My guess as to why most white progressives don't "get it" that the majority of blacks tend to political moderation comes down to proximity. Likely the only black people that white university educated progressives associate with are university educated black progressives. So you get a situation where white progressives think that Ibrem Kendi represents majority black opinion.
I think some people on the left get it just fine, and are using “black voters” as a rhetorical cudgel. Almost a stolen valor move to shut up moderate Democrats just shy of calling them racist. Or accusing them of not caring about black voters, a mortal sin over here.
Definitely some of that going on. I remember pointing out to a (white, well-educated) person here a few years ago that my neighbors didn't agree with him on much. He proceeded to accuse me of not being "of" a black community, I responded that while I'm unclear what defines "of" here, I am certainly "in" one, and it devolved from there.
I think the most memorable phrase was when he referred to the neighbors to whom my family gives a pie each Thanksgiving as my "black pie buddies."
These people fucking well understand what's they're doing, it would just force a complete and utter reevaluation of their every belief if they actually ever grappled with the implications, and so they bend over backwards not to.
I'm progressive in terms of where I would like to see this country go, policy-wise. However, I'm aware that we need to win elections in order gain any ground at all and keep from going backwards. That means that we have to appeal to a broad swathe of the electorate, which makes it necessary to communicate in plain language how the Democratic platform is helping the average household. Save the academic, social science jargon for a book club. I think that sanctimonious left-wingers need to take an introduction to political science course that's taught by a professor who knows data.
I also think simply lazy thinking plays a role, especially among journalists, many of whom actually know better. I've certainly seen plenty of reportage over the years about the Black church, Black centrism on social issues, Black unease with the harder left, Black pragmatism wrt electoral politics (eg, strongly opting for Biden over Sanders), etc. A lot of reporters are aware of these things. But they can't always bring themselves to accurately tell the story.
I don't remember the person's name, but wasn't there a white reporter a couple of years ago who was talking with a regular Black guy (= not a Black progressive activist), and the Black guy told him "I hate police brutality, but I hate crime even more, we should fund the police, not defund them"? And the white guy Xeeted the conversation and was fired because it was considered racist! /facepalm
Doubtless the guy is real, but the attitude that Black people are more hardline on crime is unfortunately cope. They’re substantially softer on such matters.
My brother and sister are way more liberal than I am. One is an engineer and one is a professor. Neither of them know any regular working class people, yet alone, working class run of the POC.
We keep talking about universities and colleges, as being the places where leftist progressives are in a bubble, but the real bubble is in peoples workplaces.
In the past, people had bowling alleys, church, bars, where they could mix with people from different backgrounds. Nowadays people just go from there workplace bubbles to their home and watch Netflix.
Yeah. Sometimes I realize how weird it is that I actually interact with working-class Black and Hispanic folks on a regular basis in my job: I'm a lawyer, but many of the support staff and witnesses I rely on to get work done every day didn't go to college, and this being Philadelphia they are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. (Like, I am unusual among lawyers in that my regular repertoire of expert witnesses consists not of doctors or accountants or appraisers but plumbers.) Most of my friends really don't have this experience.
I love the mental image of a Sherlock Holmes style caper where the details of a pipe fitting went unnoticed by the police but are actually the key to solving a murder
Lol it's more mundane than that. It's more along the lines of people trying to get out of paying their water bill and me calling the plumbing experts to say either (1) there was nothing wrong with the water meter so the customer must've had a leak or (2) the meter was missing, bypassed, or clearly deliberately damaged, so we assessed the customer an estimate of usage and it's on them to show that estimate is wrong. (Seriously, the lengths people go to to try and not pay for water are kind of absurd.)
I actually get even more working-class exposure, as my in-laws are working-class Hispanics. (My wife was top of her class in high school and went to college, but her parents are still unapologetically working-class.) I'm about to get a full dose of the culture visiting them for Christmas lol.
I saw a study lately saying that cities had less socioeconomic integration than small towns and rural areas and it rings true to me. That was part of the city’s appeal to me when I was younger: whatever your interests of ‘community’, there are enough people like you in the city that you no longer need to spend any time at all with people who *aren’t* like you.
Of course, the internet has made it possible for the entire world to be your city, in that sense.
If it weren’t for family (my sister now works at Walmart, her husband drives a forklift at a local factory) and having cause to interact with tons of people who work on the floor at manufacturing facilities, I would’ve quite intentionally separated myself from the riff-raff (as I thought of them at the time) years ago. Now I feel lucky that I didn’t pull it off.
Also, do you find in your line of work a lot of people who didn’t necessarily go to school for engineering but worked their way up and now have something akin to engineering jobs? I know quite a few people who started on a factory floor somewhere, worked their way up, now have “engineer” in their job title. Often still working class in spirit.
