Kind of related, but I am strangely comforted by the gains the GOP/Trump made with non-college non-whites. I think conservative gains in those groups serves two functions - 1, it defangs some of the progressive anti-racism narrative which I think is unproductive, and 2, I think it genuinely leads to a dash more racial empathy in conservative circles.
If I had to pick which divide is most existentially dangerous to a democracy, race or education, I'd pick race. If we were hopelessly polarized around race, I could see things really flying apart, but if we see a decrease in racial polarization, I think the parties can re-align in a way that's less existentially bad to the American experiment.
I would think that the best progressive argument against popularism is that there's a lot of popular support, across the political spectrum, for "throwing progressives from helicopters".
It’s Monday, and I’m am sick, chilling in a Hotel in Argentina, so here is a rambling by Rory. Probably completely off-topic.
The other day, Noah Smith put up a tweet asking what are the top five things about America. Then I think he also put up another tweet asking who is the most innovative conservative thinkers today?
Ever since then, I’ve had this question in my head.. Is America exceptional? By exceptional, I mean that are there things that the US can do better than anyone else. Things like entering World War II and turning the tide of the war against Germany and Japan. Things like sending a rocket to the moon. Things like giving birth to Tesla and Google and Apple.
Then, if you agree that America is exceptional, What is it about America that makes it exceptional?
I’ve been thinking about this. Is Americas inequality, and relative lack of social support system a key? Is there something about inequality that makes the culture more competitive than other places?
Sure, America is one of the leading western nations in the world. We are also a nation with untamed wilderness. We still have people in Alaska homesteading. We have people in the northwest living off grid, hunting for their food. And it’s not even that rare.
I was raised in New Zealand till I was 10 years old. My brother and I were fascinated by American Cowboys. We had these embossed books about the American west. We dressed up like cowboys and Indians all the time. To us, America was Cowboys. And, I this view is shared by many in the world. Why is it so many immigrants want to move to the United States even though the progressives like to point out that we’re shit at healthcare and welfare and all these other things. It’s my thinking, that these immigrants want the adventure and risk that America represents.
So let me circle around to the point. When Matt talks about the thermostatic theory of politics. Isn’t he just talking about conservatism. Conservatism is basically you don’t want things to change. We would like things to get marginally better, but we also don’t want any great disruption. When I say we here, I mean us sort of moderates in the middle.
I’ve actually had the same political theory myself. When Democrats were talking that they were going to dominate because of demographics, I just rolled my eyes. The problem is once you take control of the government,you are responsible for the government. And sooner or later shit is going to go bad. You’re gonna have a recession. There’s going to be a war, no matter who is in power. And who are people going to blame. They’re going to blame the party in power. It doesn’t even matter if the Democrats made life better by improving healthcare. Whenever things get better, people just reestablish a new norm. So that when something gets less better, its viewed as worse. For example, last year’s surge in violence. The murder rate is not nearly as bad as it was in the early 90s, but people feel like it is. There is no permanent winning in politics. History is too random and unforgiving.
I remember when the labor party was in charge of the UK. I remember reading articles about how labor was going to dominate, and the conservative Torres had no chance in the future. Now look where we are at.
Now I know the above paragraphs might make me sound pretty conservative. I don’t think I am. I do want things to be better. I am 100% in support of the child tax credit. I would like a minimum level of national healthcare. My gut feeling is somethings like a national health insurance policy to compete against the private insurance industry. But at the same time, I don’t want the United States to be like Scandinavia or Germany. I love those countries. I lived in Europe for 12 years. Great place. But you’re not going to convince me that these semi socialist European countries are exceptional.
Anyway, I know I’m probably way off target. But he starts of been bouncing in my head for a couple of days so I just wanted to put them out there.
Once again, forgive any grammatical errors. I literally dictate this shit on my iPhone. Also, I fully acknowledge that at least 90% of you are way smarter than I am. Go easy on me.
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.
This seems to me to be the flip side of the “Progressive Mobilization Delusion” piece.
Progressives genuinely believe that if they keep “pushing”, they can alter the fundamentals.
Unfortunately, they’re right, just not in the way they expect or want.
They *want* to make certain policies so non-controversial that they can’t help but be enacted. This is delusional.
