I'm increasingly agog at how recklessly progressives are behaving. They're risking a Trump presidency/autocracy because the guy who beat them fair and square in the primary only tacked halfway towards them once in office? Defying historical precedent of tacking to the centre after winning?
Ditto. On the issues I’m with the progressive on most things (esp economic policy). But on the politics I’m increasingly disillusioned and angry with them as a political group. Early in the 2020 primaries I was on team Warren, and always had sympathy for Bernie sanders (still do!). But by and large today’s “progressives” esp the activists and media figures not to mention the cringe “squad”, strike me as somewhere on the spectrum between colossal fools and simply bad people.
I don’t disagree but this where I remind everyone that something Matt made passing reference to but worth emphasizing is that this group of doomer progressives is really active on social media but actually quite small. But because they are loud on social media they suck up a lot of the oxygen in the discourse.
Really hit home to me with these pro Palestinian protests. I know a few were pretty big. But look carefully at a lot them; it’s very often a handful of people with many many more onlookers and reporters. Pure”Streisand effect” all the way down.
It’s also just everywhere, you can’t find a lighthearted thread on Reddit about your favorite hobby that doesn’t degenerate into “Because Late Capitalism” by the end of it. Part of it ties into the depressive affect stuff that Greg Lukianoff talks about.
The "blame capitalism" stuff on reddit just drives me batty. It really reveals how the average user is in the early 20s and I'm just too damn old to be spending time there anymore. I wish there were other discussion platform options! (Substack serves decently enough in spots, of course.)
Reddit feels like the most conservative of the conventional social sites (and apart from substack, I think it’s the best one out there bc of how non social it is)
Reminds me so much of early 2000s when I was in college and I was on message boards or comment sections all the time (glad I got over that) including on Matt's original blog at The Atlantic. And invariably within a few comments Godwin's law would come up. "Bush is a Nazi", "Bush is bad but he's not a Nazi", "Tony Blair is worse than Hitler!"...blah, blah, blah.
I feel like "Because late capitalism" should some addendum to Godwin's law...let's call it "Godwin's razor". Also, sort of thing that gives me hope; internet forums and message boards being full of extremists or trolls or people with just general over the topic rhetoric has been an issue for a long time now and is not nearly as new as we think.
One of these days I'll get into the story of the first time I went on a message board circa 1995-1996. This chat room devoted to NFL talk. Let's just say a "canary in the coal mine" situation as far as what the internet would be in 2024.
The part I don't get is that the places they want the USA to become - Norway, Denmark - are...capitalist societies. Even if we become Norway, we're still gonna be capitalists. They can't square this circle very well, either, when I point that out.
I think it has disempowered the old method of progressive influence, where Twitter exposed media professionals to the ideas of the extreme left vastly more often than they would've encountered them in reality.
But simultaneously and in parallel, TikTok has given progressive doomers new channels to reach a much larger audience in absolute terms, even if that audience is less elite. If you know the types of people who like to repost infographics on their instagram story about racism and LGBT rights and etc., a ton of those people are now reposting stuff about how Gaza is genocide and it's all Joe Biden's fault.
>but this where I remind everyone that something Matt made passing reference to but worth emphasizing is that this group of doomer progressives is really<
Bingo. For all the angst about the supposedly dangerous influence of the progressives (And, let's face it, a lot of the hand-wringers *enjoy* bitching about the hard left. They find it somehow comforting), decidedly centrist Scranton Joe is crushing it in the primaries. Not exactly 1980 redux.
Meanwhile, presumptive nominee and lunatic Donald J. Trump is about to get a lot more attention. That's probably not good for Republicans.
(That said, the Perry Bacon column is a doozy! But many of his columns are like that, and, I'd bet not one in twenty American voters could tell you who Bacon is.)
I mean Matt is one of them who enjoys bitching about the hard left in part for good reason if you read about what alienated him from Vox and why he left. So I do get it. But it's clearly biasing Matt's writing to the point you'd think the left wing non-profit complex is literally whispering in Biden's ear wormtongue style. I think a lot of Matt's criticisms of lefty non-profits is quite trenchant, but I'm sorry left wing non-profits can only dream of having the influence that Matt, or Josh Barro or Jonathan Chait think they have.
I mean, you saw where a bunch of White House staffers signed a petition about Biden taking firmer action vis a vis Gaza? It’s not actually that implausible that they are whispering in his ear.
With the end result that Biden took the action of (checks notes); pushing for a bill to give massive amount of aid to Israel, then trying to push for another bill that pushed aid to Israel and Ukraine by tying it to border security. To this day, the Biden administration is still trying to pass a bill giving aid to Israel despite the fact that Israel doesn't really need that aid given its huge military superiority over Hamas (as opposed to Ukraine).
I'm aware that behind the scenes reporting indicates that Biden is trying to put pressure on Netanyahu to pull back from the grossest and most extreme strategist currently being pursued by the Israeli government and IDF (which I 100% support btw) and is also trying to find some path to a ceasefire. But yeah, the Biden administration is still very clearly on the side of Israel here and has not come close to implementing these staffers demands (also, I'd love to know just how many staffers signed on to this).
Are you around young people often, specifically at colleges? I think the progressive message has really locked in in those spaces, and has influenced the politics of young people quite a bit.
Are they going to be a re-run of the boomers, with some of them being unironic diametrical flippers from one extreme to another, over life's journey? Like turning from hippie to anarcho-conservative libertarian over their lifetime?
Awesome. Just another public-spirited utilitarian generation we need. Not.
>I mean Matt is one of them who enjoys bitching about the hard left in part for good reason<
The comment wasn't directed at Yglesias although I can see why it might be construed that way. It's really just a plea (a futile one, to be sure) to not give the hard left so much oxygen, coupled with the observation that the Bari Weissian-Andrew Sullivanesque "cranky centrist" sector and the hard left co-enable each other. And in many cases make a nice living doing so!
Don't disagree with this. It's why I've used the phrase "Streisand effect" a lot because I think it sort of describes this phenomenon (that I think you're getting at) whereby someone (or some protestor or some tik tok influencer) gets way more attention than they should because someone with a big platform highlights this person. And I actually think you're right to say there's self-reinforcing mechanism going on. Sullivan is right now taking a victory lap over Ibram Kendi and his apparent fall from grace. But honestly my thought with Kendi that I wanted to yell at Sullivan for forever is "I had never heard of this person until you started ranting and raving about terrible he is. You realize you're ranting and raving is a real factor as to why Kendi gained such prominence in the first place given how hysterically you were writing about him and how much reach you have especially with other news reporters". Like in his more measured moments he made what I thought were reasonable criticisms of Kendi's work (unfortunately mixed with wild over the top rhetoric in other posts). But I honestly wonder if you were to give truth serum to Kendi he would say he was grateful to Sullivan for boosting his name so much.
As someone who lives in SF, where Non Profits have effectively rendered the government as useless, and cares about climate change where Non Profits routinely sue over clean energy projects, I think k we should bitch about them *more*.
I mean some dude named ‘Nobody’ or alternatively, actually no one. Though I partly feel like we already have that with Biden being basically Bernie (not Sanders but the one from Weekend at Bernie’s). That being said, he generally has a competent team which is what matters
I would lean toward "colossal fools" with a side of "can't read the room," in accordance with Hanlon's Razor: "Do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity."
The problem is that these “activists” have no real concern for making material change. Addressing a problem and acknowledging that fact undermines their identity and the value they derive from advocating for the morally “correct” thing.
And for some of them who make money on this there is a perverse incentive for them to make problems worse (hence why so many astroturf for the GOP.)
I agree with you, for a loud but small fraction of activists. Though with all the noise it makes it hard to figure out what to think or do if you really care about an issue but rely on others for strategic guidance
The great irony being, had Bernie Sanders won the primary and miraculously the general, it’s not clear how he would have governed differently. Indeed, I think there’s an argument to be made that he would have been much less successful in implementing progressive priorities. But I guess he would have made a lot of speeches the activists agree with.
I think because so much of the run up to the 2020 primary was fought over the differences of (dead on arrival) policy, I had a belief that the real blocking and tackling of politics was grounded in policy ideas as Matt tries to elevate. But seeing Biden achieve more policy than anyone could have possibly imagined on jan 20 2021, and getting essentially zero credit for it from progressives, genuinely makes me think most voters of all stripes simply have a Jed Bartlett theory of the Presidency. To them, the central job of POTUS is to make speeches and be seen taking sides, even if this kind of public issue taking often retards the opportunity for bipartisan legislating and policy implementation through raising the salience of partisanship. Biden is uniquely suited for this kind of somewhat secret congress dealmaking, and uniquely poor at the Bartlett Theory of the Presidency. Unsurprisingly, his immediate predecessors, a literal Television personality and one of the single most rhetorically talented politicians of all time, were better at that, but arguably worse at the actual meat and potatoes of policy making.
Your Bartlett theory of the presidency is also supported by Trump. Many people referred to him at the time as "effective", despite accomplishing almost nothing. It was all position-taking theater.