I am literally one of those guys at work my way up to be an engineer. I do have a degree. I got online in the military in computer programming, but it wasn’t required for my job. I started as a technician for 12 years and then got promoted to engineer. my fellow engineers got their job, the exact same way.
In fact, my company hires, entry-level engineers without degrees. Guys who have 10 years of technically experience or 4 to 8 years of enlisted military experience.
The problem is college graduates can’t handle fieldwork for more than 2 to 3 years
The young ones I get who came from college instead of the floor tend to be shocked a lot, kind of overwhelmed by the chaos of it all. I think they were expecting engineering work to be much more orderly, more proactive and less reactive, than it is at the ground level.
To be fair to the stereotypical clueless white do-gooder, the DEI industry that they are ever more exposed to holds ITSELF out as representing majority black opinion, or at the very least majority black interests.
I think that's an important point about DEI actually (and I may turn it into a tweet). DEI focuses on the diverse faces and voices WITHIN the university, but in doing so it is exclusionary of the many members of minority groups who are not represented in university faculty and students. (Indeed, I'm not even sure DEI cares enough about the voices of, say, the janitorial staff at the university, unless they are on strike.)
"(Indeed, I'm not even sure DEI cares enough about the voices of, say, the janitorial staff at the university, unless they are on strike.)"
When I was in an English PhD program, there may have been a slight passing thought given to the secretarial staff that essentially ran the department, but I know at least one of those staff was apparently paid so little that she had to do night shifts at the local grocery store to make ends meet. My ten year grad school career was bookended by a strike to gain recognition of the grad student union and another strike to protest the university's attempt to remove some of our rights previously protected by the original contract. In all that time of hearing constant refrains about the nobility of work and our rights as laborers, I never heard a single person bring up the office support staff as a group of workers to be in solidarity with. Sure, let's talk about adjunct faculty, because all grad students worry about falling into the perpetual-adjunct-faculty-trap, but why bother even thinking about the woman who checks out TVs on carts for showing videos in our classrooms.
Someone left a comment yesterday stating something about what the results of a Buttigieg vs. Trump general election would look like amongst black voters. I'm still chuckling.
I'll also take this moment to harp on this point again: the main reason black voters go so overwhelmingly Democrat is because the Republicans are the party of white people who don't like them*, or rather "maybe most Republicans aren't racist, but most racists are Republican." People DO NOT like to vote for people who don't like them!* And "well, we'd start liking you if you became one of the good ones by coming over to our side" really doesn't work too well either.
It's important to note that non-black Americans tend to raciopolitically characterize whites via a dichotomy of "racist" versus "not racist," regardless of what the terminology du jour is. From what I have seen, and heard, and discussed, with a lot of black Americans it's at least trichotomous:
1: "True friend." Does not apply to as many white people as the average prog would like to think. Much less about performing the right politics and more about demonstrating an honest appreciation for black people and culture outside of the political realm. No, that doesn't mean occasionally listening to hip-hop. Sometimes this is summed up as "invited to the cookout."
2: "Doesn't actually like us at the end of the day, but isn't actively malicious." The default categorization for young non-black people and older non-"ethnic" whites.
3: "Dangerous, bad, hates us." Even white people call people in this category racist. Older non-Anglos are almost invariably assumed to belong to this category until proven otherwise. Also presumed to be the most common type of individual found in the boonies.
The purpose of stating all of this, of course, is to get across the point that Democrats aren't "the good white people," they're the "less bad white people." Otherwise one may be lulled into a false sense of security by the historical asymmetry of the black vote, and think it's due to the benevolence of Democrats instead of the malevolence of Republicans.
*That's also why the "deplorables" remark was, more than anything else in my opinion, the single most damaging moment of Hillary's 2016 campaign. It was a rhetorical smoking gun for what the yokels knew all along, which is that she despised them.
Look, I'm not a big Hillary fan, but she's been treated really unfairly over the "deplorables" remark. It's clear that she did NOT mean "Trump voter = automatically deplorable," she meant "some Trump voters support him because he encourages their worst impulses, and THOSE people are deplorable."
BTW, it drives me nuts the way Democrats have been beating Clinton over the head with the "deplorables" comment, while Trump has said so many things that were as bad or worse, and NONE of his base gives a mutant fruit fly's ass.
THANK YOU. It’s one thing to say “people interpreted HRC’s comment that way”, it’s another to promote the misreading that that’s what she said and meant. The left and center carried a lot of water for the right when they refused to correct the record on this every single time.
By "rhetorical smoking gun" I was trying specifically to refer to how she didn't mean "all the F-150-and-light-beer people are deplorable" but it didn't matter because it gave her detractors an instant soundbite that described, in a nutshell, what they felt she was about.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me as much as you believe. My statement is that "deplorables" was simply a nucleation point, something people could single out to justify the vibe they had. The comment, taken literally, wasn't too nuts. But Hillary already had an extremely unlikeable image, especially among low-proles, and she happened to say something that allowed people to encapsulate that entire aura she gave off in one word henceforth.
