movement's goals as improving the immediate material conditions of their particular workplace and creating a more just and equal society. I am going to guess from your comment you do not see yourself as a leftist and do not share this vision of the labor movement.
I think the issue there is that you have to convince me that specific interventions in the Gaza conflict will create a more just and equal society. That's exactly what people said about the Iraq war or the Khmer Rouge.
I doubt I will change your mind on the Israel-Palestine conflict in a blog comment section, but here goes:
I personally believe providing diplomatic and financial support to a nation that violates international law in seizing land and commits what I consider to be war crimes contributes to a less just world. I have no illusions that an end to US support would lead to immediate peace in the Middle East, but I do believe that our nation unconditionally supporting one side of the conflict inhibits a peaceful agreement between the 2 sides.
Historically the working class has never really cared about 'creating a more just and equal society' in countries outside of the one they live in, to the eternal chagrin of Communists & activist/organizer types. It's a trope that's been around for 140+ years now, but just never works out in practice- if you work with your hands for a living, you're just not particularly moved or interested in what happens overseas. 'Cross-national working class solidarity' has never actually worked out in practice, sorry- the participants simply don't care.
I do not believe that even 2% of high-school educated blue collar workers give a single shit about the Palestinians. Now the highly ideological activist/organizer class? Sure
Historically speaking this is true. I would quibble with the 2% figure, but obviously the Israel/Palestine conflict is not super salient among your average worker.
Perhaps Fain he will be voted out by members who are tired of his focus on left-wing politics.
Or perhaps he will win enough gains for his workers that they will tolerate his weird lefty politics, and the weird lefty politics may inspire some activists within the union to do a shitload of volunteer work for the union that will help win gains for his workers.
I will say that as a very left-wing person, there have been times I have been surprised/slightly concerned by how far Fain has gone, because I share some of your pessimism. But who knows, we will see in real-time how this plays out, they are really going for it in terms of unionizing a lot of shops nationwide.
Joe Biden is not Jeremy Corbyn! The odds are that he'll lose but the reasons for that do not especially have to do with ideology (which isn't to say he wouldn't benefit from doing highly salient moderate things).
I want Biden to win! Corbyn lost in a historic landslide, so "better than Corbyn" is not the goal. If Biden loses a tight election, then (just like 2016 and 2020) many small factors will have been decisive, and the far-left's combination of constantly criticising him while also pushing for some unpopular policies will likely be one of those decisive factors
AOC is head and shoulders above the rest of the rest of the Squad in terms of talent and effectiveness. This is especially apparent watching her on committee hearings - she's always sharp, knows what she wants to achieve, and rarely grandstands. It was her questioning of Michael Cohen that pointed Manhattan prosecutors to where Trump's financial fraud lay. I can tell she's frustrated with establishment Democrats not knowing how or how hard to press political advantages (a la Beutler) but as you perfectly state in this article, she is fundamentally a team player who knows when to shut up and support the team.
All of which to say is I am a big fan of hers as a member of my coalition if not my specific faction. I wish I had someone as effective in my faction (Jamie Raskin perhaps?) I would have said a Chris Murphy is my boy, but honestly his whole anti-neoliberalism crisis of masculinity schtick gives me some JD Vance style willies. I love Murphy on foreign policy, wish he kept pushing for a secretary of state job instead of obviously pivoting to presidential ambitions .
Also, not for nothing, AOC talks and acts like a normal person. She could be a strong asset to the Biden campaign as a surrogate focused on pulling the left back in.
Plus she plays League of Legends so she already knows how to deal with insane toxic trolls at a pro level.
I think this is about right. Just as someone has to be the furthest right member of the caucus someone has to be the furthest left and it is better if that person has good instincts, which I think AOC mostly does, and is not a fool or obvious weirdo, which she is definitively not. The rest of the squad always strike me as pretty shallow and inconsequential but not AOC at all.
Specifically I think Omar and Tlaib are liabilities on net. AOC is at least a Sanders-level talent in her generation, likely greater.
Omar and Tlaib represent a constituency that is otherwise unrepresented. I think they would be much better in a political system that didn't force them to pretend to be Democrats while doing so.
The thing about Tlaib is she legitimately gives Boebert and MTG a run for their money from an intellectual firepower standpoint.
pretty gross criticism
Tlaib is a profoundly dumb person.
AOC, fwiw, is quite smart.
Why is it not gross to say you think MTG or Boebert is dumb, but gross to say the same about Tlaib?
Omar is the left of me but I actually think she get's a bit of bad rap. I remember her grilling Elliot Abrams and I remember a lot of the chatter afterwards was criticizing her for being so "disrespectful" to Abrams and I'm thinking "screw this polite elite deference. Abrams is a scumbag who deserves all the opprobrium he can get for this role in all sorts of awful stuff in central America in the 80s. She's right about this".
And that "All about the benjamins" comment. It was clearly her attempt to be funny and it was definitely ill considered and at the very least cringe. But the blowback was unbelievably over the top and considering how much worse stuff has come out from other politicians. I'm sorry, this from Mike Collins is miles worse than that Omar tweet. https://news.yahoo.com/gop-rep-mike-collins-standing-201842245.html
I give Omar more benefit of the doubt than Tlaib. She seems like a genuinely good person who cares about universal rights and principles.
Tlaib seems like she cares about “me and mine” first, everyone else second.
I would suspect that Omar being an immigrant versus Tlaib being born in the US probably contributes to those differences.
Maybe in some way? I hesitate to build that up into anything that sounds overly determinative, though.
Does “Sanders-level talent” mean talks big and achieves little more than naming a post office?
I think the "normal person" part is what makes most of the difference. Omar and Tlaib are career organizers, but average talents at best -- they're never going to parlay that schtick into a competent presidential run like Obama could; they simply don't have the oratory skills nor the leadership.
AOC, by contrast, is a regular old bartender who got fed up, did some organizing on the side, and found out she was pretty good at politics. She'll probably end up like Matt, where her politics don't so much shift rightward as she ages, but the world progresses and moves left such that she eventually finds herself close enough to the center that she can win a run for president.
My only quibble with Matt today is that I don't think she'd run in 2028. She's only 34 right now, and I think if you put a gun to her head she herself would tell you that she wants to take more time before really going for the presidency. If Schumer dies or retires in the next decade, she'll probably run for his seat first, do two terms, and THEN pivot to the presidency, assuming that she decides she doesn't want to shoot for Speaker in the first place.
Addendum: Omar and Tlaib speak "Group-ish" because they're ultimately at home in The Groups. AOC really *doesn't*. Like, she speaks "PC" because she's a college-educated Millennial and ALL of us college-educated Millennials grew up learning PC language, but she was never truly a creature of The Groups, so she doesn't have that Gollum-esque quality that alienates her from normies and leaves her unable to ever simply leave The Groups behind (like she's doing now).
Now I'm imaging Tlaib addressing AOC: "Oh, you think the Groups are your ally? But you merely adopted the Groups; I was born in them, molded by them. I didn't see the center-right until I was already an adult natal female, by then it was nothing to me but FASCISM!"
Slow Boring: come for the insightful political analysis, stay for the Batman and Dune references.
And Simpsons references--I will make damn sure of that!
I think you may be onto something with this. I'm an old millennial (or what I now at times hear called a xennial). I was in high school and college during the post PCU nadir of the influence of political correctness. Much like I find the fanatical love the cohorts immediately behind me have of Harry Potter to be totally baffling I find the group speak alienating and cult like. As you note AOC has her tics but she never comes off as brainwashed. Just maybe a friend or person at the bar you have some political disagreements with, not someone you can't understand or could never hope to get along with.
