Trump wasn’t leading us to fascism, but breaking into congress should be punished to the extent that individuals committed crimes, including the president. At some point, however, I think it will be correct to assume that if charges aren’t forthcoming, then people have concluded the president didn’t commit crimes.
A semi-related question.. don't facist ideals typically get generated by the left? State-run industries, reducing competition, governing speech, and more importantly and most dangerous, tribalism. The current democratic rhetoric seem to have the opposite effect on progress. Typically by inciting divisivness, and grouping people based on their demographics rather than individual.
I also was under the impression that the right prioritizes individual sovereignty, where as facism puts the group first if I'm understanding correctly.
Where Matt suggests to Democrats that they exercise discipline.
Cute!
I was basically tossed out of local Democratic politics because I dared to suggest that we could use some of the learnings I've assembled from working in Corporate America to reform how we did things in the party - y'know, to bring more discipline to how things were run.
He generally supports "popularism", defined by pushing hardest and being loudest on the parts of the D agenda that are popular. But this is his best, devil's advocate argument against popularism, which boils down to something like "whatever you do won't change the vote anyways, so might as do what you think is most important and disregard popular opinion'.
So I guess he usually says it's good, but the above was the best case against it in his view.
I dunno ... they may not be on the verge of throwing people out of helicopters (few helicopters available to them presently) but DeSantis and Abbott seem to want to kill off their old and disabled people. And then there's the Tennessee juvenile injustice system. Looks kinda fascist to me.
Florida and Texas are middle of the pack in terms of COVID deaths per 100,000 overall. If you focus on those over 65, Florida, for example, has had a death rate of 906 per 100k, while Massachusetts is at 1065 per 100k (I don't pick on NY and NJ because those are just too easy). Texas is worse though along this metric at 1288 deaths per 100k for 65+.
Ezra Klein’s column this week was about David Shor and his advice for the Democratic Party. Link in show notes. Trigger warning for New York Times. Both Klein and Shor agree that polarization based on education level is just a proxy for polarization by class, where the upper classes are voting democrat and the working class is voting Republican. This tends to screw over the Democrats because upper classes are more concentrated in cities, leading to disadvantages in the House, Sentate, and Electoral College. In fact, Shor predicts that if the Democrats win 51% of the vote, they’ll lose the Senate, and a four-point margin of victory only gives them a 50/50 shot of holding it.
Shor’s advice to appeal to more rural voters is this: “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” Talk about popular ideas like allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Don’t talk about unpopular stuff like immigration.
I think this is wrong. Shor is a data scientist, so it’s not surprising that his advice is “do data science.” And I think he’s on the right track, but he’s wrong about what animates voters - especially conservative ones. They don’t care about policy. Most Trump supporters probably couldn’t do better than chance if asked what policies Trump supports. Knowing and caring about policy is already an upper-class thing. The people who know and care about policy already mostly vote Democrat.
If Democrats really want to capture more rural voters, they need to side with them on culture war issues. New Jersey Democrats can be very culturally liberal, but if you want to be competitive in Tennessee, you’ve got to nominate people - especially for Senate races - who support democratic policies but who identify as conservatives culturally. Yes, this means abortion, but most people actually support the right to abortion in the first trimester, so you can have a squishy position on that so long as you make sad faces about it and say that the real solution is for people to be more responsible when it comes to premarital sex. What you really need to do is hate the people conservatives hate - the coastal elites who look down on rural living as backward, stupid, and deplorable. You need someone who thinks being called a racist is worse than being a racist, that white men are the most disadvantaged demographic, and that #metoo has gone too far. Someone who thinks critical race theory is the biggest problem with our educational system. Someone who worries that kids are being pressured to change their gender and that none of them go to church enough. That you’re safer with a gun than without one, and that illegal Mexicans are takin our jerrrbs. Agree with them on that stuff loudly and often and they won’t care about your tax policy. They might even enthusiastically support your plan to tax the rich to give them free healthcare so long as you are very loudly against “socialism.” Conservatives didn’t love Trump because he supported tax cuts and opposed entitlement spending. They loved him because he was obviously and unapologetically anti-blue tribe. The hatred radiated from him. He didn’t speak in euphemisms, he said “the Mexicans are sending us their rapists.” If Democrats want to win in red states, they need people who can do the same thing while still agreeing with Democrats on the actual important policy questions. It means you might lose their vote on a few especially salient issues, but you still have a reliable vote on everything that’s not super culturally important, which - news flash - is almost everything the Federal government does. At the very least, you’ll be able to confirm your judges.