“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Trump voters, and plenty of independents, will tell you that this quote is the equivalent of Hillary’s “deplorables” comments or Obama’s “bitter clingers.”
There is another layer. Plenty of normie white people realize many black people are deeply suspicious of them and don't bother trying to bridge that divided. There is a big economic literature on trust and economic outcomes; low trust is bad. The lack of trust between the communities can't be helping economic outcomes.
"the main reason black voters go so overwhelmingly Democrat is because the Republicans are the party of white people who don't like them*, or rather 'maybe most Republicans aren't racist, but most racists are Republican.'"
The flaw in this argument is that, even presuming it's true (and it probably is!), black voters started trending Democratic when the Democratic party was still unambiguously the party with substantially more racist officeholders (and those officeholders were dramatically more publicly racist than the vast majority of Republican officeholders today).
Wasn't the New Deal a big deal for black people? I thought that's why FDR was so popular amongst them. It's why Democrats eventually had to realign because the southern Democrats weren't going to work anymore.
I agree, it was, and I think it was much more important in causing the initial movement of black voters toward the Democrats than racism by Republican politicians in that era.
You mean black voters voted slightly more for Democrats under FDR after Hoover failed spectacularly to improve unemployment? Can't say I'm surprised, (or that black voters were wrong about who would be better for them).
It's a real questionable assertion to say that "both parties were about equally hostile to them" at that point. In the 1930s, virtually all former Confederate states were run by segregationist Democrats. Are there literally *any* examples of pro-segregation statewide Republican officeholders from that decade?
Hillary's "deplorables" comment was indeed a damaging gaffe and I wish she hadn't said it.
And yet, as I'm finishing Tim Alberta's "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory," I'm scratching my head and thinking what word I would use for all these folks who populate his book.
I haven't read the book, but I have read Alberta's article on how, after his father (an Evangelical pastor) died, some of the congregation - people who had known the young Alberta for years - told him how bad and wrong he was for not supporting the Orange God King. On the day of *his father's funeral service*.
"Someone left a comment yesterday stating something about what the results of a Buttigieg vs. Trump general election would look like amongst black voters. I'm still chuckling."
I'm not saying you're wrong, and I ask this in good faith, not as a gotcha question: why is this?
Specifically, would Buttigieg lose because:
-he's too college-educated/elitist/unappealing to non-college-educated voters?
-he's too inexperienced/has never been Senator or Governor (not like Agent Orange has, but whatever)?
-(I hate myself for even typing this) he's openly gay and married to a man? Cause I gotta tell you, that's a really bad look. It's one thing to say "I don't approve of gay people/I think being gay is a sin" (still not a good thing to say, mind you) and it's something else altogether to say "I am so repelled by gay people that I would rather let the serial adulterer/pathological liar/insurrectionist/would-be tyrant/all-around scumbag win the Presidency than see an openly gay man in the White House!" Not great, Bob!
How does my comment read as espousing an anti-Buttigieg position on my own behalf? I'm talking about how it would be a massive, comical embarrassment to the concept of a united progressive coalition (that anyone with half a brain could have seen coming, but many would have chosen not to).
I wasn't even saying he would lose the general election, I'm saying that he would get a saliently lower share of the black vote. And yes, it's because he's openly gay. And a skinny white nerd with a funny name. Do I think it's a good idea to vote against someone for those reasons? Of course not.
Sorry if I came across like I was criticizing you. I didn’t word my comment very well.
You may well be right! Just, it’s super awkward. I’m white and straight, I’m a liberal, and I want full rights and equal opportunities for Black AND gay people. When Black people are prejudiced against gay people or vice versa, it just feels bad, like seeing two of your neighbors or coworkers get into a bad argument. It’s like, come on, we’re supposed to be on the same side!
I left the comment in question, and yes, it's because he's openly gay. I have no problem with that but if you look at the GSS results, or do a scatterplot of the gap between Obama and a pro-marriage equality referendum's vote shares from 2012 against Black population share by county in Maryland, it's pretty clear that there are a lot of Black people who generally vote blue but have some reservations about gay people.
My guess is that this is due to higher religiosity. But regardless of the cause it is true that Buttigieg being gay would cost him some support with Black voters and that could very well cost him a presidential election and I don't see the point in pretending that this isn't the case.
Higher religiosity combined with more value placed on traditional masculinity, and a relatively smaller share of ideological progressives within the group as a whole.
I ask, did you also read my comment to be a statement against Buttigieg rather than "how fucking awkward would it be for the chattering classes if this happened?" It was the latter.
Black people have historically not needed a clinical term such as "systemic racism" for what can be taken as common knowledge; that the wider American society is biased against them.
I'm talking about the whole spectrum of progressive theorizing over the racial divide in this country. There are certain things that they are close to getting at, they just can't step outside a hide-bound ideological worldview that inhibits understanding.
