This is a bad take because it assumes conservative blacks vote on policy. Academic experimental work by White and Laird ("Steadfast Democrats") shows that these voters respond to social pressure, not policy. Encouraging more progressive blacks with GOTV messages with their friends is the best solution, not another bad justification of more regressive policy
White progressive democrats need to go to commercial gyms more, instead of elite gyms, like equinox. The gym is the only place in America, where you are on even footing and can mix with people of all races, ethnic backgrounds, and income levels.
Idk I’ve never ever talked to someone at the gym. It’s 5am and I have things to lift or miles to accrue.
Also my gym 5am crowd isn’t really that diverse at all. There’s like 20 people rolling in that early and are mostly white or white presenting Hispanics in between 30 and 50 give or take.
At least at my gym there are very few people lifting heavy heavy weights and more people with like marathoner bodies.
I’m one of these, I have the body of a 40 mile a week runner who lifts 2-3x consistently but I’m not moving more than about 95 pounds for most of my lifts.
Did you see today's NYT opinion piece by Mara Gay on how poor Black voters in Georgia are discontented with Biden and may sit out next year's election? What did you think of it?
Great article. A quote: "In Valdosta, not far from the Florida border, several residents told me they were angry the city was spending $1.8 million to build pickleball courts even as it keeps threadbare hours for a public swimming pool in a largely Black neighborhood throughout the sweltering South Georgia summer."
Going after our own David Abbott's vote right there, but at what cost???
I've just come to the conclusion that white radicals are going to be angry no matter what and it makes no sense to try to placate them because what they want is so deeply unpopular with the broader electorate.
It would be beneficial for the country if we could get a 2.5 party system like in Canada, with the White radicals confined to a third party that never wins power. Unlikely, though.
Thank you Lauren for this excellent piece! I've asked in many a Slow Boring Mailbag for this kind of article.
Normie Black voters with reasonable, moderate views ARE the base of the Democratic Party. Biden's only 2020 primary supporter in the New York Times interviews was the blue-collar Black woman working as a security guard in the elevator. This was a funny microcosm of that whole primary and a reminder that since 1992 it has been an iron law of Democratic primaries that as goes the normie Black vote, so goes the nomination.
I think it could be argued that the Black Church is one of the most important institutions in Demicratic politics and certainly one of the most underrated. It plays an outsize role in selecting the party standard-bearers; it was a key origin point of the most successful Democrat in a generation; and it has served as an important moderating counterweight against more left-wing / less electable elements of the coalition. If you pay attention to the views of Black moderates a lot of what happens in Dem primaries makes sense ... and if you don't (like the Far Left mostly doesn't) you keep being surprised by the Dem base's mostly normie views.
"I think it could be argued that the Black Church is one of the most important institutions in Democratic politics and certainly one of the most underrated."
Probably true, but worth mentioning that it seems to be slowly losing influence due to immigration and irreligion
I'm starting to feel a little overdosed on all these "this is what Democrats need to win" and "here is why Republicans winning is bad" and "this is the mistake many Democrats are making" posts. A certain level is fine and interesting, but it's been a week of them, broken up only by the "Copyright Law is Living in the Past" guest post which at least had some interesting trivia on the history of copyright law as regards to music.
In this case I read the title of the post "Black Democrats are moderate" and feel like, yes I believe it and I don't need multiple charts to be convinced. There wasn't some interesting history of Black political moderation content that would make the post more interesting or entertaining to read.
I'm sorry if you didn't like the post, but this is a blog about American politics so I do think the question of which election outcomes are desirable and which choices are likely to lead o which outcomes are going to be topics that come up frequently.
I suspect part of the issue is that the guest bloggers haven’t coordinated with each other and are all doing what they think will work with this audience. Too many of them are targeting this bit of political core.
>The maxim that Democrats must “mobilize the base” could be better understood simply by acknowledging that our actual base is moderate on many core issues.<
There is truth here but it is not the whole story.