It also won’t work if it’s insincere. You can’t get someone to just say the right things. You need someone who actually speaks the language and actually shares the feelings of marginalization. But don’t call it marginalization, that’s a blue tribe word. But that shouldn’t be too hard because surveys consistently show that the most popular political quadrant is fiscally liberal but socially conservative. Outside of politics and media, almost everyone hates the far left and their holier-than-thou bullshit. These people are everywhere, and the Democrats should be finding them and encouraging them to run for office.
To win rural votes, nominate people who share rural values but also care about good governance. It’s not fair that our system puts a thumb on the scale in favor of rural votes, but it does, and if the Democrats want to win elections, they’re going to need to deal with that. Since they won’t change the rules, they’re going to have to find a way to appeal to more rural voters, and they won’t do that by switching policy positions. They’ll do it by nominating actual red tribe members.
Rural America is a big place and probably more diverse in its cultural views than I think you're giving it credit for here.
Also - to some extent the kind of candidates you're describing are the kinds of candidates Dems do run in rural states and regions, right? They might not be as loud on cultural grievance issues as you recommend, and maybe that's the key difference you're proposing. But the ones I've seen are as authentic to the place they are running in as typical republicans are.
Maybe? It wasn't who they ran in any of the high-profile senate races. And I'm somewhat skeptical that a person like this could make it through a primary in the current environment
Seems like there has been a choice to carve out ambitious climate change action, which as far as I can see, is being badly mishandled by senate Democratic leadership. Instead of saying “we want it all and you two stop being such a-holes” maybe reframe into some sort of cohesive narrative around what can be packaged around reconciliation and what will need to be carved out and readdressed later.
"If the endgame of a GOP electoral victory is, in fact, that progressive activists will be thrown out of helicopters, then progressive activists should be leading the charge in favor of a more cautious approach to politics."
I'm going to guess that the mindset that prevents progressives from grasping this is the same mindset that, at least up until COVID, kept progressives ranting against federalism and how we need to reduce or eliminate state autonomy. Because, when there's a high risk of an imminent government takeover by people you sincerely believe are genocidal fascists who will reinstitute slavery and reduce women to the status of property, what you *definitely* want to do is concentrate maximum power and authority into the central government! [/snark]
I feel like in the past there was more of a tension between various issue advocacy groups in both parties... i.e. environmental advocates were in tension with labor over pollution rules, abortion rights advocates might have tension with party leadership if the party wanted to run a pro-life candidate in a moderate district, immigration issue advocates might be expected to balance between the parties because the business community is pretty pro-immigration (and generally on the Republican side).
Because of this tension a lot of the negotiations within the party would sand off the most unpopular ideas naturally...
But now (like Matt pointed out with the Sierra Club and NARAL endorsing Defund the Police) basically every issue group just rallies around whatever happens to be the issue du jour and takes the mainstream left/progressive position. So the internal coalition management is no longer inherently "popularist." Does anyone have a good book or article on why this happened? Seems important.
- Electoral politics being an industry with crappy career prospects.
- Citizens United providing a way around this
Traditionally, if you were an issue advocacy group, and wanted your issue to win, you tried really really hard not to be partisan, because that was how to win.
Now, the issue advocacy groups fInd so much money in being a vehicle for doing partisan politics. The dynamic that existed in 2016 was very much a bunch of SuperPacs fighting to be the ones who took credit for Clinton’s win.
Basically, at one point in time because you worked for an issue advocacy organization if you wanted to advocate for an issue, and worked for a political organization if you wanted to do electioneering, and now you go work for an issue advocacy org if you want to do election work, and it doesn’t so much matter the specific org because the job is the same at all of them.
One way I've explained a similar critique of popularism: If Democrats had nominated Ted Cruz for President in 2020, we would have won all 50 states. A great political outcome, but in my opinion, not worth the resulting policies. So we're all drawing lines in the sand somewhere and saying that it's not worth it to support someone you fundamentally disagree with just to gain a few points and win a few more states.
I think what people misinterpret about Shor is that he really isn't telling people where to draw their own lines, he's just pointing out that where you draw the line affects your chances of success.