AOC knew she wanted to run for office early-enough in life that she kept a healthy distance from the Groups, yeah, and exploits them more than she lets them use her.
Yeah I think AOC taking over Schumer's seat is way more likely scenario. Schumer is now spring chicken; he's 73 and will be 77 by 2028. Like sort of perfect time to retire and let new blood take over.
>Yeah I think AOC taking over Schumer's seat is way more likely scenario. Schumer is now spring chicken; he's 73 and will be 77 by 2028.<
Maybe I'm a party of one on this, but I get serious "I want to serve until I'm at least ninety" vibes from Schumer.
Schumer will totally do it, believing that he's doing it "for The Baileys".
Back in 2020, Matt suggested an alternative office she should consider running for: "If we want big things to happen in state government, then we... need to make it the case that the road to stardom for someone like Ayanna Pressley or AOC is to run for governor and try to enact these policies in states where success might actually be possible." (https://www.slowboring.com/p/make-blue-america-great-again)
OR for state senator and/or majority leader.
One of the biggest problems facing blue states right now is that the legislatures can't overcome entrenched interests NEARLY fast enough to enact good policies.
If AOC ran for NYS Senate, she'd probably get a nice, solid YIMBY bill passed well within 5 years, instead of whatever crappy one that the state party's C-team is timidly negotiating right now with a bunch of fucking upstate car dealers on the other side.
I agree with your point. Alas she'd have to start over in terms of seniority, which is an unfortunate fact when it comes to switching between state and federal offices. I guess as governor she'd also be somewhat disadvantaged by not having deep relationships in Albany, but there are cases where former members of Congress have managed to make it work (Mike DeWine is the first to come to mind, though he was state AG in between).
AIUI seniority for majority leader positions is mostly a proxy for viability to challenge the leader, not a strictly relevant factor in its own right.
IE, she can challenge whenever she wants. Sure, she have might lost the first time or two if she'd started her entire career in the NYS Senate. But now that she's already in the House, she has a platform to basically blow whoever the current dipshit is out of the water. And if she doesn't, she can make a name for herself just by making a go of it every single election and pounding the dipshit over any refusal to pass her YIMBY bill.
I don't think she'll run in 2028 either. If she does and loses, she's out of the game. Since Congress ia all about seniority to get power, she'll wait things out, get more power legislatively, strenghthen the resume and then go for it.
I concur 100% with this comment and congrats on calling your shot
AOC has talked being afraid during Jan. 6th that she'd get killed before having the chance to be a mom. Presumably that's a life goal she'll want to pursue soon, and I doubt she'll run for President while she has a kid or kids under the age of 5. (I realize some men do, but they shouldn't either. Staying in the House or even running for Senate is one thing but the rigors of a presidential campaign are on another level.)
If the world shifts left to where AOC is a moderate…
Well, I mean, imagine we get 4 more years of Biden's eminently-competent presidency. Lots of incremental progress gets made -- probably a border compromise, maybe another gun bill, probably some more stuff to loosen up implementation of the IRA (like whatever that followup they were gonna do on green energy permitting).
The next president is probably a Republican just on thermostatics, but maybe not, if Trump dies in the interim. Either way, the filibuster starts getting eroded by pushes to make exceptions on a national abortion bill, and continues getting eroded to the point that the next Democrat after that (2028-2032ish) probably finally manages to pass an M4A bill.
In that scenario, AOC probably looks like the center-left of the party, because most of her original platform will have been accomplished -- just not in the ways she ever envisioned it. The economy will be well into the green energy transition, we'll have M4A, etc. The only thing left is... what, reforming student loans? Wrapping up various culture war fights that the liberals will have won by that point (IE shoring up LGBT protections)? It's not much for her to get out over her skis on.
I'm not saying all of that is GOING to happen that way. I'm just saying that the natural march of progress can EASILY catch up to her before she even hits 50. At that point, if no other Millennials have seized the spotlight, she's a shoo-in.
Yeah, Senator Pete (D-IN) could have done a LOT more for the party than Secretary Pete has.
This presumes he could win
I feel like if beto couldn't beat Ted Cruz in Texas, there's no way Pete could have won in Indiana vs generic Republican Senator. Anyway, he's a Michigander now!
I mean, he could have used the same strategy I mentioned for AOC in the state house - use your national platform and resources to reshape your state house from within and dominate the insiders. Basically, you run the Trump play on a smaller scale and without the rank authoritarianism.
It’s amazing the degree to which she’s matured into the job. Her talent is obvious and she’s proven she has good instincts and can adjust to political realities. She is going to be a major player in Democratic politics for many years to come.
AOC is a very talented communicator, and that is a valuable thing to have in the party. I'm also very glad she's smart enough not to tank Democratic presidential nominees. But I'm reading these glowing comments with a measure of disbelief. AOC has toxic positions ("defund the police means defund the police"), terrible legislative strategy (forcing a vote on a nonexistent Green New Deal), a huge dose of millennial narcissism (Met Gala, livestream manicures), and no understanding of the broader electorate (lecturing Conor Lamb on how to win suburban Pittsburgh). She has generally seemed more interested in being a progressive social media celebrity than a legislator.
I do not think AOC is dumb, not at all. But for a 28-year-old political newbie, she did WAY too much Twitter and TV. She was uninformed, and it showed.
I broadly agree with you on all your criticisms, i.e. last two sentences of paragraph one. Especially the millennial narcissism (see also e.g. Beto), whereas to my ongoing astonishment Trumpian narcissism ("people tell me it's the greatest form of narcissism ever") continues somehow to gain power.
Unfortunately, to sentence 1 of graf 2 (also I agree), I think/fear that she is entirely correct that being a social media celebrity who has a seat in Congress gives her far more leverage (net present value of a discounted future influence stream) than actually influencing/passing legislation, to the degree that those two objectives conflict.
Especially defund the police. I'm sad that once in a generation energy to reform policing basically got squandered.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/wednesday-thread-633/comment/51083413
It's kind of wierd that I called this article last night without knowing AT ALL that Matt was going to publish it.
All of which is what she explicitly campaigned in both her primary and general election, she I seem to recall people around here getting mad at Kirsten Sinema for that exact kind of thing. When you campaign one way and govern a completely different way, people get mad, and they should.
She campaigned explicitly to undermine a sitting Democratic president?
She campaigned explicitly not to play play ball with establishment Dems. Go Google! I don't know why it's so hard for you to say "I myself am a centrist so I'm glad she's become a centrist."
Is she a centrist? She doesn't seem like that to me...only that she wants her faction to win so she plays the politics to do so.
Campaigned that way to beat Joe Crowley in 2018? No question.
In 2022 the district knew what it had though, I'd say. And you can say "oh, but incumbency advantage" but tell that to Joe Crowley.
Ultimately AOC has been running for president for several years now, into the same lane roughly 12 Dems tried to squeeze into in 2020 only to find there weren't any votes there.
AOC being a centrist is certainly a take.
There's some room between centrist and leftist. Sorry you're disappointed.
Not to pile on but "internet leftists writ large" is not her constituency. All evidence that I can find points to that AOC actually remains popular in her own district. There's not a ton of public polling for her district but, as of 2019, her favorability was measured at +19. [1] She won her 2020 Primary with 75% of the vote and didn't even face a primary challenge in 2022. [2]
Kirsten Sinema, on the other hand, is so unpopular she decided not to seek reelection. There's really no comparison.