I would go so far to call many black voters socially right wing on most issues. They have the most negative opinions on all non-black groups than any other demographic has about out groups, (especially gay people).
However, they are very left wing on identity politics for Blacks. They tend to vote for black candidates in primaries again far more than other parts of coalitions vote for their demographics.. They also are most in favor of Affirmative Action for themselves and a majority support tax increases to pay for reparations for themselves.
I mean these are uncomfortable facts, but they kind of qualify the general truth that Black voters are the most moderate.
One strong undercurrent of Dave Chappelle's trajectory over the last few years is his apparent belief that the benefits won by the LGBT community in recent years have come at the expense of the black community.
To be honest, while many people definitely believe Black voters in general support "defunding the police" and the activist agenda in that space, I think it's actually relatively well known that Black voters are more moderate generally speaking.
No one's stereotypical portrayal of a far-left SJW-type would be a black person.
This is a good point, and as a follow-up, stereotypes of Black leftists are usually seen as being "Black community focused" - more similar to 70s radicals than modern woke liberals
I would say it, sincerely and unironically. My husband and I are wealthy (not rich-rich, with a private jet or gold plated toilet seats or anything like that, but solidly upper-upper middle class). We have a nice house in a high COL area and a large financial cushion and money for travel and going to concerts and stuff.
The vast majority of Americans are worse off than I am, and I would rather the government helped them and did the things no person can do by themselves - good infrastructure, clean energy, etc.
I mean the UBI proponents get weirdly silent when you point out that it's simply not plausible to send everybody a $1000 monthly check and only have taxes go up on billionaires.
Honest political science needs to acknowledge though that implementing Yglesias Thought secured Presley less than a percentage point more than his predecessor against a corrupt and unpopular incumbent.
Just one data point among many, but the idea that this is a can't miss One Weird Trick is damaged by Presley's failure in that race.
Well that's the thing, right? The actually existing Democratic Party is not running raging lefties in these races and never has been, the very occasional Beto O'Rourke aside.
It's just a matter of doing the best candidate recruitment you can in as many races as you can and being prepared for opportunities where good political work may unearth them. The slow boring of hard boards, if you like.
If Matt Yglesias Thought can get a Democrat to within three points of winning statewide in Mississippi imagine what it could do in Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, etc.
A democrat losing in MS is hardly a knock against the approach. The only "tricks" afaik that have worked in such deep-red states are (1) a long history at the statewide level (like Manchin in WV, which wasn't going to continue working anyway) or (2) an opponent who is literally a pedophile (Jones one-time win in AL).
An excellent post. But I'm curious if there's more to be said about why the Professional Left has convinced the media and others, often including Democratic politicians themselves, that Black voters are the same as progressive voters. In identifying the tactics it should be possible to push back against the tactics. I think far too often there's an inability to push back against left-wing activists who try to present Black voters as the same as progressive voters.
30 years ago, many prominent members of the Professional Left were Black, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. They don't really matter any more, but journalists still think they are important.
Like I wish someone could outline how we actually solve any of these problems for people with a moderate agenda.
Like I wholly recgonize the political importance of it as a tactic to win elections, but don’t see how we stop the ecological horror of untold trillions of unnecessary animal deaths and accelerating rates of extinction. And you can go idea by idea here where pragmatically these are great tactics but poor strategy and no one ever articulates how you level up into something more than the next election.
I'm pretty sure animals aren't dying "unnecessarily" at any appreciably different rate than before humans showed up. Back when lions and tigers still roamed the Mediterranean world their prey weren't exactly living to old age. They were being eaten or starving, or falling and breaking a leg or whatever. If you're talking about farming practices then that's different, though.
And I agree that species extinction is an important concern, but it's a human concern. From an animal rights perspective a rare woodpecker has no more right to live than does a house sparrow.
I mean what you describe is true but humans weren't such an invasive species that we were destroying everything. There's just a lot less habitable land left, and as. we watch coral bleach it's unclear to me that the oceans don't have an equally morbid fate ongoing.