Well yah...it's why direct voting is a bad system for picking a leader.
As a lone voter with negligible chance of deciding the issue my incentive is to use my vote (or claimed vote which ppl rarely lie about) the way one uses a bumper sticker -- as a way to broadcast my identity to my peers.
Direct elections suck. Parliamentary systems avoid this and even the us founding fathers didn't want them. They just were too shortsighted to realize you need to give electors another job like house member so they aren't just proxies.
Bernie would've lost the general once Republicans started digging up his old material and hammering him with the help of business donors and right-wing middle class voters. It never happened, because Bernie was never the Dem nominee.
Exactly. A Jewish socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Give me a break. I have stalwartly democratic friends who would sit that out, namely those from Eastern European, Chinese, or Korean backgrounds.
I recall reading a quote by Hannah Arendt, I don't remember the exact wording, but it's something like: the dictator doesn't want your support. The dictator wants you to become totally cynical and disengaged and to say, "All those politicians are the damn same! It doesn't matter who is in power, things are going to suck anyway!" It's chilling.
Also, this is one reason why I no longer subscribe to Freddie "the US is the greatest source of evil since WWII" deBoer's Substack, even though he is a brilliant writer.
I don't really fault him for writing what he wants vs what's good business, since that's clearly an essential part of his motivation...but the ratio of beclowning-level posts went way up after 10/7, and that's been rather frustrating. You gotta give people some hope, a future to believe in, especially on the progressive left where the entire premise is to make huge sweeping systemic changes. Much harder to believe such outcomes will be good when so much ink is spilled about the seed being corrupt, the battle being pointless, America being in decline, the world being fallen, etc, etc. Like I get it, there's Problems. But such garment-rending is very, well, Debbie Downer as Matt puts it today. (I'd have gone with Negative Nancy.)
So much of modern politics comes down to the question: “who do you fear more - left wing populists or right wing populists?” In 2020 people generally feared right-wing populists more, and so Biden won. In 2024, polls seem to indicate the opposite.
This is why, as much as I think Biden is likely to lose, that Ezra Klein is wrong to believe that dropping Biden would result in a better candidate. The progressives would pick up Bernie's charge that an economic warrior will drive democratic turnout and it would be the second coming of McGovern.
Centrist establishment nominees do generally tack away from the center after winning the nomination to shore up their coalition.
H W Bush's "no new taxes" promise, for example. The last Democratic candidates to be both centrist and establishment were Kerry who moved left on Iraq after winning and H. Clinton who also moved left.
Insurgent centrists (Bill Clinton, McCain) don't generally try to consolidate the base, but run on Sister Soujah moments.
Can't edit. Lost the final para about McCain running like an establishment centrist, appointing Palin to consolidate the base, even though his appeal was as an insurgent. Could have run against the Bush party and policies and called for the Republicans to change course, much as B. Clinton did in 1992, but didn't.
Hillary tacked left to win the primary against Bernie, not to shore up support afterward. She moved to the center, but not enough. Or the damage had already been done.
This is clear in retrospect, but something funny is how little I remember being aware of it at the time. Definite vibes of throwing red meat to the starving dogs in the basement that I didn't know were down there.
I honestly despise these people more than I despise Trumpers. Trumpers are prima facie low IQ whereas these people are presumably smart but are fine with tossing a W to Trump - and for what reason?
Not to be a snarkosaurus, but "these people are presumably smart"? Wow, citation needed. I can assure you that from the point of view of professional folk (particularly in STEM) who have to make these calls for a living, "presumably smart" is _not_ how we think about educated progressives. Presumably verbally facile, sure, granted, but that's a hell of a long way from "presumably smart". A good life rule to remember is that no matter how smart you are, someone agreeing with you one a topic is usually totally uncorrelated with their intelligence.
I think it's pretty obvious that the educated progressives calling for a ceasefire and who want to cancel anyone to the right of Nina Turner, although very misguided, are on average much smarter than the median Trump rally attendee.
What is even the point of living in a democracy if you cannot risk losing an election to run a platform on things you believe in? It doesn't make sense why any political party would rationally sideline all interests within itself to win 100% of the time. Unsurprisingly, our parties don't. Because if they ever got enough power to do exactly that without any faction breaking off, we wouldn't live in a competitive democracy anymore.
What interests are they sidelining? The interests of people who think there should be better and broader medical coverage, better support for childcare, more support of union labor, more clean energy and transportation, more legal pathways to entry to the country? All those people are being supported by the Biden administration, even if some people want him to push things even farther on some of those policies than he already has been.
I think Bacon's view is very much of a progressive writer in the Democratic party world, demanding more commitment to more policies on the left. This has been very successful over the last decade of the Dem party platform and it completely makes sense why writers like him will keep doing it. The problem with bringing up the existential threat of fascism is these people already do the same thing on policing, immigration, climate, and so on. You can't out-existential someone, especially if they're a coalition member in your party who also writes about politics for a living.
But to answer your point on the substantive policy matter, I think it would be Biden talking more about his 2020 platform, expanding Medicare down the age group, clamping down on more fossil fuel production, not taking executive actions on immigration like Johnson wants and defending the status quo of it instead. That's completely possible for Bacon to push Biden on. Whether it's a good idea overall is another matter.
You don’t risk losing an election when the costs of losing are too high: democratic backsliding, complete reversal of policy gains, and an even more unhinged judiciary.
Biden's checks, asylum policy, EV tax credits, Ukraine counter-offensive, EPA rules, Dept of Educ. rules, there are plenty of policy examples where they've risked losing an election. Let's quit with the pretense they're taking zero risks on behalf of their coalition.
TBF one rational play in this scenario is to play chicken by claiming you'll defect unless Biden makes commitments to do more of what you want but not really do it.
The problem is that it's hard to actually do this without drawing votes away from your guy.
Left wing theory of progressive change: Keep telling people that things are terrible and that they should vote for the angry, bearded, wild eyed guy in the corner in order to fix everything.
Actual progressive change: Back a charismatic and/or folksy, competent person and gradually move things forward while pushing a message of progress, pride and patriotism.
I think successful progressive government does a good job of serving the average person. That then creates a virtuous cycle of trust and willingness to invest in it (and of course also vote in that direction).
What is a real-world example of that kind of progressive government? As a resident of the biggest blue city, I experience progressive government as daily misrule. It doesn't do a good job at anything.
Arguably, mid-century America from the New Deal to the Great Society carried this out decently well. Societal trust in institutions was high, and the social safety net steadily expanded over three-and-a-half decades. Citizens saw the government meet the challenges of the Great Depression and WW2 and, not without some bumps or pushback, accepted this. Then Vietnam blew this up. It revealed widespread lying by government officials, polarized society, revealed incompetence, and cost a lot of money when the economy was at full employment, driving inflation. The New Deal consensus was never perfect, and cracks would've formed for other reasons, most likely. However, I think Vietnam really messed with a cycle of government trust and consensus.
The only way to say the New Deal wasn't progressive is if you narrowly define 'progressive' to mean the annoying and self-defeating tendencies of the modern left
But the actual New Deal was a radical expansion of the government and public sector institutions, the creation of the American welfare state, corporate oversight, trust-busting, even the creation of a number of state-owned companies. It was about as progressive as progressive gets. Important to remember that the notion of a 'progressive' ideology emerges not 20 years ago but 120 years ago, with the ideology of using expanding the state to solve social problems.
I don't know - I'm wary of redefining historical terms.
In the past, "progressive" described a middle-class reform movement that concentrated on good government and restraint (not replacement) of capitalism. Theodore Roosevelt was a progressive. He was the one who did the trust-busting. He was a proud Republican and a great believer in American capitalism. Those progressives had no interest in a welfare state.
Did the New Dealers call themselves progressive? If so, I never heard of it. Franklin Roosevelt's appeal was in that he positioned himself as being for all the people, against the "money power." New Dealers emphasized work, and good wages for work, and treated what we think of as "the welfare state" as social insurance. In this, they were 100% in sync with the American people. No enterprises of any size were nationalized, except in wartime.
"Progressive" is a bit of wordplay in the current context. By the 1990's, I remember, both "liberal" and "socialist" were such toxic labels that those adherents started calling themselves "progressives" instead. Their (still-toxic) mix of middle-class performative socialism and identity politics has very little to do with either the Square Deal or the New Deal.
It potentially was a high water mark for state capacity, which enabled the delivery of public goods to the extent policy pushed such things. If the state can’t actually efficiently function … then pushing stronger social policy really is a waste of money. This is one of the reasons I really like Matt’s droll policy analysis - the details matter quite a bit.
Agree. My experience with urban progressive government is in Seattle and Portland. Very difficult for me to see these as successful, especially not Portland.
It's not just the (non) policies, it's that such governments surface some of the nastiest people, to the great damage of the rest of us (particularly net tax payers, who should get *some* credit).
Good governance in Seattle is significantly hamstrung by the limits on state or local government's ability to raise revenue through any form of progressive taxation.