1) that isn't true. I certainly would not choose Cruz for sure. He has also shown a willingness to screw up our institutions for his own personal gain (see: 2013 shutdown)
2) there would absolutely be a third-party candidate, who would likely outperform Cruz by quite a bit, turning it into a Green-Republican or Indy-Republican race, or what have you
This is the latest piece I've seen from our host that doesn't seem too concerned about a Trump/fascism connection. I guess I'm quite a bit more worried than MY about us losing our democratic system of government:
1. We have one really specific failure point, our ridiculous Electoral College/certification system, where Trumpy Republican governors or legislators could not 'certify' that Democrat has won their state
2. I doubt we'd get a full-on fascist takeover because Americans would be extremely not resigned to it, but I could see escalating protests, violence, repression and then more protests & violence kind of cycles in response to a rigged election. Where that ends up is anyone's guess
3. I know not being concerned about stuff is an important part of looking one of the Cool Kids, but our government collapsing is a tail risk, and worrying about extremely bad things with a 10-15% probability seems prudent?
"I know not being concerned about stuff is an important part of looking one of the Cool Kids"
As far as I can tell, the people who would actually be anywhere near the definition of "Cool Kids" are overwhelmingly the ones shrieking about how Trump is a fascist. There's no plausible case for Matt being a "Cool Kid" (no offense, Matt!).
I guess the counterpoint is 2020 was THE stress test for this systemic risk and we passed. So some - I think Ezra Klein even laid the arguments out well, even if he doesn't agree completely - would place the risk more like 1%. Whether you think it's prudent or not to focus on likely just depends on your probability assessment. I personally find the concerns hyperbolically overblown but I've probably listened to too much Pod Save America.
I'm not an engineer but I don't think that's how a stress test works. It reminds me of Feynman's analogy of a bridge rated for 3000 pounds that cracks when a 1000-pound truck drives over it: the bridge doesn't have a safety factor of 3 (as NASA said about the Challenger O-rings), but of 0, because the bridge just isn't supposed to crack. Our democracy is not supposed to depend on a quick-thinking security guard leading rioters up a certain staircase, or on the Vice President getting honest, prudent advice from Dan Quayle. We're just supposed to keep humming along, not crack in that fashion.
Well, I’ll just repeat what I said in another comment, which is that there are more bad things in the world than Trump being sworn back in for a second term, and a mob seizing the Vice President could have led to many of them.
No, but "Trump is declared president despite losing the election" is only one of several outcomes that we might consider the end of American democracy. Let's run with the Pence hypothetical. Say he tried the Eastman maneuver, declaring that there wasn't a unified slate of electors from 7 states and therefore Trump had won. Is it overwhelmingly likely that we end up with what we have now, with Biden president of a functioning, if restive, democracy? Because I think Pence taking that action would have greatly expanded the range of possible outcomes. And Pence was looking for ways he could follow the Eastman plan! So we came very close to things going crazy in unpredictable but clearly bad ways.
What system doesn't at some point have to rely on people carrying out their duties in good faith?
Yes, it's kind of weird here, and we would probably prefer it was a bit more on autopilot than it is now. But on the flip side, executing this requires multiple states, congressmen, the VP, and probably the Supreme Court at some point to all go along with it.
It’s because the system relies on people carrying out their duties that we should be very alarmed when that stops being automatic! Put it another way, the list of people and institutions you gave is what’s required to have Trump on the big stage on January 20 with the band playing Hail to the Chief. But more chaotic outcomes don’t take as much coordination as that.
If you are going to take a swing at a major increase in a popular program you should probably adopt the Major ____ De Coverley strategy from Catch-22. Everybody Eat! And stop trying to sell it as remedial for past injustices directed at just certain demographics.
I like Shor a lot, but I'm always puzzled by how people keep talking about his "theory of politics". I've never seen much of actual theory in what he says, much less a theory of his own. And it's not really his job to do it, he's an empiricist! It's just that a "theory" it's not just a collection of empirical findings.
As for the progressives' intransigence, even though I imagine most of them defend Proportional Representation, they are really taking advantage of the winner takes all nature of the American electoral system. Making the system a little more proportional, with at least one more party becoming competitive, would free those factions to pursue their agenda while at the same time making them face more political consequences for their intransigence.
I dunno. Seems to me Shor espouses a fairly comprehensible, internally logical and coherent set of principles describing the US politics of 2021. (Though sure, if we were to see significant demographic or sociological shifts leading to different voter behavior, no no doubt his "theory" as it exists now would no longer be tenable.)
I know it might feel like too subtle a distinction, but it's one thing for Shor to be theory-informed and have some internal consistency (which makes him a better analyst), and another for him the be providing theory out of his empirical analysis. This might feel too academic, but it makes a difference that can prove quite substantial when pundits are analyzing slightly complex issues.