This seems factually incorrect. Think how many animals must have been killed in the process of converting wilderness to human use (agriculture, housing, pasture, etc.)
Are we counting down to microbes, spiders, pill-bugs and creatures that live under a year? Or just mammals, birds, and cute stuff?
If it's the former, any change is truly a drop in the bucket.
But especially in the latter case, comparing today to 10,000 years ago it may be the case that more animals were being born but also more were routinely dying, most in "childhood", of disease, being eaten, starvation, genetic defects, etc.. And I'm not sure that the number killed in creating a farm or whatever is really all that big. Most of the bigger ones simply move away and the subsequent crowding probably reduces birth rates more than it directly causes death.
I mean, you can directly measure this over the long term, and it seems very clear that one effect of global industrialization has been to massively reduce (and sometimes locally extirpate) charismatic megafauna populations.
And, of course, widespread species extinction seems to be accelerating.
As to whether extinction or species endangerment is the exact moral equivalent of killing lots of animals, I think that’s a matter of individual interpretation.
I guess my point is that extinctions is more of a human problem than an animal rights problem. Coyotes don't really care if they are eating common bunny rabbits or endangered prairie dogs. I do, though.
It's just a different sort of moral question from "right to live" or animal cruelty sorts of questions. An animal being rare or beautiful may tell you a lot about how we humans value it, but it doesn't tell you anything about it's capacity to feel pain.
I notice that I'm unsure what the crux of this argument is, if it even is one.
I think I agree with what you're saying here about the difference in morality between reduced birth rates and straight up mass killings (direct or indirect). The main point I was trying to make is that, regardless of which mechanism we focus on, it seems pretty much true that the human race has caused these widespread reductions in populations over the past 200k-10k years, and that this trend is accelerating.
I mean I picked something from the article but it’s frustrating that moderates always get to present their ideas in politics terms because they mostly skate on status quo bias.
You would need to convince more voters that the ecological horror you describe is a high priority so that it becomes the moderate position.
In this sense, the "moderate" position doesn't mean "the position halfway between the current right and current left, and it won't change" it's the positions that most people support, kind of in the middle.
For climate change this can be shifting opinion on it's importance over time, or it can be making it cheaper to _be_ green (wind farm technology etc), so that the costs seem smaller.
And if you think it's an existential crisis right now that must be addressed maximally or it's too late - then you need to convince the rest of the left wing to abandon their other goals in order to get it done. So, moderate heavily on immigration, go much closer to the pro-life stance(most people support some access - you wouldn't have to be pro-life), etc. - . You can risk dying on one hill, but you can't risk dying on 10 different ones.
But it's a democracy, not a dictatorship(and thank goodness since we just had Trump and voted him out) - if you can't convince the voters, it's hard to get it done.
And sometimes a hill is worth dying on because it's so important, but then you'd better be willing to give up a bunch of other hills to win the votes
"You can risk dying on one hill, but you can't risk dying on 10 different ones." Man, I wish I could upvote this more than once.
The most successful Single Issue Organizations of my lifetime -- the NRA of the 1980s - 2010s and the Pro Life Movement of the same time frame -- did this. They would support anyone of any party who supported their issue. Nothing else mattered.
The Hamas thing is really baffling to me. I wasn't at all surprised that you had a bunch of people put their feet in their mouths immediately after the 10/7 attacks, but that we're now at the point of people not just doubling or tripling down, but screaming, "All in for Hamas, mother f****r!" as they shove the deed to their house, car title paperwork, and firstborn child across the table isn't something I anticipated.
For example, a friend told me his teenage daughter keeps coming at him with made-up stuff about Gaza that she sees on TikTok, which is clearly presented in a manipulative way. I don't think "foreign psyops" is the only possible explanation though.
Another critical aspect of the Black Democratic vote is that they are basically offline. They contribute very little to the vibes. Biden's instinct to focus on offline voters is probably a good one, since in the real world the median voter is a non-college fifty something who lives in an area with a population density of suburb or lower (offline). This explains the firewall that Biden had in 2020 in South Carolina that forced the other moderates to drop out and endorse him.
