Pretty much on target, as usual. I'm old enough to remember the right-wing craziness of years past. You left out "Remember the Pueblo!" among many other demented fantasies. On the other hand, you ignore the left-wing crazies. Perhaps they really are fewer, or less crazy, or less dangerous, but it might also reflect the powerful influence of one's cultural environment. A significant element of the Democratic party used to be pro-Stalin, and I remember the bitter arguments from the early 1970s between Progressive Labor and the Weathermen on how best to promote the Revolution. The contemporary focus on Kendi's antiracism, the widely-disliked (amongst the Hispanic-American community) term "Latinx," and other follies are perhaps less malignant but in my opinion just about as nutty as many of the goofier beliefs widespread amongst Republicans.
I marched amidst clouds of tear gas in the streets of Chicago in 1968 to protest against the corrupt Democratic party. I now think I was wrong, and have come to see the primary system as a major part of the problem. Healthy liberal democracy in the US requires some kind of tweaking of the electoral system to stop rewarding extremists.
I'm not trying to make any comparative claim here, simply to address a specific claim that I see prominent people on the left and the center make about the dynamics on the right.
I think that claim is mistaken and the conservative movement is, in its essence, a productive and fairly functional partnership between conspiracists and racists and the "mainstream."
>conservative movement is, in its essence, a productive and fairly functional partnership between conspiracists and racists and the "mainstream."
It's the racist/white supremacist critique that Democrats need to parse a bit bit more or else it could backfire. I've been engaging black conservative networks for years now, and while many are nutty and retrograde but there is a little bit more going here than anyone that I know has taken account of. These claims are viewed as just another kind of insulting elitism from liberals for black/African American Trump supporters, who are a small but vocal group in the MAGA universe. The Democrats really need to consider their narratives in this analysis.
IMHO there's a fairly common rhetorical style among white pundits of the left that while trying to be sympathetic/supportive to minorities and others with less privilege comes out as overwhelmingly condescending.
Equating Kendi's anti-racist policy preferences and clumsy gender neutral wording with an satanic election rigging blood drinking pedophile conspiracy is a more-than-tepid take for sure.
On its face what you say is certainly true, and I think a fair-minded person would judge the lunacies of the right as both more dangerous and more crazy than those of the left. But I think left nuttiness has perhaps equal potential to develop into something malign, as it has in other countries.
I'm an academic. Notwithstanding "academic freedom," it's obvious to me that there are plenty of fundamentally innocuous things I might say at faculty meetings (like questioning the validity of a particular measure of "equity") that would get me in enough trouble that I routinely self-censor. That's pretty trivial in fact, but could point to ominous future directions.
There are plenty of other countries with cautionary stories, that you likely know as well as I do, ranging from mild (Bolivia?) to unpleasant (Venezuela) to horrific (Cambodia). These examples are all from countries with bad histories. I don't think the US is likely to move toward left-totalitarianism any time in the next 50 years, but I'm deeply disturbed by the bipartisan growth of illiberalism and decline of liberal democracy.
I concur with the general view on this forum that realistic dangers from the right exceed those from the left, but (as with the Weimar Republic and the terminal phase of the Roman Republic), one side's intemperance and anger fuels the other side's escalations. Indeed, one of the things I particularly like about this venue is that people seem to be generally reasonable in their opinions.
I'm in a similar position as you. One thing I've realized about myself is that while I find right-wing extremism an existential threat to the *idea* of America, it has not been particularly harmful to me personally (at least not yet). Whereas some of the more radical ideas coming from the left have affected me directly as they find purchase in academic, corporate, and cultural spaces.
I hope I don't come across as overstating my point! I'm just trying to understand why one often *feels* more salient to me than the other.
Yup - it's easy to over-criticise the excesses of the left because they are the people who personally annoy and offend us. We don't socialise or work in spaces that are safe for the median-population level of right wing insanity
Is there a bipartisan growth in illiberalism tho? I think that the woke power structure in academia and corporate HR departments is pretty distinct and different from the hard left/tankies and these kinds of IDW arguement tend to conflate the two groups
No doubt there's a taxonomy of illiberalism, including left illiberalism. I don't know enough about contemporary politico-cultural trends to have any sensible comments, though I do recognize (for example) a disconnect between what you might call the cultural left and the economic left. Not too different perhaps from the Weathermen vs the Progressive Labor Party in my era.
I'm no expert on Bolivia. I pulled it out of the hat as an example of a country dominated by left politics that is in some but not overwhelming trouble because of its politics. My very limited knowledge is that the problems of Bolivia relate to poverty, inequality, and a wretched history probably more than contemporary political disfunction.
The more appropriate comparison is probably Portland/Seattle black bloc; many members are committed anarchists who see their movement as aiming at the overthrow of the United States.
That said, Kendi's views are truly nutty when you stop to think about them for a minute. According to his definition of racism, it would be racist to cure Tay Sachs disease, since this would primarily benefit Ashkenazi Jews who are a relatively privileged racial group in the present-day United States.
Can you provide some evidence/citation for your assertion please. Especially about how "nutty" Kendi's writing on racism and health care is, because I don't know any other academic who has studied this and who might be qualified to comment. Unless it is simply your opinion of his scholarship, and if so, I question the value. Thanks.
Since Tay Sachs mainly runs in Ashkenazi families, a policy of trying to cure Tay Sachs would (if successful) make Ashkenazi Jewish people better off without significantly improving life for more marginalized races. So it would increase inequity between racial groups. So it is racist, as he defines racism.
Thanks for the citation, but it is not an especially "nutty" or fringe perspective, which is what Mattie's original post was about. I suggest you read Kendi's work about healthcare before making such unwarranted and cynical claims about the implications of his definition of racism for Ashkenazi Jews. I know I would want my scholarship to be understood in the way it was intended, and you seem to be going out of your way to misinterpret.
I think this gets to what actually has changed on the right in recent years. When we talk about "extremists" you have 1) people who are just nutty and 2) people who want to completely overthrow the system, and who want to use (or are at least comfortable with using) actual violence as a means to that end. There have always been people on the Right and Left who fell into category 1 and who were tolerated as part of the governing coalition of each party. What's changed in recent years is that the Right's version of category 2 (actual Nazis/fascists/militia members/etc.) sees Donald Trump as a champion of their ideas in a way they never saw George W. Bush and have totally thrown themselves in with the Republican Party. There's no equivalent on the Left. The anarchists in Seattle did not vote for Joe Biden for president and don't consider themselves part of the Democratic Party.
It's true, anarchists and tankies don't see themselves as allies of the Democrats in any sense (except that some seem to consider Bernie a fellow traveler).
Kooks have always been with us, but in the past they stuck sharing their crazy conspiracies over a beer in the local watering hole. The internet has allowed all these kooks to feed off each other, and now... vote for a fellow kook.
It really sucks as a sane person with a maverick conservative streak. I feel orphaned.
Quite frankly the insane rhetoric has driven me to read more and more reasonable progressive writers (like Matt here. Also Noah Smith).
Slowly turning me into a Democrat.
I openly hope the Republican Party splits. Let the insane people go off on their own. Let me find a home in a center party.
Happy Wednesday. I’m on another plane. This time to a solar power plant in California. I need a vaccine.
I think as the Democratic party becomes more establishment and the Republican party becomes more anti-establishment, if you have a strong moderate tendency, a party shift isn't weird - the Democrats are becoming, among other things, a new default for an establishment center.
The Democratic party is clearly the more establishment party - it aligns with the cultural views of most media, large business, academia, and other elite institutions. Its also true that almost all of those have become much more culturally liberal over the last 20 years than the population as a whole. So while I agree with you that the Democratic party has become the establishment party, its hard to reconcile that they are a party for "moderates."
Good post as always, and I love reading your stuff.
But, I am not gonna lie to you Matt, the increasing number of disingenuous edgy "principled" conservatives in the comments section are killing my vibe. I am getting an internet circa 2010 vibe sometimes here, and not in a good way.
Looking at the comments (and vote patterns) below, I don't think that kind of conservative is dominating the space, I'd say they're a definite minority. Is the problem that there's any of them at all? Or do you have a different read on it?
From my view it's nice to have a place where people with a range of opinions can discuss together - if nothing else, it keeps your arguments sharp.
I used to tell my friends who take in conservative media that outright lies aren't the problem. The biggest problems are (a) the information that they will simply prevent you from encountering, which would help make informed decisions and (b) they will not walk back badly incorrect stories, they simply drop them, and the audience continues thinking that those stories had some validity.
Our team has developed these problems, outlets previously seen as above reproach or nearly so. I think this is already leading to a huge increase in conspiratorial thinking, and it's only going to get worse.
At a certain point, I stopped paying close attention to the Russia story, deciding that I would dig in after Mueller issued findings (with a few exceptions, I read the New Yorker most weeks, for instance). After the IG and Senate findings, I went back through the reporting on the topic. It's really, really awful. Horrifying actually. If the media and government officials behaved that way toward a politician that I *didn't* hate, I'm sure that I would also be looking for conspiracies around every corner. I wonder if non-conservative media will ever reckon with the facts and implications of that story. In 10 years, after Trump is no longer a threat? Maybe?
The only people who got that story right have been ostracized. At that point I began walking back other stories, out of curiosity, and my entire information ecosystem (NY Times, WaPo, etc) had the same problems that I've described in my opening paragraph. I find myself walking stories all the way back to primary sources, where available, like I have to be an independent news organization.
Conspiratorial thinking is growing and here to stay. I feel like *I* am engaging in it, by saying these things, and trusting no one fully. I wish I could still identify it as exclusively a "conservative" problem.
Hmmm..the Trump + Russia case is an interesting one.
There's no question that progressives (e.g. nearly everyone I know) had a really short hand sloppy "Trump is in Russia's pocket" meme that covered a true thing (Trump's personal rhetoric toward Russia was really different from his party and the foreign policy people working for him and the foreign policy consensus - it would have been weird not to note it) and a false thing ("Trump is a Manchurian candidate groomed by the Russian security services"). Since we all didn't like him no one was super picky about that distinction.
And despite trying to be a skeptic, I suspected enough to give real weight to something else that has been disproven - that Trump was being financed by Russian oligarchs. That seemed real possible up until it turned out that Deutsche Bank had loaned him all of that money.
But if I think back to reporters from e.g. the WaPo or NYT, when they'd be on e.g. "Fresh Air" talking about the state of investigation of Trump, they were very careful to not make incorrect factual claims.
So if we're going to have a moment of leftward naval-gazing on our information ecosystem, I think the question is: if myself and my friends on the left really didn't like Trump, and heard a bunch of factually true things that *could imply* some much worse things (that turned out not to be true) and we said "yeah, that bad stuff is almost certainly true"...did the WaPo or NYT reporters have an obligation to not let readers run with the circumstantial evidence?
Whose job is it to stick their head up and say "the consensus of this group has gotten ahead of the facts and they need to dial it down"?
That's a great breakdown, and I wish I had the answer. I think the reason I ended up on this substack is MY is sometimes willing to be the voice that sticks his head up.
> Trump is a Manchurian candidate groomed by the Russian security services
He, like, was though. His campaign manager worked for free by selling their internal polling data to Russian intelligence (Kliminik). His loans from Deutsche Bank were assisted by Russian oligarch funding and his family’s previous career was helping them do money laundering. This is more or less in the Senate report written by Republicans.
I doubt it was a personal scheme of Putin’s, it’s more likely he was just friends with them since he was already doing financial crimes alongside them all.
Right - and that's where things get complicated. If you're on NPR talking about the facts you've found about the case from direct research and trying to be accurate, do you have to also say "btw, the crazy speculation on a 5-way talking head CNN segment, we've found nothing like that"? Maybe that's on the host?
"Deliberately fanned the conspiratorial thinking" - that's exactly the case that I would make against "careful" Republicans. My argument there is "if a bunch of people believe crazy things Lin Wood says and you say 'he gets his day in court', you should really say 'Trump gets his day in court but Lin Wood is completely full of shit".