They’re *succeeding* at raising the salience of a series of unpopular positions and getting them treated as litmus tests in and out of politics, and thus provoking a reaction from the 80-90% of the electorate that doesn’t like the stupid positions in the first place.
They’re basically setting up a situation in which the “fundamental” paradigm is increasingly hostile to them.
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?
Saying the fundamentals matter most is of course true, but it's just a description of the conditions on the ground, the winds a party is riding or facing. It doesn't address how, all else equal, a party might improve its election performance. Why do Republicans win in the areas or constituencies where they are strong, and what might the Democratic Party do to expand into that territory, all else equal? Popularism does try to answer that, and it seems like to make the case against popularism you need to take on why its answer to that question is wrong or limited.
My first thought while reading through this is that Yglesias is treating internal Democratic coalition politics as a minor detail, which is not true given the entire thesis of popularism essentially comes down to "elect Democrats to get good policy and also avoid democratic backsliding".
A lot of ink has been spilled in the popularism debate about what if anything the Hillary Clinton campaign could have done differently in 2016 to stop Donald Trump. Without getting into the specifics about policy and messaging changes (which have been debated to death), I'll offer this: the single best thing for Clinton in 2016 would have been avoiding the brutal primary campaign. We might forget how damaging it was given the 2020 Democratic primary campaign seemed spirited (and Bernie was back!), but it was nothing close to 2016. The way to avoid this is to bring the left into the Democratic tent.
Yglesias and others were very correct in criticizing the 2020 Democratic candidates for adopting fantastically left wing policies and spending the bulk of their debates attacking each other for not being liberal enough. However, it is wrong to criticize the House for passing bills that don't have a chance in the Senate. Yes, they might get some play on Fox News. They will also get play in Democratic friendly media outlets. But they will broadly miss non-partisans and not hurt Democrats with the hypothetical median voter.
What passing House bills *will* do is help forge a broad consensus across the Democratic caucus about what its purpose is. This is very critical given how diverse the caucus is. And people like AOC and other progressives are very influential with young progressive voters. Proving to them that the Democratic party is not just a bunch of corporate hacks and liars who will sell their constituents out at a moments notice will yield *tremendous* political dividends over the next couple of decades. You can already see this in the reconciliation debate. Bernie backing Biden against Manchin is tremendously useful, both in the immediate sense of helping the bill pass, but also for signaling to the left that Biden isn't a wimpy sellout! Plenty of these people are inclined to believe that Biden is secretly glad to see Sinema and Manchin tank his agenda. We'll need their votes in 2022 and beyond, and I can't think of anything more helpful in getting them than people like Sanders and Jayapal distinguishing between Biden as an ally and Manchin as an obstructionist.
In other words, Yglesias and the popularism crew are absolutely correct that every action taken during a presidential campaign should be in service of winning the presidency. However, it is also *not* true that every political action everywhere should be in service of winning the presidency. In fact, the opposite might be true. Forging political consensus now might help settle debates that then don't need to get ironed out during presidential primaries. Likewise, if AOC and other progressives trust the Democratic establishment that they are taking policing reform seriously, it might lead them to avoid adopting unproductive activist messaging points.
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.
What if Trump is a fascist who will throw progressives out of helicopters, and global warming will incinerate us unless we decarbonize now and the dominant phallicentric paradigm is so awful that life isn’t worth living? Is it nobler to heighten the contradictions in hopes of being thrown out of a helicopter or just to drink oneself to death? Asking for some of my FB friends.
Matt, it wasn't so long ago that you were critical of the Obama admin for preemptively compromising and then being shocked when it turned out that conservatives were going to oppose everything anyway. It now seems like you're criticizing House Dems for having learned that lesson.
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 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.
The conversation around the overall effect of any particular political tactics, especially political positions, is somewhat hamstrung by the actual restriction of range of actual candidates. If Biden had embraced Defund the Police, i am confident that he would have lost.
If some Republicans actually campaigned on legit ending Social Security, they would lose dramatically. Kansas has a Democratic governor because Brownback drank the cool aid and gutted their budget.
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.
After the post 2020 election behavior of Trump and his continued support by the republican party, what matters most is Trump or a Trump surrogate not being elected in 2024. So I hope that is the lane that Biden swerves back to.