However...and again I stick to my case that this is Biden's Winter of Discontent(tm)...the vibes are bad and the polling of under-30 voters and young Black voters is wow not good.
We need a both/and strategy, not an either/or strategy when it comes to holding the coalition together. All of which to say is I think Biden is probably still in pretty good shape with liberal wine moms and the Black voters described in this post. The base is absolutely moderate. But the base is still with him. It's going to be a squeaker, so we gotta fix the vibes. Some of the vibes will fix themselves, and some of the vibes mean we gotta fight where the yoots are (aka tiktoks and smoking blunts with Joe Rogan).
Yesterday I commented that I *think* part of Biden's vibe problem is that the discoursers are carrying out their factional fighting by other means. So Biden is getting compared to the immaculate imaginary Progressive Dem in the minds of many online Dems. Heck, I do it too with vague gauzy Whitmer-Warnock imaginings.
On the other hand, it just may be that the inflation of 2021-2022, the intergenerational conflicts in the Democratic coalition are too much for 81 year old Biden to overcome.
Unfortunately, I don't think we'll have any chances to pivot if the latter is the case.
I'm not sure anyone can overcome the intergenerational conflicts in the Democratic coalition, because the intergenerational conflicts don't go to policy so much as who is actually running the party. The younger folks want the torch to be passed and the older folks think the younger folks haven't earned the torch-passing.
In general there is a lot of intergenerational beef that comes down to "70-year-old would prefer to keep working because he enjoys it and 25-year-old would prefer the 70-year-old retire because the 25-year-old can't imagine that somebody would be unhappy with not working."
Thanks for an informative and overwhelming persuasive piece. You can’t argue with facts, and the facts (multiple empirical polls) all point in one direction…and there’s lots of them. What surprises me is that the well intentioned professional political writers got it so badly wrong. OK they wouldn’t have all the polling data given here but they have the internet, Pew is not an obscure organization and its poll (decisive in itself) was presumably available before they wrote their paper. It’s a quite shocking case of failing to check your priors against readily available data.
This is a bad take because it assumes conservative blacks vote on policy. Academic experimental work by White and Laird ("Steadfast Democrats") shows that these voters respond to social pressure, not policy. Encouraging more progressive blacks with GOTV messages with their friends is the best solution, not another bad justification of more regressive policy
White progressive democrats need to go to commercial gyms more, instead of elite gyms, like equinox. The gym is the only place in America, where you are on even footing and can mix with people of all races, ethnic backgrounds, and income levels.
Can any of my fellow meatheads vouch for this?
Idk I’ve never ever talked to someone at the gym. It’s 5am and I have things to lift or miles to accrue.
Also my gym 5am crowd isn’t really that diverse at all. There’s like 20 people rolling in that early and are mostly white or white presenting Hispanics in between 30 and 50 give or take.
Well, obviously at 5 AM you’re not gonna get a diverse crowd. I do not understand early-morning worker outers.
I’m guessing no one had that time of the morning is actually Jacked.
At least at my gym there are very few people lifting heavy heavy weights and more people with like marathoner bodies.
I’m one of these, I have the body of a 40 mile a week runner who lifts 2-3x consistently but I’m not moving more than about 95 pounds for most of my lifts.
It’s one of those elite gyms that they have in New York City and Los Angeles that cost something like $200 or $300 a month. Google it.
Well, the difference in workout quality is amazing.
lol. I have a viral TicTok talking about how Equinox is better because the 45lbers weigh more than 45lbers at commercial gyms.
Is the music also turned up to 11?
Hi Matt Y and anyone else reading this,
Did you see today's NYT opinion piece by Mara Gay on how poor Black voters in Georgia are discontented with Biden and may sit out next year's election? What did you think of it?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/19/opinion/editorials/georgia-election-biden-democrats.html
Note that among other things, the voters want more well-paying jobs AND lower prices, which... Consistency, thy name is not "the American voter."