That was absolutely the case in 2016. I would also add that Trump's secret sauce is that he authentically talks like a person who never went to college.* (Yes, he went to Wharton, no, nobody cares.) Of course, I'm not stating that this is the entirety of his appeal, but it seems to be the most plausible explanation for why he developed a cult of personality among the yokels: they finally got their guy in the White House. He's the Louis Farrakhan of deplorables.
I do think that the magic has faded outside the core of the Trump cultists. The perceptual problem the Dems have to deal with now is more a result of the actions of the blue-coded establishment during his term in office, particularly the legacy media burning their remaining credibility with a flamethrower. (Pretending this didn't happen or didn't matter is as stupid as saying there are no swing voters.)
Following from this is my usual statement about the Trump prosecutions: they will never be accepted as impartial by people who aren't rooting for him to go to jail, and that is because the "establishment" (perceptually) was proclaiming him illegitimate (Russiagate) and calling for his legal but non-electoral ouster from the get-go. If you are a prosecutor, and are on record saying "I want John Doe in jail because he's a son of a bitch," when you find credible evidence that Mr. Doe murdered someone his defense lawyer will trot out that line regardless, probably to good effect.
*A reply induced me to add an important point: a necessary condition for this to work is that the establishment (again, perceptual) has to dislike you. When they act like you're the next Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mobutu all rolled into one, that proves that you're sticking it to them. Then low-information voters don't find out that he DIDN'T end up sticking it to them.
Sort of. That's not the only ingredient to pulling off the "champion of the ill-lettered" schtick: a necessary complement is that the establishment should actually dislike you. I should have specified that.
Even though I think AWBs are moronic I did really get a kick out of Biden telling a Michigan autoworker "you don't know shit" in an argument 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."
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.
This was a great piece. One would have thought that the election of Eric Adams in NYC (not exactly a Black progressive) would have disabused the media of some of these misconceptions, but 🤷🏼♂️
You would think, but the media is still mad that Eric Adams won because they don't like what it reveals about urban Democratic voters (at least in NYC specifically.) Andrew Yang or one of the self-styled "progressive" candidates winning wouldn't have challenged their priors as much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think Dave would agree with this characterization. I think he would say that LBGT rights have just been easier for most white progressives to accept because being an LGBT ally requires very little from white progressives while being an ally of black people might force them to actually make uncomfortable choices. And there is a belief that straight, black men aren't as welcome among progressives as black women or gay men, but I think you find find similar sentiments among straight men of every race.
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
Nice to hear from someone who hears my neighbors and values their actual positions, as opposed to the positions of a narrow, carefully curated selection of people who look like them on Twitter.
I’ve known for years that Black Democrats are socially moderate to conservative. What I don’t understand is how the Democratic Party keeps missing that. And the pundits are even worse.
I think there’s a group on the left for whom racial unity is important who convince themselves that black voters are on their side. Additionally, when some demographic is heavily skewed between the two parties, you naturally assume it is concentrated on the ideological extreme of the party it favors rather than at the margin.
I think your 2nd point here is key. It's an easy logical fallacy to assume that the most Democratic ethnic group is also the most left-wing ethnic group.
Social progressives are the largest donors in Democratic politics. Basically every billionaire who donates heavily to Democrats is pushing a social progressive message versus a economically progressive one.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
It would probably be smart to listen to the people who created lasting change through a morally just movement and forced America to realize one of the core principles of its founding vision.
Who? My best guess is you mean "Black people" but that strikes me as kind of odd, given the movements you mentioned did that about 2 generations ago and few of the individuals who contributed to it are no longer with us. I'm not trying to argue against listening to anyone but it seems like a strange basis for prioritizing views
I just think listening to people is good in general and in specific moderates within different groups get priority for me. I'm speaking more directionally in this case.
My guess as to why most white progressives don't "get it" that the majority of blacks tend to political moderation comes down to proximity. Likely the only black people that white university educated progressives associate with are university educated black progressives. So you get a situation where white progressives think that Ibrem Kendi represents majority black opinion.
I think some people on the left get it just fine, and are using “black voters” as a rhetorical cudgel. Almost a stolen valor move to shut up moderate Democrats just shy of calling them racist. Or accusing them of not caring about black voters, a mortal sin over here.
Definitely some of that going on. I remember pointing out to a (white, well-educated) person here a few years ago that my neighbors didn't agree with him on much. He proceeded to accuse me of not being "of" a black community, I responded that while I'm unclear what defines "of" here, I am certainly "in" one, and it devolved from there.
I think the most memorable phrase was when he referred to the neighbors to whom my family gives a pie each Thanksgiving as my "black pie buddies."
These people fucking well understand what's they're doing, it would just force a complete and utter reevaluation of their every belief if they actually ever grappled with the implications, and so they bend over backwards not to.