The citizens of the City want good streets, good parks, good schools, the homeless housed, accessible behavioral health services, strong public safety, and good environmental stewardship. But those things are almost impossible to provide within our current budget restraints. We have had a pattern of electing people who sincerely promise to do all those things better than we are doing the now and then can't do what they promise. It gets worse and we kick the can on issues were we can't make wise up front investments and so go for inefficient short term fixes.
So we tend to vote in whoever promises to "change" the most. Always Dems but sometimes radically progressive, sometimes much more conservative. Not much changes on the street and we vote to "change" again. We don't reward effective governance because at best we can see people making the best of a really bad situation and that doesn't look that different from being incompetent. It hasn't led to a focus on good governance or really evaluating folks policy details and skills.
But when push comes to shove and everyone is forced to make the best of a really bad situation -- like Covid, our leaders actually did a much better job of keeping us alive and economy from tanking than many other locations - especially given that Covid came here first and we had less lead time than other locations. It gives me some hope about how well we could function if our state constitution didn't give us only bad options.
I’m optimistic that the current leadership in Seattle is cleaning things up. I drove through 12th and Jackson yesterday and it was much cleaner than it’s been over the past few years!
I do think things are gradually getting better in Seattle. The last City Council raised some real revenu with the jump tax and invested it in building some much needed housing options for the most at need. Some of that has finally gotten built and opened in the last year. (Ironically, part of what discourages proactive approaches in Seattle is that everything takes 3 years to build so you don't get credit for anything you started during your current term during you current term.) I think that has helped.
I also think the current mayor's UCC have done a good job of breaking up some of the most dangerous and problematic encampments and cleaning up some of the trash from sites. I don't think either of those are solutions to the actual problem of homelessness but I do think they have helped prevent some violence. I also think that just keeping the city clean helps with public safety from a broken windows approach. (I don't actually think the "broken windows policing" approach is that effective but I do think the actual findings about areas that look uncared for and where crime is already happening making crime more common is probably right and at minimum that suggests we should fix windows and do more to make our communities look safe.) I also think it has helped to quell come community anger which wasn't helping the issue.
But there has also been resources wasted on chasing a few individuals from spot to spot, park to park, without any real benefit except different neighbors have to take turns dealing with them. I wish some of that money had been put into tiny house villages instead since at least all the folks in my neighborhood who have been frequent fliers and been swept multiple times say they would take a place in a tiny house immediately if one was available.
But the left wing has been very good at getting policy concessions out of the Democratic party over the last decade. That's why the party platform is way bigger and more expensive, and it's why Biden says populist stuff like Georgia's voting laws make "Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle" (???)
It's just literally true progressives have been very good at pulling the party to their positions while the Democratic party wins elections 50% of the time. Everyone proceeds to scream 50% isn't enough, but their revealed preference says otherwise.
I remember the proposed Georgia election laws being called "Jim Crow 2.0" and realizing that they were actually *less* restrictive than the laws I first voted under.
I live in left-wing academia. It is shocking to see such insistent doomerism among young (ish) people who are securely employed, well compensated, partnered with children, and spending holidays in Italy. These are among the luckiest people who’ve ever walked the earth. And yet they feel constantly aggrieved.
Gratitude is unfashionable. Myopia and grievance are in vogue. It’s no wonder everyone’s falling apart at the seams psychologically.
I work in left-wing academia, but I live in right-wing America. And I never ceased to be amazed by how far everyone goes out of their way to be depressed or angry.
It's like the lefties feel guilty for daring to feel happy because there is still unfairness left in the world and the righties are certain that their current good fortune is fleeting because the woke sword of Damocles is hanging over them.
I'll admit that as a conservative employee, I definitely feel like that woke Sword of Damocles is real.
And as a conservative parent of several young kids, I definitely feel like I have to carefully titrate my kids exposure to popular culture in order to protect them from some of the more harmful woke (or at least left-coded) trends out there.
I'm financially secure and damned near unfireable unless I do something stupid, yet some I still feel like I'm in a very precarious social situation.
I can try to use reason all I want about about the true odds of catastrophe being small and The Economy Is Good, Actually...but the feeling of dread doesn't go away. It's kind of oppressive.
> I definitely feel like I have to carefully titrate my kids exposure to popular culture in order to protect them from some of the more harmful woke (or at least left-coded) trends out there.
That just sounds like good parenting!
> I'm financially secure and damned near unfireable unless I do something stupid, yet some I still feel like I'm in a very precarious social situation.
Have you noticed a shift at all in the last 2 years? I certainly have. At my very woke tech company, DEI is basically gone, pronouns-in-bio are no longer "suggested" during onboarding, and we actually fired some political troublemakers
>And as a conservative parent of several young kids, I definitely feel like I have to carefully titrate my kids exposure to popular culture in order to protect them from some of the more harmful woke (or at least left-coded) trends out there.
Wouldn't it be easier to preemptively expose the kids to the trends and then have a talk with them where you explain why the trends are stupid and the people promoting them are idiots? That way if you fail and your kids are exposed to them anyway, they are immunized.
It's true that, despite efforts to immunize them, lots of parents suffer from "Rapid Onset Gender Denial," a mental condition where exposure to dumb far-right trends on the Internet causes them to repeatedly deny and invalidate the gender identity of their transgender children. However, I still think that immunization is best on the net. I've read many accounts of loving parents who supported their child's transition, and now have happy adult children living as their true gender.
Kids are right to be concerned about their parent's media consumption, since parents have vast power over their children's lives, and often fall for all kinds of dumb and harmful parenting trends. But I don't think censorship is the right way to go. :-)
If you hold standard social conservative beliefs that were considered centrist (or even slightly liberal) 15-20 years ago, a lot of modern pop culture (especially the stuff targeted at kids) is basically...very fraught.
So unless I felt fine just throwing my kid's futures to the wind and wishing/praying for the best, then keeping it all at arms length and only allowing controlled exposure is required.
It definitely makes me feel alienated from the rest of society, and I'm a pretty bog-standard conservative from a social POV.
I was just going to write a post highlighting how good things have been over the past 80 years. My biggest fear is that because of idiots on the far right and left, we kill our own good fortune. I would challenge anyone to find a better 80 period than the time between the end of WWII and now. Lifespan, global famine, global violence, access to healthcare, education, liberation for women and minority groups.
I think we should all be very thankful we got to live in this era and try very hard not to screw it up for our kids and grandkids.
It strikes me as a mirror image of the "I built that" crowd, who believe everything they have and achieved is a product of their own work rather than mostly a product of a remarkable system and society underpinning that allows them to then take their luck, and add a little hard work and fall into something remarkable. They believe that they owe nothing to the rest of society that makes it all possible
Both sides ignore that it's the underpinning society that makes their lives anything other than nasty, brutish, and short. And that they both owe an obligation to, and should see it as in their self interest to, strengthen the society in which they live.
Yes. I'm also astonished at how many similarly-situated young(ish) people I know - through hobbies like knitting, no less - who say they are consumed by anxiety and depression and depend on cocktails of medication to get through a day that, TBH, doesn't seem all that stressful. I don't begrudge sick people their medication, but this "falling apart at the seams" phenomenon seems tragically costly, at both the individual and society-wide scales.
It is the one ism that everyone can aspire to! You can’t change most of your identity easily, or without very strong social consequence, but you can be mentally ill. Congrats you are now part of an aggrieved group.
One criteria of finding out who is an actual intellectual person and who is merely a poseur is to find out if they believe that we live in the best epoch of humanity so far or not. Only the poseurs think that it used to be better (on a general level).
I think we’re living in the only era of humanity the previous ones were all just part of the simulation bc humans would have immediately killed themselves en masse when presented with a world without central heat and air
I thought gratitude was only for the 3 minutes of Shavasana at the end of yoga class. You're telling me it's supposed to be an all the time kind of thing?
Having a goal of improving the world often motivates people to spend time thinking about the things that can be improved, which means becoming very aware of badness that exists. Focusing on this can make you miserable.
I think that's definitely an interesting question!
To some extent, I'd say there is a long-running aspect to this. Your prototypical 1970s leftist, who supported the Marxist Party of the United Kingdom or the UK Marxist Party or the Marxist-Leninist Party, or any of the other groups that Monty Python satirized at the end of Life of Brian, probably was just as miserable and depressed as your typical Twitter/TikTok Gen Z activist. But there weren't as many people who had fallen into this way of being. My guess is that somehow social media helps get more people into this mindset.
I think this is it. Doomerism is the absence of hope. It isn’t just that things are bad, it is that this isn’t a clear path to fix catastrophic climate change / housing prices / enact leftist-utopia in their own eyes. There is no revolution in the wings.
