My respect for AOC has steadily grown during the Biden years. Most credit goes to her own smarts, of course -- street, political, and general -- but I think I also see the results of inspired mentorship from Nancy Pelosi, put to very good use. That woman is a national treasure.
Unless she moves closer to the Center in more substantive ways than style I think that the presidential prediction is overblown, but she still has created a lot of good options for herself. As a New Yorker most of my references are New York-based, and if she decides to stand still ideologically, I can see her becoming a 21st Century Charlie Rangel: a smart, crafty, institutionalist and operator well Left of the mainstream but always pushing the Democratic Caucus farther to the Left whenever she can and sometimes farther than they want to go, a power player with and for any Democratic Administration, and somebody who consistently delivers for her constituents for years from her safe seat. Not a bad career, and one of real contributions.
TBF don't they kinda have a point that the most effective tactic to get a president to change policies is to credibly threaten to defect if they don't?
I respect AOC. I don't necessarily like or agree with her, but she's growing on me as she's actually trying to play the game and win. She's not just a radical waiting for the US political system to collapse in the hopes that their faction can pick up the pieces, she's prepared to compromise, and she recognizes that helping Democrats win is better for her than watching them lose. The other members of the Squad do not recognize this and I therefore hope they all lose their primaries (AOC, like Barbara Lee, is a fine Congressman).
It's honestly how I wish Bernie would act more: had he acted more like AOC now I think he'd have won the nomination in 2020 (granted, I don't think he'd be in any better shape than Biden politically right now, but that's a topic for another time).
From a purely theoretical perspective, I think electoral politics (the stuff people do to get elected) as existing on a spectrum from philosophical purity on one end to the pragmatic on the other side. Successful politicians balance their actions across that spectrum. Hopefully not dipping too far into the pragmatic because that’s where a lot of the corruption comes from. A lot of people, mostly those who’ve never actually governed, fixate on the philosophical purity. Forming coalitions can be very hard, and from a strategic perspective it is better to maximize your coalitional matching. That means keeping closer to the center, and a clear idea of what you are willing to compromise on.
Modern leftward leaning politics are going through some coalition issues. The old matchup between Green (educated, elite, socialist, the watermelons) and the Browns (people who get dirty building and digging) is frayed because of concerns about global warming. Trump and Boris Johnson won because they got some of the Browns to switch sides.
Whichever party can ditch the fringe beliefs & candidates and move towards the center could build a very durable coalition. Strangely neither side seems interested right now.
Hopefully one or the other party will have such a catastrophic loss that they’ll actually reconsider what it takes to get elected and govern.
The Very Online Left are only a serious problem because so many mainstream media stories insist on portraying their views as if millions of people shared them, when in reality it is the same tiny amount of people that it's always been, it's just now they have giant megaphones to blast their nonsense via social media.
I would very much like to go back to ignoring them, like we did in the pre-internet days.
Pre-internet, or at least pre-ubiquitous internet and pre-social media, not everyone was ignoring them. They or their equivalents would occasionally have a panelist on a PBS or NPR panel show. Not nearly as much as centrists. And conservative talk radio folk would manage to find these people, their pamphlets, local media reports, and amplify their importance for their own cynical purposes, as did early Fox News, which was becoming a thing in 98, 99, 2000.
Among my top reasons for never wanting to be famous is how much I would hate watching a good movie (like Dune Part 2) and then immediately upon leaving, rather than being able to bask in the moment and chat about the film while strolling out, instead having to endure weirdo hecklers yelling at me while holding a cell camera. I get that politicians are public figures, but they're also people.
Both the purists and pragmatists have their roles to play in any ideological movement. The purists keep everyone's eyes on the prize, while the "slow boring" pragmatists do battle in the political arena where, no matter how hard you try, you are not going to get everything you want.
Silly Matt. Politics isn't about the real world. It is about virtue signaling!
>What they want, instead of her being “predictable” and “boring” I guess, is for her to ride into DC on the back of a sandworm and sweep away all obstacles to progress.
The idea that AOC could be a viable candidate in 2028 is depressing. Not because of her politics but her experience. We should go back to the standards of pre-Trump. Ie we should expect her to successfully become a governor, senior senator or successful secretary in another dem admin before she could be a viable candidate in 20 years or something (she is still very young!).
The idea that a decade in the House with zero foreign policy experience zero management experience zero executive branch experience etc is enough qualification for the presidency of the us is depressing.
By 2028 AOC will have been in Congress for a decade, if she stays. That's more elected office experience than George W. Bush, Reagan, or Carter (but not Obama, who was in the state senate for 8 years).