I'm progressive in terms of where I would like to see this country go, policy-wise. However, I'm aware that we need to win elections in order gain any ground at all and keep from going backwards. That means that we have to appeal to a broad swathe of the electorate, which makes it necessary to communicate in plain language how the Democratic platform is helping the average household. Save the academic, social science jargon for a book club. I think that sanctimonious left-wingers need to take an introduction to political science course that's taught by a professor who knows data.
Agreed.
I also think simply lazy thinking plays a role, especially among journalists, many of whom actually know better. I've certainly seen plenty of reportage over the years about the Black church, Black centrism on social issues, Black unease with the harder left, Black pragmatism wrt electoral politics (eg, strongly opting for Biden over Sanders), etc. A lot of reporters are aware of these things. But they can't always bring themselves to accurately tell the story.
I don't remember the person's name, but wasn't there a white reporter a couple of years ago who was talking with a regular Black guy (= not a Black progressive activist), and the Black guy told him "I hate police brutality, but I hate crime even more, we should fund the police, not defund them"? And the white guy Xeeted the conversation and was fired because it was considered racist! /facepalm
Doubtless the guy is real, but the attitude that Black people are more hardline on crime is unfortunately cope. They’re substantially softer on such matters.
My brother and sister are way more liberal than I am. One is an engineer and one is a professor. Neither of them know any regular working class people, yet alone, working class run of the POC.
We keep talking about universities and colleges, as being the places where leftist progressives are in a bubble, but the real bubble is in peoples workplaces.
In the past, people had bowling alleys, church, bars, where they could mix with people from different backgrounds. Nowadays people just go from there workplace bubbles to their home and watch Netflix.
Yeah. Sometimes I realize how weird it is that I actually interact with working-class Black and Hispanic folks on a regular basis in my job: I'm a lawyer, but many of the support staff and witnesses I rely on to get work done every day didn't go to college, and this being Philadelphia they are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. (Like, I am unusual among lawyers in that my regular repertoire of expert witnesses consists not of doctors or accountants or appraisers but plumbers.) Most of my friends really don't have this experience.
I love the mental image of a Sherlock Holmes style caper where the details of a pipe fitting went unnoticed by the police but are actually the key to solving a murder
Lol it's more mundane than that. It's more along the lines of people trying to get out of paying their water bill and me calling the plumbing experts to say either (1) there was nothing wrong with the water meter so the customer must've had a leak or (2) the meter was missing, bypassed, or clearly deliberately damaged, so we assessed the customer an estimate of usage and it's on them to show that estimate is wrong. (Seriously, the lengths people go to to try and not pay for water are kind of absurd.)
I actually get even more working-class exposure, as my in-laws are working-class Hispanics. (My wife was top of her class in high school and went to college, but her parents are still unapologetically working-class.) I'm about to get a full dose of the culture visiting them for Christmas lol.
Worse, they go to internet spaces carefully manicured for their little slice of the personality and interest spectrum (like this one!)
I’m just here to provide you diversity. You’re welcome.
I saw a study lately saying that cities had less socioeconomic integration than small towns and rural areas and it rings true to me. That was part of the city’s appeal to me when I was younger: whatever your interests of ‘community’, there are enough people like you in the city that you no longer need to spend any time at all with people who *aren’t* like you.
Of course, the internet has made it possible for the entire world to be your city, in that sense.
If it weren’t for family (my sister now works at Walmart, her husband drives a forklift at a local factory) and having cause to interact with tons of people who work on the floor at manufacturing facilities, I would’ve quite intentionally separated myself from the riff-raff (as I thought of them at the time) years ago. Now I feel lucky that I didn’t pull it off.
Also, do you find in your line of work a lot of people who didn’t necessarily go to school for engineering but worked their way up and now have something akin to engineering jobs? I know quite a few people who started on a factory floor somewhere, worked their way up, now have “engineer” in their job title. Often still working class in spirit.
I am literally one of those guys at work my way up to be an engineer. I do have a degree. I got online in the military in computer programming, but it wasn’t required for my job. I started as a technician for 12 years and then got promoted to engineer. my fellow engineers got their job, the exact same way.
In fact, my company hires, entry-level engineers without degrees. Guys who have 10 years of technically experience or 4 to 8 years of enlisted military experience.
The problem is college graduates can’t handle fieldwork for more than 2 to 3 years
The young ones I get who came from college instead of the floor tend to be shocked a lot, kind of overwhelmed by the chaos of it all. I think they were expecting engineering work to be much more orderly, more proactive and less reactive, than it is at the ground level.
Excellent point.
To be fair to the stereotypical clueless white do-gooder, the DEI industry that they are ever more exposed to holds ITSELF out as representing majority black opinion, or at the very least majority black interests.