The word "theory" is misleading. I think "advice to win" is more accurate. Pretty much everything he publishes basically says "Talk about things most voters like, don't talk about things most voters don't like."
Yeah, I get that people often use "theory" broadly, that's fine, but when you talk about the "theory of politics" or "unified theory of politics", like in that New York Magazine article, it brings it much closer to the strict meaning.
It’s odd: the people in my life who talk about fascism regularly aren’t progressives, they’re previously centrist MSNBC viewers.
The progressives themselves aren’t hurting us as much as the media and everyone else on the left being afraid of raising their ire. Look at why Shor got fired. Look at how the post-Floyd protests/riots were covered. Absolutely everyone became captive to the progressives’ messaging, whether from sympathy, fear or some combination of the two.
It makes it look like every institution, every liberal-adjacent group, is sold on defund the police, for example, because the people who had misgivings wouldn’t speak up (or had to go start a Substack). People on our side need to speak up when they think these things are crazy or even just a little overboard, but there has been a real fear, often justified, of doing so.
People think that nutty progressives are the left, because almost no one says otherwise and anyone who did got exiled or abused.
Yes, Fed policy in 2014 WAS a mistake and know to be one by anyone holding the Fed to its mandate to keep CPE inflation chugging along at 2% and employment at a maximum. [Now you can always cut the Fed some slack on employment maximization because who knows for sure what the maximum in any given circumstance is, but inflation, more precisely inflation expectations are a known quantity in near real time. No excuses!]
In contrast, The Fed has no particular mandate to raise or lower the amount of QE so “normalizing interest rates or holding of LT bonds should not have been an objective of the Fed.
Shor: "Police Unions are Fascist Terror Organizations". Anyone want to try defending that?
I just read yet another news piece on some Republican (it happened to be Hall of Fame running back Herschel Walker) being "cancelled" because his fundraiser used a swastika in its logo. ( It's absolutely critical to note that the swastika was intended to compare HW political opponents to Nazis / fascists ).
It just seems sloppy and hypocritical for progressives to loosely throw around the term fascist when the same intentions are so beyond the pale when used by non-progressives. If comparing something or someone to Hitler is beyond the pale because it trivializes the Holocaust then maybe people on the left should be cautious about using it, too.
FWIW it does strike me that Yglesias was using the word fascist in a more meaningful way and not just using it as sloppy name calling.
I don't know if HW got more pressure from the Left or Right to cancel his fundraiser. If it was more from the Left it means they can cancel him. If it was from the Right maybe the Right is actually better at self-policing certain types of stupid speech than they are given credit for.
in any case, the other example I had in mind was Gina Carano who was fired, at least in part, for saying something that boiled down to "the Democrats are acting like Nazis". That might be ridiculous, but people like Shor are saying some version of "the right are fascists" pretty regularly.
My main complaint here is the Left has developed some fairly hypocritical standards when it comes from self-policing stupid speech. Shor got fired for tweeting research (from a Black Princeton professor) that looked at the impact of any violence associated with racial justice protests, but there's no pushback when he calls police organizations "Fascist Terrorist Organizations".
Appreciate the response as this has become one of my own personal peeves.
So that's where I think it gets very sloppy. Noone's clarifying what they mean. To the most man on the street who could barely tell you Mussolini was, fascism == Hitler. To the student of history fascism might be a specific political movement that all but died out in the 40s. My interpretation is it's most often used to mean "right wing person who I fear could become a dictator", in which case they should say that more clearly instead of softly implying that we're at risk of gencide.
I agree with you, fascism is a specific ideology that has essentially been dead since WWII with no signs of revival.
Fascism as shorthand for not actually fascist right-wing dictatorship (for example: Brazil in the 70s) isn't wholly offensive to me, but it's also not wholly accurate.
Trump wasn’t leading us to fascism, but breaking into congress should be punished to the extent that individuals committed crimes, including the president. At some point, however, I think it will be correct to assume that if charges aren’t forthcoming, then people have concluded the president didn’t commit crimes.
A semi-related question.. don't facist ideals typically get generated by the left? State-run industries, reducing competition, governing speech, and more importantly and most dangerous, tribalism. The current democratic rhetoric seem to have the opposite effect on progress. Typically by inciting divisivness, and grouping people based on their demographics rather than individual.
I also was under the impression that the right prioritizes individual sovereignty, where as facism puts the group first if I'm understanding correctly.
Where Matt suggests to Democrats that they exercise discipline.