The presentation of facts without referencing the crazy gives cover to the crazy, and makes it harder to roll back later.
This right here is a much bigger problem than most people on the left are realizing or acknowledging. The left is so distracted with QAnon and other right-wing conspiracies that they are completely missing that their own information ecosystem is rotting from the inside-out.
I think people need to be more skeptical in general, modulated to the weight of the claim being made. I feel kind of dumb for buying into the Covington kid story a couple of years ago, but it wasn't very consequential either. On the other hand, I'm not about to buy into the conspiracy theory circulating that members of Congress may have directly and intentionally aided the rioters without a lot more hard evidence.
The major news organizations may misrepresent or overstate the importance of certain things, but I do think they try to get the *facts* right, such as they are known (hope I'm not being too generous). So I try to pay attention to those, separate from the opinions that come with them.
To some extent I disagree simply because electability is not measured in isolation but in the context of an actual election where there is another candidate and a certain state of the world (the economy is doing well or not, we're at war or not, etc.). Former House Speaker John Boehner (not someone I often agree with) said a few years ago that Hillary Clinton was the only Democrat Trump could possibly have beaten, and he was the only Republican she could possibly have beaten. I think he may be right about that.
Another factor is that there is a definite pattern over the last century that if the incumbent president is not running for re-election, the White House almost always changes parties. The only exceptions to this since WW1 are the elections of 1928 and 1988. The public usually seems to favor the party that's been out of power whenever the incumbent steps down (and sometimes even if he doesn't, e.g. 1976, 1980, 2020). It also usually favors incumbents when they run for re-election, though not as consistently (incumbents lost their re-election bids in 1932, 1976, 1980, 1992, and of course 2020).
The public doesn't like boring candidates even if they might be very effective as President. There are different ways of not being boring, but one way is to be crazy. Whatever else one might say of Trump or Goldwater, they weren't boring.
Reagan didn't engage in a paranoid conspiracy to steal an election he was already winning in a landslide. His conspiracies were much more policy-directed, like Iran-Contra.
Look up Quemoy and Matsu. Nixon was a frothing rabid anti-communist one step short of Joseph McCarthy. But it's close to being a toss-up and if anything makes my point stronger.
Reagan is the guy who made that stupid "didn't know the mic was hot" joke, "My fellow Americans, I have just signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union. We begin bombing in five minutes." Nixon was never crazy enough to joke about something like that.
I recall, as a child in a small southern town, worrying about if a friend of mine could go to heaven because he told me his parents voted for Clinton. Based on what I knew at the time, your immortal soul was very much tied to whether you supported the Republican candidate for President or not. That seems like an insane thing now but there are people I grew up with that still believe that. This is an ideology that cuts both deep and across several closely held belief systems. I have no clue how to fix it, I’m just glad I’m not longer a part of it.
yeah, it's hard for me to blame Republicans for thinking it's immoral to be a Democrat, given that I feel the reverse. It was horrible, for instance, when they nominated Roy Moore in Alabama but what Republicans who voted for him in the general not the primary did wrong was *be Republicans*, not vote for the Republican nominee *given that they were already Republicans*. I don't think people's views can really be decoupled from their moral character! Political issues are inescapably about moral values! It's normal and logical to sit in judgment of someone who disagrees with you about the foundational blocks of morality! But political views are not the whole of moral character, and people should be treated with basic decency even if you hate them. One big philosophical question for Democrats is "what do and don't we owe to our ideological opponents" and I'm not thrilled with the answers that various leading Democratic politicians and thinkers have offered; they're all either too permissive or too sweeping, and they all try to police how we feel about each other instead of what is unacceptable to do even to someone you hate.
Right - when I'm having a "how can you have that guy in your party" moment I try to stop myself - the math of partisanship is like a perfectly balanced tug of war where you know that letting go of the rope will cause your entire side to fall over and the other side to win. So it's really hard to stop pulling for your own side even when it's being gross.
I think that partisan logic isn't specific to the Republicans - the Democrats don't have someone like Trump to test it.
And your wallet! My family changed churches when the priest trotted out the “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven” thing. At the next place we left because the priest explained that the saying meant the wealthy should unburden themselves by giving to the church.
You’d almost think this Jesus guy didn’t care much for the rich?
Would respectfully disagree here. While certainly true that all the fringe elements you described have had some sway within the conservative movement over the years, they haven't defined it.
My (admittedly elitist) view is that complex policy thinking is hard, and for that reason it is often mixed with baser elements to navigate the world of politics. This is certainly not unique to the right. Last summer's "defund the police" is only the most readily-available example of asinine thinking serving as a political tool for pursuing a policy agenda - and then overtaking that agenda to fail miserably. And we can't pretend that elite institutions of center-left thinking didn't embrace it, either. I see little difference between that and WFB flirting with McCarthyism.
The issue with Trump is that the monkeys have come to run the circus. It's always been the case that good policy thinking doesn't fit on a protest sign - but under Trump the people who were only capable of articulating thoughts simple enough to adorn protest signs became the policy makers.
This is due to the weakness of parties as institutions. Largely because of our unique (and awful) system of primaries, the parties have virtually no control over their platforms. Case in point - the GOP didn't even have a platform last cycle, and the #2 finisher in each of the past two Democratic primaries was not even a registered Democrat.
I don't think there's "an answer" politics is just an ongoing process.
But I think we benefit from a realistic understanding of how it works. The mainstream right will kick the lunatics overboard *after they are defeated* not when they are at the height of their powers.
I think you've allude to one answer, which is to enact voting rights/pro-democracy reforms so that conservatives have to win 51% of the vote, rather than 46-47%. A "realistic understanding" of conservatism also probably has to examine how mainstream media treats conservative media and how it structurally fosters both-sides-ism and helps launder the crazy as normal politics.
If you think that the problem is that the mainstream media doesn't go *far enough* to treat conservative beliefs as fundamentally illegitimate, you're out of your mind.
~140 members of the House of Representatives just voted to overturn a democratic election, hours after a murderous mob occupied the US capitol building. If you think the beliefs that underpin such behavior are fundamentally legitimate, you're out of your mind.
"...this is why I found the "don't vote for Trump but do vote for Republicans" side of the Trump-disillusioned conservative debate to be so dead wrong."
Well, there *was* a lot of really crazy stuff being discussed in the Democratic debates. Given that, a defensive vote to keep them out of power seems prudent.
No, there genuinely was not. You may not like Bernie Sanders and that's fine, but a wealth tax or gun control is just not in the same category of bad as voter suppression.
"Voter suppression" is bad but Democrats improperly call everything "voter suppression." In Germany, you have to show up in person to an office within 14 days of moving to a new place, with paperwork and ID in hand, to update your residency status. Voter rolls are based directly on that. Democrats would call that "voter suppression."
The most galling example of this is Georgia. As Secretary of State, Brian Kemp implemented automatic voter registration, online voter registration, experimented with things like voter registration by text message, etc. These efforts have undisputedly increased voter registration by more than what Stacey Abrams did over that time.
Yeah, well, Biden said MIT Romney would put blacks “back in chains.” To be able to say such outrageous things with a strait face requires ginning up a lot of fake evidence.
Serious question to you, Ken in MIA: Even assuming no filibuster, under Biden nothing can become law without Joe Manchin's blessing. Are you really afraid that Joe Manchin would bless a lot of the crazy stuff discussed in Democratic debates? If not, what was a vote for Republicans protecting us from?
I think "appointed a judge that isn't textualist" isn't _that_ crazy?
The democratic primary really did swing hard left for a while in that the progressive lane really didn't worry about pivoting back to the center while they were one-upping each other. But I think you have to specifically make that case.
Wait - I'm not sure I follow that. I may have my facts about polling wrong, and it may be too soon to have good data about the election results down to adequate precision, but I was under the impression that Republicans did well in the House by running _ahead_ of Trump.
Does this not imply that (1) some people did vote for Biden + other Republicans and (2) therefore Trump lost and (3) it'd be _easier_ for Republicans to distance from a lame duck Trump than from a re-elected Trump?
On that last point I realize we never really got to see because Trump followed up losing the election by losing the Senate and then inciting a mob to attack the capital. So now he's _really_ out of favor.
We did see a lot of "not wanting to piss Trump off" post-election before Georgia, and counter-factuals are hard, but if he had won the election and the house had picked up seats, would the narrative not be "it's his party, 100%"?
In other words, is "it's easier to purge the crazies when they lose" not incremental and on a continuum?
My understanding is that there is basically nowhere other than the Maine senate race where the difference between Biden and the downballot Democrats was more than 5%. Republicans did well in the house because the House districting favors Republicans - exactly the same sort of issue that there is in the Senate and Presidency. Democrats won the House, but would have lost it if there had been a few hundred thousand different votes across a dozen seats. Democrats won the Presidency, but would have lost it if there had been a few tens of thousands of different votes across three states.
I think your counter-factual is 100% correct here.
I think the only thing I would add is that if Trump had won, you'd see a purge of Trump-disloyals in the GOP that isn't possible in your case.
In the Trump loses case, Trump can still make things hell for non-Trump-loyal republicans in the primary.
In the Trump wins case, Trump can make things hell for non-Trump-loyal republicans in the primary, more of the federal bureaucracy, he can coopt more of the right wing media ecosystem, etc.
My country (NZ) abolished our upper house in 1950, has a reconciliation process for historical crimes (The Waitangi Tribunal), and has had proportional representation since 1996. I don't think that you can bore any of those boards overnight ;-) but it's a good vision of the right direction.
Work to diminish the political power of 'land' over people.
Work towards an honest reckoning with your past.
Work towards making your elected representatives more... representative of the people
Based on the theme of the blog so far: win elections, even if it means conceding certain positions or at least making certain messaging adjustments due to the imbalance of the electoral map and the composition of the electorate.
I haven't read Matt as advocating for moderate positions so much as court politically popular ones. "Wokeness" is unpopular because most White folks don't understand the idea of White privilege. Most White do lead what they perceived as privileged lives and they don't. Providing healthcare is politically popular even among Republicans, just don't call it Medicare for all.
That would be an example of a messaging adjustment. IE you don't even need to change the policy but talk about it in universal terms and not in racial justice terms.
I'm not sure M4A is an example of bad messaging tho, associating single payer healthcare with medicare which is enormously popular is actually really good messaging imo. Ofc even good messaging doesn't guarantee a win when we're talking about fairly drastic overhauls of healthcare.
I'd add that "Wokeness" is also not resonant with the majority of non-white people of recent immigrant background. The (very roughly) 20% of the US population whose family came from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa are not motivated to vote for Democrats based on white privilege or anti-racism messages. And in my own personal experience they can be much more open in their criticisms of "wokeness" when they encounter it.
>The (very roughly) 20% of the US population whose family came from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa are not motivated to vote for Democrats based on white privilege or anti-racism messages.
This is very interesting and I would like to see some studies on this. From my experience at a liberal elite college I think the that children of these immigrant populations find great appeal in wokeness politics and critical race theory, and it's perhaps less a matter of campus indoctrination than the re- formation of intergenerational/family values for these kids.
I think the 2nd generation is simply assimilating to whatever environment they gravitate to or find themselves in. If they are at an elite liberal school, they will politically think much like the rest of the student body. But if they are in the work force of a rural town in West Texas, their thoughts will be closer to the mainstream of that town.
"from my experience at a liberal elite college" - that's your problem right there. We can try to do studies to broaden our horizons, but ultimately we all live in our own bubble.
My anecdotal is that I also know immigrant children that go to these elite colleges. The majority already quite liberal leaning and don't need much more push to accept "Wokeness". I also know as many (maybe more) immigrant children that never attended these schools and never will who do not appreciate "Wokeness," and I'm sure their parents don't either. It can be cast in a somewhat demeaning under the pretense that White people had to make a cool slogan and terminology to understand that non-White people are not treated the same. Then they wonder, "why don't other non-White people like this as much as we do?! We did this for them!"