I think that's an important point about DEI actually (and I may turn it into a tweet). DEI focuses on the diverse faces and voices WITHIN the university, but in doing so it is exclusionary of the many members of minority groups who are not represented in university faculty and students. (Indeed, I'm not even sure DEI cares enough about the voices of, say, the janitorial staff at the university, unless they are on strike.)
"(Indeed, I'm not even sure DEI cares enough about the voices of, say, the janitorial staff at the university, unless they are on strike.)"
When I was in an English PhD program, there may have been a slight passing thought given to the secretarial staff that essentially ran the department, but I know at least one of those staff was apparently paid so little that she had to do night shifts at the local grocery store to make ends meet. My ten year grad school career was bookended by a strike to gain recognition of the grad student union and another strike to protest the university's attempt to remove some of our rights previously protected by the original contract. In all that time of hearing constant refrains about the nobility of work and our rights as laborers, I never heard a single person bring up the office support staff as a group of workers to be in solidarity with. Sure, let's talk about adjunct faculty, because all grad students worry about falling into the perpetual-adjunct-faculty-trap, but why bother even thinking about the woman who checks out TVs on carts for showing videos in our classrooms.
Before I retired, I forced myself to attend a DEI training offered by my employer. I wasn’t required to attend, but I just had to see for myself.
Can confirm your comment.
Too bad they don’t learn how read or look at data in college. Could have helped realize their personal sample is skewed! /s(?)
Someone left a comment yesterday stating something about what the results of a Buttigieg vs. Trump general election would look like amongst black voters. I'm still chuckling.
I'll also take this moment to harp on this point again: the main reason black voters go so overwhelmingly Democrat is because the Republicans are the party of white people who don't like them*, or rather "maybe most Republicans aren't racist, but most racists are Republican." People DO NOT like to vote for people who don't like them!* And "well, we'd start liking you if you became one of the good ones by coming over to our side" really doesn't work too well either.
It's important to note that non-black Americans tend to raciopolitically characterize whites via a dichotomy of "racist" versus "not racist," regardless of what the terminology du jour is. From what I have seen, and heard, and discussed, with a lot of black Americans it's at least trichotomous:
1: "True friend." Does not apply to as many white people as the average prog would like to think. Much less about performing the right politics and more about demonstrating an honest appreciation for black people and culture outside of the political realm. No, that doesn't mean occasionally listening to hip-hop. Sometimes this is summed up as "invited to the cookout."
2: "Doesn't actually like us at the end of the day, but isn't actively malicious." The default categorization for young non-black people and older non-"ethnic" whites.
3: "Dangerous, bad, hates us." Even white people call people in this category racist. Older non-Anglos are almost invariably assumed to belong to this category until proven otherwise. Also presumed to be the most common type of individual found in the boonies.
The purpose of stating all of this, of course, is to get across the point that Democrats aren't "the good white people," they're the "less bad white people." Otherwise one may be lulled into a false sense of security by the historical asymmetry of the black vote, and think it's due to the benevolence of Democrats instead of the malevolence of Republicans.
*That's also why the "deplorables" remark was, more than anything else in my opinion, the single most damaging moment of Hillary's 2016 campaign. It was a rhetorical smoking gun for what the yokels knew all along, which is that she despised them.
Look, I'm not a big Hillary fan, but she's been treated really unfairly over the "deplorables" remark. It's clear that she did NOT mean "Trump voter = automatically deplorable," she meant "some Trump voters support him because he encourages their worst impulses, and THOSE people are deplorable."
BTW, it drives me nuts the way Democrats have been beating Clinton over the head with the "deplorables" comment, while Trump has said so many things that were as bad or worse, and NONE of his base gives a mutant fruit fly's ass.
THANK YOU. It’s one thing to say “people interpreted HRC’s comment that way”, it’s another to promote the misreading that that’s what she said and meant. The left and center carried a lot of water for the right when they refused to correct the record on this every single time.
By "rhetorical smoking gun" I was trying specifically to refer to how she didn't mean "all the F-150-and-light-beer people are deplorable" but it didn't matter because it gave her detractors an instant soundbite that described, in a nutshell, what they felt she was about.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me as much as you believe. My statement is that "deplorables" was simply a nucleation point, something people could single out to justify the vibe they had. The comment, taken literally, wasn't too nuts. But Hillary already had an extremely unlikeable image, especially among low-proles, and she happened to say something that allowed people to encapsulate that entire aura she gave off in one word henceforth.
“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Trump voters, and plenty of independents, will tell you that this quote is the equivalent of Hillary’s “deplorables” comments or Obama’s “bitter clingers.”
There is another layer. Plenty of normie white people realize many black people are deeply suspicious of them and don't bother trying to bridge that divided. There is a big economic literature on trust and economic outcomes; low trust is bad. The lack of trust between the communities can't be helping economic outcomes.
Absolutely.