Great article. A quote: "In Valdosta, not far from the Florida border, several residents told me they were angry the city was spending $1.8 million to build pickleball courts even as it keeps threadbare hours for a public swimming pool in a largely Black neighborhood throughout the sweltering South Georgia summer."
Going after our own David Abbott's vote right there, but at what cost???
An edit just to add Matt's great piece about public swimming pools: https://www.slowboring.com/p/public-pools-need-an-abundance-agenda
I'm getting to like these guest posts more and more.
Good essay.
I've just come to the conclusion that white radicals are going to be angry no matter what and it makes no sense to try to placate them because what they want is so deeply unpopular with the broader electorate.
It would be beneficial for the country if we could get a 2.5 party system like in Canada, with the White radicals confined to a third party that never wins power. Unlikely, though.
Thank you Lauren for this excellent piece! I've asked in many a Slow Boring Mailbag for this kind of article.
Normie Black voters with reasonable, moderate views ARE the base of the Democratic Party. Biden's only 2020 primary supporter in the New York Times interviews was the blue-collar Black woman working as a security guard in the elevator. This was a funny microcosm of that whole primary and a reminder that since 1992 it has been an iron law of Democratic primaries that as goes the normie Black vote, so goes the nomination.
I think it could be argued that the Black Church is one of the most important institutions in Demicratic politics and certainly one of the most underrated. It plays an outsize role in selecting the party standard-bearers; it was a key origin point of the most successful Democrat in a generation; and it has served as an important moderating counterweight against more left-wing / less electable elements of the coalition. If you pay attention to the views of Black moderates a lot of what happens in Dem primaries makes sense ... and if you don't (like the Far Left mostly doesn't) you keep being surprised by the Dem base's mostly normie views.
"I think it could be argued that the Black Church is one of the most important institutions in Democratic politics and certainly one of the most underrated."
Probably true, but worth mentioning that it seems to be slowly losing influence due to immigration and irreligion
FYI Charts are unreadable in Pixel's dark mode.
Wonderful article Lauren, thank you!
I'm starting to feel a little overdosed on all these "this is what Democrats need to win" and "here is why Republicans winning is bad" and "this is the mistake many Democrats are making" posts. A certain level is fine and interesting, but it's been a week of them, broken up only by the "Copyright Law is Living in the Past" guest post which at least had some interesting trivia on the history of copyright law as regards to music.
In this case I read the title of the post "Black Democrats are moderate" and feel like, yes I believe it and I don't need multiple charts to be convinced. There wasn't some interesting history of Black political moderation content that would make the post more interesting or entertaining to read.
This is what happens when Dune 2 gets delayed to 2024.
I'm sorry if you didn't like the post, but this is a blog about American politics so I do think the question of which election outcomes are desirable and which choices are likely to lead o which outcomes are going to be topics that come up frequently.
I suspect part of the issue is that the guest bloggers haven’t coordinated with each other and are all doing what they think will work with this audience. Too many of them are targeting this bit of political core.
>The maxim that Democrats must “mobilize the base” could be better understood simply by acknowledging that our actual base is moderate on many core issues.<
Words to live by if you're a Democrat.
I loved this article, Ms. Harper.
There is truth here but it is not the whole story.
I would go so far to call many black voters socially right wing on most issues. They have the most negative opinions on all non-black groups than any other demographic has about out groups, (especially gay people).
However, they are very left wing on identity politics for Blacks. They tend to vote for black candidates in primaries again far more than other parts of coalitions vote for their demographics.. They also are most in favor of Affirmative Action for themselves and a majority support tax increases to pay for reparations for themselves.
I mean these are uncomfortable facts, but they kind of qualify the general truth that Black voters are the most moderate.
One strong undercurrent of Dave Chappelle's trajectory over the last few years is his apparent belief that the benefits won by the LGBT community in recent years have come at the expense of the black community.
To be honest, while many people definitely believe Black voters in general support "defunding the police" and the activist agenda in that space, I think it's actually relatively well known that Black voters are more moderate generally speaking.