What the commentators MT & John H Brown were promoting is that all parties, but mainly Democrats, need to provide moderate candidates to win seats. "Wokeness" is actually not a moderate position out in the non-liberal elite college world; and it's not racist to think that it isn't. It's just a slogan gone bad, which we've seen quite a few instances of in this past decade.
I'm not sure I follow you about the value of anecdotes in making generalizations about experience but I believe there is a lack of clarity around the idea of "wokeness" and whether it embodies a politics or ideological position beyond the current slogan or meme. Perhaps a genealogy of "wokeness" and critical thought is needed before we can say whether it is compatible with liberalism or not, since none of us can agree on what it is and a lot of the thinking is uninformed.
I don't think moderation on the Dems part is a slam dunk path to winning every senate seat. Neither is money as we saw this last election. Plenty of moderates lost. If we can't both pull off a super majority and then pass major reform to restore the institution does that mean we're effed?
Democratic moderates lost because despite a House/Senate candidate's personal moderation, they'll still support Pelosi/Schumer as Speaker/Majority Leader, which empowers people to the left of that moderate candidate. Voters understand that a vote for a moderate House/Senate candidate is effectively a vote to empower the national Democratic party, which they correctly perceive as to the left of the moderate candidate. I don't know how to get around this besides somehow imposing message discipline and/or actual moderation on all House/Senate candidates, which seems really hard, especially given that Republicans will always be pushing the "all Democrats are closet communists" message regardless of how far left the national party actually is.
Which seems to inevitably cut against a depressed majority that offers more and more radical solutions for why they aren’t ever winning. Seems most Western countries can’t square the circle.
What EK and Matty harp on - adjust the democratic system to build incentives for political parties to have to moderate themselves to win. Get rid of the filibuster, add states, etc. Feels way too wonky and simple to me but I guess I read it so much it starts to seem like the only option.
The solution is to persuade with words and actions. Now that the Democratic Party controls, even with a slim majority, both Houses of Congress and the Presidency, they win by governing effectively and showing broad-based, material benefits to the citizens of the US. That leads to lasting success.
While I agree this is the case, the left has not been doing well with persuasion. Been harping on this for 20 years and democrats keep on hiring the same consultants and failing in the same ways.
Whenever I read these sort of partisan system-tinkering solutions I immediately get very alarmed. There's only so much political capital, and if Biden spends it on PR-statehood that's much less for infrastructure, or trade agreements, etc...
My big problems with trying to redo the system are #1) They will be seen (correctly, imho), as a partisan power grab. The electoral maps do currently favor the GOP, but at least when it comes to the EC and the Senate and the Supreme Court - they have been playing the game by the rules. Changing the rules because you're temporarily losing is not a good look and is not likely to help the D brand with swing voters
Which brings me to #2 - the current GOP-favoring alignment is, like all alignments, temporary. No one can predict what sorts of geographic and demographic shifts the next 4 or 8 years will bring. It would be a shame for the Ds to spend their ammo pushing PR statehood, for example, and then find in 8 years that PR votes R in the presidential election.
I think PR and DC need to be represented, period. Shouldn't really be seen as benefiting one party or the other. Should be seen as granting long overdue rights to citizens of this country that currently aren't representated. That's just wrong on it's face if democracy means anything at all anymore. Just as you said, it's not necessarily going to benefit Dems (either now or in the long run!) so I'd say this is a problem and needs to be rectified but I don't think it's THEE problem as outlined in Matt's post nor is it THEE solution to our polarization problem. Insofar as there actually is a solution. I've been pretty vocal in this thread that I dont actually see a viable path forward and I find it deeply concerning.
The partisan environment is why I'm skeptical that statehood is being evaluated on its merits. It seems to come up whenever system-hacking to favor the Democrats comes up. Rightly or wrongly, I think much of the country would see it as a partisan move.
I don't consider myself well-informed on the merits of statehood. I've read that the last referendum for statehood in PR got 52% support only vs 48% against - that fact contributes to my cynicism on this issue, but again, I don't feel like I understand the pro or con arguments very well so I'm open to learning more if I'm misinterpreting that statistic.
I'd also want to know where we draw the line in the representation argument. There are some US possessions like the Virgin Island and American Samoa that have populations less than 100,000. Where do pro-statehood arguments stand on statehood for those populations?
Maybe the line is no states smaller than the current smallest state? DC is bigger than Wyoming and Vermont; Guam is 1/4 the size of Wyoming and still bigger than the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, or the Northern Mariana Islands. It is still kind of an arbitrary line, though.
Yeah, if Puerto Rico gets statehood and votes Republican, that's a totally OK outcome. It would be annoying for Democrats to have to be the ones to put off their legislative priorities to make it happen, but statehood absolutely should not be contingent on the expected partisan gain/loss.
DC is pretty clear. But the margins on the Puerto Rico statehood referendums haven't exactly been overwhelming. Do Democrats want Puerto Rico statehood more than Puerto Ricans?
Not to mention that adding PR and DC as states and assuming they would give you four D senators would not have changed the Senate balance of power over the past 20 years. By all means, if you think it's the right thing to do, go for it! But as a power grab, it's a pretty lame and ineffectual one.
Even if the system feels kind of silly now, I agree with you that I fail to see why the dems can't just try to compete in it rather than claiming the only way forward is to change it.
Sure. But he also has explicitly said that somebody like Bernie Sanders would have beaten Donald Trump. So you just have to pick your leftly RPG skilltree correctly.
I see Matt's main point as: a lunatic fringe will not be disavowed by a party if they bring votes. So perhaps the the answer (for Dems) is don't focus on the lunatic fringe. Go after your Republican opponent for being pro-business/anti-worker and forget about all the Q anon bullshit.
I think that would be a mistake. I personally see us at a crossroads and Dems need to focus on the right fringe more, not less. We can't handwaive them off any more. Look where that's gotten us so far.
I think there's an argument to be made that the stuff the right wing crazies believe has gotten even crazier in the age of social media. It was crazy to think Eisenhower was a secret communist, or that Obama was born in Kenya, but communism and Kenya are at least both real things.
There are now two members of congress who have openly expressed belief in QAnon. Lauren Boebert is the harder of the two to get a read on, and she may just be a cynical creep who saw that there was a political opportunity in embracing this stuff, but Marjorie Taylor Greene is an honest-to-god true believer.
She is *on video* talking about some of the very craziest parts of the QAnon mythology, like the belief that members of the satanist cabal (i.e. many of her new coworkers!) torture and kill children in order to extract adrenochrome from their blood, which in QAnon lore is both a psychoactive drug and some kind of youth serum.
It's difficult to estimate the percentage of Republicans who believe in QAnon at this point, but it's a large minority. If you're familiar with their symbols and slogans you will start to see them everywhere. Now, some of that is just a frequency illusion, but some of the places where unambiguous QAnon stuff is showing up should be extremely concerning to people.
The head of the NYC Sergeants Benevolent Association appeared on TV repeatedly this summer with a QAnon mug behind him, carefully turned to be visible to the camera. And it wasn't even a big story! Largely because normal people just don't know how crazy this stuff is. We've had cases all over the country of cops being caught wearing QAnon swag on the job or expressing QAnon belief on social media, and departments mostly seem to treat these cases as relatively minor incidents of an officer being "too political" while on duty.
These are people who think there are tunnels full of "mole children" under Central Park! Who think Hillary Clinton *literally* eats babies! This stuff should be as disqualifying from any position of public responsibility as would belief in Islamic State-style jihadism.
The latest Economist/YouGov poll is showing ~10-20% with a favorable or very favorable view of QAnon across a variety of different demographic groups. Lowest is white women college grads with 6%, highest is 18-29 year olds with 26%.
Those are the numbers for the population at large. What do you think the numbers are among Republicans? Because it's going to be higher than that.
Personally, if I had to put my money where my mouth is I think I'd guess around a third.
It's absolutely true though that there are far-right milieus in which QAnon is anathema, white nationalists for example (at the extreme end) mostly think QAnon is a Jewish plot to distract people, and of course there's plenty of hardcore MAGA people who might think QAnon is stupid but who still probably believe the election was stolen.
I suspect the basic problem here is that the democratic process doesn't distinguish between moderates and extremists. Every vote is the same as every other vote, and you need as many as you can get if you want to win elections or pass legislation. As a Republican, then, it's in your best interest (at least in the short term) to be tolerant of right-wing extremists, because you need them to vote for you rather than going off to put their energy and votes into a new fringe party of their own. And the same is true for Democrats regarding left-wing extremists.
It's possible that ranked-choice voting could help with this problem, since it would allow the extremists to start their own nutjob party and make it their first choice, while making one of the major parties their second choice. But neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want ranked-choice voting because it would destroy their argument that voting for a third party is "just throwing away your vote."
Meh. On the other side of the coin we see Democratic Party politicians playing footsie with the likes of Louis Farrakhan and the badly misplaced trust in the contents of the Steele Dossier.
At risk of starting a dumpster fire in the comments, I'll bite here. If you wanted to write a "the left has always had kooks and never reels them in or disavows them" kind of essay, what's your top ten list of "tin foil hat and crackpots from the left"? It would be useful to specify what you think they said that was ridiculous and not just who they are.
(I ask because one of my conservative friends once said, after Steve King got axed "we police our own, I _never_ see the left do that." My immediate reaction was "who the hell do. we have who is like Steve King?" But...it's easier to see what you think is gross or dumb on the other side.)
Not interested. I think both parties have their fair share of crazy ideas and tolerance of objectively bad people, but trying to show any sort of equivalence inevitably descends into arguments about how many angels can dance on the heads of pins.
Just because Kristen Clarke said some really dumb stuff in college (and it absolutely was pseudoscientific nonsense!) and invited a crazy speaker to campus doesn’t make her a kook? She’s done lots of really great work in civil rights and expanding voting rights and is very qualified for the DOJ posting.
Castro really did make impressive gains in literacy, though it was propaganda and I think it’s a bad look for a politician to defend it. But literacy is literacy. I mean Mao was a brutal tyrant, but his program to teach simplified characters really has helped improved literacy. Of course, that’s now being used to impose linguistic hegemony for various reasons, and was full of propaganda at the time, but having more Chinese people able to read is... good?
I mean, yeah those tweets were very clearly ill advised as phrased, but as Matt explains, they contain a reasonable critique of Israel-US foreign policy. It’s also clear that she received broad condemnation for saying that by lots of people within the party.
Uh... I don't know if you've read the news but Donald Trump is president and just staged a violent coup attempt and is being defended by the vast majority of his party. That's kinda why this article got written, not because literally The John Birch Society are a present day GOP influence.
Louis Farrakhan is definitely someone who the democratic political establishment has tolerated to an embarrassing extent, but he’s only one man in comparison to the entire Sean Hannity Rush Limbaugh Glenn Beck media ecosystem. Care to give more examples of left wing crackpots that are not only liked by activists and grassroots groups but are actively embraced by the political establishment? That’s the key here. The president calls into Rush Limbaugh all the time. I’d be very surprised if Biden started hanging out with Brianna Joy Grey or something.
So if you have to pick one person to represent the Republican party, their presidential nominee, who 71% of Republicans approve of, is a pretty good example of where the party is.
This kind of thing annoys the heck out of me - "there are crazies on both sides" is a true statement, but it doesn't address the *amount* of crazy on both sides, which seems skewed toward Republicans. It's like taking two people, one making $20K/year and one making $90K/year, and saying "well, they're both making tens of thousands of dollars a year, so they're about equally well off."
So just assume it's all the same then? There's no objective criteria for art either, so a kid's finger-painting is basically the same as the Mona Lisa.