Cute!
I was basically tossed out of local Democratic politics because I dared to suggest that we could use some of the learnings I've assembled from working in Corporate America to reform how we did things in the party - y'know, to bring more discipline to how things were run.
Wait, I’m confused, Matt. Are you saying popularism isn’t good or that it is good and that progressives should adopt it?
He generally supports "popularism", defined by pushing hardest and being loudest on the parts of the D agenda that are popular. But this is his best, devil's advocate argument against popularism, which boils down to something like "whatever you do won't change the vote anyways, so might as do what you think is most important and disregard popular opinion'.
So I guess he usually says it's good, but the above was the best case against it in his view.
Ok, that makes sense, thanks. He should really put a summary or something at the end haha.
I agree
I dunno ... they may not be on the verge of throwing people out of helicopters (few helicopters available to them presently) but DeSantis and Abbott seem to want to kill off their old and disabled people. And then there's the Tennessee juvenile injustice system. Looks kinda fascist to me.
Florida and Texas are middle of the pack in terms of COVID deaths per 100,000 overall. If you focus on those over 65, Florida, for example, has had a death rate of 906 per 100k, while Massachusetts is at 1065 per 100k (I don't pick on NY and NJ because those are just too easy). Texas is worse though along this metric at 1288 deaths per 100k for 65+.
How do you define fascist?
I also disagree with David Shor, but for a different reason. Here is what I said on my podcast last week: https://mindkiller.substack.com/p/episode-41-social-studies-69a
Ezra Klein’s column this week was about David Shor and his advice for the Democratic Party. Link in show notes. Trigger warning for New York Times. Both Klein and Shor agree that polarization based on education level is just a proxy for polarization by class, where the upper classes are voting democrat and the working class is voting Republican. This tends to screw over the Democrats because upper classes are more concentrated in cities, leading to disadvantages in the House, Sentate, and Electoral College. In fact, Shor predicts that if the Democrats win 51% of the vote, they’ll lose the Senate, and a four-point margin of victory only gives them a 50/50 shot of holding it.
Shor’s advice to appeal to more rural voters is this: “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” Talk about popular ideas like allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Don’t talk about unpopular stuff like immigration.
I think this is wrong. Shor is a data scientist, so it’s not surprising that his advice is “do data science.” And I think he’s on the right track, but he’s wrong about what animates voters - especially conservative ones. They don’t care about policy. Most Trump supporters probably couldn’t do better than chance if asked what policies Trump supports. Knowing and caring about policy is already an upper-class thing. The people who know and care about policy already mostly vote Democrat.
If Democrats really want to capture more rural voters, they need to side with them on culture war issues. New Jersey Democrats can be very culturally liberal, but if you want to be competitive in Tennessee, you’ve got to nominate people - especially for Senate races - who support democratic policies but who identify as conservatives culturally. Yes, this means abortion, but most people actually support the right to abortion in the first trimester, so you can have a squishy position on that so long as you make sad faces about it and say that the real solution is for people to be more responsible when it comes to premarital sex. What you really need to do is hate the people conservatives hate - the coastal elites who look down on rural living as backward, stupid, and deplorable. You need someone who thinks being called a racist is worse than being a racist, that white men are the most disadvantaged demographic, and that #metoo has gone too far. Someone who thinks critical race theory is the biggest problem with our educational system. Someone who worries that kids are being pressured to change their gender and that none of them go to church enough. That you’re safer with a gun than without one, and that illegal Mexicans are takin our jerrrbs. Agree with them on that stuff loudly and often and they won’t care about your tax policy. They might even enthusiastically support your plan to tax the rich to give them free healthcare so long as you are very loudly against “socialism.” Conservatives didn’t love Trump because he supported tax cuts and opposed entitlement spending. They loved him because he was obviously and unapologetically anti-blue tribe. The hatred radiated from him. He didn’t speak in euphemisms, he said “the Mexicans are sending us their rapists.” If Democrats want to win in red states, they need people who can do the same thing while still agreeing with Democrats on the actual important policy questions. It means you might lose their vote on a few especially salient issues, but you still have a reliable vote on everything that’s not super culturally important, which - news flash - is almost everything the Federal government does. At the very least, you’ll be able to confirm your judges.
It also won’t work if it’s insincere. You can’t get someone to just say the right things. You need someone who actually speaks the language and actually shares the feelings of marginalization. But don’t call it marginalization, that’s a blue tribe word. But that shouldn’t be too hard because surveys consistently show that the most popular political quadrant is fiscally liberal but socially conservative. Outside of politics and media, almost everyone hates the far left and their holier-than-thou bullshit. These people are everywhere, and the Democrats should be finding them and encouraging them to run for office.