[1] https://scri.siena.edu/2019/04/10/ocasio-cortez-viewed-favorably-by-majority-of-voters-in-her-district/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez#Electoral_history
What does exactly does getting mad accomplish, Freddie?
It seems like a good media strategy, and the sort of exaggeration of hypocrisy and false equivalency can all be a good cottage industry, but what does getting mad in politics do?
What the fuck are you talking about? Who is talking about getting mad?
Freddie, I kindly request that you re-read your post that I am replying to, and note where you say something about people getting mad.
But now you do seem pretty mad.
The main problem for the left is most of the Dem party voters are okay with the party establishment whereas Republicans have an actual mobilized activist base to distrust theirs.
I don’t know, there were a lot of people who repeated the name “Debbie Wasserman-Schulz” about a million times after the 2016 primary. I don’t think any of those people were fans of her.
Sanders has been much more conciliatory to the Democratic party than Trump would be to the GOP if he narrowly lost the primary. That's partly because Sanders understands he is in a party of many interest groups rather than a party with a big ideological activist base he can threaten to hold hostage as leverage. The idea of a break-off MAGA party is a massive spoiler threat. The idea of a break-off DSA-style party is not.
The Left wants to act as the actual mobilized activist base who despise the Party establishment. The problem is that the Left disagrees with most of its own voters on policy, so the "progressive" faction never really lets the Left off the leash for fear of losing.
She is a social media personality w/ almost zero legislative accomplishments- what world are you living in? She’s basically Jake Paul of the far left.
If you think AOC is as ridiculous as Jake Paul, I think the real question is what world are you living in
What are her legislative accomplishments Casey?
What are the individually-attributable legislative accomplishments of any single member of the House?
You are technically correct ("the best kind of correct") that no bill AOC has sponsored alone has passed the House. However, she has cosponsored a number of bills which have or still might become law, including, e.g., a message bill calling on Hamas to release their hostages (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-resolution/793); federal legalization of same-sex marriage, in case SCOTUS changes its mind (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/8404); a federal whistleblower protection bill (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/2988); or a bill to ensure that Presidents cannot unilaterally ban immigrants for bullshit reasons, like Trump (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1333).
If none of these float your boat, you're welcome to read through the other 123 (https://www.congress.gov/member/alexandria-ocasio-cortez/O000172?s=1&r=1&q=%7B%22search%22%3A%22ocasio-cortez%2C+alexandria%22%2C%22sponsorship%22%3A%22cosponsored%22%2C%22bill-status%22%3A%5B%22passed-one%22%2C%22passed-both%22%2C%22resolving%22%2C%22president%22%2C%22law%22%5D%7D), to find ones you like.
I've got bad news. "A social media personality with almost zero legislative accomplishments" is just what a member of congress is now.
Ultimately, AOC is a cause celebre because she's young and hot. There are 5-10 other Dems she could body swap with and it would be the same schtick.
"Ultimately, AOC is a cause celebre because she's young and hot" and smart.
FTFY.
Did you all seemingly forget and forgive her idiot stance on Amazon’s second headquarters in LI city?
You need to update your priors. At the time AOC was firmly in the lefty NIMBY camp. And she since actually done a bit of a 180. https://www.curbed.com/2022/01/aoc-2022-pledge-pro-housing-yimby.html
Which I actually think speaks well of her. She's seems at least somewhat willing to change her stances on issues based on learning new info or learning more about topic.
A superpower for a politician that will put them at odds with hardcore ideologues — which as far I’m concerned is another superpower!
She was right to oppose that give away to one of the world's richest firms.
My recollection is she misread the situation, thought Amazon would be much more willing to concede than they were, and killed a winnable deal, not that she knowingly sank the ship.
But that was also quite a while ago, and it seems plausible that she's learned since then.
"killed a winnable deal"
Good. NYC doesn't lack for economic vitality. Even a good deal that subsidized Amazon was worse than no deal.
The arguments she marshaled against the project were either dishonest or foolish. It’s possible in her heart of hearts she is actually advancing some principled stance against race to the bottom locality shopping by large companies or was playing brinkswoman to drive a better deal and don’t mean to kill it, and didn’t really think that tax abatements (I.e collecting less tax than you would with Amazon by no abatements, but more than you would with no Amazon at all) are the same thing as revenue expenditures etc., but based on her level of apparent economic sophistication I think she believes them. She thinks a lot of wrong things about economics and monetary policy and antitrust and a host of related issues, so not surprising she got this wrong in a foolish way.
That said, for someone of those beliefs she could certainly be much worse.
Tax abatements are potentially the worst form of crony capitalism by nakedly giving away taxpayer money relative to a non-race-to-bottom equilibrium to particular, favored firms while other firms don’t get such consideration.
While I admit there are conceivably situations in which subsidizing particular nascent firms or industries might be desirable, for a company like Amazon this was, as Charles indicated, just a giveaway. The only winning move in that context is not to play.
Agree, she's become a capable and reliable legislator and politician. She has not demonstrated a sufficient understanding and sophistication of policy and economics. Unless and until she does she isn't ready to be a real leader, and by no stretch of the imagination President.
AOC would be a huge disaster for a presidential candidate. Probably even worse than Kamela Haarid
Eh, I'm definitely not a fan of AOC's politics, but she's a better public speaker than Harris.
And frankly seems to understand current political dynamics better than Harris.
Agree 100%. She beat Crowley because she may possibly be a generational talent. I was so frustrated with the stupid questioning of Cohen before AOC did what was needed.
I still remember her ditching her Justice Democrat chief of staff because she knows how to be independent. I don't know if she wants to go for the presidency or become the next Pelosi but she has a long career and that I'm sure she's already planning out.
Agreed. I certainly disagree with AOC about a lot of things, but she's always understood what her job is and when to be a team player.
Unfortunately a lot of leftists want the Squad to act like the Freedom Caucus (never give an inch, blow up deals if they're not 100% perfect). Which is not only bad politics on its own merits, but wouldn't work for the far left because it's a much smaller constituency than the far right!
The Freedom Caucus governs like they campaigned, so people don't get mad at them for not doing that.
The structure of Congress is uniquely designed to not get things done; something that Matt points out all the time and why he was pretty early proponent of getting rid of the filibuster because there are so many other veto points in the system. Which also means if you're whole schtick is to be sabotage artists (which appears to be the Freedom caucus central conceit) the system is set up to help you.
If you're AOC and you're someone who wants to see fundamental change to American society and policy, trying to implement that change on your own with no compromise is just never going to happen given the way Congress works. Which is sort of the point Matt is trying to make. If you're interested in actually moving policy at least the direction you want it to go you have to be willing to compromise in a way that Freedom Caucus just doesn't for the reasons I laid out above.
I mean, their voters don't, but it dramatically reduces the chances I'd vote Republican.
I would question whether the Freedom Caucus “governs” at all. The disappointment with AOC has to do with failing to deliver enough performative outrage to those starved for such entertainment.
I only just noticed that the twitter account screenshotted in the article is "@still_oppressed", which is absolute poetry. *chef's kiss*
If the dog actually catches the car and society solves his oppression, will he need to get a new Twitter account?
The dog cannot catch the car. If the dog ever does catch the car, by definition, it is not a car. He will always remain oppressed.