All politics has always intermingled freely with fringe nonsense, and both parties are growing more extreme. Biden is the moderate Democrat, but he's to the left of Bill Clinton, and his administration will be to the left of Obama's (though he himself may not be on a personal level). There will be no firewall between responsible Democrats and nutty communists and identitarians.
I think there’s a difference between the Dems moving to the left and “intermingling with fringe nonsense.” Obviously theres plenty of fringe nonsense on the left- I’m a college student and a good chunk of my friends earnestly believe in overthrowing capitalism. The difference is that there’s no one in mainstream democratic politics that represents their viewpoint (and no, Bernie/the Squads use of the word “socialism” to describe expanding the welfare state doesn’t count). On the other side, a majority of house republicans objected to the election certification.
A good comparison, that I think Matt tweeted about a while back, is that in 2016, a big chunk of democrats were pretty convinced that Russia was directly responsible for Trump winning the election. The difference is, no one in dem party leadership really added fuel to that belief. In 2020, the rep party leadership embraced the nuttier side of the bases beliefs.
The Republicans are presently different from the Democrats in that Trump was much more willing to engage with fringe nonsense than previous leaders were, and he ushered in a huge number of Congressional Republicans (especially but not exclusively in the House) who share his willingness.
But Matt's thesis is that this is not a particular Trump thing, that conservatives have always been willing to entertain intellectuals who have nutty beliefs, that you couldn't draw a clean line between mainstream conservatives and nutty fringe people. The same is true on the left, and it's getting worse for both sides. That's not to say that Democrats are as bad off as Republicans right now.
I think it’s a little disingenuous to compare a House Committee investigating the very real Russian cyber warfare/ disinformation campaign with Republicans lying blatantly about midnight ballot drops and trying to overturn the results of the election.
I think that it's a little disingenuous to refer to Schiff as merely "investigating a cyber warfare/disinformation campaign." Here is something Schiff said:
"The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help. The Russians gave help and the President made full use of that help."
That's several steps further than "doing some investigation."
And kind of to my point, this is what it looks like for in-groups and out-groups. Like, you just sort of apply a gentler lens to people in the in-group. Okay, Schiff maybe was a little crazy, but you put a kinder gloss on his craziness. Meanwhile, on the out-group side, you put a harsher gloss on everything.
I’m definitely more sympathetic to Adam Schiff than Kevin McCarthy because the Russian espionage campaign is a real thing that happened, while Democrats stealing the election in Georgia is not in fact a real thing that happened.
Exactly. Whatever complaints anyone has about Adam Schiff, Republican Richard Burr ran the investigation in the Senate. The Senate report found a lot of Russian involvement in getting Trump elected, even if "direct" is an overstatement.
Jenny Durkan saying "Seattle is fine, don't be so afraid of Democracy" while there was literally an anarchist-controlled zone in the city is fringe nonsense.
A big chunk of Rachel Maddow's reporting from 2017-2018 was conspiracy theories. There was real reporting in there too, to be sure, but she also happily jumped on every ultimately unfounded conspiracy theory too.
Lots of respectable media figures jumped onto the theory that far-right agent provacateurs had caused BLM protests overt he summer to become violent.
I live and work in Seattle, and I'm tired of uninformed people trying to use us to make their rightwing points. Fair to say the city is not being perfect, and being mayor of Seattle is legitimately hard, but Seattle is not a dystopian wasteland, and Jenny Durkan is certainly not a left-wing fringe nutcase. CHOP was probably a bad idea, on balance, but I went down there, and knew friends and colleagues who also went down there. It was fine and actually a fun kind atmosphere. People of color do have legitimate grievances because Seattle, like so many other places, has a police union which has been dead set against officer accountability, and pretty successful in squashing it. But the city rolls on and remains a great place to live. Go find somewhere else to be your strawman.
Right wing talking point? I come from a third world country where police don’t have a monopoly on violence. Having criminal gangs try to break into your house is no fun. Police maintaining control over all parts of a city at all times is table stakes for civilization.
Watch out, the mob of raging anarchist criminal-gang Seattlites that you've conjured up in your mind might light your strawman on fire if you're not careful
People getting shot on the streets seems to happen regularly in our society--less than it used to, but more than it ought. I NEVER think it is fine. My assessment is that we have way too many people carrying guns, especially youngish males. This was as true in CHOP as it is everywhere else in our nation. I wasn't going to CHOP at night; and as I said, I thought at the time that it was a essentially a bad idea. Checkpoints involving guns and amateur security was the main problem I had with it--it was not a viable or well thought out response to the problems posed by removing police from the streets. And that's what led to the CHOP quickly folding.
So, remind me, what idyllic non-lefty-fringe corner of America doesn't have problems with gun violence again?
Well, that street crime could be reduced too, if we used the power of the state to limit possession of weapons. Or if we used the power of the state to reduce conditions that lead to crime. Or if we used the power of the state to put cameras on every 10 feet of pavement.
Meanwhile, in real life, politicians navigate complex decisions involving multiple variables and unknowns. You can posit Durkin's decisions in trying deescalate public anger at police violence were wrong, but don't make her out to be some kind of anarchy-lover from the comfort of your living room. CHOP had it's problems, obviously but the kind of doubling-down on police violence that you envision would have raised problems too. Honestly, I don't know if Durkin's response to the crisis was better or worse than the alternatives. However, I seriously doubt you know anything about Seattle, nor actually care.
That was about the time I stopped watching Maddow. She's smart as hell, and her work on Flint was great, but she went off the deep-end a bit for a while.
Wasn't the firewall the primary? It seems the DNC/corporate donors/'low information voters in SC'/electability were all blamed for why Biden beat out the cultural liberals' and economic liberals' respective favourites?
All true. But I feel it's incomplete. By focusing only on the Right, you are implicitly stating that the Left does not have a similar dynamic at play.
This POV won't be super popular here I'm sure, but what of the Left's the fantasies of "just put poor people in public housing - that will solve the problem of poverty!" to the Left Woke's assertion that "everything in our country is the result of a race-based statement of political power."
Fantasies of an idyllic world live on both sides of the ideological spectrum. We can argue and debate which are more harmful, and we should. If we did, that would be a wonderful, old-school, and refreshing example of political debate... vs. political warfare, where we denigrate our enemies as existential threats.
This post paints the Conservative side as a more dire threat to our republic. And that may be the case at this very point in time. But each side has its own crazies, blind spots, and areas of excellence. Effective governance is about leveraging the right bits from the right side at the right moment.
We just need to stop vilifying the other - in this case, the Right. The Left is arguably the more ideal side to start this trend.
I think you have to take a certain amount of partisan baggage or knowledge of current events to the essay to come out with "This post paints the Conservative side as a more dire threat to our republic." I went back and looked Matt's post - and it says basically -nothing- about the left (good or bad) other than that before sorting, right wingers could enter the Democratic party and now they basically never do.
We could have an interesting discussion about the left, but I feel like we'd need to start with something of the scope Matt has done - tying together a bunch of threads with references to deeper dives. And I'm not sure we'd see something symmetrical - whatever you want to say about the left, it seems that the left could be subject to lots of the same polarizing dynamics but also just have its own idiosyncratic weirdness that would be worthy of its own study.
(E.g. in the John Birth NR essay, Goldberg is arguing that, because there really were soviet spies, McCarthy was "kinda right" in that the problem wasn't fake, and the left needs to raise our hands and go "yeah, we were wrong" WRT communism/marxism. I think a careful examination of the left would have to look at what it means that e.g. Jerry Rubin became a capitalist.)
In other words, the left should be carefully examined in its own right as a specific historical thing, and not just by trying to find the reflection of the right or the 'nearest similar thing'.
My critique is not designed to be yet another exhausting both-sidism. It's designed to share with Matt that I expect him to have a larger aperture when he does ideological analyses like these.
It's perfectly understandable that people on the left would use this period of time to dive into all the ills of the "side" that is currently delivering so many of them. But I can find that at Vox and the NYT. I pay for Matt because I expect more from his uniquely expansive mind combined with his analytical orientation and exemplary written communication skills.
I met a Bircher at an ice cream social in college back in the 1980s. His immediate gambit was to explain how they aren't as crazy as people claim they are. Nowadays he would be a RINO.
I do not think, however, that it is just or primarily the nationalized/polarized nature of the electorate that gives room for the crazies on the right to have so much power. I really think, boringly enough, that a lot of it is actually just Donald Trump. The crank elements of the conservative movement percolate in the swamp of Republican politics all the time, but Trump activated them in a way that raised their prominence and gave a blessing for elevating them further.
For example, much as I loathe George W. Bush and decry the horrible policies of his administration, this was not an issue during his two terms. Perhaps we are more polarized now, but I recall that we were pretty polarized then as well. But the very worst elements of the conservative movement/Republican base were held at bay because the Republican power holders, though corrupt, didn't give those elements nearly as much oxygen.
Basically, there are latent elements of craziness throughout American society, and not all on the right. It takes actions by the leadership to activate them and unleash their force.
Bush openly spoke against many of the more loathsome elements of his party, like jingoists and Islamophobes. At the time we on the left didn't give him much credit for that, because his policies (especially re Islam) were usually agreeable to those groups and because speaking against hatred seemed like a pretty low bar. And it was a low bar, but we didn't realize how bad things would get if someone came along who just gave up on mouthing pieties like that.
This is quickly becoming my favorite read every morning while I hastily suck down coffee before my 5-month-old daughter wakes up. Thanks, Matt!
Matt has been pretty good. Quality posts. And a lot of them.
Pretty much on target, as usual. I'm old enough to remember the right-wing craziness of years past. You left out "Remember the Pueblo!" among many other demented fantasies. On the other hand, you ignore the left-wing crazies. Perhaps they really are fewer, or less crazy, or less dangerous, but it might also reflect the powerful influence of one's cultural environment. A significant element of the Democratic party used to be pro-Stalin, and I remember the bitter arguments from the early 1970s between Progressive Labor and the Weathermen on how best to promote the Revolution. The contemporary focus on Kendi's antiracism, the widely-disliked (amongst the Hispanic-American community) term "Latinx," and other follies are perhaps less malignant but in my opinion just about as nutty as many of the goofier beliefs widespread amongst Republicans.
I marched amidst clouds of tear gas in the streets of Chicago in 1968 to protest against the corrupt Democratic party. I now think I was wrong, and have come to see the primary system as a major part of the problem. Healthy liberal democracy in the US requires some kind of tweaking of the electoral system to stop rewarding extremists.
I'm not trying to make any comparative claim here, simply to address a specific claim that I see prominent people on the left and the center make about the dynamics on the right.
I think that claim is mistaken and the conservative movement is, in its essence, a productive and fairly functional partnership between conspiracists and racists and the "mainstream."
>conservative movement is, in its essence, a productive and fairly functional partnership between conspiracists and racists and the "mainstream."
It's the racist/white supremacist critique that Democrats need to parse a bit bit more or else it could backfire. I've been engaging black conservative networks for years now, and while many are nutty and retrograde but there is a little bit more going here than anyone that I know has taken account of. These claims are viewed as just another kind of insulting elitism from liberals for black/African American Trump supporters, who are a small but vocal group in the MAGA universe. The Democrats really need to consider their narratives in this analysis.
IMHO there's a fairly common rhetorical style among white pundits of the left that while trying to be sympathetic/supportive to minorities and others with less privilege comes out as overwhelmingly condescending.
I'm inclined to agree with your point. My own comment was only obliquely related.
Why not both? Conservatism has always been terrible AND it has been getting worse ;-)
Equating Kendi's anti-racist policy preferences and clumsy gender neutral wording with an satanic election rigging blood drinking pedophile conspiracy is a more-than-tepid take for sure.
On its face what you say is certainly true, and I think a fair-minded person would judge the lunacies of the right as both more dangerous and more crazy than those of the left. But I think left nuttiness has perhaps equal potential to develop into something malign, as it has in other countries.
What examples did you have in mind?