To win rural votes, nominate people who share rural values but also care about good governance. It’s not fair that our system puts a thumb on the scale in favor of rural votes, but it does, and if the Democrats want to win elections, they’re going to need to deal with that. Since they won’t change the rules, they’re going to have to find a way to appeal to more rural voters, and they won’t do that by switching policy positions. They’ll do it by nominating actual red tribe members.
Rural America is a big place and probably more diverse in its cultural views than I think you're giving it credit for here.
Also - to some extent the kind of candidates you're describing are the kinds of candidates Dems do run in rural states and regions, right? They might not be as loud on cultural grievance issues as you recommend, and maybe that's the key difference you're proposing. But the ones I've seen are as authentic to the place they are running in as typical republicans are.
Maybe? It wasn't who they ran in any of the high-profile senate races. And I'm somewhat skeptical that a person like this could make it through a primary in the current environment
Seems like there has been a choice to carve out ambitious climate change action, which as far as I can see, is being badly mishandled by senate Democratic leadership. Instead of saying “we want it all and you two stop being such a-holes” maybe reframe into some sort of cohesive narrative around what can be packaged around reconciliation and what will need to be carved out and readdressed later.
"If the endgame of a GOP electoral victory is, in fact, that progressive activists will be thrown out of helicopters, then progressive activists should be leading the charge in favor of a more cautious approach to politics."
I'm going to guess that the mindset that prevents progressives from grasping this is the same mindset that, at least up until COVID, kept progressives ranting against federalism and how we need to reduce or eliminate state autonomy. Because, when there's a high risk of an imminent government takeover by people you sincerely believe are genocidal fascists who will reinstitute slavery and reduce women to the status of property, what you *definitely* want to do is concentrate maximum power and authority into the central government! [/snark]
I feel like in the past there was more of a tension between various issue advocacy groups in both parties... i.e. environmental advocates were in tension with labor over pollution rules, abortion rights advocates might have tension with party leadership if the party wanted to run a pro-life candidate in a moderate district, immigration issue advocates might be expected to balance between the parties because the business community is pretty pro-immigration (and generally on the Republican side).
Because of this tension a lot of the negotiations within the party would sand off the most unpopular ideas naturally...
But now (like Matt pointed out with the Sierra Club and NARAL endorsing Defund the Police) basically every issue group just rallies around whatever happens to be the issue du jour and takes the mainstream left/progressive position. So the internal coalition management is no longer inherently "popularist." Does anyone have a good book or article on why this happened? Seems important.
A whole lot of this stems from two things:
- Electoral politics being an industry with crappy career prospects.
- Citizens United providing a way around this
Traditionally, if you were an issue advocacy group, and wanted your issue to win, you tried really really hard not to be partisan, because that was how to win.
Now, the issue advocacy groups fInd so much money in being a vehicle for doing partisan politics. The dynamic that existed in 2016 was very much a bunch of SuperPacs fighting to be the ones who took credit for Clinton’s win.
Basically, at one point in time because you worked for an issue advocacy organization if you wanted to advocate for an issue, and worked for a political organization if you wanted to do electioneering, and now you go work for an issue advocacy org if you want to do election work, and it doesn’t so much matter the specific org because the job is the same at all of them.
One way I've explained a similar critique of popularism: If Democrats had nominated Ted Cruz for President in 2020, we would have won all 50 states. A great political outcome, but in my opinion, not worth the resulting policies. So we're all drawing lines in the sand somewhere and saying that it's not worth it to support someone you fundamentally disagree with just to gain a few points and win a few more states.
I think what people misinterpret about Shor is that he really isn't telling people where to draw their own lines, he's just pointing out that where you draw the line affects your chances of success.
I'm extremely confused as to why you believe your first sentence. I think it's more likely for Ted Cruz to have lost all 50 states than won them.
I'm assuming that if Democrats were asked to choose between Cruz and Trump, they would all nearly all choose Cruz.