"the main reason black voters go so overwhelmingly Democrat is because the Republicans are the party of white people who don't like them*, or rather 'maybe most Republicans aren't racist, but most racists are Republican.'"
The flaw in this argument is that, even presuming it's true (and it probably is!), black voters started trending Democratic when the Democratic party was still unambiguously the party with substantially more racist officeholders (and those officeholders were dramatically more publicly racist than the vast majority of Republican officeholders today).
Wasn't the New Deal a big deal for black people? I thought that's why FDR was so popular amongst them. It's why Democrats eventually had to realign because the southern Democrats weren't going to work anymore.
I agree, it was, and I think it was much more important in causing the initial movement of black voters toward the Democrats than racism by Republican politicians in that era.
You mean black voters voted slightly more for Democrats under FDR after Hoover failed spectacularly to improve unemployment? Can't say I'm surprised, (or that black voters were wrong about who would be better for them).
It's a real questionable assertion to say that "both parties were about equally hostile to them" at that point. In the 1930s, virtually all former Confederate states were run by segregationist Democrats. Are there literally *any* examples of pro-segregation statewide Republican officeholders from that decade?
I would read up on the history of sundown towns before I made this assertion.
White Southerners had segregation. White Northerners straight up excluded Black people from their communities.
Almost everything about historical black voting patterns can be explained by analyzing African-Americans as a stateless nation.
Hillary's "deplorables" comment was indeed a damaging gaffe and I wish she hadn't said it.
And yet, as I'm finishing Tim Alberta's "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory," I'm scratching my head and thinking what word I would use for all these folks who populate his book.
I haven't read the book, but I have read Alberta's article on how, after his father (an Evangelical pastor) died, some of the congregation - people who had known the young Alberta for years - told him how bad and wrong he was for not supporting the Orange God King. On the day of *his father's funeral service*.
Deplorables indeed.
What about his brother, Jim Saskatchewan?
"Someone left a comment yesterday stating something about what the results of a Buttigieg vs. Trump general election would look like amongst black voters. I'm still chuckling."
I'm not saying you're wrong, and I ask this in good faith, not as a gotcha question: why is this?
Specifically, would Buttigieg lose because:
-he's too college-educated/elitist/unappealing to non-college-educated voters?
-he's too inexperienced/has never been Senator or Governor (not like Agent Orange has, but whatever)?
-(I hate myself for even typing this) he's openly gay and married to a man? Cause I gotta tell you, that's a really bad look. It's one thing to say "I don't approve of gay people/I think being gay is a sin" (still not a good thing to say, mind you) and it's something else altogether to say "I am so repelled by gay people that I would rather let the serial adulterer/pathological liar/insurrectionist/would-be tyrant/all-around scumbag win the Presidency than see an openly gay man in the White House!" Not great, Bob!
How does my comment read as espousing an anti-Buttigieg position on my own behalf? I'm talking about how it would be a massive, comical embarrassment to the concept of a united progressive coalition (that anyone with half a brain could have seen coming, but many would have chosen not to).
I wasn't even saying he would lose the general election, I'm saying that he would get a saliently lower share of the black vote. And yes, it's because he's openly gay. And a skinny white nerd with a funny name. Do I think it's a good idea to vote against someone for those reasons? Of course not.
Sorry if I came across like I was criticizing you. I didn’t word my comment very well.
You may well be right! Just, it’s super awkward. I’m white and straight, I’m a liberal, and I want full rights and equal opportunities for Black AND gay people. When Black people are prejudiced against gay people or vice versa, it just feels bad, like seeing two of your neighbors or coworkers get into a bad argument. It’s like, come on, we’re supposed to be on the same side!
I left the comment in question, and yes, it's because he's openly gay. I have no problem with that but if you look at the GSS results, or do a scatterplot of the gap between Obama and a pro-marriage equality referendum's vote shares from 2012 against Black population share by county in Maryland, it's pretty clear that there are a lot of Black people who generally vote blue but have some reservations about gay people.
My guess is that this is due to higher religiosity. But regardless of the cause it is true that Buttigieg being gay would cost him some support with Black voters and that could very well cost him a presidential election and I don't see the point in pretending that this isn't the case.
Higher religiosity combined with more value placed on traditional masculinity, and a relatively smaller share of ideological progressives within the group as a whole.
I ask, did you also read my comment to be a statement against Buttigieg rather than "how fucking awkward would it be for the chattering classes if this happened?" It was the latter.
"it's awkward for them when Black people themselves are racist towards another minority group."
Racism = prejudice + power! Black people have no power in our white supremacist society, so they cannot be racist!!! dO BeTtEr!!!
/insert 1000 clapping emojis
/and a sarcasm tag just to be sure
Black people have historically not needed a clinical term such as "systemic racism" for what can be taken as common knowledge; that the wider American society is biased against them.