They vote* like they campaigned, the actual governing gets them a tiny bit less spending vs their "small enough to drown it in a bathtub" rhetoric. Plus they're an order of magnitude bigger than the Squad, are associated with more popular ideas, etc.
Right - instead people get mad at them for making the leadership work with the Democrats for everything.
For now. Eventually voters will expect the Freedom Caucus to do something beyond opposing everything.
Unfortunately I highly doubt that. Even if god forbid they get their way and force a debt default, given the way public opinion works and media works the blame will likely fall entirely on the President whether that's Biden, Trump or some other person no matter what they tried to do.
It's basically the central insight of McConnell (or someone on his staff) that not working with President on anything actually helps you if you're in the opposition party because swing voters will just automatically blame the President (as well as too many reporters who still somehow believe that President can change things with a great speech ala Michael Douglas).
Like monkeys typing or a broken clock, eventually they will be in a position of real authority and influence where they can't easily deflect blame.
Doesn't really work for the Freedom Caucus, either (other than at the "this way I won't get primaried" level
Most of the republican success the last decade has been despite them, not because of them
I think a lot of the people protesting AOC want to support a witness party; they don't actually want political power, or, at least, they will only accept it if utterly undiluted by compromise.
The Netherlands originated the concept that political scientists call the "witness party". It's a political party that doesn't seek to obtain political power, but to represent the views of a narrow, well-defined constituency. The original witness party was, unsurprisingly given the name, a religious party, the SGP ("Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij" - Political Party of the Gereformeerde [Gemeenten], ie the "Reformed Congregations", a hardline Calvinist church - note that the mainline Dutch Reformed Church calls itself "Hervormde", which also means "Reformed" but represents a distinction in Dutch that is lost in English).
They aren't interested in votes from people who aren't members of the correct church, they don't seek to widen their appeal, they don't compromise, they never enter government, they vote on each issue as it comes before parliament in accordance with their strict set of religious beliefs (so strict that, for instance, they shut down their website on Sundays and refuse to appear on TV).
There are other parties that are witness-like in Dutch politics, one of which is the PvdD ("Partij voor de Dieren" - Party for the Animals), which takes a very strict animal-rights and environmentalist position and is similarly uninterested in government or compromise.
These should be contrasted with parties that seek to represent a minority group but to get into government - like the Israeli religious parties, or the Dutch DENK (a party for Turkish and other Muslim Dutch voters) or CU (the other orthodox Calvinist party, which is less strict than the SGP and also significantly to the left on economics).
The difference is that the SGP and the PvdD get actual seats in the Tweede Kamer since it’s not like in America where your party needs a plurality of votes in a single given district to be represented in Congress. A very special-interest party can get *some* national political power in the Netherlands but in America’s system it’s impossible.
Oh absolutely - the SGP might win a seat or two with districts as they are very geographically concentrated, but that's not really relevant. My point was more that, in a political system that accommodates this kind of desire, these people get what they want and are relatively content with that; in a system like the US one that doesn't, these people become understandably frustrated.
After all, Americans aren't that different from Dutch people. Freddie de Boer lives (or lived, he's written that he's moving) in AOC's district and wants a bomb-throwing left candidate and thought that was what AOC promised (I think it's less clear than he thinks it is that she promised that) and that's a fair enough thing to want, but the American political system isn't set up to deliver a small group of bomb-throwing leftists (or rightists for that matter; the Freedom Caucus isn't small, and they couldn't operate like that when there were very few of them). I think that's better understood as a criticism of the American political system than of AOC. I thought the whole point of Marxism was not to criticise individuals for operating within the system of incentives they have, but to change the system of incentives.
Notably, the original Marxist party, the pre-WW1 Social-Democratic Party in Germany, was built on the same model. They would get into office, vote yes on bills that were good for the labor movement, and vote no on literally everything else, including mundane stuff like funding the government. When you asked them why they wanted to shut down the government for lack of funding, the answer was simple: they're revolutionaries! If the government shuts down, it's easier to rise up and overthrow it.
Good point, some of the Arab parties in Israel also act like this.
Yes, I considered mentioning them, but all the ones I can think of want to be in government (or at least say they do), but are excluded by the non-Arab parties.
These parties only work in parliamentary systems. Which is fair, because I suppose most of the people we are talking about want America to switch to a parliamentary system. Which is all well and good, except for the minor nitpick that doing so isn't possible. Sure would be nice if we stopped wasting our time wishing for impossible things to happen.
No, they don't. They work much better with proportional voting systems (which is not the same thing), but presidential vs parliamentary has almost nothing to do with it.
Most of Latin America has proportional voting for their congress, but a president elected separately like the US. And it has lots of small parties that either run presidential candidates with no hope of them winning (like US third parties) or which back a major party presidential candidate, while still running independently in congressional elections.
And switching the US to proportional voting (within states) is not impossible at all. State-internal elections (state legislatures, city councils) are just a matter of state-level legislation.
The US House is a bit more complicated; there's an Act of Congress that bans at-large multi-member districts but it's never actually been tested in court whether that's constitutional (Congress' powers over its own elections are limited outside of the 15th Amendment, which it would be hard to invoke for PR), and anyway, repealing/amending that Act of Congress is definitely easier than dismantling the presidential system and imposing a parliamentary one.
Obviously, the Presidency and the Senate could not be subject to this, but you could definitely have political parties that don't seriously attempt to win those offices.
Mostly agree - if given my druthers I'd probably want a German-style MMP system.
In some cases though, e.g. for Congress and maybe Governor (or EC votes), RCV-IRV - the slightly better than FPTP system in place in ME and AK, possibly after this November in NV as well - is both reachable (probably mostly only in blue to purple states) and gives us a few percent net improvement IMHO and given the basic form of the electoral coalitions.
Likewise in what are basically single party states, WA/CA style top two produces on the whole - I *think* - more net moderation versus partisan primaries and pure FPTP in November.
State legislatures could switch (presumably by state constititutional amendment) to being elected by a proportional system. The problem is that you'd have to either get the politicians elected by FPTP to switch, or you'd have to pass an initiative on exactly the sort of thing that most voters are (rightly) suspicious of.
I'm not actually sure a state *could* switch to proportional for the legislature if they wanted to. I'm sure such an attempt would be challenged in Federal court, and you have at least a colorable case that Baker v. Carr could override.
I assume in a MMP system like Germany or NZ the constituency seats would be subject to the same VRA rules as state legislative seats do now - not sure how the hypothetical proportional seats would or would not be affected by the VRA (generally speaking at large voting e.g. for city council and county supervisor seats has survived VRA challenges IIUC).
Whereas RCV-IRV has survived multiple court challenges. AFAIK it has always been by initiative (certainly at least in ME, AK, and if it happens NV).
I feel like in a blue sky kind of vision there's something a lot more appealing about a say what you actually believe and officially compromise in public makes a lot more sense to me than the kind of everyone in the party should have to try to pretend to appeal to the median voter.
Like it used to be the case that there was a kind of bright line between governing and like activists but because of the internet and educational polarization that line has gone away so now we have no place where you can express your fringe the police are bad type view that isn't really intended to win votes but to be a witness as it were.
During the 15-round Speaker election a year ago, Lauren Boebert said she wanted Republicans to be the minority in the House so she could protest against the "establishment" more.
The Squad has often been lumped together as if they are all the same, but you can clearly see differences in the approach of AOC or Pressley. Pressley is going to be a Senator someday and she's been far more strategic than other members like Omar or Bush.