The sort of darkly humorous answer, I'm pretty sure, from someone who used to be immersed in those spaces and still has a lot of younger leftist friends, is that liberalism is working very well. The West is very far from perfect, there are many problems left to be solved and in the current moment much of it is in political or social turmoil, but as has been said many times in this comment section, this is the greatest age of human history. It is easier and better to be alive now as a human than any other time. Until two years ago territorial war was a thing of the past, and while many Western institutions and governments might be inefficient or corrupt, most of them are stable. In the advanced democracies, at least, the world is at peace, and as much as people complain or protest vote about things, most of them are pretty comfortable. And in a stable, comfortable world, what progressives want, or what they say they want, can never happen. If you have the leftist/Marxist worldview, which states that the current system is so fundamentally broken and unjust that it needs to be overturned, the modern systems of government and economy are largely fixed in place in terms of their overall structures, even if the details change over time. That means that the only way to achieve what they want is a literal violent uprising and overthrow of government - which is also not going to happen, for the same reasons. So if you are a leftist in the modern Western world, you are 100% convinced that the world needs to be fundamentally different, but it's also self-evidently obvious to your eyes that that degree of change is impossible. So the only thing left to do, basically, is be miserable, and try to get other people on the Internet to be as miserable as you.
It's a worldview that leads pretty much inexorably to nihilism, it's a really profoundly depressing headspace to be in. Obviously this is combined with the internet making it easier to know about every injustice happening all over the world that you're supposed to be miserable about. (I'm convinced that this is a secret reason for the emergence of the small but vocal pro-Hamas left - they see what Hamas did as aspirational from a philosophical perspective, they wish that they had an army and weapons and they could march into Wall Street and massacre the bankers and politicians they see as the source of all suffering the same way Hamas murdered all those Jews.)
I don't want to sound without sympathy here - on the actual issues I get where a lot of those folks are coming from, and at the base level I probably agree with them more often than not. But I've lost all patience with their complete refusal to think strategically and take practical steps to advance their goals and their neopuritan ideological attitude. And the pro-Hamas stuff is utterly inexcusable.
From the outside looking in, I definitely seems like a lot of younger liberal people have embraced this idea that they and society are broken and they need to talk about it constantly.
And now that 'talking about it constantly' bit has led them to reinforce the behavior more and more.
It's worth pointing out to those outside academia that most people in academia aren't core faculty, have lousy pay and aren't all that lucky (by contemporary American standaards). Even the minority who are core faculty in most cases would be better compensated doing other jobs. They aren't to be pitied, of course, they mostly do what they chose and love and are compensated in other ways (job security, huge autonomy etc), but they are certainly no more privileged than many professions, less than most of their peers, perhaps.
P.S.
At least from my experience most young tenure-track faculty, at least, are just super grateful that they were lucky enough to get their position despite fierce competition, and don't shy away from expressing their gratitude if you ask them, but ymmv.
Yep, but also there is an undercurrent of if not jealously as such, at least a sense of injustice in the world that their non-academic peers are more economically compensated.
I live in Florida and see the very same mindset but on the opposite end of the political spectrum - with small business owners, finance bros and personal injury attorneys. You would think we're living under Fidel Castro's Cuba during the Great Depression, while these very same people are taking multiple ski trips per year, driving around in Teslas and eating at Joe's Stone Crab.
The negativity bias and the “everything sucks” mentality among progressives is a product of the “oppression Olympics.” Among well to do, highly educated, and downwardly mobile progressives, people can gain social status by signaling their victimization. They use manufactured grievances to excuse their behavior and assert they are good people because they were wronged by those bad people.
It’s silly. It’s the product of capitalism’s abundance and success that this cohort of people have the luxury to fabricate such dismal fictions about the state of the world.
(This message was written by someone who gets joy from chasing ducks.)
I think it's the combination of what you are talking about and what Matt is talking about. There was already a theory of change on the Left with longstanding theoretical roots that says you get people pissed off and they vote for Left wing change, as well as the dynamic where Democratic politicians don't want to piss off The Groups. And then on top of it all, you have the Oppression Olympics which, let's be honest, is mostly a bunch of the most privileged people in the world cosplaying as if they personally face tons of oppression, in order to chase additional status in their elite realms by pretending everything in still terrible.
Put that all together and it's really hard for the Left to come together around a really optimistic message.
Portland is a good example of aggregative impacts of this kind of mentality. The more people act like that and give it legitimacy the more it becomes an option for others in a feedback loop.
Communists routinely discussed hastening the revolution. "Be sad about everything" has a long history, and is probably attractive to radicals on all sides of politics.
From your quote from Perry Bacon: "...comparably little focus on the structural weaknesses of the U.S. economy."
The key word is "structural". Matt (and the rest of us, on the whole) has an appreciation for the fruits of a market economy. We want more of those fruits! Helping the less fortunate and expanding the safety net depends on the continuing growth of our economy. It is an abundance agenda.
But the people like Perry Bacon don't agree. They envision a different economy altogether -- hence the word "structural". Elsewhere in his essay, Bacon writes that "Most Americans are better off economically compared with 2010 and perhaps even compared with 1999 or 2018. Americans have more money per capita than the overwhelming majority of people around the world. But our system of hyper-capitalism still shouldn't be described as good or strong, because it leaves to many people either struggling or very nervous about their future."
The one positive about Donald Trump is that he unites the Democratic Party coalition in opposition to his criminality, incompetence and authoritarian inclinations. Once he is gone, I think we are going to have a serious problem in the Party holding together the professional and managerial class, who support and benefit from our market economy, with the growing number of young people who want to see "structural" changes to the capitalist system that has created -- and continues to create -- the best economy in the world.
I didn't come away from the good old 538 days thinking I could think a whole lot less of Perry Bacon, but *holy shit*, there was so much basement underneath that floor!
He went deep into Black history, particularly post Civil War era, and wrote a number of very good things on that time. But he seems to have become stuck using those years as his framework for explaining everything in the country. He's become less insightful and repetitious as a result.
It so odd...I liked his articles and podcast appearances while at 538 (though he was no Harry Enten). But ever since...yikes, I can't even believe it's the same guy. Definitely one of the prominent writers I kind of reflexively disagree with the most.
I feel like Nate did a good job as editor in chief in getting his writers to stick to the goal of empirical data journalism even while acknowledging some of the takes they really wanted to cover.
One of things most of us assumed at the end of the Cold War was that the capitalism vs. Communism argument would go away and the Overton Window would narrow to some spectrum such as Singapore to Sweden or the United States to Denmark.
But a lot of these loud folks really do talk as if "overthrowing capitalism" is a possible and desirable political outcome, even now.
Overthrowing capitalism, if you narrowly define capitalism as a system where a small number of capitalists (ie the owners of capital) direct the state to operate in their interests and prevent ostensibly democratic mechanisms from countering their control of the state, is a perfectly reasonable goal.
The problem is that the United States is not a capitalist country by that narrow definition. The Gilded Age ended 120 years ago. TR broke up the trusts.
These people are operating from a false understanding of how the USA operates. They should be seen as conspiracy theorists on a comparable scale to Qanon.
Also, there's a serious dose of motte and bailey going on here: switching between the strict Marxian definition of capitalism (roughly what I wrote) and the looser popular definition (a market system that isn't socialist) is something that happens a lot, and is used to conceal the fact that a lot of people are essentially conspiracy theorists about the economy and political system. If you say "the country is capitalist and capitalism is bad", then you could either be wildly hostile to all markets, or you could have false beliefs about how the country works, and you find people who buy into the conspiracy theory pretending to be wildly hostile to markets because that's much more socially acceptable.
But when you hear massively OTT descriptions of Citizens United: this is the conspiracy theory that lies behind them: every politician (or almost every politician) is explicitly being bribed by a conspiracy of billionaires, newly elected politicians are near-instantly corrupted by the system and there are only a handful of holdouts (usually: Bernie plus whoever the individual conspiracy theorist likes; AOC is now often seen as having been corrupted because she didn't refuse to associate herself with non-Squad Democrats). Only a revolution can clear out these Augean Stables; electing politicians always runs the risk that they will be corrupted. If you say this openly, it's laughable. But they don't; they use the ambiguity in "capitalism" to conceal it. Indeed, many are themselves caught in the ambiguity and aren't explicit believers, but repeat statements that only make sense from the conspiratorial context.
It is the abundance created by capitalism that gives these people the idleness and luxury to hold such asinine beliefs. They are materially protected from the consequences and costs they want to impose on others.
Maybe this is yet another consequence of having a two-party system? Here in Germany we have separate parties for the far-left and the far-right, and in the last election from 2021, they respectively received 4.9% and 10.3% of the vote. And of Germany's 7 big parties, these two are the only ones that have never been part of a federal coalition government.
In contrast, if you only have two parties, the far-left and far-right have little choice but to try and influence whichever of the two parties is closer to them. So how could the Overton Window narrow?
But rhetoric aside, to the extent they proposing policies vs platitudes, they are proposing largely the policies of an idealized Scandinavia not the USSR. The Overton window is about arguing the merits of Citizens United or expanding unions, not collectivizing the farmland and turning the Apple Store into a Co-op
I'm curious for readers of Slow Boring who apparently agree with Perry's analysis to enlighten me about the aspects of our economy that require deep structural change. This is a genuine question; I'm actually quite curious!