I'm an academic. Notwithstanding "academic freedom," it's obvious to me that there are plenty of fundamentally innocuous things I might say at faculty meetings (like questioning the validity of a particular measure of "equity") that would get me in enough trouble that I routinely self-censor. That's pretty trivial in fact, but could point to ominous future directions.
There are plenty of other countries with cautionary stories, that you likely know as well as I do, ranging from mild (Bolivia?) to unpleasant (Venezuela) to horrific (Cambodia). These examples are all from countries with bad histories. I don't think the US is likely to move toward left-totalitarianism any time in the next 50 years, but I'm deeply disturbed by the bipartisan growth of illiberalism and decline of liberal democracy.
I concur with the general view on this forum that realistic dangers from the right exceed those from the left, but (as with the Weimar Republic and the terminal phase of the Roman Republic), one side's intemperance and anger fuels the other side's escalations. Indeed, one of the things I particularly like about this venue is that people seem to be generally reasonable in their opinions.
I'm in a similar position as you. One thing I've realized about myself is that while I find right-wing extremism an existential threat to the *idea* of America, it has not been particularly harmful to me personally (at least not yet). Whereas some of the more radical ideas coming from the left have affected me directly as they find purchase in academic, corporate, and cultural spaces.
I hope I don't come across as overstating my point! I'm just trying to understand why one often *feels* more salient to me than the other.
Yup - it's easy to over-criticise the excesses of the left because they are the people who personally annoy and offend us. We don't socialise or work in spaces that are safe for the median-population level of right wing insanity
One element for me is that I feel more responsible for the views of people with whom I identify.
Is there a bipartisan growth in illiberalism tho? I think that the woke power structure in academia and corporate HR departments is pretty distinct and different from the hard left/tankies and these kinds of IDW arguement tend to conflate the two groups
No doubt there's a taxonomy of illiberalism, including left illiberalism. I don't know enough about contemporary politico-cultural trends to have any sensible comments, though I do recognize (for example) a disconnect between what you might call the cultural left and the economic left. Not too different perhaps from the Weathermen vs the Progressive Labor Party in my era.
I don’t really disagree with your larger point, but I don’t think Bolivia is a great example of left wing politics run amok.
Jordan Peterson explained it to me, it's Cultural Marxism you see ;-)
I'm no expert on Bolivia. I pulled it out of the hat as an example of a country dominated by left politics that is in some but not overwhelming trouble because of its politics. My very limited knowledge is that the problems of Bolivia relate to poverty, inequality, and a wretched history probably more than contemporary political disfunction.
The more appropriate comparison is probably Portland/Seattle black bloc; many members are committed anarchists who see their movement as aiming at the overthrow of the United States.
That said, Kendi's views are truly nutty when you stop to think about them for a minute. According to his definition of racism, it would be racist to cure Tay Sachs disease, since this would primarily benefit Ashkenazi Jews who are a relatively privileged racial group in the present-day United States.
Can you provide some evidence/citation for your assertion please. Especially about how "nutty" Kendi's writing on racism and health care is, because I don't know any other academic who has studied this and who might be qualified to comment. Unless it is simply your opinion of his scholarship, and if so, I question the value. Thanks.
It's a straightforward application of his definition of racism.
Kendi tells us that "A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups." (https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/june/ibram-x-kendi-definition-of-antiracist.html)
Since Tay Sachs mainly runs in Ashkenazi families, a policy of trying to cure Tay Sachs would (if successful) make Ashkenazi Jewish people better off without significantly improving life for more marginalized races. So it would increase inequity between racial groups. So it is racist, as he defines racism.
Thanks for the citation, but it is not an especially "nutty" or fringe perspective, which is what Mattie's original post was about. I suggest you read Kendi's work about healthcare before making such unwarranted and cynical claims about the implications of his definition of racism for Ashkenazi Jews. I know I would want my scholarship to be understood in the way it was intended, and you seem to be going out of your way to misinterpret.
I think this gets to what actually has changed on the right in recent years. When we talk about "extremists" you have 1) people who are just nutty and 2) people who want to completely overthrow the system, and who want to use (or are at least comfortable with using) actual violence as a means to that end. There have always been people on the Right and Left who fell into category 1 and who were tolerated as part of the governing coalition of each party. What's changed in recent years is that the Right's version of category 2 (actual Nazis/fascists/militia members/etc.) sees Donald Trump as a champion of their ideas in a way they never saw George W. Bush and have totally thrown themselves in with the Republican Party. There's no equivalent on the Left. The anarchists in Seattle did not vote for Joe Biden for president and don't consider themselves part of the Democratic Party.
It's true, anarchists and tankies don't see themselves as allies of the Democrats in any sense (except that some seem to consider Bernie a fellow traveler).
Kooks have always been with us, but in the past they stuck sharing their crazy conspiracies over a beer in the local watering hole. The internet has allowed all these kooks to feed off each other, and now... vote for a fellow kook.
It really sucks as a sane person with a maverick conservative streak. I feel orphaned.
Quite frankly the insane rhetoric has driven me to read more and more reasonable progressive writers (like Matt here. Also Noah Smith).
Slowly turning me into a Democrat.
I openly hope the Republican Party splits. Let the insane people go off on their own. Let me find a home in a center party.
Happy Wednesday. I’m on another plane. This time to a solar power plant in California. I need a vaccine.
I think as the Democratic party becomes more establishment and the Republican party becomes more anti-establishment, if you have a strong moderate tendency, a party shift isn't weird - the Democrats are becoming, among other things, a new default for an establishment center.
The Democratic party is clearly the more establishment party - it aligns with the cultural views of most media, large business, academia, and other elite institutions. Its also true that almost all of those have become much more culturally liberal over the last 20 years than the population as a whole. So while I agree with you that the Democratic party has become the establishment party, its hard to reconcile that they are a party for "moderates."
Good post as always, and I love reading your stuff.
But, I am not gonna lie to you Matt, the increasing number of disingenuous edgy "principled" conservatives in the comments section are killing my vibe. I am getting an internet circa 2010 vibe sometimes here, and not in a good way.
Looking at the comments (and vote patterns) below, I don't think that kind of conservative is dominating the space, I'd say they're a definite minority. Is the problem that there's any of them at all? Or do you have a different read on it?
From my view it's nice to have a place where people with a range of opinions can discuss together - if nothing else, it keeps your arguments sharp.
Definitely feeling more and more like a Facebook comments sections
Could you break that down for people who don't spend anytime on FB?
Second. The prevalence of a defensive "both sides are bad!" is so so tired
I used to tell my friends who take in conservative media that outright lies aren't the problem. The biggest problems are (a) the information that they will simply prevent you from encountering, which would help make informed decisions and (b) they will not walk back badly incorrect stories, they simply drop them, and the audience continues thinking that those stories had some validity.
Our team has developed these problems, outlets previously seen as above reproach or nearly so. I think this is already leading to a huge increase in conspiratorial thinking, and it's only going to get worse.
At a certain point, I stopped paying close attention to the Russia story, deciding that I would dig in after Mueller issued findings (with a few exceptions, I read the New Yorker most weeks, for instance). After the IG and Senate findings, I went back through the reporting on the topic. It's really, really awful. Horrifying actually. If the media and government officials behaved that way toward a politician that I *didn't* hate, I'm sure that I would also be looking for conspiracies around every corner. I wonder if non-conservative media will ever reckon with the facts and implications of that story. In 10 years, after Trump is no longer a threat? Maybe?
The only people who got that story right have been ostracized. At that point I began walking back other stories, out of curiosity, and my entire information ecosystem (NY Times, WaPo, etc) had the same problems that I've described in my opening paragraph. I find myself walking stories all the way back to primary sources, where available, like I have to be an independent news organization.
Conspiratorial thinking is growing and here to stay. I feel like *I* am engaging in it, by saying these things, and trusting no one fully. I wish I could still identify it as exclusively a "conservative" problem.
Hmmm..the Trump + Russia case is an interesting one.
There's no question that progressives (e.g. nearly everyone I know) had a really short hand sloppy "Trump is in Russia's pocket" meme that covered a true thing (Trump's personal rhetoric toward Russia was really different from his party and the foreign policy people working for him and the foreign policy consensus - it would have been weird not to note it) and a false thing ("Trump is a Manchurian candidate groomed by the Russian security services"). Since we all didn't like him no one was super picky about that distinction.
And despite trying to be a skeptic, I suspected enough to give real weight to something else that has been disproven - that Trump was being financed by Russian oligarchs. That seemed real possible up until it turned out that Deutsche Bank had loaned him all of that money.
But if I think back to reporters from e.g. the WaPo or NYT, when they'd be on e.g. "Fresh Air" talking about the state of investigation of Trump, they were very careful to not make incorrect factual claims.
So if we're going to have a moment of leftward naval-gazing on our information ecosystem, I think the question is: if myself and my friends on the left really didn't like Trump, and heard a bunch of factually true things that *could imply* some much worse things (that turned out not to be true) and we said "yeah, that bad stuff is almost certainly true"...did the WaPo or NYT reporters have an obligation to not let readers run with the circumstantial evidence?
Whose job is it to stick their head up and say "the consensus of this group has gotten ahead of the facts and they need to dial it down"?
That's a great breakdown, and I wish I had the answer. I think the reason I ended up on this substack is MY is sometimes willing to be the voice that sticks his head up.
I'd recommend following Matt Taibbi's TK for the same reason.
> Trump is a Manchurian candidate groomed by the Russian security services
He, like, was though. His campaign manager worked for free by selling their internal polling data to Russian intelligence (Kliminik). His loans from Deutsche Bank were assisted by Russian oligarch funding and his family’s previous career was helping them do money laundering. This is more or less in the Senate report written by Republicans.
I doubt it was a personal scheme of Putin’s, it’s more likely he was just friends with them since he was already doing financial crimes alongside them all.
Right - and that's where things get complicated. If you're on NPR talking about the facts you've found about the case from direct research and trying to be accurate, do you have to also say "btw, the crazy speculation on a 5-way talking head CNN segment, we've found nothing like that"? Maybe that's on the host?
"Deliberately fanned the conspiratorial thinking" - that's exactly the case that I would make against "careful" Republicans. My argument there is "if a bunch of people believe crazy things Lin Wood says and you say 'he gets his day in court', you should really say 'Trump gets his day in court but Lin Wood is completely full of shit".
The presentation of facts without referencing the crazy gives cover to the crazy, and makes it harder to roll back later.
This right here is a much bigger problem than most people on the left are realizing or acknowledging. The left is so distracted with QAnon and other right-wing conspiracies that they are completely missing that their own information ecosystem is rotting from the inside-out.
I think people need to be more skeptical in general, modulated to the weight of the claim being made. I feel kind of dumb for buying into the Covington kid story a couple of years ago, but it wasn't very consequential either. On the other hand, I'm not about to buy into the conspiracy theory circulating that members of Congress may have directly and intentionally aided the rioters without a lot more hard evidence.
The major news organizations may misrepresent or overstate the importance of certain things, but I do think they try to get the *facts* right, such as they are known (hope I'm not being too generous). So I try to pay attention to those, separate from the opinions that come with them.
Republican presidential nominees of the past x years ranked by craziness highest to lowest.
Donald Trump
Barry Goldwater
Richard Nixon
Ronald Reagan
George W. Bush
John McCain
George H. W. Bush
Bob Dole
Mitt Romney
Gerald Ford
For the most part there is a clear correlation between craziness and electibility. The market has spoken.
To some extent I disagree simply because electability is not measured in isolation but in the context of an actual election where there is another candidate and a certain state of the world (the economy is doing well or not, we're at war or not, etc.). Former House Speaker John Boehner (not someone I often agree with) said a few years ago that Hillary Clinton was the only Democrat Trump could possibly have beaten, and he was the only Republican she could possibly have beaten. I think he may be right about that.