I think the fact that the Very Online Left has turned on AOC so quickly, reminding me of when the DSA Roses on Twitter kept tweeting Snakes in 2020 when talking about Warren, shows how fundamentally narrow and unserious their project is.
I was wondering whether Pressley would be mentioned in this thread. You beat me to it. And you're right. She's smart, and strategic. I hate to see her lumped in with the other non-AOC members of the Squad.
I was going to say this too!
I’m reassured to hear that the “very online left” has turned against AOC. I see that as a good sign.
They are misogynistic to the core and will look for any excuse to use the “evil backstabbing woman” trope a pretext for their abusive bile.
Nah DSA tweeted snakes at Elizabeth Warren because Warrenism and Sandersism were two different and opposed things.
Warrenism and Sandersism are two different things and don't think Warren ever said anything to suggest otherwise. How does that make Warren a snake?
"I think the more contemporary idea that politics should be exciting and flash is unhealthy, because fundamentally, the work of politics is kind of boring"
This is the key passage to me. These people who see AOC as a sellout have an unhealthy obsession with their far-left brand of politics and need to go touch some grass.
For me personally, I like keeping up with political policy and politics in general (hence why I'm here), but I have work, I have a family, and I have other hobbies, so it's easy enough to pull back from politics if I feel like I need to do so. It seems like some of these folks really need to invest some time in other parts of their lives.
With incentivizes you can use positive and negative reinforcement, a carrot and stick. With the American left ecosystem there only sees to be negative reinforcement. Fail to do what they want and they will work to get Republicans elected. Make concessions, then you might alienate other voters groups and they still will punish you and work to get Republicans elected. Embrace their agenda fully, and they will move goal posts and punish you.
No matter what Democrats do it’s the same threatening response with these people.
Just absolutely a lie. 100% a lie. The Bernie left has done literally everything the Clintonite establishment of the party has asked them to since the 2016 primary.
Bernie Sanders himself has been a pretty good team player, this is true.
The "Bernie Left" includes people who are explicitly and directly telling people not to vote for Biden in 2024.
8 years of people parroting “the DNC rigged the primary!” apparently never happened.
I 100% promise you the Clintonite establishment (who are they btw?) never asked the Bernie left to sprint further leftward in 2019 from a pretty sensible public option to an unworkable, self-defeating, and stupid Medicare 4 All policy. I promise you that.
Bernie and the Left were already supporting Medicare For All in 2016.
Ok I can't remember the timeline. I thought Bernie introduced is MFA bill in 2017. All I could find was he endorsed Clinton and called out her support for a public option in 2015. Either way, there's no doubt Bernie moved further left from 2015 to 2019 and I'd be shocked if that was at the request of the "Clintonite establishment".
https://www.vox.com/2016/7/12/12159062/bernie-sanders-endorsement-hillary-clinton
I wonder if this is a divide between the economic left (which I think includes Freddie) and the identitarian left (which Freddie critcizes frequently). I view the identitarian left as more hostile, more like Dan Quail's comment, and, probably more importantly, louder in (social) media.
Hmm I had the opposite impression about whether the identitarian or economic left was more hostile.
Hmm, the distinction between the two was first made salient to me by Garrison Lovely who is economic left and very reasonable and unhostile. I'm trying to think of like, the people who put guillotines in front of people's houses. That act feels like economic left but I'd associate that with antifa, who seems like they get big rallies during identitarian flashpoints. That could be just that media covers it when its identitarian or happens on prestigious campuses which are more identitarian. IDK the full activity list for antifa or if they are constantly doing stuff but only sometimes get put on the news.
I guess it depends on how broadly one views either group but I have found the opposite. The economic HARD LEFT which is what I think we are talking about here generally feels free to trash anyone who isn't pure because their goal is a total revolution in the economic system/political system so they sort of need the system not to work and incremental change can actually be counterproductive to the extent that it relieves pressure on the system. If they don't overlap with the Identitarian left, and many don't, they are frequently not very self-aware about their own biases and will target women and minorities frequently in misogynistic and racially insensitive ways. Their goal is to hurt the enemy and "traitors" are the worst kind of enemy and they don't really mind how they hurt them.
The Identitarian Left (which you would likely place me in if even if that isn't how I self-identify) can definitely turn on people through things like cancel culture but they are, in my experience, less likely to turn on their own or the rest of the Left or even Center Left as traitors unless they really cross a line. To the extent that they can turn on centerists or folks in the center right who feel like this is unfair because they don't think that they are really racist, that is a bit of a different issue. Their goals are frequently radical but they can in theory be achieved through gradual progress even if this pace feels very unjust. For example lots of leading candidates including Clinton in the 2016 Dem primary put their foot in it by saying "all lives matter" but they all walked it back and expressed an understanding and sympathy for the need to express that Black Lives Matter. There wasn't any movement among BLM to not vote for Clinton because of this and a clear sense that while she wasn't perfect she was way better than Trump. While there was a faction of disappointed Bernie Bros who seemed very comfortable in voting third party over Clinton and talking about her in nasty and misogynist ways when she was the leading candidate.
I think the Gaza thing has been a bit an interesting outliner on this. (To extent anything as heartbreaking as this conflict and its fall out could be considered interesting.) The pro-Gaza faction is using a lot of language of the identity and I am seeing it show up in identitarian circles. But it's focus on Nationalism vs equity within pluralistic societies is a bit unique. The whole settler-colonialism lense that is being used by many of these groups is kind of a hybrid that describes a system of erasing native peoples to allow for economic exploitation of land and neo-liberal capitalism so it is at core very much an anti-capitalism argument.
At the one problematic rally that I checked out in Seattle, there were zero people wearing BLM t-shirts or pride colors and a shit ton of folks carrying posters that were explicitly pro-socialist or even pro-communist. There were literally folks with hammer and sickle flags, which is unusual even for Seattle. My daughter joked it felt like a USSR rally. I do think that there are quite a few economic leftist who still see this conflict through it's cold war framing and in some ways are using new identitarian language to recode that into a message with wider appeal to the whole left. I think that is also part of why there has been so much rampant antisemitism since there is also a decent portion of the economic hard left that shares a jews=banks=capitalism=evil conspiracy theory mindset. They have offered up that a jews steal from brown people narrative to the most conspiracy minded folks in the identitarian left and the results have been pretty toxic.
What found the most intellectually confusing was that I was watching this rally unfold on the unceded territory of the Duwamish people from whom it was stolen in an actual classic settler colonial genocide. It did not appear that there we any significant number of Native people there and that most of the crowd could most clearly support their stated goal of displacing colonists and returning land to indigenous people by packing a bag, moving back to Europe, and gifting their land to the Duwamish so they could retake Seattle from the Lake to the Sound and there didn't seem to be any big move to do that.
To be fair the Northwest Treaty Tribes have been pretty clear that their own "land back" demands are not actual demands that their non-indigenous neighbors actually fuck off and go back to Europe. They have a mix of requests that range from receiving a portion of the value of the land each year in perpetuity to support tribal services, recognition of their sovereignty on lands they still possess, right of first refusal and reasonable pricing to repurchase lands of cultural and environmental significance, and compensation for damage to natural resources that they rely upon, and a strong voice in decisions around land use and environmental stewardship. This based in part on a nuanced understanding of the ways land ownership and value of land differ between Salish People and Western economic models.