I think that:
1) that isn't true. I certainly would not choose Cruz for sure. He has also shown a willingness to screw up our institutions for his own personal gain (see: 2013 shutdown)
2) there would absolutely be a third-party candidate, who would likely outperform Cruz by quite a bit, turning it into a Green-Republican or Indy-Republican race, or what have you
This is the latest piece I've seen from our host that doesn't seem too concerned about a Trump/fascism connection. I guess I'm quite a bit more worried than MY about us losing our democratic system of government:
1. We have one really specific failure point, our ridiculous Electoral College/certification system, where Trumpy Republican governors or legislators could not 'certify' that Democrat has won their state
2. I doubt we'd get a full-on fascist takeover because Americans would be extremely not resigned to it, but I could see escalating protests, violence, repression and then more protests & violence kind of cycles in response to a rigged election. Where that ends up is anyone's guess
3. I know not being concerned about stuff is an important part of looking one of the Cool Kids, but our government collapsing is a tail risk, and worrying about extremely bad things with a 10-15% probability seems prudent?
"I know not being concerned about stuff is an important part of looking one of the Cool Kids"
As far as I can tell, the people who would actually be anywhere near the definition of "Cool Kids" are overwhelmingly the ones shrieking about how Trump is a fascist. There's no plausible case for Matt being a "Cool Kid" (no offense, Matt!).
I guess the counterpoint is 2020 was THE stress test for this systemic risk and we passed. So some - I think Ezra Klein even laid the arguments out well, even if he doesn't agree completely - would place the risk more like 1%. Whether you think it's prudent or not to focus on likely just depends on your probability assessment. I personally find the concerns hyperbolically overblown but I've probably listened to too much Pod Save America.
I'm not an engineer but I don't think that's how a stress test works. It reminds me of Feynman's analogy of a bridge rated for 3000 pounds that cracks when a 1000-pound truck drives over it: the bridge doesn't have a safety factor of 3 (as NASA said about the Challenger O-rings), but of 0, because the bridge just isn't supposed to crack. Our democracy is not supposed to depend on a quick-thinking security guard leading rioters up a certain staircase, or on the Vice President getting honest, prudent advice from Dan Quayle. We're just supposed to keep humming along, not crack in that fashion.
Even if the rioters had gotten Pence, do you really think Trump would still be in office?
This wasn't a real insurrection. There was no plan, much less ability to actually take over.
Well, I’ll just repeat what I said in another comment, which is that there are more bad things in the world than Trump being sworn back in for a second term, and a mob seizing the Vice President could have led to many of them.
I'm not sure that's what saved our democracy...
If the protestors break into the chambers or the VP refuses to certify, do we think that Trump is declared president?
No, but "Trump is declared president despite losing the election" is only one of several outcomes that we might consider the end of American democracy. Let's run with the Pence hypothetical. Say he tried the Eastman maneuver, declaring that there wasn't a unified slate of electors from 7 states and therefore Trump had won. Is it overwhelmingly likely that we end up with what we have now, with Biden president of a functioning, if restive, democracy? Because I think Pence taking that action would have greatly expanded the range of possible outcomes. And Pence was looking for ways he could follow the Eastman plan! So we came very close to things going crazy in unpredictable but clearly bad ways.
What system doesn't at some point have to rely on people carrying out their duties in good faith?
Yes, it's kind of weird here, and we would probably prefer it was a bit more on autopilot than it is now. But on the flip side, executing this requires multiple states, congressmen, the VP, and probably the Supreme Court at some point to all go along with it.
It’s because the system relies on people carrying out their duties that we should be very alarmed when that stops being automatic! Put it another way, the list of people and institutions you gave is what’s required to have Trump on the big stage on January 20 with the band playing Hail to the Chief. But more chaotic outcomes don’t take as much coordination as that.
If you are going to take a swing at a major increase in a popular program you should probably adopt the Major ____ De Coverley strategy from Catch-22. Everybody Eat! And stop trying to sell it as remedial for past injustices directed at just certain demographics.
I like Shor a lot, but I'm always puzzled by how people keep talking about his "theory of politics". I've never seen much of actual theory in what he says, much less a theory of his own. And it's not really his job to do it, he's an empiricist! It's just that a "theory" it's not just a collection of empirical findings.
As for the progressives' intransigence, even though I imagine most of them defend Proportional Representation, they are really taking advantage of the winner takes all nature of the American electoral system. Making the system a little more proportional, with at least one more party becoming competitive, would free those factions to pursue their agenda while at the same time making them face more political consequences for their intransigence.
I dunno. Seems to me Shor espouses a fairly comprehensible, internally logical and coherent set of principles describing the US politics of 2021. (Though sure, if we were to see significant demographic or sociological shifts leading to different voter behavior, no no doubt his "theory" as it exists now would no longer be tenable.)