I don’t agree with Perry Bacon about the deep structural changes that are needed, but I do think there are deep structural that should be made. Pigouvian taxes (including carbon taxes), broad permitting reform for construction of housing and green infrastructure, probably a very different relationship between work, taxes, redistribution, health insurance, etc, especially as artificial intelligence reshapes the economy.
But I also think the way you get there safely is through the slow boring of hard boards, not through a revolution that could just as easily go the way of the Iranian, Chinese, Russian, or French revolutions as the American one.
I unironically don’t think this requires structural reforms but simply raising taxes and getting rid of zoning, with some sprinkle of pro union legislation.
I say tho because I don’t think the US actually is far off from much of these things and doesn’t requires a massive overhaul to get there (like it didn’t in the earlier 20th century).
I had a feeling someone might reply with something like this, and I suppose it depends on your definition of "structural." But are you saying the New Deal wasn't structural reform? It created huge new agencies, created millions of jobs, and changed the economy in pretty fundamental ways. It wasn't the Bolshevik Revolution, but it also wasn't simply a higher EITC. Even getting rid of zoning is a pretty damn radical change that would alter quite literally the structures in our country. It's not structural in that it wouldn't require a new government association, but it is a soft appropriation, in that people bought property believing it would have exclusionary zoning and we'd be taking that away. I fully support getting rid of zoning, and I certainly get downplaying its radicalness in public communication, but among friends we can admit it's a big fucking deal.
I don't know that I fully agree with Perry's analysis but I am probably closer to him than most readers. I would say that the biggest structural issues would be that we are using the free market to provide some essential services where the free market is not going to create the best possible outcomes, most significantly health care. I also think we are being sufficiently progressive in our taxation system and so are not adequately distributing wealth out of the system in a fair way. We are also allowing corporations to participate too much in the political system as the equals of people and this has created distorted policies that focus too much on protecting corporate profits over protecting the public (ie banking deregulation).
If only we could have a free-market in healthcare OR a more social policy things would be so much better. The current market is so distorted it isn’t much of a market at all. High regulation across the board, limited numbers of participants, no pricing transparency, almost no ability to negotiate at the services level either due to exigent circumstances, being tied to employer plans of which you have almost no say over, or strong regulation that limits what is on the market anyway. You have government controlled credentials and residency supply. It is a mess. A more free-market solution would be less fair to the least advantaged but probably much more efficient. And so would a single-payer system that just operated a top down service. Personally I’d prefer something closer to the dual tack system the Dutch have with single-payer “long term” care and private “short term” insurance for things like a broken arm. The shorty term market can actually function as real insurance because expense is capped and you can subsidize those that can’t pay via the functioning market. Not a perfect system,
But seems to have strengths of both approaches and is actually pretty close to what we have with some tweaks. “Medicare for all … long term care” is not far off from the current system and it would enable us to fix some the issues with competitiveness of the exchanges by capping costs (to insurers)
Nah, free Cadillac care for everyone, don’t let everyone become a doctor but increase the number of residency spots by a LOT, and reduce the population by using Republicans for LD50 chemical testing so that we have more doctors per capita
I feel like the one that keeps coming up in my life and social circle is childcare and to a large extent healthcare, and I actually mean this in a much larger sense than just how it's typically used (Like including measures of stress, anxiety and other mental health problems). Education and housing are also structurally unequal and not just something that everyone gets a good one of like without any special work on their part.
It's funny because the "structural change" energy in education seems to be coming from the right these days--which aligns with Matt's observation that "change" is no longer necessarily a left-oriented disposition.
And is there any "structural change" momentum in health care currently? Seems more like a "slow boring of hard boards" situation of voting for officials that expand ACA subsidies and cap drug costs (Democrats at the federal government level) and expand medicare (Democrats at the state level) which has yielded the lowest health uninsured rate in the country's history.
I think with healthcare a lot of the structuralist fervor right now is in nurses unions. Like the whole staff system at major hospitals in my area have been wholly gutted by the pandemic. My wife had to be in the hospital for a few days earlier this year and it was obviously a pale shade of what that same hospitals non-doctoring staff was like.
I don't know that there's a political block for this but I think just in general we don't have anything close to the number of care professionals that we'd really need to make sure everyone was really healthily handling shit. Like I'm a foster parent and the demand for youth mental health services like kind of outstrips the supply by a nearly immeasurable amount. The healthcare system has reached a capacity for diagnosis that is orders of magnitude beyond its ability to provide treatment.
As for education I'm not so sure it's so much that conservatives have more ideas about this or if they're just more organized about their ideas. Like get into school TikTok and tell me there's not a lot of left wing ferment going on there. It's just not that salient for some reason. I'd be open to some of the right wing ideas if they werent' just dripping with homophobia and racism. Have the gay penguin book in the library, have respect for the way your students walk in the door if they want to be queer or genderfluid or w/e and suspend them with an option to expel when they become unruly little bastards.
If the conservative parents are racist and/or homophobic, it seems like you would want them safely segregated (of their own volition) in their own schools and away from everyone else.
Better they have their school choice rather than take over public schools.
I mean I'm a charter school teacher and I think more of a free market for policies around these things would be fine if it isn't sanctioning outright discrimination. I think I'd be unwilling to countenance a no blacks or gays are allowed to attend here but a hey at this school we teach a fairly conventional American history, at this school we teach the 1619 project or whatever and at this school we can have inclusive books and at another we carefully review the materials to keep all but the most inoffensive content out of students reading.
Like it strikes me as insane how much conservatives have become statists once they started losing elite culture. I used to be a much more conflicted voter and think things should just be left up to individuals to find what was right for them but when they really started down this road of using preemption all the time it makes me skeptical that any compromise that has provisions for marginalized people at all is going to be tenuous at best and a house of cards more often than not.
I don't blame kids for their parents being racist or homophobic and I don't want to see them denied an evidence based education that includes learning how to function in a pluralistic society just because I don't like sitting at PTA meetings with their asshole parents.
I'll confess that here is a part of me that is selfishly a little bit relieved when wealthy, high-competition, smug parents pull their kids out of SPS and put them in private schools. The high minded part of me worries about the resource hoarding and segregation that brings. But I also don't want to have to sit with them at PTA meeting and, unlike the racist and homophobs who won't talk to me once they get to know me for more than five minutes, they guys will torture me with entitled stories about their previous geniuses for hours. There have definitely been some loud exits where I have muttered "don't let the door hit your ass on the way out under my breath."
There's an inherent contradiction here that you are deploying all this rhetoric to defend a market economy, but also say the expansion of the social safety net are consequence of it.
You probably are plenty aware of the existence of market externalities, market failures, state capture, and that social safety net programs explicitly remove distribution of goods and services out of the market.
You're probably also aware of American history having access to centuries of untapped resources, so it's not exactly clear this is fundamentally resultant of capitalism. In fact, the Chinese economy has experienced more rapid growth, in such a short time frame, than any other nation in the history of the world.
Would you yourself accept this kind of inconsistent reasoning for any other topic, if it didn't wind up leading to the conclusion that capitalism is more important than politics?
China got to benefit (less so now) from having a functional government (so they could implement changes and foreign investors didn't have to worry about too much instability) and being able to take advantage of technological advances elsewhere so they can do a lot of "install what already works elsewhere to catch up"
If they _hadn't_ had a lot of growth (like India) I'd have been surprised.
That's part of the tragedy of Africa is that it's failing to be able to use these same factors.
By highlighting China's more rapid growth performance, are you trying tohighlight Socialist performance over Capitalist? Because it doesn't quite work. However, you want to label China's system, while it is way more central and receptive to government demands from the commanding heights, it is far from oblivious to market forces domestically and internationally, including the all-important price system, and it certainly has not been the type of system that American and western leftists aim for of prioritizing equality of public consumption uber alles.
The Democrats need to be on the bench for 8 or 12 years, meditating on their sins and figuring out a new approach. Meanwhile, the Republicans will run riot (for ill and maybe some good). Hopefully Trump will leave (or be kicked out) of office when the time comes.
The GOP fully supports a would-be dictator and all-around d-bag, but it's the *Democrats* who need to sit on the bench for 8 years and meditate on their sins? Gotcha. Glad we cleared that up.
One of my least favorite takes in sports is the idea that a team has to suck badly in order to get better, usually pinning their hopes on a high draft pick to turn things around. Most of time...the team just keeps sucking. Always try to win as much as you can.
And this applies much, much more to things that actually matter in life.
Both parties are unworthy. But we have only two choices, so we work with what we've got. I'd be more comfortable in November if I knew that a vote for Biden would not be a vote for four more years of even worse incompetence than we've seen in the last four. If they win by a hair, the party factions will decide that their failed policies are actually perfect and a-okay with the people (except the deplorables who can be ignored) and they will never fix their problems. The bench is a good place to do that. Just because Trump talks big about being a dictator, doesn't mean the Americans will let him be one.