I actually think part of what makes the issue in the Levant so hard to untangle is the fact that the land in question here also has unique non-market value to the participants involved. You can't give Israelis the market value of their property and have them set up a new homeland in another area because that will never be their holy land. Similarly, Jerusalem is an irreplaceable holy area for Islam and unfettered access to it is of deep religious concerns. Both groups have legitimate claims to be its indigenous people and having cultural ties to the land that go beyond it's "rational" value. I suspect that whatever long term peace can be achieved in the area is probably going to require a more nuanced approach that anyone seems to be attempting to envision right now.
Are you a part of the Bernie left?
Considering how much he just projected and lied right there, yes.
Bully logic flipping transgressive agency to “Clintonites,” some parroted script about “the establishment,” and a basic debasement of language with the word “lie” when we have two MattY articles in a row that support the constant negativity and threats coming from the “left.”
It’s silly. He knows lots of Bernie staffers have made a cottage industry out of lambasting Democrats.
If you have low status and are unwilling or unable to strive in the corporate world, only upheaval will do.
I see Katie Porter has exited the stage with her usual grace and positivity.
/s
Saying someone rigged the election is...not cool, yo.
https://twitter.com/katieporteroc/status/1765513523050791023
Did you see her statement from late last night trying to change the definition of rigged? So pathetic.
Eh, it's been very much a thing on the left for a long time to claim that being outspent in a campaign is "rigging" the election, so it's not really a new definition. Where she slipped up is that in the last eight years (for obvious reasons) claims that an election was "rigged" has taken on a dramatic right-left political valence that they didn't have before, so leftwingers are less likely to make that claim these days.
And here's Matt's take: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1765729217193370061
"Stepping back from Porter's churlishness, recall that her whole strategy to win this race was to trick Republicans into voting for her in a second-round matchup with Schiff because he played a big role in impeaching Trump.
I won't say she was trying to "rig" anything, she was playing by the rules of a dumb top-two system.
But her loss has avoided a large amount of Dem money being wasted on a dishonest longshot gambit."
Ah, I wasn’t following that context! It explains why I was seeing ads saying “Steve Garvey is too conservative for California, he always supports Trump and won’t support Pelosi’s progressive agenda!” which were obviously intended to get Republicans to vote for him. Presumably that was Schiff angling for the right opponent.
They should advertise his crappy career WAR.
“In 2024 California can’t afford an empty batting average. Steve Garvey doesn’t have the OPS we need for our modern economy.”
It was Schiff angling for the right opponent, there was no secret about that, Porter complained about it during the campaign. Smart politics from Schiff, and it succeeded.
Initially and primarily yes (see relatively bankrolls), but Porter then went "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" on a rather smaller and late to the party scale.
I disagree with Matt. Yes, she should have restrained herself and not made the sour grapes remarks. Schiff's gambit with Garvey was a bit gross, but politics is a contact sport. I don't hold that against him, but Porter would have been a better Senator than Schiff. Her economic populism sometimes misfires, but it is a potential path forward in competing with Trump republicans. My impression of Schiff is that he combines a Sinema-like deference to the finance industry, with "resistance democrat" celebrity from an arguably pointless impeachment. Maybe that's unfair but I would have liked to see a better outcome than a replacement level democratic senator.
She didn't run a good campaign. But it's a shame she lost to Adam Schiff, who lied non-stop about what information he had[1] while on the House Intelligence Committee. He'll probably win the Senate seat this November, but he's such a piece of work. I would've easily voted Porter in the jungle primary over him.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-adam-schiff-transcripts-11589326164
Schiff is a TV actor, which means he gets way more attention than he should.
I'm only half joking when I say that I presume Schiff gets a certain number of votes based on people thinking they are voting for the NYC District Attorney from "Law & Order".
Sure, he can be an actor and *not* be on a classified intelligence committee ever again.
Well, either they're wrong or they're right. Are they wrong that Schiff lied about what he knew and could not share from the House Intelligence Committee? I'm open to a rebuttal! Share what you have!
Calling the election "rigged" because you got outspent -- not a good look. (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4515806-katie-porter-calls-california-senate-race-rigged-billionaires/)
It's sad how Trumpism leaks into places you'd least likely expect.
Considering how the Bernie left has claimed the 2016 primary was rigged, I don't think this is a Trumpism thing but rather a sore loser thing (which yes, Trump is).
"The Superdelegates.":
We wish the Superdelegates were that empowered and effective at this point.
Were Hillary’s claims that the 2016 election was stolen and Stacey Abrams claim that she won also examples of Trumpism?
"When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn to see Dune Part 2, a small group of protesters yelled at her, complaining “you refuse to call it a genocide.”"
There is a reading of this sentence that make it seem like the protesters were mad that AOC refused to condemn the movie Dune Part 2 and if that is in fact the case I agree with them.
Refusing to call out the genocide in Dune? Do you think they are they accusing her of being a Maud’Dib apologist? Or do you think that she didn’t condemn colonialism of CHOAM?
No, refusing to condemn the movie itself for wasting 166 minutes of millions of people's lives.
Heretic.
This guy believes Karl Urban is a better actor, and more wildly a bigger *star*, than anyone in Dune. He's either trolling or abso-fuckin-lutely deranged.
Sci-Fi fans must be pretty hard up because you all will go nuts for some real terrible movies.
Heretic of Dune! Bring him to the God Emperor.
Feed him to the sandworms!
IMO
It was a great movie and a bad "Dune" adaptation.
I haven't read the book so I can't say it was a bad adaptation but if they did stray from the book maybe they should have stuck to it more because what they came up with was awful.
Bring that energy to the comments tomorrow.
One inevitable and vexing question in politics is “why should political elites have higher status and more power than me?” I certainly like my own policy ideas more than theirs. If I could only get my hands on enough power, the world would, judged by my criteria, be a much better place. I know more about history and economics than most of the grubby politicians in Congress. I’m more erudite yet they have more power. Booooooo!
Of course, successful politicians are much better at reading the room, maintaining message discipline and accessing paid and earned media than I am. Vanity and jealousy make it tempting to denigrate these skills, and it’s easy make better arguments than politicians who must maintain primary and general election majorities. Thus the temptation to tweet out one’s rage at the brokers of compromise.
I think it is valuable to contrast, and note the contrast, between asserting that one wants power versus the reality of one wanting attention. I think there are many who believe they want power but in reality (and action) want attention. Often, the two are in conflict, and folks will default to choosing the attention path, not realizing it closes out the power path.
I want power, old friend, but I’m not willing to pay the price for a punchers chance at getting it.
Every time there is an open seat on the Seattle City Council or open State House seat in my area, I get a lot of calls from people asking me if I am going to run. I am never going to run. When people ask whether I think I have as good or better answers that the other candidates I admit that I do. But to run and win an election, one has to be more than smart, thoughtful, knowlegable or compassionate. One has to be likable and likable is a hell of a lot of work, especially for a woman and I have no interest in putting that kind of work into that kind of goal.
I prefer to work by day job and in my off hours give my elected officials lots of information and advice, apply some occasional private pressure, and do a rare turn testifying at a hearing or two if asked. I have had some good luck changing some thinking and language my local electeds use and their policy positions but it is nice to get to say "well, now that I have convinced you that this the right thing to do, I am going sit back and let you figure out how to sell that widely and negotiate with others to try to get as close a possible to that goal. Good luck with that."
This seems like between educational polarization and the realities of the modern media we're in for a long haul of this in a way that I don't think was as common in the recent past. The inability to suppress viewpoints and paper it over with a kind of lay ignorance of what voting for cloture and against the bill means has a real price to be paid.