>By 2028 AOC will have been in Congress for a decade, if she stays<
Right. Ten years in the national legislature seems...pretty solid? No one would think twice about challenging the "experience" credentials of a 50 year old white male who was entering his 7th year as a governor. I think David Cameron was in parliament for all of nine years before getting the top job...
Eh, plenty of other countries handle leaders who aren't all nearly retirement age. Macron is in his 40's, Martin was PM of Finland at 30-something, and so on. Tony Blair was 45 when he became PM. As pointed out, Obama wasn't some experienced super old Senator either.
We'd have to go farther back than Trump for your standard to apply. Obama didn't qualify either. He wasn't a "senior" senator; most of his four years in the Senate were just spent running for president.
Correct. The deterioration of standards started with Obama, whose candidacy wasa criticized at the time. yes, Obama was a good president, but exceptions do not justify getting rid of the "rule". And as a matter of fact Obama's inexperience did bring a lot of problems with it. We would have presumably been better off with Hilary Clinton in 2008 and a more experienced and better prepared Obama in 2016. It's time to take the presidency seriously again.
I really hated her when she won (I was a Kasich voter listing leftward), but she always impresses and is a strikingly good leftist politician. I too wouldn’t vote for her (too much of a conservative boogeywoman) but I’m glad she’s around.
With the more competent leftists, I always wish some would run for executive office—I think the act of actually governing would temper a lot of their thinking, and I think state governments are where we need much bolder thinking a la Matt’s Make Blue America Great Again post which is now ancient.
It's a nice blog-post, but I think it fundamentally ignores a major question: who are the politician's actual constituents? Are they the voters in your district, or The Groups who provided the infrastructure and money for your campaign? Or is it both because the voters actually poll as agreeing with the Groups on the major issues (there was a short-lived period when this was true during the Bernie campaign!)? Or is it both because the Groups are smarter and better representatives of the voters' real interests than the voters themselves (this is the Groups' theory of change, by and large)?
Moreover, once you're in office, what do you do to not just deliver for voters in general, but *your* voters in specific, the particular electoral faction who put you in office? How has AOC, for instance, strengthened the DSA in its effort to not just participate in a "progressive faction" in the Democratic Party but actually exercise control and power over the Democratic Party?
"... it’s probably inevitable that a left-factional candidate will win the nomination at some point in the next few cycles."
This depends on one crucial question - can a left-factional candidate appeal to normie Black voters? Since at least 1992 it has been an iron law of Democratic primaries that as goes the Black vote, so goes the nomination. Media types (whose biases Slow Boring has explored at length) seem surprisingly unaware of this ... and not coincidentally, this is why the left-factional campaigns lost in the last two cycles.
It could be argued that the moderating influence of Black voters is the only thing that has kept the Dems clinging to some shred of national viability. And it's definitely true that a left-factional candidate capable of winning them will need to be someone with a practical interest in the slow boring of hard boards.
Democrats have controlled the Senate for 14 of the past 30 years, but they have controlled the House for only 8 of the past 30 years. It is not the Senate that is preventing Democrats from getting what they want, it is the House.
Maybe this next time will be different, but I always point this out every time someone argues that the Democrats are screwed in the Senate for a very long time.
We held the 3/5 majority for just over one year, and we got it at precisely the same time “control of the Senate” meant no less than a 3/5 majority for the purpose of legislation.
& that would make you think we should run back towards the centrist policies that allowed us to win that 3/5th majority. But no. We want to push positions further and further left to fight endlessly for a razor thin 50/50 split. Bring back Rahm.
The 2010 midterms were about the ACA. And everyone complains about the topline number of the ARRA, but really it was the structure of the spending that sucked. It was half temporary payroll tax cuts that no one noticed, especially unemployed people, and half road construction projects that didn't begin until 1.5 years after the bill became law during time of a housing construction crash, not a road construction crash.
It is growingly baffling to me how bad at progress the proclaimed "progressives" are.
And this isn't isolated to that odd disconnect. I think top liberals, conservatives, feminists, etc., have all shown some odd entrenchment in ideologies that are rather counter to their main. I'm assuming this is largely just the loudest of the groups? That is, that it is not the full group that has gone so counter to their principals.
My respect for AOC has steadily grown during the Biden years. Most credit goes to her own smarts, of course -- street, political, and general -- but I think I also see the results of inspired mentorship from Nancy Pelosi, put to very good use. That woman is a national treasure.