"four more years of even worse incompetence than we've seen in the last four..." What in the world are you talking about? Things aren't perfect, but they haven't been catastrophic either, and did you live through the Trump administration? Matt's article may be about Debbie Downer progressives, but I don't understand Debbie Downer centrists either.
Tom Nichols the other day said on Twitter that he's starting to think it's a 50/50 shot we're in for a dark 20 years if Trump wins and I'm starting to think that might be true...
I have felt it's over 50 percent for some weeks now. The New York Times poll yesterday (10% of Biden 2020 voters actively plan to vote for Trump in 2024) is disastrous for the Democrats, who have richly earned a place on the bench. At this point, I'm trying to talk myself into the possibility that Trump will be President again. I'm repeating the mantra "I have faith in the American people."
It's a revolutionary situation. Trump is just surfing the wave. As Jefferson said "a little rebellion is a good thing, now and again." I just wish we didn't have a malignant narcissist at the head of it. But, if Trump is that bad, the Republicans won't have 20 years.
Do you really believe that we should run a country by punishing people appropriately for their sins, regardless of what that does to everyone else who has to live in the country while you’re doing that?
It's a turn of phrase - don't take it too literally. I think if you want to run an excellent organization, you have to be ruthless with failure. It might be nice to wait until Trump is off the scene before taking time to do that, but the situation doesn't permit that, so there we are. Part of being an American is accepting it when a majority of your fellow Americans install someone you don't prefer, even if you think he's a dirtbag. If Trump wins by a good margin (distinctly possible, in my view) then that's that.
I agree that part of being an American is accepting it when a majority of your fellow Americans install someone you don’t prefer, even if you think he’s a dirtbag.
But doesn’t that precisely contradict what you said when you said the Democrats deserve to be punished? Shouldn’t we be accepting them, and trying to make them better, rather than encouraging people to replace them with someone worse?
The Democrats have no vested rights to be in power. That's what "sitting on the bench" means. They are out of power until they can convince a majority that they are trustworthy enough to put them back in again. I think this will take more than 4 years, because the dysfunction goes deep.
Clearly an economy managed democratically by the electorate, which is always a hair’s breadth away from a GOP majority, would never leave anyone struggling or uncertain about the future.
Dismissing conservatives as being "for selfishness" is an easy way to miss something important.
Progressives have done everything they can to define "virtue" as "being hostile to the United States in all its works." In so doing, they make the message loud and clear, that they don't really belong, or want to belong to the American project, and that they have no commitment to their fellow citizens as Americans. In time of war, they are perfectly comfortable supporting our enemies.
Now, conservatives tend to be patriotic, as do centrists and a lot of liberals like me, and we all tend to hate this stuff. Let's not pretend that this negativity and hostility represents "high-minded principle." How can anyone claim the right to direct the future of our nation, when they don't want to be associated with its most basic principles? Loud progressives aren't everyone, but the inexplicable failure of responsible people in that camp to protest against this remotely enough, says volumes to the rest of us.
I think you're allowing yourself to confuse extreme left Democrats who control a handful of local governments on the Pacific coast and like 5 congressional seats with the actually-existing Democratic party, which is so committed to the American project it was willing to sacrifice left-wing priorities on immigration to get Ukraine aid passed.
Also consider that virtually every staffer who presents themselves for employment in a Democratic administration is a PMC who adheres to left-wing policy and cultural ideas. They don't even fathom that the rest of the country doesn't share them. This is why you have lowly staffers writing publicly to the President to denounce his policy in the Middle East, which is in strong support of one of our major allies. In any functional organization, they'd be on the street the very next day. They are the worst people possible to be leading a party that needs its working-class votes.
The left is a strong faction in the Democratic Party, strong enough to block and redirect if not to rule. Exhibit one is the shambles created at the border, where countless attempts by the President to get it solved were ignored or slow-walked by the "loyal" staffers to whom he assigned the problem, starting with the Vice President. This year it is far, far too late. He wasn't "willing" to sacrifice left-wing priorities on immigration: he was going hat-in-hand from a position of weakness that that very faction put him in. Now it will cost him his presidency.
So who are the patriots running the Republican ship?
I simply can't credit this as an explanation of anything. I don't like lima beans. That doesn't mean I have to order a double bacon cheeseburger with fries and a shake, and if I did, you'd have the right to be skeptical when I said I was on Atkins.
It's all a matter of perspective. Our country was born in revolution. If you think it is being run into the ground by corrupt people who despise American values, then you might view yourself as being patriotically motivated to throw them out. Americans have seen Trump a lot and they know everything about him, January 6 and all the rest. If enough of them vote for him anyway, that's the end of the matter: its the American people talking. At that point, personal opinions about Trump's unlovely behaviors kind of fade in importance.
Yeah let’s stop elevating selfishness *and* anti-Americanism and get back to elevating virtue, including appropriate recognition of the suffering of those who are worse off in one way or another, without centering it in such a way that makes us negative about all attempts to help.
Being effective means to be cold-eyed as to causes and effects. That may involve tough judgments on some of the people who need help and are suffering. For example, my city spends more than $1b/year on homeless services, yet many homeless people prefer to sleep on the street rather than go into dangerous and degrading barracks shelters. But why don't we have better, single-room shelters? Because the government defers to advocates who are ideologically invested in "compassion" and not stigmatizing any of the behaviors that get people into homelessness, or obstruct their getting out of it. They believe in building free apartments for people who can't manage their own lives, with services to manage it for them. Those apartments are very expensive, can be built only slowly, and take away a lot of money that could be spent on better shelters and services. So maybe we should make results matter more than compassion? Like, accepting that we should spend that money making the shelters safe and humane? And helping developers to build what used to be called SRO's (which most young people call "living with roommates") at market rates that are affordable for people who have modest jobs. And trying to help people down on their luck to get accountable drug treatment and a job so they can move out and pay rent like everyone else.
I think that virtue consists in doing things that actually effectively help those who are worse off. Some people don't care about helping those who are worse off, and vote against policies that cost something in order to help those who are worse off. Other people want to distinguish themselves from that group, so they start with the first step of elevating caring about helping those who are worse off. Making it very obvious that you care about those who are worse off makes it clear you're not in the first group.
But sometimes, the actions that make it most clear that one isn't in the first group aren't the most effective actions at actually benefiting those who are worst off. I think real virtue requires taking this second step, and actually doing the things that are helpful (or at least, making the effort to try to figure out which things are in fact helpful) rather than just taking the first step of distinguishing oneself from those who actually don't care.
The in-between group consists of people who are "virtue signaling". I think that virtue signaling is in fact a good thing, but we shouldn't let the signaling of virtue outweigh real virtue. Sometimes when people complain about virtue signaling they take this complaint as a reason to reject virtue itself, when I think we should take it to be a reason to embrace virtue above and beyond mere signaling, even when it conflicts with sending the most effective signals.
I seem to remember that some of the most right-wing people are church people who give a lot of money to charitable causes (not just the collection plate). Mormons, famously, give 10%. Believing that the government shouldn't be doing something, or that it shouldn't be doing it that way, is not the same as believing that it shouldn't be done. You can't conclude that, because they vote against something, they therefore don't care to help. They may just not like the way it's being done.
The most basic principle of this country is popular sovereignty. Government of, by, and for the people. The Democratic Party believes in that. Trump’s GOP thinks your vote only counts if you vote for him.
I think both Democrat and Republican voters believe in that. I believe that parties and politicians believe in what helps them stay in power, and that can get away with.
"In so doing, they make the message loud and clear, that they don't really belong, or want to belong to the American project, and that they have no commitment to their fellow citizens as Americans. In time of war, they are perfectly comfortable supporting our enemies."
Oh my God! We have a believer in the "Green Lantern" Theory of Geopolitics.
An oldie but goodie penned by Matt Y. himself. Jeebus Christmas. You lose your license for being taken seriously believing in that kind of garbage. You think foreign policy and national security outcomes don't hinge on countries' material interests, capabilities, and how policy iand strategy are executed, competently or incompetently? It's just about willpower, and will to win, vs. cheering for the enemy or blaming America first? That the Republican Party is superior at National Security, defense policy, foreign policy, simply on the say-so, its own say-so, that it hates America's enemies more, and the other party, or people somehow adjacent to it, don't hate them enough?
That's a load of cock-a-mamie BS pollluting our national discourse for decades. And I love the latest exceptions, which seem to be, "but as soon as a Republican says an enemy isn't an enemy (Russia), well then it is not an enemy".
Since you need an Atlantic subscription for the original Green Lantern theory article, I'll try to find a free one.
Patriotism can have multiple definitions. I would argue that the Progressive cause has been hostile the history of the United States and some of its symbols and national identity but is very much concerned with the welfare of the American People. Conservatives are much more positive about US History and identity but are less concerned about the universal welfare of the American People. We may differ about which counts as love of country. (Ironically on the Left I am seeing people exhibit a lot more concern about the history and identity of the nation of Palestine and less on the long term welfare of the Palestinian people.)