Kind of related, but I am strangely comforted by the gains the GOP/Trump made with non-college non-whites. I think conservative gains in those groups serves two functions - 1, it defangs some of the progressive anti-racism narrative which I think is unproductive, and 2, I think it genuinely leads to a dash more racial empathy in conservative circles.
If I had to pick which divide is most existentially dangerous to a democracy, race or education, I'd pick race. If we were hopelessly polarized around race, I could see things really flying apart, but if we see a decrease in racial polarization, I think the parties can re-align in a way that's less existentially bad to the American experiment.
I would think that the best progressive argument against popularism is that there's a lot of popular support, across the political spectrum, for "throwing progressives from helicopters".
It’s Monday, and I’m am sick, chilling in a Hotel in Argentina, so here is a rambling by Rory. Probably completely off-topic.
The other day, Noah Smith put up a tweet asking what are the top five things about America. Then I think he also put up another tweet asking who is the most innovative conservative thinkers today?
Ever since then, I’ve had this question in my head.. Is America exceptional? By exceptional, I mean that are there things that the US can do better than anyone else. Things like entering World War II and turning the tide of the war against Germany and Japan. Things like sending a rocket to the moon. Things like giving birth to Tesla and Google and Apple.
Then, if you agree that America is exceptional, What is it about America that makes it exceptional?
I’ve been thinking about this. Is Americas inequality, and relative lack of social support system a key? Is there something about inequality that makes the culture more competitive than other places?
Sure, America is one of the leading western nations in the world. We are also a nation with untamed wilderness. We still have people in Alaska homesteading. We have people in the northwest living off grid, hunting for their food. And it’s not even that rare.
I was raised in New Zealand till I was 10 years old. My brother and I were fascinated by American Cowboys. We had these embossed books about the American west. We dressed up like cowboys and Indians all the time. To us, America was Cowboys. And, I this view is shared by many in the world. Why is it so many immigrants want to move to the United States even though the progressives like to point out that we’re shit at healthcare and welfare and all these other things. It’s my thinking, that these immigrants want the adventure and risk that America represents.
So let me circle around to the point. When Matt talks about the thermostatic theory of politics. Isn’t he just talking about conservatism. Conservatism is basically you don’t want things to change. We would like things to get marginally better, but we also don’t want any great disruption. When I say we here, I mean us sort of moderates in the middle.
I’ve actually had the same political theory myself. When Democrats were talking that they were going to dominate because of demographics, I just rolled my eyes. The problem is once you take control of the government,you are responsible for the government. And sooner or later shit is going to go bad. You’re gonna have a recession. There’s going to be a war, no matter who is in power. And who are people going to blame. They’re going to blame the party in power. It doesn’t even matter if the Democrats made life better by improving healthcare. Whenever things get better, people just reestablish a new norm. So that when something gets less better, its viewed as worse. For example, last year’s surge in violence. The murder rate is not nearly as bad as it was in the early 90s, but people feel like it is. There is no permanent winning in politics. History is too random and unforgiving.
I remember when the labor party was in charge of the UK. I remember reading articles about how labor was going to dominate, and the conservative Torres had no chance in the future. Now look where we are at.
Now I know the above paragraphs might make me sound pretty conservative. I don’t think I am. I do want things to be better. I am 100% in support of the child tax credit. I would like a minimum level of national healthcare. My gut feeling is somethings like a national health insurance policy to compete against the private insurance industry. But at the same time, I don’t want the United States to be like Scandinavia or Germany. I love those countries. I lived in Europe for 12 years. Great place. But you’re not going to convince me that these semi socialist European countries are exceptional.
Anyway, I know I’m probably way off target. But he starts of been bouncing in my head for a couple of days so I just wanted to put them out there.
Once again, forgive any grammatical errors. I literally dictate this shit on my iPhone. Also, I fully acknowledge that at least 90% of you are way smarter than I am. Go easy on me.
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.
This seems to me to be the flip side of the “Progressive Mobilization Delusion” piece.
Progressives genuinely believe that if they keep “pushing”, they can alter the fundamentals.
Unfortunately, they’re right, just not in the way they expect or want.
They *want* to make certain policies so non-controversial that they can’t help but be enacted. This is delusional.