Unless she moves closer to the Center in more substantive ways than style I think that the presidential prediction is overblown, but she still has created a lot of good options for herself. As a New Yorker most of my references are New York-based, and if she decides to stand still ideologically, I can see her becoming a 21st Century Charlie Rangel: a smart, crafty, institutionalist and operator well Left of the mainstream but always pushing the Democratic Caucus farther to the Left whenever she can and sometimes farther than they want to go, a power player with and for any Democratic Administration, and somebody who consistently delivers for her constituents for years from her safe seat. Not a bad career, and one of real contributions.
TBF don't they kinda have a point that the most effective tactic to get a president to change policies is to credibly threaten to defect if they don't?
I respect AOC. I don't necessarily like or agree with her, but she's growing on me as she's actually trying to play the game and win. She's not just a radical waiting for the US political system to collapse in the hopes that their faction can pick up the pieces, she's prepared to compromise, and she recognizes that helping Democrats win is better for her than watching them lose. The other members of the Squad do not recognize this and I therefore hope they all lose their primaries (AOC, like Barbara Lee, is a fine Congressman).
It's honestly how I wish Bernie would act more: had he acted more like AOC now I think he'd have won the nomination in 2020 (granted, I don't think he'd be in any better shape than Biden politically right now, but that's a topic for another time).
From a purely theoretical perspective, I think electoral politics (the stuff people do to get elected) as existing on a spectrum from philosophical purity on one end to the pragmatic on the other side. Successful politicians balance their actions across that spectrum. Hopefully not dipping too far into the pragmatic because that’s where a lot of the corruption comes from. A lot of people, mostly those who’ve never actually governed, fixate on the philosophical purity. Forming coalitions can be very hard, and from a strategic perspective it is better to maximize your coalitional matching. That means keeping closer to the center, and a clear idea of what you are willing to compromise on.
Modern leftward leaning politics are going through some coalition issues. The old matchup between Green (educated, elite, socialist, the watermelons) and the Browns (people who get dirty building and digging) is frayed because of concerns about global warming. Trump and Boris Johnson won because they got some of the Browns to switch sides.
Whichever party can ditch the fringe beliefs & candidates and move towards the center could build a very durable coalition. Strangely neither side seems interested right now.
Hopefully one or the other party will have such a catastrophic loss that they’ll actually reconsider what it takes to get elected and govern.
The Very Online Left are only a serious problem because so many mainstream media stories insist on portraying their views as if millions of people shared them, when in reality it is the same tiny amount of people that it's always been, it's just now they have giant megaphones to blast their nonsense via social media.
I would very much like to go back to ignoring them, like we did in the pre-internet days.
Pre-internet, or at least pre-ubiquitous internet and pre-social media, not everyone was ignoring them. They or their equivalents would occasionally have a panelist on a PBS or NPR panel show. Not nearly as much as centrists. And conservative talk radio folk would manage to find these people, their pamphlets, local media reports, and amplify their importance for their own cynical purposes, as did early Fox News, which was becoming a thing in 98, 99, 2000.
Among my top reasons for never wanting to be famous is how much I would hate watching a good movie (like Dune Part 2) and then immediately upon leaving, rather than being able to bask in the moment and chat about the film while strolling out, instead having to endure weirdo hecklers yelling at me while holding a cell camera. I get that politicians are public figures, but they're also people.
Saw my first Don Samuels for Congress sign a two months ago. Begun the sign wars have!
Both the purists and pragmatists have their roles to play in any ideological movement. The purists keep everyone's eyes on the prize, while the "slow boring" pragmatists do battle in the political arena where, no matter how hard you try, you are not going to get everything you want.
Silly Matt. Politics isn't about the real world. It is about virtue signaling!
>What they want, instead of her being “predictable” and “boring” I guess, is for her to ride into DC on the back of a sandworm and sweep away all obstacles to progress.
I LOLed at this.
The idea that AOC could be a viable candidate in 2028 is depressing. Not because of her politics but her experience. We should go back to the standards of pre-Trump. Ie we should expect her to successfully become a governor, senior senator or successful secretary in another dem admin before she could be a viable candidate in 20 years or something (she is still very young!).
The idea that a decade in the House with zero foreign policy experience zero management experience zero executive branch experience etc is enough qualification for the presidency of the us is depressing.
By 2028 AOC will have been in Congress for a decade, if she stays. That's more elected office experience than George W. Bush, Reagan, or Carter (but not Obama, who was in the state senate for 8 years).
>By 2028 AOC will have been in Congress for a decade, if she stays<
Right. Ten years in the national legislature seems...pretty solid? No one would think twice about challenging the "experience" credentials of a 50 year old white male who was entering his 7th year as a governor. I think David Cameron was in parliament for all of nine years before getting the top job...
All three were governors of state before wh. Now re-read what I wrote.