No one's stereotypical portrayal of a far-left SJW-type would be a black person.
This is a good point, and as a follow-up, stereotypes of Black leftists are usually seen as being "Black community focused" - more similar to 70s radicals than modern woke liberals
It is not surprising voters are self-interested and want more money.
Maybe, but I would hardly call large support for pay outs based on skin color to be "moderate" especially at the size of what is being demanded.
Sure, but many people will use any justification they can for the government to give them more money.
I would say it, sincerely and unironically. My husband and I are wealthy (not rich-rich, with a private jet or gold plated toilet seats or anything like that, but solidly upper-upper middle class). We have a nice house in a high COL area and a large financial cushion and money for travel and going to concerts and stuff.
The vast majority of Americans are worse off than I am, and I would rather the government helped them and did the things no person can do by themselves - good infrastructure, clean energy, etc.
I think a lot of voters simply do not believe that their own taxes would not go up as well.
Whether they know it or not, many normies believe in MMT. All fun, no trade-offs.
I mean the UBI proponents get weirdly silent when you point out that it's simply not plausible to send everybody a $1000 monthly check and only have taxes go up on billionaires.
Good and important article especially for white Democrats to read.
“ Last month, Brandon Presley, a pro-life moderate Democrat who endorsed President Bush for re-election…”
Can I assume she meant to write President Biden?
Nope, it's really Bush: "As mayor, he crossed party lines to endorse the reelection campaign of George W. Bush in 2004.[15]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Presley
Honest political science needs to acknowledge though that implementing Yglesias Thought secured Presley less than a percentage point more than his predecessor against a corrupt and unpopular incumbent.
Just one data point among many, but the idea that this is a can't miss One Weird Trick is damaged by Presley's failure in that race.
Yeah but it wasn't as though Democrats didn't try something similar in 2019 in Mississippi -- Jim Hood wasn't some wild-eyed liberal.
Well that's the thing, right? The actually existing Democratic Party is not running raging lefties in these races and never has been, the very occasional Beto O'Rourke aside.
It's just a matter of doing the best candidate recruitment you can in as many races as you can and being prepared for opportunities where good political work may unearth them. The slow boring of hard boards, if you like.
If Matt Yglesias Thought can get a Democrat to within three points of winning statewide in Mississippi imagine what it could do in Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, etc.
I get it, but Presley didn't move the needle versus prior Democrats there, whereas Andy Beshear really did in Kentucky.
So maybe Matt Yglesias Thought is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
And just to add to my note below (or maybe above if you sort like a heathen), Beshear benefited from a family history in KY state politics.
A democrat losing in MS is hardly a knock against the approach. The only "tricks" afaik that have worked in such deep-red states are (1) a long history at the statewide level (like Manchin in WV, which wasn't going to continue working anyway) or (2) an opponent who is literally a pedophile (Jones one-time win in AL).
An excellent post. But I'm curious if there's more to be said about why the Professional Left has convinced the media and others, often including Democratic politicians themselves, that Black voters are the same as progressive voters. In identifying the tactics it should be possible to push back against the tactics. I think far too often there's an inability to push back against left-wing activists who try to present Black voters as the same as progressive voters.
It's the same logic that leads people to believe that Hispanic voters are deeply committed immigration doves.
"Those people's" politics must be centered around whatever is at the trendy most extreme edge of benefitting "those people".
30 years ago, many prominent members of the Professional Left were Black, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. They don't really matter any more, but journalists still think they are important.
Like I wish someone could outline how we actually solve any of these problems for people with a moderate agenda.
Like I wholly recgonize the political importance of it as a tactic to win elections, but don’t see how we stop the ecological horror of untold trillions of unnecessary animal deaths and accelerating rates of extinction. And you can go idea by idea here where pragmatically these are great tactics but poor strategy and no one ever articulates how you level up into something more than the next election.