I define it simply: understanding yourself as part of the American project and accepting that you have a bond of citizenship with other Americans. We all have different views of how to express and act on that, which is fine, we need that diversity of voices.
That said, I don't see any of this basic realization in progressives. They just trash the entire idea of America, period. They aren't even proud of being American themselves (polls show this). Thus I would argue that they can't be truly concerned about the welfare of all Americans because they are disdainful of those very bonds of citizenship in both theory and practice. Of course this is very painfully obvious in the Israel-Hamas situation, where they support people who are designated enemies of the United States, and behave terribly towards American Jews who are their fellow citizens. I conclude some of the Palestinian-Americans among them are not, in their own heads, Americans at all - they are basically Palestinians who happen to live comfortably in the United States where they have liberal free speech rights and can get away with hate speech against Jews. As for the others in the protests, well: education in civics and American history has declined badly, so I think they have a very rudimentary idea of what American citizenship is.
Conservatives might say "I don't think those people are deserving or real Americans" and that's bad in my books, but at least they acknowledge bonds of citizenship with the rest of us, and are proud to be part of the American project.
"In time of war, they are perfectly comfortable supporting our enemies."
"They aren't even proud of being American themselves"
I think there's some severe stated-vs.-revealed preference issues going on here. It may be fashionable to dissociate oneself from America, but nobody's burning their draft cards or refusing to pay their taxes.
"Conservatives might say 'I don't think those people are deserving or real Americans' and that's bad in my books, but at least they acknowledge bonds of citizenship with the rest of us, and are proud to be part of the American project."
(1) If somebody says that "those people are [not] real Americans", then I don't think you can really claim that they "acknowledge bonds of citizenship with" those people. (2) I'm much more comfortable with somebody who would deny themselves the right to be American than with someone who would deny me the right to be an American.
If what you mean is, do I support the Israelis in this conflict, yes, that is the case. I do that very largely because of the atrocious behavior that the pro-Palestinian protestors have indulged themselves in, and its clear relationship with leftist anti-American ideology, and how powerful this is in spite of it very much not approved of by 90% or more of the voters. I see a whole bunch of people who don't understand that they are American first, and have a responsibility to behave decently to their Jewish fellow citizens before they have any responsibility for "From the River to the Sea" or other foreign causes.
If these protestors' impact on our vacillating government get us into a shooting war with Iran, they may well have draft cards (boys and girls both, this time), and uniforms, and assault rifles with which to kill Muslims as part of their American duty. And they had better be prepared to do it. That kind of protest is a little harder than what they've been used to - you can actually go to jail for it.
"If what you mean is, do I support the Israelis in this conflict"
No. That's not what I mean at all.
What I mean is: there's a gigantic distinction between "wishing the US to support a different side in an armed conflict and attacking other Americans for not sharing one's political views on that topic" and "in times of war...supporting our enemies". It is the distinction between political dispute (loyal, albeit uncivil, opposition) and treason. And I do not think it is appropriate (indeed it is un-American!) to cloud that distinction.
There's a degree to which I am highlighting this to make a point (though if we get dragged into a big war with Iran, it may be literally accurate). Recognize, though, that these protests are not acts of civil disobedience nor are they about freedom or civil rights for citizens. They are street actions on behalf of a foreign power that is inimical to us.
People who openly supported communism during the Cold War had a very hard time even though we weren't actually in a formal state of war with the Soviet Union. Even the communists understood that they were being unpatriotic: were proud of it, in fact. They said that they were exercising their free speech rights, and they were, but a large majority saw that what the communists were freely speaking about is overthrowing our political system. This was over the line for them, and, in my mind, justifiably so.
The Bill of Rights guarantees our right to peaceably assemble for redress of grievances. These protests are neither peaceable nor related to any grievances they might have as American citizens about their own government and our collective life together. It's a big stretch to extend that right to the importation of a foreign dispute to our shores. There is nothing "loyal" about this, as is clear from what they openly shout in these protests and what they say in their social media feeds. In a big national crisis these would almost certainly earn them a trip to preventive detention. The situation is not that severe (yet) but the acts are the same even if the consequences are not.
If you like a history lesson, in the last big national crisis, the vast majority of German- and Italian-born citizens were at great pains to stress their American loyalty. So were the Japanese citizens, who were treated shamefully, yet who were 100% loyal in word and practice. I'm not hearing any of that from the Palestinian or other Arab communities, most of whose members are American citizens. Maybe there are cooler heads there, but I'm not hearing anything about it.
Hum. I would say that I understand myself to be part of the American Project. I understand the "American Project" to be an ongoing experiment of providing strong individual civil liberties and democratic rule in a large and growing pluralistic society in which every generation has face challenges and generally expanded access to democracy and expanded liberty as our understanding of the needs of neighbors and the recognition of the truly equality of all has grown through a combination of us living as neighbors and the brave activism of people fights for liberty and justice for all. I understand my role in that project to be key to my entity.
I also feel a strong bond of citizenship with other Americans. That is why I want all of them to have the right to vote, the right to practice their faith, get excellent health care if they get sick, and be supported by a strong social safety net in times of trouble and am willing to pay more in taxes to provide all that even to folks who hate my guts and wouldn't wish the same to me. You can't acknowledge your bonds of citizenship only with the folks you think should count as real Americans. That isn't a bond of citizenship. That is a bond of tribalism.
I'm not "proud to be an American" per se. I am an American because I was born here. I did nothing to earn it. Why would I be proud of it. I think I am a good neighbor and citizen and I am proud of that. I am not proud of parts of our history like Native American genocide and slavery. I am proud of parts of our history like the civil rights movement and New Deal although I think neither was perfect or complete.
I'm with James Baldwin when he said "I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."
Folks can wear a flag shirt and carry a tiki torch - that flag shirt doesn't make them a patriot.
As far as I am concerned the best gauge of patriotism is your willingness to serve your country and your neighbors. If you, like me, believe that justice is what love looks like out in public, than a fight for just isn't a fight against your country is your way of showing you love your country.
I support strong individual civil liberties and democratic rule in a large and growing pluralistic society as well. But I also understand that some of us have other things (such as religion) that are equally protected and equally part of our liberties. I've seen a lot of stuff in this "fight for justice" movement that is heedless of those things. We forget about the "e pluribus unum" thing, but it's needed now more than ever.
I am actually a very religious person. I would say that my faith is a guiding principlel in much if not most of my political thinking. My faith also requires things of me that depend on protection of freedom of religion. For example I can't say the pledge of allegiance. I'm an attorney and I can't take oaths or say "Your Honor" to a judge. I've had many cases where I have had to directly rely upon our constitutional protections of freedom of religion for myself and my daughter. I consider religious liberty to be a core part of civil liberties and one of America's most important contributions to the development of human rights world wide.
I have definitely had the experience of others on the Left saying things to me that I found insulting about religion and religious people but I am not aware of any attempt by any progressive politician to limit people's ability to freely practice their religion. In general, progressive communities tend to be more protective of minority rights such as the right of Muslim women to wear a hijab than more conservative communities. The only really arguments that I have heard on the Right is that they object to public officials not being able to discriminate against who gets access to public services because it would permit other people to do something that they themselves are precluded to do under their religion (same sex marriage registrations) and Pharmacists not being able to refuse to dispense medication that their religion says would be a sin for them to take. Neither of those things are actual limits on people's religious liberties just their ability to require others to act as members of their own faith community.
I do think that there are factions of the Left should be more respectful of people of faith. I think it would be a better match to their stated values if they were more inclusive. But there are also lots of people like me who on the Left because of faith based commitments. A lot of the activism I do is with other people of faith.
This is why I love the terms prosocial and antisocial. You can put things on an axis of selfish/altruistic, or tolerant/intolerant, but I think prosocial/antisocial is the best axis for defining virtue. People hate cancel culture because it's tolerant in an antisocial way, and doomers are annoying because they're altruistic and empathetic in an antisocial way. Meanwhile, lots of selfish conservative behavior winds up being neither prosocial nor antisocial, just neutral. So we should try to reserve our judgement for people who are actually being antisocial and reserve our praise for people who are actually being prosocial.
I think it's pretty clear that progressive doomerism is more about signaling one's leftwing bonafides than a clear-eyed tactical decision to effect change.
I’m glad that Perry made an explicit strategic argument for doomerism, but I think that like 90% of the time, the behavior is just backfilled from the speaker’s existing sense of doom. I think the underlying drivers are:
1– Journalism and academia, where professional discourse-makers live, actually are in a horrible economic state that’s not getting better. Even people who are smart enough to know better emotionally over-index on their immediate conditions.
2– Heavy X.com use is both a symptom of and contributor to depression, and depressed people are inclined to interpret all information negatively.
In the short run, if you’re an electoral politician, you should avoid relying on journalists and heavy X.com users to push your optimistic message. Instead, go on TV or do livestreams and push your optimistic narrative, with a level of sunniness and conviction which might initially seem a bit weird. Play DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win.” If the media push back against you, call them out of touch. Make ad spots where normal-seeming people talk about how they’re doing well.