The typical swing voter is a blissfully ignorant of senate procedure. The gaggle on amateur pundits is the biggest novelty, and I doubt we matter much.
So I’ve long been of the opinion that AOC must either be an idiot or a grifter. She constantly says things that are not only u true (what politician doesn’t) but that are extremely easily disproved or just flat out don’t make sense. All the major fact check sites are chock-full of examples but to point to some specifically:
1. She claimed that unemployment numbers were only low because “everyone has two jobs”. The unemployment rate is not calculated by dividing people by jobs - and she should know that.
2. A deal was being considered where Amazon would set up in NYC in return for tax breaks. Amazon had a number of options for where to move and would only move to MUC if offered the tax breaks. AOC opposed the deal suggesting NYC should just invest the money in creating jobs directly. This misunderstands that a tax break forgoes potential future income and is not equivalent to cash in the bak today.
2. When it was revealed that the Pentagon upon audit has $21T of pentagon accounting errors (very concerning), AOC implied this was the same as the pentagon having lost $21T and thus proof we could easily have paid for her Medicare for all proposal (estimated to cost $32T).
Clearly based on this article, many people disagree with me so I am asking people to convince me I am wrong.
AOC was right about Amazon, though maybe not for the right reasons. Giving tax breaks to attract a giant corporate campus makes sense for a dying city like Detroit, but not for New York where land is already scarce and overpriced.
The issue here is NIMBYism, in other words. New York doesn't need "more jobs"; what it needs is apartments for people who already have jobs there. All that underutilized warehouse space in Queens that was going to be offered to Amazon needs to be redeveloped as housing instead. (No corporate welfare required; the city just needs to get out of the way.)
I hated how HQ2 was pitched and how Amazon made so many cities debase themselves when we all knew Amazon wasn’t even considering other locations.
But if Amazon hadn't done that, we would never have seen the hilarity of Tuscon shipping a large saguaro cactus to Jeff Bezos' house in Washington.
Yes, but it gave us this brilliant bit of political satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_eG7leM6ew
No argument on the merits of the tax breaks. But what AOC said does not make sense.
And? Politicians routinely make arguments that don't make objective sense because they are more convincing than the ones that do.
And we should oppose this in the strongest terms! Politicians saying things they don’t believe and know are wrong is bad!
OK, fine, you go tilt at that windmill. But that still doesn't make this a useful argument about AOC, who isn't exceptional or unusual in this respect.
I think politics is for getting things done. Lot of fields to go into if integrity is your top priority.
“Sure she said a bunch of dumb and false things about the Amazon deal, but there are good unrelated reasons to oppose it, so she gets a pass on her bananas takes”. Ok!
It didn't seem to me like Jeff was saying she should get a pass. It seemed like he was taking the opportunity to making a comment about the Amazon thing.
Fair enough.
I won the election-DJT
My son died in Iraq-Joe Biden
Weapons of mass destruction-GWB
You can keep your Dr- Obama
The entire comment section could be dedicated to the lies of politicians. She is smart and savvy. I think she will be the jr senator of NY some time soon.
>You can keep your Dr- Obama<
People can reasonably accuse Barack Obama of being insufficiently careful with his words. But it was no lie. Obama didn't say "100% of Americans will have a legal right to keep their current doctor" because that would be a self-evidently absurd thing to say: Doctors retire. Doctors move. Doctors die. No law can change these basic realities. In fact the ACA didn't directly affect the provider arrangements of the vast majority of Americans, so most people indeed kept their doctors. Obama was quite truthfully pointing out that nothing in the legislation required MDs to drop patients (or patients to drop doctors). I get that politics ain't beanbag, and so the right found a juicy "gotcha" by implying the ACA promised a *guarantee* of uninterrupted provider arrangements. Fair enough! They made some political hay with that. Good on them.
But I hate to see this bad faith interpretation go unchallenged in a serious forum like SB.
My wife was on a grandfathered pre-Obamacare plan until it finally got cancelled by the insurance company last year.
She was able to keep her plan for more than a decade after Obamacare passed, yet the majority of both democrats and republicans believe the canard that Obama lied or exaggerated about this. His only mistake was not including a three paragraph disclaimer about all the reasons not having to do with Obamacare why a plan might get cancelled.
Ironically, "you can keep your Dr" is only true under a universal health insurance system. As long as we have a system where plans come and go, its always possible you will need to get a new doctor
Even in the NHS, doctors retire, doctors quit, doctors move. I've had four GPs in ten years.
WMDs and lying about the election are no way comparable.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/joe-biden-repeats-false-claim-that-beau-biden-died-in-iraq
“ Biden told an audience in Colorado that Beau “lost his life in Iraq.” Just weeks later, he said “I’m thinking about Iraq because that’s where my son died,” during a speech in Florida. In reality, Beau died in 2015 after battling stage four glioblastoma—a diagnosis that the president has previously attributed to the “burn pits” in Iraq, which the military used to destroy trash while Beau was deployed from 2008 to 2009.”
Amazon's HQ2 move was a sham from the start. Good for her for recognizing it. Just like Boeing's bullshit Chicago move that brought all of like 500 accounting positions which then then shut down as soon as the tax breaks ended to move to D.C..
100% grifter. Look at wall the whataboutism below.
I took the claim to be that AOC is worse than other politicians, more of a grifter. If that’s the case than what you call “whataboutism” is actually responsive, since it suggests that her behavior is par for the course, even if we don’t like that course.
She allied herself with people who think cow farts are a problem.
They *are* a problem! Even more so than the usual problems of feeding your food to something else to make less efficient food.
Cow farts are not a problem. Unless, I suppose, you’re milking a cow by hand.
Why aren’t they a problem? Do you deny that they are significantly changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere in ways that affect the climate?
Cow farts are not a problem because that’s not the end of the cow that emits methane..
She’s really remarkably ignorant about policy topics she claims to care about.
I assumed you were using "cow farts" in the way that people who are dismissive of the role of agriculture in climate change use it, as a shorthand for the problem of methane emission from domesticated cattle. I didn't think you were quoting her using that term intending it to be a precise statement of the problem.
Wondering what you mean by u true? Do you mean the union of the state of truth with something else?
*untrue
Serious contender for president? No, but she will be a senator at some point. People like her, even the ones that “hate” her. She is conventionally attractive, charismatic and seems nice. She isn’t the Marjorie Taylor Green of the left and she’s not an actual antisemite like iIlhan Omar. Sandy is in a category of her own.
I agree that AOC will likely be a senator, but I tend to doubt that she will stop there: you and I might have somewhat different connotations/priors behind "Serious contender for president", but I'd say she's more likely to make a serious run (as serious as Warren 2020, for example - extrapolating from the current system out ten plus years, equivalent to getting delegates in at three primaries/caucuses) than any other D House member I can think of at the moment.
Great post, and an excellent addition and/or counterpoint to yesterday's.
Not only is AOC is a good politician, she is actually pretty brave. We here at Slow Boring think it's a no-brainer to punch at the progressives and The Groups, but they're not our people. But that's where AOC comes from and those are the people she's been closest to. It's no easy matter to disappoint or anger your friends. So good on her.
I wish her "allies" would learn about politics from her, that it's full of compromises and slow boring while keeping your eye on the prize. Instead for most of them it's endless rerunning of that classic movie title, "A Futile and Stupid Gesture" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33dztfqRu_k)
Is she brave or simply eyeing the presidency?