They’re *succeeding* at raising the salience of a series of unpopular positions and getting them treated as litmus tests in and out of politics, and thus provoking a reaction from the 80-90% of the electorate that doesn’t like the stupid positions in the first place.
They’re basically setting up a situation in which the “fundamental” paradigm is increasingly hostile to them.
Well done, we’ve changed the fundamentals…?
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?
Saying the fundamentals matter most is of course true, but it's just a description of the conditions on the ground, the winds a party is riding or facing. It doesn't address how, all else equal, a party might improve its election performance. Why do Republicans win in the areas or constituencies where they are strong, and what might the Democratic Party do to expand into that territory, all else equal? Popularism does try to answer that, and it seems like to make the case against popularism you need to take on why its answer to that question is wrong or limited.
My first thought while reading through this is that Yglesias is treating internal Democratic coalition politics as a minor detail, which is not true given the entire thesis of popularism essentially comes down to "elect Democrats to get good policy and also avoid democratic backsliding".
A lot of ink has been spilled in the popularism debate about what if anything the Hillary Clinton campaign could have done differently in 2016 to stop Donald Trump. Without getting into the specifics about policy and messaging changes (which have been debated to death), I'll offer this: the single best thing for Clinton in 2016 would have been avoiding the brutal primary campaign. We might forget how damaging it was given the 2020 Democratic primary campaign seemed spirited (and Bernie was back!), but it was nothing close to 2016. The way to avoid this is to bring the left into the Democratic tent.
Yglesias and others were very correct in criticizing the 2020 Democratic candidates for adopting fantastically left wing policies and spending the bulk of their debates attacking each other for not being liberal enough. However, it is wrong to criticize the House for passing bills that don't have a chance in the Senate. Yes, they might get some play on Fox News. They will also get play in Democratic friendly media outlets. But they will broadly miss non-partisans and not hurt Democrats with the hypothetical median voter.
What passing House bills *will* do is help forge a broad consensus across the Democratic caucus about what its purpose is. This is very critical given how diverse the caucus is. And people like AOC and other progressives are very influential with young progressive voters. Proving to them that the Democratic party is not just a bunch of corporate hacks and liars who will sell their constituents out at a moments notice will yield *tremendous* political dividends over the next couple of decades. You can already see this in the reconciliation debate. Bernie backing Biden against Manchin is tremendously useful, both in the immediate sense of helping the bill pass, but also for signaling to the left that Biden isn't a wimpy sellout! Plenty of these people are inclined to believe that Biden is secretly glad to see Sinema and Manchin tank his agenda. We'll need their votes in 2022 and beyond, and I can't think of anything more helpful in getting them than people like Sanders and Jayapal distinguishing between Biden as an ally and Manchin as an obstructionist.
In other words, Yglesias and the popularism crew are absolutely correct that every action taken during a presidential campaign should be in service of winning the presidency. However, it is also *not* true that every political action everywhere should be in service of winning the presidency. In fact, the opposite might be true. Forging political consensus now might help settle debates that then don't need to get ironed out during presidential primaries. Likewise, if AOC and other progressives trust the Democratic establishment that they are taking policing reform seriously, it might lead them to avoid adopting unproductive activist messaging points.
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.
What if Trump is a fascist who will throw progressives out of helicopters, and global warming will incinerate us unless we decarbonize now and the dominant phallicentric paradigm is so awful that life isn’t worth living? Is it nobler to heighten the contradictions in hopes of being thrown out of a helicopter or just to drink oneself to death? Asking for some of my FB friends.
Matt, it wasn't so long ago that you were critical of the Obama admin for preemptively compromising and then being shocked when it turned out that conservatives were going to oppose everything anyway. It now seems like you're criticizing House Dems for having learned that lesson.
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 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.
The conversation around the overall effect of any particular political tactics, especially political positions, is somewhat hamstrung by the actual restriction of range of actual candidates. If Biden had embraced Defund the Police, i am confident that he would have lost.
If some Republicans actually campaigned on legit ending Social Security, they would lose dramatically. Kansas has a Democratic governor because Brownback drank the cool aid and gutted their budget.
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.
After the post 2020 election behavior of Trump and his continued support by the republican party, what matters most is Trump or a Trump surrogate not being elected in 2024. So I hope that is the lane that Biden swerves back to.