I'm pretty sure animals aren't dying "unnecessarily" at any appreciably different rate than before humans showed up. Back when lions and tigers still roamed the Mediterranean world their prey weren't exactly living to old age. They were being eaten or starving, or falling and breaking a leg or whatever. If you're talking about farming practices then that's different, though.
And I agree that species extinction is an important concern, but it's a human concern. From an animal rights perspective a rare woodpecker has no more right to live than does a house sparrow.
I mean what you describe is true but humans weren't such an invasive species that we were destroying everything. There's just a lot less habitable land left, and as. we watch coral bleach it's unclear to me that the oceans don't have an equally morbid fate ongoing.
This seems factually incorrect. Think how many animals must have been killed in the process of converting wilderness to human use (agriculture, housing, pasture, etc.)
Are we counting down to microbes, spiders, pill-bugs and creatures that live under a year? Or just mammals, birds, and cute stuff?
If it's the former, any change is truly a drop in the bucket.
But especially in the latter case, comparing today to 10,000 years ago it may be the case that more animals were being born but also more were routinely dying, most in "childhood", of disease, being eaten, starvation, genetic defects, etc.. And I'm not sure that the number killed in creating a farm or whatever is really all that big. Most of the bigger ones simply move away and the subsequent crowding probably reduces birth rates more than it directly causes death.
I mean, you can directly measure this over the long term, and it seems very clear that one effect of global industrialization has been to massively reduce (and sometimes locally extirpate) charismatic megafauna populations.
And, of course, widespread species extinction seems to be accelerating.
As to whether extinction or species endangerment is the exact moral equivalent of killing lots of animals, I think that’s a matter of individual interpretation.
I guess my point is that extinctions is more of a human problem than an animal rights problem. Coyotes don't really care if they are eating common bunny rabbits or endangered prairie dogs. I do, though.
It's just a different sort of moral question from "right to live" or animal cruelty sorts of questions. An animal being rare or beautiful may tell you a lot about how we humans value it, but it doesn't tell you anything about it's capacity to feel pain.
I notice that I'm unsure what the crux of this argument is, if it even is one.
I think I agree with what you're saying here about the difference in morality between reduced birth rates and straight up mass killings (direct or indirect). The main point I was trying to make is that, regardless of which mechanism we focus on, it seems pretty much true that the human race has caused these widespread reductions in populations over the past 200k-10k years, and that this trend is accelerating.
It doesn't sound like you actually have a moderate agenda if that's immediately where you go.
I mean I picked something from the article but it’s frustrating that moderates always get to present their ideas in politics terms because they mostly skate on status quo bias.
You would need to convince more voters that the ecological horror you describe is a high priority so that it becomes the moderate position.
In this sense, the "moderate" position doesn't mean "the position halfway between the current right and current left, and it won't change" it's the positions that most people support, kind of in the middle.
For climate change this can be shifting opinion on it's importance over time, or it can be making it cheaper to _be_ green (wind farm technology etc), so that the costs seem smaller.
And if you think it's an existential crisis right now that must be addressed maximally or it's too late - then you need to convince the rest of the left wing to abandon their other goals in order to get it done. So, moderate heavily on immigration, go much closer to the pro-life stance(most people support some access - you wouldn't have to be pro-life), etc. - . You can risk dying on one hill, but you can't risk dying on 10 different ones.
But it's a democracy, not a dictatorship(and thank goodness since we just had Trump and voted him out) - if you can't convince the voters, it's hard to get it done.
And sometimes a hill is worth dying on because it's so important, but then you'd better be willing to give up a bunch of other hills to win the votes
"You can risk dying on one hill, but you can't risk dying on 10 different ones." Man, I wish I could upvote this more than once.
The most successful Single Issue Organizations of my lifetime -- the NRA of the 1980s - 2010s and the Pro Life Movement of the same time frame -- did this. They would support anyone of any party who supported their issue. Nothing else mattered.
Dying on multiple hills should be called diversifying one's morte-folio.
I’ve often wondered why the climate change (and the anti-gun folks) can’t see this
Or why, of all things, they picked Hamas as the hill to die on.