Another factor is that there is a definite pattern over the last century that if the incumbent president is not running for re-election, the White House almost always changes parties. The only exceptions to this since WW1 are the elections of 1928 and 1988. The public usually seems to favor the party that's been out of power whenever the incumbent steps down (and sometimes even if he doesn't, e.g. 1976, 1980, 2020). It also usually favors incumbents when they run for re-election, though not as consistently (incumbents lost their re-election bids in 1932, 1976, 1980, 1992, and of course 2020).
I think that is correct and it's because the base does not like the non-crazies.
The public doesn't like boring candidates even if they might be very effective as President. There are different ways of not being boring, but one way is to be crazy. Whatever else one might say of Trump or Goldwater, they weren't boring.
Nixon higher than Reagan?
Reagan didn't engage in a paranoid conspiracy to steal an election he was already winning in a landslide. His conspiracies were much more policy-directed, like Iran-Contra.
Look up Quemoy and Matsu. Nixon was a frothing rabid anti-communist one step short of Joseph McCarthy. But it's close to being a toss-up and if anything makes my point stronger.
Reagan is the guy who made that stupid "didn't know the mic was hot" joke, "My fellow Americans, I have just signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union. We begin bombing in five minutes." Nixon was never crazy enough to joke about something like that.
But he was crazy enough to try to cheat in an election he was already winning in a landslide.
I think 1960 Nixon and 1968 Nixon should be ranked separately.
I recall, as a child in a small southern town, worrying about if a friend of mine could go to heaven because he told me his parents voted for Clinton. Based on what I knew at the time, your immortal soul was very much tied to whether you supported the Republican candidate for President or not. That seems like an insane thing now but there are people I grew up with that still believe that. This is an ideology that cuts both deep and across several closely held belief systems. I have no clue how to fix it, I’m just glad I’m not longer a part of it.
"your immortal soul was very much tied to whether you supported the Republican candidate for President or not."
Oh, I believe that, too. Just with the consequences reversed. And I'm an atheist. Otherwise, though: totally true.
yeah, it's hard for me to blame Republicans for thinking it's immoral to be a Democrat, given that I feel the reverse. It was horrible, for instance, when they nominated Roy Moore in Alabama but what Republicans who voted for him in the general not the primary did wrong was *be Republicans*, not vote for the Republican nominee *given that they were already Republicans*. I don't think people's views can really be decoupled from their moral character! Political issues are inescapably about moral values! It's normal and logical to sit in judgment of someone who disagrees with you about the foundational blocks of morality! But political views are not the whole of moral character, and people should be treated with basic decency even if you hate them. One big philosophical question for Democrats is "what do and don't we owe to our ideological opponents" and I'm not thrilled with the answers that various leading Democratic politicians and thinkers have offered; they're all either too permissive or too sweeping, and they all try to police how we feel about each other instead of what is unacceptable to do even to someone you hate.
Right - when I'm having a "how can you have that guy in your party" moment I try to stop myself - the math of partisanship is like a perfectly balanced tug of war where you know that letting go of the rope will cause your entire side to fall over and the other side to win. So it's really hard to stop pulling for your own side even when it's being gross.
I think that partisan logic isn't specific to the Republicans - the Democrats don't have someone like Trump to test it.
And your wallet! My family changed churches when the priest trotted out the “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven” thing. At the next place we left because the priest explained that the saying meant the wealthy should unburden themselves by giving to the church.
You’d almost think this Jesus guy didn’t care much for the rich?
Would respectfully disagree here. While certainly true that all the fringe elements you described have had some sway within the conservative movement over the years, they haven't defined it.
My (admittedly elitist) view is that complex policy thinking is hard, and for that reason it is often mixed with baser elements to navigate the world of politics. This is certainly not unique to the right. Last summer's "defund the police" is only the most readily-available example of asinine thinking serving as a political tool for pursuing a policy agenda - and then overtaking that agenda to fail miserably. And we can't pretend that elite institutions of center-left thinking didn't embrace it, either. I see little difference between that and WFB flirting with McCarthyism.
The issue with Trump is that the monkeys have come to run the circus. It's always been the case that good policy thinking doesn't fit on a protest sign - but under Trump the people who were only capable of articulating thoughts simple enough to adorn protest signs became the policy makers.
This is due to the weakness of parties as institutions. Largely because of our unique (and awful) system of primaries, the parties have virtually no control over their platforms. Case in point - the GOP didn't even have a platform last cycle, and the #2 finisher in each of the past two Democratic primaries was not even a registered Democrat.
So what's the answer?
I don't think there's "an answer" politics is just an ongoing process.
But I think we benefit from a realistic understanding of how it works. The mainstream right will kick the lunatics overboard *after they are defeated* not when they are at the height of their powers.
I think you've allude to one answer, which is to enact voting rights/pro-democracy reforms so that conservatives have to win 51% of the vote, rather than 46-47%. A "realistic understanding" of conservatism also probably has to examine how mainstream media treats conservative media and how it structurally fosters both-sides-ism and helps launder the crazy as normal politics.
If you think that the problem is that the mainstream media doesn't go *far enough* to treat conservative beliefs as fundamentally illegitimate, you're out of your mind.
~140 members of the House of Representatives just voted to overturn a democratic election, hours after a murderous mob occupied the US capitol building. If you think the beliefs that underpin such behavior are fundamentally legitimate, you're out of your mind.
"...this is why I found the "don't vote for Trump but do vote for Republicans" side of the Trump-disillusioned conservative debate to be so dead wrong."
Well, there *was* a lot of really crazy stuff being discussed in the Democratic debates. Given that, a defensive vote to keep them out of power seems prudent.
No, there genuinely was not. You may not like Bernie Sanders and that's fine, but a wealth tax or gun control is just not in the same category of bad as voter suppression.
"Voter suppression" is bad but Democrats improperly call everything "voter suppression." In Germany, you have to show up in person to an office within 14 days of moving to a new place, with paperwork and ID in hand, to update your residency status. Voter rolls are based directly on that. Democrats would call that "voter suppression."
The most galling example of this is Georgia. As Secretary of State, Brian Kemp implemented automatic voter registration, online voter registration, experimented with things like voter registration by text message, etc. These efforts have undisputedly increased voter registration by more than what Stacey Abrams did over that time.
As a result, Georgia has one of the highest voter registration rates for Black residents of any state: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/voting-and-voter-registration-as-a-share-of-the-voter-population-by-raceethnicity/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D. In fact, its one percentage point higher than for white residents. (In many blue states, the registration rate for white voters is 5-10 points higher than for Black voters.)
Kemp, however, was attacked as a vicious racist, for enforcing race-neutral laws for maintaining the voter rolls.
I've come to realize that the facts don't matter, just optics. For example, studies show that Voter ID laws don't depress turnout: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/21/18230009/voter-id-laws-fraud-turnout-study-research. ID is required in many other countries to vote. But Voter ID laws are denounced as "suppression" by Democrats anyway.
Yeah, well, Biden said MIT Romney would put blacks “back in chains.” To be able to say such outrageous things with a strait face requires ginning up a lot of fake evidence.
Are you unaware that there are those on the left who want to repeal the Second Amendment?
Repealing the second amendment is just not in the same category of bad as voter suppression.
Was that in the debates?
Serious question to you, Ken in MIA: Even assuming no filibuster, under Biden nothing can become law without Joe Manchin's blessing. Are you really afraid that Joe Manchin would bless a lot of the crazy stuff discussed in Democratic debates? If not, what was a vote for Republicans protecting us from?
I doubt that Manchin will, for example, demand that Biden appoint rather more textualist judges to the federal bench.
I think "appointed a judge that isn't textualist" isn't _that_ crazy?
The democratic primary really did swing hard left for a while in that the progressive lane really didn't worry about pivoting back to the center while they were one-upping each other. But I think you have to specifically make that case.
Wait - I'm not sure I follow that. I may have my facts about polling wrong, and it may be too soon to have good data about the election results down to adequate precision, but I was under the impression that Republicans did well in the House by running _ahead_ of Trump.
Does this not imply that (1) some people did vote for Biden + other Republicans and (2) therefore Trump lost and (3) it'd be _easier_ for Republicans to distance from a lame duck Trump than from a re-elected Trump?
On that last point I realize we never really got to see because Trump followed up losing the election by losing the Senate and then inciting a mob to attack the capital. So now he's _really_ out of favor.
We did see a lot of "not wanting to piss Trump off" post-election before Georgia, and counter-factuals are hard, but if he had won the election and the house had picked up seats, would the narrative not be "it's his party, 100%"?
In other words, is "it's easier to purge the crazies when they lose" not incremental and on a continuum?
My understanding is that there is basically nowhere other than the Maine senate race where the difference between Biden and the downballot Democrats was more than 5%. Republicans did well in the house because the House districting favors Republicans - exactly the same sort of issue that there is in the Senate and Presidency. Democrats won the House, but would have lost it if there had been a few hundred thousand different votes across a dozen seats. Democrats won the Presidency, but would have lost it if there had been a few tens of thousands of different votes across three states.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/12/21/why-did-house-democrats-underperform-compared-to-joe-biden/
Districting had very little effect in the 2020 election. Democrats won 50.8% of all votes cast in House elections. And they hold 51% of seats.
I think your counter-factual is 100% correct here.
I think the only thing I would add is that if Trump had won, you'd see a purge of Trump-disloyals in the GOP that isn't possible in your case.
In the Trump loses case, Trump can still make things hell for non-Trump-loyal republicans in the primary.
In the Trump wins case, Trump can make things hell for non-Trump-loyal republicans in the primary, more of the federal bureaucracy, he can coopt more of the right wing media ecosystem, etc.
My country (NZ) abolished our upper house in 1950, has a reconciliation process for historical crimes (The Waitangi Tribunal), and has had proportional representation since 1996. I don't think that you can bore any of those boards overnight ;-) but it's a good vision of the right direction.
Work to diminish the political power of 'land' over people.
Work towards an honest reckoning with your past.
Work towards making your elected representatives more... representative of the people
Based on the theme of the blog so far: win elections, even if it means conceding certain positions or at least making certain messaging adjustments due to the imbalance of the electoral map and the composition of the electorate.
I haven't read Matt as advocating for moderate positions so much as court politically popular ones. "Wokeness" is unpopular because most White folks don't understand the idea of White privilege. Most White do lead what they perceived as privileged lives and they don't. Providing healthcare is politically popular even among Republicans, just don't call it Medicare for all.
That would be an example of a messaging adjustment. IE you don't even need to change the policy but talk about it in universal terms and not in racial justice terms.
I'm not sure M4A is an example of bad messaging tho, associating single payer healthcare with medicare which is enormously popular is actually really good messaging imo. Ofc even good messaging doesn't guarantee a win when we're talking about fairly drastic overhauls of healthcare.
I'd add that "Wokeness" is also not resonant with the majority of non-white people of recent immigrant background. The (very roughly) 20% of the US population whose family came from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa are not motivated to vote for Democrats based on white privilege or anti-racism messages. And in my own personal experience they can be much more open in their criticisms of "wokeness" when they encounter it.
>The (very roughly) 20% of the US population whose family came from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa are not motivated to vote for Democrats based on white privilege or anti-racism messages.
This is very interesting and I would like to see some studies on this. From my experience at a liberal elite college I think the that children of these immigrant populations find great appeal in wokeness politics and critical race theory, and it's perhaps less a matter of campus indoctrination than the re- formation of intergenerational/family values for these kids.
I also wish there were studies. Although not a formal study, this data investigation from the NYTimes https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/20/us/politics/election-hispanics-asians-voting.html suggested something of that effect, though.
I think the 2nd generation is simply assimilating to whatever environment they gravitate to or find themselves in. If they are at an elite liberal school, they will politically think much like the rest of the student body. But if they are in the work force of a rural town in West Texas, their thoughts will be closer to the mainstream of that town.
"from my experience at a liberal elite college" - that's your problem right there. We can try to do studies to broaden our horizons, but ultimately we all live in our own bubble.