I'm talking about the whole spectrum of progressive theorizing over the racial divide in this country. There are certain things that they are close to getting at, they just can't step outside a hide-bound ideological worldview that inhibits understanding.
Just a note here, about observation 1. If you have to blur out a word, we recommend just thinking about using a different descriptor
New York Times style. "That category of individual frequently referred to with a portmanteau of 'white' and a racial slur."
Whistler? Welder? Warmonger?
😬
I would consider those to be subcategories of category 2.
That was absolutely the case in 2016. I would also add that Trump's secret sauce is that he authentically talks like a person who never went to college.* (Yes, he went to Wharton, no, nobody cares.) Of course, I'm not stating that this is the entirety of his appeal, but it seems to be the most plausible explanation for why he developed a cult of personality among the yokels: they finally got their guy in the White House. He's the Louis Farrakhan of deplorables.
I do think that the magic has faded outside the core of the Trump cultists. The perceptual problem the Dems have to deal with now is more a result of the actions of the blue-coded establishment during his term in office, particularly the legacy media burning their remaining credibility with a flamethrower. (Pretending this didn't happen or didn't matter is as stupid as saying there are no swing voters.)
Following from this is my usual statement about the Trump prosecutions: they will never be accepted as impartial by people who aren't rooting for him to go to jail, and that is because the "establishment" (perceptually) was proclaiming him illegitimate (Russiagate) and calling for his legal but non-electoral ouster from the get-go. If you are a prosecutor, and are on record saying "I want John Doe in jail because he's a son of a bitch," when you find credible evidence that Mr. Doe murdered someone his defense lawyer will trot out that line regardless, probably to good effect.
*A reply induced me to add an important point: a necessary condition for this to work is that the establishment (again, perceptual) has to dislike you. When they act like you're the next Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mobutu all rolled into one, that proves that you're sticking it to them. Then low-information voters don't find out that he DIDN'T end up sticking it to them.
This comment has all the hallmarks of a Russian misinformation campaign.
Not sure if ironic.
Biden talks like someone who went to college?
Trump has the gallows humor of someone who never went to college, along with the language.
Any good tricks?
Sort of. That's not the only ingredient to pulling off the "champion of the ill-lettered" schtick: a necessary complement is that the establishment should actually dislike you. I should have specified that.
Even though I think AWBs are moronic I did really get a kick out of Biden telling a Michigan autoworker "you don't know shit" in an argument 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.
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.
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.
Thanks for the column, Lauren, and welcome to Slow Boring.
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.
I'm getting to like these guest posts more and more.
Good essay.
This was a great piece. One would have thought that the election of Eric Adams in NYC (not exactly a Black progressive) would have disabused the media of some of these misconceptions, but 🤷🏼♂️
You would think, but the media is still mad that Eric Adams won because they don't like what it reveals about urban Democratic voters (at least in NYC specifically.) Andrew Yang or one of the self-styled "progressive" candidates winning wouldn't have challenged their priors as much.
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.
This is what happens when Dune 2 gets delayed to 2024.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think Dave would agree with this characterization. I think he would say that LBGT rights have just been easier for most white progressives to accept because being an LGBT ally requires very little from white progressives while being an ally of black people might force them to actually make uncomfortable choices. And there is a belief that straight, black men aren't as welcome among progressives as black women or gay men, but I think you find find similar sentiments among straight men of every race.
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
Nice to hear from someone who hears my neighbors and values their actual positions, as opposed to the positions of a narrow, carefully curated selection of people who look like them on Twitter.
I’ve known for years that Black Democrats are socially moderate to conservative. What I don’t understand is how the Democratic Party keeps missing that. And the pundits are even worse.
Well, they did nominate Joe Biden and are renominating him.
Exactly.
I think there’s a group on the left for whom racial unity is important who convince themselves that black voters are on their side. Additionally, when some demographic is heavily skewed between the two parties, you naturally assume it is concentrated on the ideological extreme of the party it favors rather than at the margin.
I think your 2nd point here is key. It's an easy logical fallacy to assume that the most Democratic ethnic group is also the most left-wing ethnic group.
I think racial unity is important too; I just don’t think you really get there without acknowledging the reality of who is on your side, and why.
Social progressives are the largest donors in Democratic politics. Basically every billionaire who donates heavily to Democrats is pushing a social progressive message versus a economically progressive one.
Maybe so. But if they want to actually win elections, they need to be more pragmatic.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
It would probably be smart to listen to the people who created lasting change through a morally just movement and forced America to realize one of the core principles of its founding vision.
Who? My best guess is you mean "Black people" but that strikes me as kind of odd, given the movements you mentioned did that about 2 generations ago and few of the individuals who contributed to it are no longer with us. I'm not trying to argue against listening to anyone but it seems like a strange basis for prioritizing views
I just think listening to people is good in general and in specific moderates within different groups get priority for me. I'm speaking more directionally in this case.
Good one. Thanks a lot.