The Hamas thing is really baffling to me. I wasn't at all surprised that you had a bunch of people put their feet in their mouths immediately after the 10/7 attacks, but that we're now at the point of people not just doubling or tripling down, but screaming, "All in for Hamas, mother f****r!" as they shove the deed to their house, car title paperwork, and firstborn child across the table isn't something I anticipated.
It was wild how it took approximately two days for Israel to be regarded as the bad guys.
But you also could see this coming from a mile away with the Justice Dems shifting to saying the quiet part out loud about AIPAC.
Perhaps that is the much-underrated manipulated by Putin et.al angle
For example, a friend told me his teenage daughter keeps coming at him with made-up stuff about Gaza that she sees on TikTok, which is clearly presented in a manipulative way. I don't think "foreign psyops" is the only possible explanation though.
Another critical aspect of the Black Democratic vote is that they are basically offline. They contribute very little to the vibes. Biden's instinct to focus on offline voters is probably a good one, since in the real world the median voter is a non-college fifty something who lives in an area with a population density of suburb or lower (offline). This explains the firewall that Biden had in 2020 in South Carolina that forced the other moderates to drop out and endorse him.
However...and again I stick to my case that this is Biden's Winter of Discontent(tm)...the vibes are bad and the polling of under-30 voters and young Black voters is wow not good.
We need a both/and strategy, not an either/or strategy when it comes to holding the coalition together. All of which to say is I think Biden is probably still in pretty good shape with liberal wine moms and the Black voters described in this post. The base is absolutely moderate. But the base is still with him. It's going to be a squeaker, so we gotta fix the vibes. Some of the vibes will fix themselves, and some of the vibes mean we gotta fight where the yoots are (aka tiktoks and smoking blunts with Joe Rogan).
Ok I'm done
Yesterday I commented that I *think* part of Biden's vibe problem is that the discoursers are carrying out their factional fighting by other means. So Biden is getting compared to the immaculate imaginary Progressive Dem in the minds of many online Dems. Heck, I do it too with vague gauzy Whitmer-Warnock imaginings.
On the other hand, it just may be that the inflation of 2021-2022, the intergenerational conflicts in the Democratic coalition are too much for 81 year old Biden to overcome.
Unfortunately, I don't think we'll have any chances to pivot if the latter is the case.
I'm not sure anyone can overcome the intergenerational conflicts in the Democratic coalition, because the intergenerational conflicts don't go to policy so much as who is actually running the party. The younger folks want the torch to be passed and the older folks think the younger folks haven't earned the torch-passing.
In general there is a lot of intergenerational beef that comes down to "70-year-old would prefer to keep working because he enjoys it and 25-year-old would prefer the 70-year-old retire because the 25-year-old can't imagine that somebody would be unhappy with not working."
Biden presents old and I see how that bothers many people.
But would the younger generation really be happy if he were replaced with a 56 year old candidate?
I mean, would they really rather vote for one of their parents and not for their grandfather? I find that hard to believe.
Not really, considering how much they dislike the 53-year-old Hakeem Jeffries.
Right.
It's not that Biden is too old; it's that he's not Bernie Sanders (or Elizabeth Warren).
It's actually pretty wild that those two *don't* present as old, actually.
I think and hope you're right, and - in a strange form of gallows non-humor - I hope Trump doesn't moderate his speech once he wins the nomination.
They also will notice that Trump seems old. Like, way older than he seemed in 2016 or 2020.
I’m not sure the contrast to Biden speaking at length is much of a benefit to either candidate.
Thanks for an informative and overwhelming persuasive piece. You can’t argue with facts, and the facts (multiple empirical polls) all point in one direction…and there’s lots of them. What surprises me is that the well intentioned professional political writers got it so badly wrong. OK they wouldn’t have all the polling data given here but they have the internet, Pew is not an obscure organization and its poll (decisive in itself) was presumably available before they wrote their paper. It’s a quite shocking case of failing to check your priors against readily available data.