My anecdotal is that I also know immigrant children that go to these elite colleges. The majority already quite liberal leaning and don't need much more push to accept "Wokeness". I also know as many (maybe more) immigrant children that never attended these schools and never will who do not appreciate "Wokeness," and I'm sure their parents don't either. It can be cast in a somewhat demeaning under the pretense that White people had to make a cool slogan and terminology to understand that non-White people are not treated the same. Then they wonder, "why don't other non-White people like this as much as we do?! We did this for them!"
What the commentators MT & John H Brown were promoting is that all parties, but mainly Democrats, need to provide moderate candidates to win seats. "Wokeness" is actually not a moderate position out in the non-liberal elite college world; and it's not racist to think that it isn't. It's just a slogan gone bad, which we've seen quite a few instances of in this past decade.
I'm not sure I follow you about the value of anecdotes in making generalizations about experience but I believe there is a lack of clarity around the idea of "wokeness" and whether it embodies a politics or ideological position beyond the current slogan or meme. Perhaps a genealogy of "wokeness" and critical thought is needed before we can say whether it is compatible with liberalism or not, since none of us can agree on what it is and a lot of the thinking is uninformed.
The Ezra Klein interview with Ian Haney Lopez discussed this topic including some research results: https://ianhaneylopez.com/race-class-read
I don't think moderation on the Dems part is a slam dunk path to winning every senate seat. Neither is money as we saw this last election. Plenty of moderates lost. If we can't both pull off a super majority and then pass major reform to restore the institution does that mean we're effed?
Democratic moderates lost because despite a House/Senate candidate's personal moderation, they'll still support Pelosi/Schumer as Speaker/Majority Leader, which empowers people to the left of that moderate candidate. Voters understand that a vote for a moderate House/Senate candidate is effectively a vote to empower the national Democratic party, which they correctly perceive as to the left of the moderate candidate. I don't know how to get around this besides somehow imposing message discipline and/or actual moderation on all House/Senate candidates, which seems really hard, especially given that Republicans will always be pushing the "all Democrats are closet communists" message regardless of how far left the national party actually is.
Which seems to inevitably cut against a depressed majority that offers more and more radical solutions for why they aren’t ever winning. Seems most Western countries can’t square the circle.
What EK and Matty harp on - adjust the democratic system to build incentives for political parties to have to moderate themselves to win. Get rid of the filibuster, add states, etc. Feels way too wonky and simple to me but I guess I read it so much it starts to seem like the only option.
The solution is to persuade with words and actions. Now that the Democratic Party controls, even with a slim majority, both Houses of Congress and the Presidency, they win by governing effectively and showing broad-based, material benefits to the citizens of the US. That leads to lasting success.
Do you mean like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did?
While I agree this is the case, the left has not been doing well with persuasion. Been harping on this for 20 years and democrats keep on hiring the same consultants and failing in the same ways.
I think badly-targeted and massively wasteful infrastructure "stimulus" is a likelier outcome.
Not sure that's possible without a super majority
Whenever I read these sort of partisan system-tinkering solutions I immediately get very alarmed. There's only so much political capital, and if Biden spends it on PR-statehood that's much less for infrastructure, or trade agreements, etc...
My big problems with trying to redo the system are #1) They will be seen (correctly, imho), as a partisan power grab. The electoral maps do currently favor the GOP, but at least when it comes to the EC and the Senate and the Supreme Court - they have been playing the game by the rules. Changing the rules because you're temporarily losing is not a good look and is not likely to help the D brand with swing voters
Which brings me to #2 - the current GOP-favoring alignment is, like all alignments, temporary. No one can predict what sorts of geographic and demographic shifts the next 4 or 8 years will bring. It would be a shame for the Ds to spend their ammo pushing PR statehood, for example, and then find in 8 years that PR votes R in the presidential election.
I think PR and DC need to be represented, period. Shouldn't really be seen as benefiting one party or the other. Should be seen as granting long overdue rights to citizens of this country that currently aren't representated. That's just wrong on it's face if democracy means anything at all anymore. Just as you said, it's not necessarily going to benefit Dems (either now or in the long run!) so I'd say this is a problem and needs to be rectified but I don't think it's THEE problem as outlined in Matt's post nor is it THEE solution to our polarization problem. Insofar as there actually is a solution. I've been pretty vocal in this thread that I dont actually see a viable path forward and I find it deeply concerning.
The partisan environment is why I'm skeptical that statehood is being evaluated on its merits. It seems to come up whenever system-hacking to favor the Democrats comes up. Rightly or wrongly, I think much of the country would see it as a partisan move.
I don't consider myself well-informed on the merits of statehood. I've read that the last referendum for statehood in PR got 52% support only vs 48% against - that fact contributes to my cynicism on this issue, but again, I don't feel like I understand the pro or con arguments very well so I'm open to learning more if I'm misinterpreting that statistic.
I'd also want to know where we draw the line in the representation argument. There are some US possessions like the Virgin Island and American Samoa that have populations less than 100,000. Where do pro-statehood arguments stand on statehood for those populations?
Maybe the line is no states smaller than the current smallest state? DC is bigger than Wyoming and Vermont; Guam is 1/4 the size of Wyoming and still bigger than the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, or the Northern Mariana Islands. It is still kind of an arbitrary line, though.
Yeah, if Puerto Rico gets statehood and votes Republican, that's a totally OK outcome. It would be annoying for Democrats to have to be the ones to put off their legislative priorities to make it happen, but statehood absolutely should not be contingent on the expected partisan gain/loss.
DC is pretty clear. But the margins on the Puerto Rico statehood referendums haven't exactly been overwhelming. Do Democrats want Puerto Rico statehood more than Puerto Ricans?
Not to mention that adding PR and DC as states and assuming they would give you four D senators would not have changed the Senate balance of power over the past 20 years. By all means, if you think it's the right thing to do, go for it! But as a power grab, it's a pretty lame and ineffectual one.
Even if the system feels kind of silly now, I agree with you that I fail to see why the dems can't just try to compete in it rather than claiming the only way forward is to change it.
They won't be able to do any of that without a trifecta AND a super majority.
If the solution isn't possible, it's not much of a solution, is it?
Which is why I don't really get it
Elect David Shor.
I think he would tell you that nominating a self-described Marxist would be a big mistake!
Sure. But he also has explicitly said that somebody like Bernie Sanders would have beaten Donald Trump. So you just have to pick your leftly RPG skilltree correctly.
Haha yeah, I was just joking about how I think Shor would tell you that he would be a far from ideal politician
I see Matt's main point as: a lunatic fringe will not be disavowed by a party if they bring votes. So perhaps the the answer (for Dems) is don't focus on the lunatic fringe. Go after your Republican opponent for being pro-business/anti-worker and forget about all the Q anon bullshit.
I think that would be a mistake. I personally see us at a crossroads and Dems need to focus on the right fringe more, not less. We can't handwaive them off any more. Look where that's gotten us so far.
Subsidize higher education for the masses. It makes some of them more competent, but mostly defangs adolescent insurrectionists. Especially the girls.
I think there's an argument to be made that the stuff the right wing crazies believe has gotten even crazier in the age of social media. It was crazy to think Eisenhower was a secret communist, or that Obama was born in Kenya, but communism and Kenya are at least both real things.
There are now two members of congress who have openly expressed belief in QAnon. Lauren Boebert is the harder of the two to get a read on, and she may just be a cynical creep who saw that there was a political opportunity in embracing this stuff, but Marjorie Taylor Greene is an honest-to-god true believer.
She is *on video* talking about some of the very craziest parts of the QAnon mythology, like the belief that members of the satanist cabal (i.e. many of her new coworkers!) torture and kill children in order to extract adrenochrome from their blood, which in QAnon lore is both a psychoactive drug and some kind of youth serum.
It's difficult to estimate the percentage of Republicans who believe in QAnon at this point, but it's a large minority. If you're familiar with their symbols and slogans you will start to see them everywhere. Now, some of that is just a frequency illusion, but some of the places where unambiguous QAnon stuff is showing up should be extremely concerning to people.
The head of the NYC Sergeants Benevolent Association appeared on TV repeatedly this summer with a QAnon mug behind him, carefully turned to be visible to the camera. And it wasn't even a big story! Largely because normal people just don't know how crazy this stuff is. We've had cases all over the country of cops being caught wearing QAnon swag on the job or expressing QAnon belief on social media, and departments mostly seem to treat these cases as relatively minor incidents of an officer being "too political" while on duty.
These are people who think there are tunnels full of "mole children" under Central Park! Who think Hillary Clinton *literally* eats babies! This stuff should be as disqualifying from any position of public responsibility as would belief in Islamic State-style jihadism.
There's already two believers in congress! I'd say that's a sign it's pretty significant movement.
https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/4yijjbkc2z/econTabReport.pdf
The latest Economist/YouGov poll is showing ~10-20% with a favorable or very favorable view of QAnon across a variety of different demographic groups. Lowest is white women college grads with 6%, highest is 18-29 year olds with 26%.
Those are the numbers for the population at large. What do you think the numbers are among Republicans? Because it's going to be higher than that.
Personally, if I had to put my money where my mouth is I think I'd guess around a third.
It's absolutely true though that there are far-right milieus in which QAnon is anathema, white nationalists for example (at the extreme end) mostly think QAnon is a Jewish plot to distract people, and of course there's plenty of hardcore MAGA people who might think QAnon is stupid but who still probably believe the election was stolen.
I suspect the basic problem here is that the democratic process doesn't distinguish between moderates and extremists. Every vote is the same as every other vote, and you need as many as you can get if you want to win elections or pass legislation. As a Republican, then, it's in your best interest (at least in the short term) to be tolerant of right-wing extremists, because you need them to vote for you rather than going off to put their energy and votes into a new fringe party of their own. And the same is true for Democrats regarding left-wing extremists.
It's possible that ranked-choice voting could help with this problem, since it would allow the extremists to start their own nutjob party and make it their first choice, while making one of the major parties their second choice. But neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want ranked-choice voting because it would destroy their argument that voting for a third party is "just throwing away your vote."
Meh. On the other side of the coin we see Democratic Party politicians playing footsie with the likes of Louis Farrakhan and the badly misplaced trust in the contents of the Steele Dossier.
A pox on both their houses, I say.
Hi Ken,
At risk of starting a dumpster fire in the comments, I'll bite here. If you wanted to write a "the left has always had kooks and never reels them in or disavows them" kind of essay, what's your top ten list of "tin foil hat and crackpots from the left"? It would be useful to specify what you think they said that was ridiculous and not just who they are.
(I ask because one of my conservative friends once said, after Steve King got axed "we police our own, I _never_ see the left do that." My immediate reaction was "who the hell do. we have who is like Steve King?" But...it's easier to see what you think is gross or dumb on the other side.)
I'm not very interested in coming up with such a list. But if you want to write your own, please do share.
We were hoping that someone who is outside of our own ideological bubble might help us see the list of candidate equivalents.
Not interested. I think both parties have their fair share of crazy ideas and tolerance of objectively bad people, but trying to show any sort of equivalence inevitably descends into arguments about how many angels can dance on the heads of pins.
Oh, I'm definitely outside his ideological bubble. And refusing to play the game of 'that's just one example, give me ten more' is not trolling.
Just because Kristen Clarke said some really dumb stuff in college (and it absolutely was pseudoscientific nonsense!) and invited a crazy speaker to campus doesn’t make her a kook? She’s done lots of really great work in civil rights and expanding voting rights and is very qualified for the DOJ posting.
Castro really did make impressive gains in literacy, though it was propaganda and I think it’s a bad look for a politician to defend it. But literacy is literacy. I mean Mao was a brutal tyrant, but his program to teach simplified characters really has helped improved literacy. Of course, that’s now being used to impose linguistic hegemony for various reasons, and was full of propaganda at the time, but having more Chinese people able to read is... good?