I know it might feel like too subtle a distinction, but it's one thing for Shor to be theory-informed and have some internal consistency (which makes him a better analyst), and another for him the be providing theory out of his empirical analysis. This might feel too academic, but it makes a difference that can prove quite substantial when pundits are analyzing slightly complex issues.
"This might feel too academic, but it makes a difference that can prove quite substantial when pundits are analyzing slightly complex issues."
How so?
The word "theory" is misleading. I think "advice to win" is more accurate. Pretty much everything he publishes basically says "Talk about things most voters like, don't talk about things most voters don't like."
Yeah, I get that people often use "theory" broadly, that's fine, but when you talk about the "theory of politics" or "unified theory of politics", like in that New York Magazine article, it brings it much closer to the strict meaning.
It’s odd: the people in my life who talk about fascism regularly aren’t progressives, they’re previously centrist MSNBC viewers.
The progressives themselves aren’t hurting us as much as the media and everyone else on the left being afraid of raising their ire. Look at why Shor got fired. Look at how the post-Floyd protests/riots were covered. Absolutely everyone became captive to the progressives’ messaging, whether from sympathy, fear or some combination of the two.
It makes it look like every institution, every liberal-adjacent group, is sold on defund the police, for example, because the people who had misgivings wouldn’t speak up (or had to go start a Substack). People on our side need to speak up when they think these things are crazy or even just a little overboard, but there has been a real fear, often justified, of doing so.
People think that nutty progressives are the left, because almost no one says otherwise and anyone who did got exiled or abused.
Yes, Fed policy in 2014 WAS a mistake and know to be one by anyone holding the Fed to its mandate to keep CPE inflation chugging along at 2% and employment at a maximum. [Now you can always cut the Fed some slack on employment maximization because who knows for sure what the maximum in any given circumstance is, but inflation, more precisely inflation expectations are a known quantity in near real time. No excuses!]
In contrast, The Fed has no particular mandate to raise or lower the amount of QE so “normalizing interest rates or holding of LT bonds should not have been an objective of the Fed.
Shor: "Police Unions are Fascist Terror Organizations". Anyone want to try defending that?
I just read yet another news piece on some Republican (it happened to be Hall of Fame running back Herschel Walker) being "cancelled" because his fundraiser used a swastika in its logo. ( It's absolutely critical to note that the swastika was intended to compare HW political opponents to Nazis / fascists ).
It just seems sloppy and hypocritical for progressives to loosely throw around the term fascist when the same intentions are so beyond the pale when used by non-progressives. If comparing something or someone to Hitler is beyond the pale because it trivializes the Holocaust then maybe people on the left should be cautious about using it, too.
FWIW it does strike me that Yglesias was using the word fascist in a more meaningful way and not just using it as sloppy name calling.
I don't think progressives or anyone on the left can "cancel" Herschel Walker. That's up to the Republicans.
I don't know if HW got more pressure from the Left or Right to cancel his fundraiser. If it was more from the Left it means they can cancel him. If it was from the Right maybe the Right is actually better at self-policing certain types of stupid speech than they are given credit for.
in any case, the other example I had in mind was Gina Carano who was fired, at least in part, for saying something that boiled down to "the Democrats are acting like Nazis". That might be ridiculous, but people like Shor are saying some version of "the right are fascists" pretty regularly.
My main complaint here is the Left has developed some fairly hypocritical standards when it comes from self-policing stupid speech. Shor got fired for tweeting research (from a Black Princeton professor) that looked at the impact of any violence associated with racial justice protests, but there's no pushback when he calls police organizations "Fascist Terrorist Organizations".
This may be more of a distinction without a difference, but while all fascism is bad, all fascism is not genocidal Nazism.
Mussolini was garden-variety dictator bad, and I think David Shor is referring to that type of endpoint, not Auschwitz Redux and World War III
Appreciate the response as this has become one of my own personal peeves.
So that's where I think it gets very sloppy. Noone's clarifying what they mean. To the most man on the street who could barely tell you Mussolini was, fascism == Hitler. To the student of history fascism might be a specific political movement that all but died out in the 40s. My interpretation is it's most often used to mean "right wing person who I fear could become a dictator", in which case they should say that more clearly instead of softly implying that we're at risk of gencide.
I agree with you, fascism is a specific ideology that has essentially been dead since WWII with no signs of revival.
Fascism as shorthand for not actually fascist right-wing dictatorship (for example: Brazil in the 70s) isn't wholly offensive to me, but it's also not wholly accurate.