Elizabeth Warren eyed the presidency and still couldn’t do it
It's amazing how social media has allowed some people to make losing the 2016/2020 primaries become the entire basis of their personality.
I think the disagreement that people on the left have with AOC's approach is about how to interpret "ought implies can". In particular, if we ought to ensure that everyone has health care and that Israel stops starving the children of Gaza, then they assume that therefore there must be a way to accomplish it. But really it goes the other way -- the large number of people with moderate and conservative opinions in the US are a real obstacle and what we ought to do is constrained by reality.
AOC has never left the northeastern cities and her online bubble. I think she genuinely doesn't understand the electorate. Remember when Conor Lamb nearly lost his seat after his opponent spammed voters with pictures of AOC and defund quotes? She publicly said his problem was failing to use her social media style campaigning. I grew up in that man's district - it is 80% old white people still pissed about the end of coal.
Everyone needs to do a hard season campaigning in suburban Wisconsin before being deemed the future of the Dems.
Whenever someone tells me they don't want to vote for "the typical politician" I tell them , "yes, yes, you really do."
This is how election night 2019 went in Britain after the far-left got control of Labour:
"Corbyn was a disaster on the doorstep. Everyone knew that he couldn't lead the working class out of a paper bag...[the far left] developed this Momentum group, this party within a party, aiming to keep the purity...the culture of betrayal goes on, you'll hear it now more and more over the next couple of days as this little cult get their act together. I want them out of the party. I want Momentum gone. Go back to your student politics...The most disastrous result for the Labour Party, the worst result since 1935."
I hope not to hear a similar rant in November but it's all too easy to imagine I will
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JikhuJjM1VM
I think AOC has more political acumen in her pinky than Corbyn does in his whole body.
I am just thinking about the amount of antisemitism that Corbyn has just in his pinky finger now….
(This is not a quality contribution to the discussion.)
I think there's a lot of negative things you can say about Corbyn, but I do think the 2017 run genuinely did feature a decent amount of political acumen. Some of that was circumstantial (the specific dynamics of him running against Theresa May helped delay polarization around Brexit), but he also had a fair amount of message discipline; he was generally good at focusing on economic issues and he was actually able to pull off hurting the incumbent right-wing party after a terrorist attack!
2019 run was obviously very different, though I would say there was a lot of blame to go around there; in general, it's honestly shocking to me how much more incompetent Labour is vs the Dems).
Yes. The Conservatives have been in control for a shocking amount of time. Even the zombie continuation of Margaret Thatcher somehow won an election - 17 years, the whole 80s and most of the 90s. Labour in power for 14 years after that was an anomaly, and Tony Blair gets no credit because of Iraq.
When leftists have gained power, it has generally been because the center right has destroyed itself, a la Britain in World War Two, Tsarist Russia or the Hoover administration. (What counts as center right is context dependent). The Great Society was a notable exception, but it was discredited by the Vietnam War. “The worse the better” is a rational strategy if you have the status quo enough to endure upheaval.
While I enjoy a little red-baiting like any red-blooded American, it seems a tad unfair to directly compare UK Labour and FDR to the Bolsheviks. The common thread in all communist revolutions is they take place in non-democracies. Marx's prediction of the industrial UK and US being prime revolutionary soil never really materialized; it was the agrarian feudal societies where his project did happen.
Or one can view the degree of left wing empowerment as an almost linear function of the screwed uppedness of the former regime
Screwed uppedness is ultimately too subjective for me. Procedural democracy by contrast, is much more accessible to see and define. This is why when I read Daniel Ziblatt's book on the Tories and German Conservatives, I conclude the GOP is much more like the early 20th century Tories than their German counterparts. You can see if people have to actually face competitive mass elections. It's not easily faked or debated out of.
Oooh I just finished that last month! Good book, glad to see someone else has read it.
The more I read about how very weak political parties controlled by ideological factions lead to autocracy, the more I look nervously at the current US....
Hoover was better than Nicholas II, ergo FDR was better than Lenin. Hoover and Chamberlain were about equally bad (though in very different ways) so Atlee and FDR were about equally good.
Vichy was pretty bad (though considerably better than tsarist Russia) so post war French politics were somewhat less stable than the US or British versions.
I think this point is underrated. By far the most effective left-wing leader in America right now is Shawn Fain of the UAW. He probably could have never won a normal election, because his membership isn't as left wing as him. But he took power because his predecessor literally went to jail. Now he won a pretty damn good contract with the Big 3, is making credible efforts to unionize non-union car plants (including Tesla), and is pushing far-left positions like a 32-hour workweek and cutting off funding to Israel. The story of his career is still yet to be written, but he's certainly an exciting figure for those of us on the left.
His story is instructive because he was in a marginal reform caucus that had no path to power until circumstances changed and suddenly he had one.
"Now he won a pretty damn good contract with the Big 3, is making credible efforts to unionize non-union car plants (including Tesla), and is pushing far-left positions like a 32-hour workweek and cutting off funding to Israel." I'm really not seeing the point that all of these things are related. The last doesn't seem to have much to do with union organizing.
That's right. It doesn't.
Leftists see the labor movement's goals as improving the immediate material conditions of their particular workplace and creating a more just and equal society. I am going to guess from your comment you do not see yourself as a leftist and do not share this vision of the labor movement.
I think the issue there is that you have to convince me that specific interventions in the Gaza conflict will create a more just and equal society. That's exactly what people said about the Iraq war or the Khmer Rouge.
I doubt I will change your mind on the Israel-Palestine conflict in a blog comment section, but here goes:
I personally believe providing diplomatic and financial support to a nation that violates international law in seizing land and commits what I consider to be war crimes contributes to a less just world. I have no illusions that an end to US support would lead to immediate peace in the Middle East, but I do believe that our nation unconditionally supporting one side of the conflict inhibits a peaceful agreement between the 2 sides.
Historically the working class has never really cared about 'creating a more just and equal society' in countries outside of the one they live in, to the eternal chagrin of Communists & activist/organizer types. It's a trope that's been around for 140+ years now, but just never works out in practice- if you work with your hands for a living, you're just not particularly moved or interested in what happens overseas. 'Cross-national working class solidarity' has never actually worked out in practice, sorry- the participants simply don't care.
I do not believe that even 2% of high-school educated blue collar workers give a single shit about the Palestinians. Now the highly ideological activist/organizer class? Sure
Historically speaking this is true. I would quibble with the 2% figure, but obviously the Israel/Palestine conflict is not super salient among your average worker.
Perhaps Fain he will be voted out by members who are tired of his focus on left-wing politics.
Or perhaps he will win enough gains for his workers that they will tolerate his weird lefty politics, and the weird lefty politics may inspire some activists within the union to do a shitload of volunteer work for the union that will help win gains for his workers.
I will say that as a very left-wing person, there have been times I have been surprised/slightly concerned by how far Fain has gone, because I share some of your pessimism. But who knows, we will see in real-time how this plays out, they are really going for it in terms of unionizing a lot of shops nationwide.
The Great Society turned on well… decades later
Joe Biden is not Jeremy Corbyn! The odds are that he'll lose but the reasons for that do not especially have to do with ideology (which isn't to say he wouldn't benefit from doing highly salient moderate things).
I want Biden to win! Corbyn lost in a historic landslide, so "better than Corbyn" is not the goal. If Biden loses a tight election, then (just like 2016 and 2020) many small factors will have been decisive, and the far-left's combination of constantly criticising him while also pushing for some unpopular policies will likely be one of those decisive factors