I’m assuming this article is what you’re talking about with Omar? https://www.vox.com/2019/2/11/18220160/ilhan-omar-aipac-benjamins-kevin-mccarthy
I mean, yeah those tweets were very clearly ill advised as phrased, but as Matt explains, they contain a reasonable critique of Israel-US foreign policy. It’s also clear that she received broad condemnation for saying that by lots of people within the party.
Uh... I don't know if you've read the news but Donald Trump is president and just staged a violent coup attempt and is being defended by the vast majority of his party. That's kinda why this article got written, not because literally The John Birch Society are a present day GOP influence.
Louis Farrakhan is definitely someone who the democratic political establishment has tolerated to an embarrassing extent, but he’s only one man in comparison to the entire Sean Hannity Rush Limbaugh Glenn Beck media ecosystem. Care to give more examples of left wing crackpots that are not only liked by activists and grassroots groups but are actively embraced by the political establishment? That’s the key here. The president calls into Rush Limbaugh all the time. I’d be very surprised if Biden started hanging out with Brianna Joy Grey or something.
Um, Bill Ayers? I'm sure there are countless others but it's not something I care to spend much time on.
And I don't think it's reasonable to look at Trump's habits and say, 'This is what Republicans are like.'
He’s the Republicans party nominee!!!
So?
So if you have to pick one person to represent the Republican party, their presidential nominee, who 71% of Republicans approve of, is a pretty good example of where the party is.
I think there's a subtle line here. Most Republicans are not like Trump, but most Republicans have given Trump carte blanche to be who he is.
This kind of thing annoys the heck out of me - "there are crazies on both sides" is a true statement, but it doesn't address the *amount* of crazy on both sides, which seems skewed toward Republicans. It's like taking two people, one making $20K/year and one making $90K/year, and saying "well, they're both making tens of thousands of dollars a year, so they're about equally well off."
"...the *amount* of crazy on both sides..."
I doubt that can be measured objectively.
So just assume it's all the same then? There's no objective criteria for art either, so a kid's finger-painting is basically the same as the Mona Lisa.
That's basically the cultural relativist's argument, and I think it can go too far
I don't think cultural relativists get that deep into the weeds.
They've gotten at least as deep in the weeds as that comment you made.
All politics has always intermingled freely with fringe nonsense, and both parties are growing more extreme. Biden is the moderate Democrat, but he's to the left of Bill Clinton, and his administration will be to the left of Obama's (though he himself may not be on a personal level). There will be no firewall between responsible Democrats and nutty communists and identitarians.
I think there’s a difference between the Dems moving to the left and “intermingling with fringe nonsense.” Obviously theres plenty of fringe nonsense on the left- I’m a college student and a good chunk of my friends earnestly believe in overthrowing capitalism. The difference is that there’s no one in mainstream democratic politics that represents their viewpoint (and no, Bernie/the Squads use of the word “socialism” to describe expanding the welfare state doesn’t count). On the other side, a majority of house republicans objected to the election certification.
A good comparison, that I think Matt tweeted about a while back, is that in 2016, a big chunk of democrats were pretty convinced that Russia was directly responsible for Trump winning the election. The difference is, no one in dem party leadership really added fuel to that belief. In 2020, the rep party leadership embraced the nuttier side of the bases beliefs.
The Republicans are presently different from the Democrats in that Trump was much more willing to engage with fringe nonsense than previous leaders were, and he ushered in a huge number of Congressional Republicans (especially but not exclusively in the House) who share his willingness.
But Matt's thesis is that this is not a particular Trump thing, that conservatives have always been willing to entertain intellectuals who have nutty beliefs, that you couldn't draw a clean line between mainstream conservatives and nutty fringe people. The same is true on the left, and it's getting worse for both sides. That's not to say that Democrats are as bad off as Republicans right now.
Adam Schiff wasted endless hours on it, and he sat on the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Not sure where you have been?
I think it’s a little disingenuous to compare a House Committee investigating the very real Russian cyber warfare/ disinformation campaign with Republicans lying blatantly about midnight ballot drops and trying to overturn the results of the election.
I think that it's a little disingenuous to refer to Schiff as merely "investigating a cyber warfare/disinformation campaign." Here is something Schiff said:
"The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help. The Russians gave help and the President made full use of that help."
That's several steps further than "doing some investigation."
And kind of to my point, this is what it looks like for in-groups and out-groups. Like, you just sort of apply a gentler lens to people in the in-group. Okay, Schiff maybe was a little crazy, but you put a kinder gloss on his craziness. Meanwhile, on the out-group side, you put a harsher gloss on everything.
I’m definitely more sympathetic to Adam Schiff than Kevin McCarthy because the Russian espionage campaign is a real thing that happened, while Democrats stealing the election in Georgia is not in fact a real thing that happened.
> That's several steps further than "doing some investigation."
It's also something that was confirmed to have happened by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Exactly. Whatever complaints anyone has about Adam Schiff, Republican Richard Burr ran the investigation in the Senate. The Senate report found a lot of Russian involvement in getting Trump elected, even if "direct" is an overstatement.
Jenny Durkan saying "Seattle is fine, don't be so afraid of Democracy" while there was literally an anarchist-controlled zone in the city is fringe nonsense.
Larry Tribe, one of the most renowned law professors in the country, indulged some crazy conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/12/harvards-laurence-tribe-has-become-a-deranged-russia-conspiracist-today-was-his-most-humiliating-debacle/
A big chunk of Rachel Maddow's reporting from 2017-2018 was conspiracy theories. There was real reporting in there too, to be sure, but she also happily jumped on every ultimately unfounded conspiracy theory too.
Lots of respectable media figures jumped onto the theory that far-right agent provacateurs had caused BLM protests overt he summer to become violent.
I live and work in Seattle, and I'm tired of uninformed people trying to use us to make their rightwing points. Fair to say the city is not being perfect, and being mayor of Seattle is legitimately hard, but Seattle is not a dystopian wasteland, and Jenny Durkan is certainly not a left-wing fringe nutcase. CHOP was probably a bad idea, on balance, but I went down there, and knew friends and colleagues who also went down there. It was fine and actually a fun kind atmosphere. People of color do have legitimate grievances because Seattle, like so many other places, has a police union which has been dead set against officer accountability, and pretty successful in squashing it. But the city rolls on and remains a great place to live. Go find somewhere else to be your strawman.
Right wing talking point? I come from a third world country where police don’t have a monopoly on violence. Having criminal gangs try to break into your house is no fun. Police maintaining control over all parts of a city at all times is table stakes for civilization.
Watch out, the mob of raging anarchist criminal-gang Seattlites that you've conjured up in your mind might light your strawman on fire if you're not careful
People getting shot on the streets seems to happen regularly in our society--less than it used to, but more than it ought. I NEVER think it is fine. My assessment is that we have way too many people carrying guns, especially youngish males. This was as true in CHOP as it is everywhere else in our nation. I wasn't going to CHOP at night; and as I said, I thought at the time that it was a essentially a bad idea. Checkpoints involving guns and amateur security was the main problem I had with it--it was not a viable or well thought out response to the problems posed by removing police from the streets. And that's what led to the CHOP quickly folding.
So, remind me, what idyllic non-lefty-fringe corner of America doesn't have problems with gun violence again?
Well, that street crime could be reduced too, if we used the power of the state to limit possession of weapons. Or if we used the power of the state to reduce conditions that lead to crime. Or if we used the power of the state to put cameras on every 10 feet of pavement.
Meanwhile, in real life, politicians navigate complex decisions involving multiple variables and unknowns. You can posit Durkin's decisions in trying deescalate public anger at police violence were wrong, but don't make her out to be some kind of anarchy-lover from the comfort of your living room. CHOP had it's problems, obviously but the kind of doubling-down on police violence that you envision would have raised problems too. Honestly, I don't know if Durkin's response to the crisis was better or worse than the alternatives. However, I seriously doubt you know anything about Seattle, nor actually care.
That was about the time I stopped watching Maddow. She's smart as hell, and her work on Flint was great, but she went off the deep-end a bit for a while.
Wasn't the firewall the primary? It seems the DNC/corporate donors/'low information voters in SC'/electability were all blamed for why Biden beat out the cultural liberals' and economic liberals' respective favourites?
All true. But I feel it's incomplete. By focusing only on the Right, you are implicitly stating that the Left does not have a similar dynamic at play.
This POV won't be super popular here I'm sure, but what of the Left's the fantasies of "just put poor people in public housing - that will solve the problem of poverty!" to the Left Woke's assertion that "everything in our country is the result of a race-based statement of political power."
Fantasies of an idyllic world live on both sides of the ideological spectrum. We can argue and debate which are more harmful, and we should. If we did, that would be a wonderful, old-school, and refreshing example of political debate... vs. political warfare, where we denigrate our enemies as existential threats.
This post paints the Conservative side as a more dire threat to our republic. And that may be the case at this very point in time. But each side has its own crazies, blind spots, and areas of excellence. Effective governance is about leveraging the right bits from the right side at the right moment.
We just need to stop vilifying the other - in this case, the Right. The Left is arguably the more ideal side to start this trend.
I think you have to take a certain amount of partisan baggage or knowledge of current events to the essay to come out with "This post paints the Conservative side as a more dire threat to our republic." I went back and looked Matt's post - and it says basically -nothing- about the left (good or bad) other than that before sorting, right wingers could enter the Democratic party and now they basically never do.
We could have an interesting discussion about the left, but I feel like we'd need to start with something of the scope Matt has done - tying together a bunch of threads with references to deeper dives. And I'm not sure we'd see something symmetrical - whatever you want to say about the left, it seems that the left could be subject to lots of the same polarizing dynamics but also just have its own idiosyncratic weirdness that would be worthy of its own study.
(E.g. in the John Birth NR essay, Goldberg is arguing that, because there really were soviet spies, McCarthy was "kinda right" in that the problem wasn't fake, and the left needs to raise our hands and go "yeah, we were wrong" WRT communism/marxism. I think a careful examination of the left would have to look at what it means that e.g. Jerry Rubin became a capitalist.)
In other words, the left should be carefully examined in its own right as a specific historical thing, and not just by trying to find the reflection of the right or the 'nearest similar thing'.
My critique is not designed to be yet another exhausting both-sidism. It's designed to share with Matt that I expect him to have a larger aperture when he does ideological analyses like these.
It's perfectly understandable that people on the left would use this period of time to dive into all the ills of the "side" that is currently delivering so many of them. But I can find that at Vox and the NYT. I pay for Matt because I expect more from his uniquely expansive mind combined with his analytical orientation and exemplary written communication skills.
I met a Bircher at an ice cream social in college back in the 1980s. His immediate gambit was to explain how they aren't as crazy as people claim they are. Nowadays he would be a RINO.
Excellent, thoughtful essay.
I do not think, however, that it is just or primarily the nationalized/polarized nature of the electorate that gives room for the crazies on the right to have so much power. I really think, boringly enough, that a lot of it is actually just Donald Trump. The crank elements of the conservative movement percolate in the swamp of Republican politics all the time, but Trump activated them in a way that raised their prominence and gave a blessing for elevating them further.
For example, much as I loathe George W. Bush and decry the horrible policies of his administration, this was not an issue during his two terms. Perhaps we are more polarized now, but I recall that we were pretty polarized then as well. But the very worst elements of the conservative movement/Republican base were held at bay because the Republican power holders, though corrupt, didn't give those elements nearly as much oxygen.
Basically, there are latent elements of craziness throughout American society, and not all on the right. It takes actions by the leadership to activate them and unleash their force.
Bush openly spoke against many of the more loathsome elements of his party, like jingoists and Islamophobes. At the time we on the left didn't give him much credit for that, because his policies (especially re Islam) were usually agreeable to those groups and because speaking against hatred seemed like a pretty low bar. And it was a low bar, but we didn't realize how bad things would get if someone came along who just gave up on mouthing pieties like that.