I read it. I just don't get why Senate experience counts and House experience doesn't.
Eh, plenty of other countries handle leaders who aren't all nearly retirement age. Macron is in his 40's, Martin was PM of Finland at 30-something, and so on. Tony Blair was 45 when he became PM. As pointed out, Obama wasn't some experienced super old Senator either.
The fact that you think that the presidency of the US is equivalent to the premiership of Finland says a lot.
P.S.
It's not about age per se, it's about experience, and AOC won't be "near retirement age" in 20 years.
We'd have to go farther back than Trump for your standard to apply. Obama didn't qualify either. He wasn't a "senior" senator; most of his four years in the Senate were just spent running for president.
Correct. The deterioration of standards started with Obama, whose candidacy wasa criticized at the time. yes, Obama was a good president, but exceptions do not justify getting rid of the "rule". And as a matter of fact Obama's inexperience did bring a lot of problems with it. We would have presumably been better off with Hilary Clinton in 2008 and a more experienced and better prepared Obama in 2016. It's time to take the presidency seriously again.
I really hated her when she won (I was a Kasich voter listing leftward), but she always impresses and is a strikingly good leftist politician. I too wouldn’t vote for her (too much of a conservative boogeywoman) but I’m glad she’s around.
With the more competent leftists, I always wish some would run for executive office—I think the act of actually governing would temper a lot of their thinking, and I think state governments are where we need much bolder thinking a la Matt’s Make Blue America Great Again post which is now ancient.
It's a nice blog-post, but I think it fundamentally ignores a major question: who are the politician's actual constituents? Are they the voters in your district, or The Groups who provided the infrastructure and money for your campaign? Or is it both because the voters actually poll as agreeing with the Groups on the major issues (there was a short-lived period when this was true during the Bernie campaign!)? Or is it both because the Groups are smarter and better representatives of the voters' real interests than the voters themselves (this is the Groups' theory of change, by and large)?
Moreover, once you're in office, what do you do to not just deliver for voters in general, but *your* voters in specific, the particular electoral faction who put you in office? How has AOC, for instance, strengthened the DSA in its effort to not just participate in a "progressive faction" in the Democratic Party but actually exercise control and power over the Democratic Party?
Wow, is this a prediction, that AOC will run for president in 2028?
"... it’s probably inevitable that a left-factional candidate will win the nomination at some point in the next few cycles."
This depends on one crucial question - can a left-factional candidate appeal to normie Black voters? Since at least 1992 it has been an iron law of Democratic primaries that as goes the Black vote, so goes the nomination. Media types (whose biases Slow Boring has explored at length) seem surprisingly unaware of this ... and not coincidentally, this is why the left-factional campaigns lost in the last two cycles.
It could be argued that the moderating influence of Black voters is the only thing that has kept the Dems clinging to some shred of national viability. And it's definitely true that a left-factional candidate capable of winning them will need to be someone with a practical interest in the slow boring of hard boards.
Democrats have controlled the Senate for 14 of the past 30 years, but they have controlled the House for only 8 of the past 30 years. It is not the Senate that is preventing Democrats from getting what they want, it is the House.
Maybe this next time will be different, but I always point this out every time someone argues that the Democrats are screwed in the Senate for a very long time.
Democrats had a 3/5 Senate majority just 14 years ago. The last time Republicans had a Senate majority anywhere close to that big was the 1920s.
We held the 3/5 majority for just over one year, and we got it at precisely the same time “control of the Senate” meant no less than a 3/5 majority for the purpose of legislation.
& that would make you think we should run back towards the centrist policies that allowed us to win that 3/5th majority. But no. We want to push positions further and further left to fight endlessly for a razor thin 50/50 split. Bring back Rahm.
Well, also try to abolish the filibuster. As for Rahm, I think he whiffed on ARRA, which had a lot to do with how brutal the 2010 midterms were.
What's your theory of his whiffing? Not saying I disagree.
The 2010 midterms were about the ACA. And everyone complains about the topline number of the ARRA, but really it was the structure of the spending that sucked. It was half temporary payroll tax cuts that no one noticed, especially unemployed people, and half road construction projects that didn't begin until 1.5 years after the bill became law during time of a housing construction crash, not a road construction crash.
It is growingly baffling to me how bad at progress the proclaimed "progressives" are.
And this isn't isolated to that odd disconnect. I think top liberals, conservatives, feminists, etc., have all shown some odd entrenchment in ideologies that are rather counter to their main. I'm assuming this is largely just the loudest of the groups? That is, that it is not the full group that has gone so counter to their principals.
It's the, "I don't want a solution; I just want to be mad" meme, but IRL.