In the long run, it would probably be good to find some ways to alleviate the material situation for academics and journalists, because their situation creates bad incentives and distorts their perceptions, in ways that are bad for a complex society that needs researchers and information-providers. And we might also want a stronger state effort to measure and regulate down the negative externalities of social media.
On the media side— maybe just creating a bunch high-quality state-sponsored outlets, sort of like NPR or PBS* but for text media. It would create a bigger group of stably-employed journalists with relatively less incentive and inclination to be hyper-negative.
Overall discourse environment— something like forcing social media companies let you default to a chronological feed of posts from people you follow rather than an algorithmically curated feed, creating settings that let people precommit to limiting their time in the site, strictly enforcing an age limit of 15 or 16– other people probably have more good ideas on this front.
* Two outlets where the overall “temperature” of coverage tends to be relatively even-keeled, in a way that you mostly see elsewhere in the business-oriented press. Having stability and financial security tends to make people act less crazy.
EDIT: I mostly think these changes would make people less doomer-y/angry, but I don’t think they’d reset object-level beliefs to their 2012 state— and as somebody who supports trans rights, Big Fiscal, and some other recent opinion developments, I don’t really want that to happen.
Yea by “make America 2012 again” I’m definitely thinking more about tone than content, although definitely some things (especially the “no coercion by the government no matter what the consequences of our inaction” moves of places like Portland and Seattle) were better left untried.
If Biden loses this election after all the work he's done to cater to progressives, the lesson isn't going to be that the next Democratic candidate just needs to be more left wing. The lesson will be that progressives are unreliable liabilities as coalition partners, and much more useful as hippy-punching foils than as policy influencers.
I think this is presuming the outcome of a post-defeat debate. I fear that a Biden loss will lead to horrific chaos in the Democratic party and bellum omnium contra omnes.
Matt’s reminds me of yet more reasons why I think Biden is the best president of our lifetime. I do wonder why the common perception of him is so different. I can’t help but think it’s depressingly simple: lack of charisma. We all like to think we’re sophisticated and high minded but at the end of the day for our impression of a leader perhaps the razzle dazzle of a confident inspiring speech is worth a thousand policy achievements and subtle threadings of the needle?
Biden has seemingly pursued a "secret congress" strategy of being a minimal public presence while pushing insider legislative wins. It has worked on the legislative side, but it's been, I think, a contributor to his popularity problem.
But, I guess we'll see if that was a strategy of necessity as the election kicks off.
"...strategy of being a minimal public presence..."
His people surely understand that the more the public sees of (and hears from - ice cream cone photo ops, if overdone, can come off as cavalier, but at least he can't speak while eating) Biden, the more obvious his mental condition will be.
That system really seems flat-out better than ours where the president is both the politically most powerful person in the country *and* the national figurehead. Think the 2000 election where Gore was excoriated for being stiff and wooden while Bush was the guy people wanted to have a beer with.
Ike had his good points, but perhaps was not the best at pre-clearing some of the landmines left for his successors that he would have been better off taking the shrapnel from than they.
I am thinking on matters of Iran, Vietnam, Bay of Pigs go or no go or don't let Castro happen in the first place, more stable settlement of Berlin & European security and recognition issues, Civil Rights enforcement.
There could have been plenty worse Presidents in Ike's place, plenty of worse outcomes. I won't downplay it. He was lucky and good. And when you're lucky, being good often has something to do with it, but not everything. Sometimes you benefit from wasting assets, like Ike did. Among the ones Ike benefitted from were a few years of Soviet strategic timidity and caution, in the wake of Stalin's death, and the assumption of collective leadership and then Khrushchev's consolidation of dominant power, the Soviets' and Soviet bloc's still incomplete reconstruction from WWII damage, Asian Communists' postwar focus on domestic reconstruction and basic agricultural modernization and industrialization, and America's lead in inventory and productive capacity for intercontinental aircraft, rockets, submarines, and nuclear and thermonuclear bombs for the decade. These all provided an edge that was not going to last through the 60s and the natural build-up of Sino-Soviet industrial and technical capacity, so allowed relatively cheap defense of status quos without *either* negotiation or new regional wars. Third or Fourth term Eisenhower would have been faced with new choices, requiring fighting or retreating someplace. And domestically, putting up or shutting up on Civil Rights versus massive resistance.
Good type of class and redistribution-agnostic national building investments characteristic of the Federalist-Whig-GOP (esp. Lincoln through Taft) legacy, and that type of energy.
Well, first the claim was "in my lifetime" not whether I remembered it, so the clock for that started ticking in April 1954 (or, if you're the Alabama Supreme Court, July 1953). And while I really don't remember Eisenhower as President, I do remember the 1960 presidential race.
As I wrote it I hesitated whether to phrase it as “my millennial lifetime” but decided that the more inclusive if generalizing articulation sounds nicer…
I agree that Biden is the best President of my lifetime. The problem is we are in a very smell minority, only 38% approve of him at all. That makes him a dubious candidate.
Can I draw out the discussion on what it means to be conservative a bit? In a literal sense conservative means resistance to change, and that's a bit incongruous with today's self styled conservative movements. They style themselves as conservative because their goal is to return us to "the good old days" when society was undeniably more conservative. If anything, this makes them reactionary, and I think classifying these movements as reactionary instead of conservative is both more correct and illustrative of their political goals.
I once had an English teacher who said "you can't argue semantics with someone who doesn't care" so semantic discussion over.
I think reactionary populist movements have been effective politically because while they are doomers today, to the right kind of low-information or so-inclined voter, they actually paint a great picture of "how things used to be". Society was orderly, jobs were plentiful and had dignity, you could achieve the full shebang American dream with only one member of the household working and the other staying home with the 2.5 kids, you went on a nice vacation once a year and your kids were guaranteed to be better off than you were. It's a false picture, we here all know that, but many many voters take it as fact, look around at the present situation, find it lacking in comparison, and buy into the reactionary narrative that the halcyon past was taken from you by [insert bogeman here] and the solution is to [be selfish/mean to x group but really we're just going to create an economy more favorable to the rich and enhance their already high extractive power].
But I get it. Life is tough. Having to be the party that wants to stay grounded in reality competing against a party that pushes nothing but reactionary vibes is hard. Obama could square that circle pretty well, but I am afraid the lift requires generational talent to do it.
The best analysis I've seen makes a distinction between being a conservative in temperament and methods (i.e. cautious, pragmatic, incremental with the notion that the status quo contains accumulated wisdom) vs conservative in ideology (pro-certain values, often to do with promoting dominance for one social class). One can be a temperamental conservative and an ideological liberal at the same time.
1) Framing 'conservative' as simply 'resisting change' is...well, simplistic. It's correct in very broad strokes, but does that mean that once liberals/progressives manage to overcome them and change things, conservatives are required to stupidly 'resist change' to the new status quo? Obviously not. That would be dumb.
But then you go "AHA! Now you are trying to change things (back), so you aren't conservative anymore, you're a reactionary!"
No one in their right mind would say that that is a valid working/functional definition of conservativism, even if 'resist change' is the overall goal of conservatives. We don't have the memory and tactical acumen of mere goldfish.
2) We all know that those pushing to define us as 'reactionary' are doing so merely because it is one or two steps closer to 'fascist' and/or 'nazi' in the general public's political word cloud.
For what it's worth, as someone who sees merit in drawing distinction between "conservative" and "reactionary", there is no group of "us" that I would ever describe that includes both you and, say, Stephen Miller.
I think 'conservative' and 'far right' is sufficient.
I'm sure many center left liberals don't like being associated with antifa or whatever other extreme left wing groups, but they are still part of the same broad coalition.
I think of conservatism being about "go slow and carefully, maybe too carefully". Not sufficient in itself, but useful baggage to the reforming impulse that wants to fix everything today without thinking too deeply about the second- and third-order consequences.
If you meet well-to-do voters for the Democratic party, it's not very clear that selfish motives are a uniquely conservative phenomenon. But more importantly, this response to Perry Bacon would benefit from mentioning actual fiscal constraints to what he's discussing.
At no point does Bacon suggest we should raise income and consumption taxes on everyone. Yet if he wants a transformed political economy, that is really the approach he'll have to sell to voters. It's simply untrue that raising taxes a bit more on the richest people in the US can finance vast universal public goods idealized with the nostalgia for mid-century European social democracy. But his essay is stuck with that belief, going to explain Biden needs to give bold plans and talk about the ways he'll tax the rich to deliver them.
The math doesn't add up very well. But if you don't know the math, then objections just come off as political cynicism or worse in the face of inequality. The greatest opposition to expanding the welfare state with broad tax rises is fundamentally democratic, and comes from the working class as much as the richest. People are genuinely skeptical the government can do a better job with their money than they can. I leave it to the reader if that worldview, or one of the intellectual who ignores it, is selfish.
I think by far the best argument to get more super lefties* on board with stop being “Debbie downers” is the practical argument; convincing people things are worse than they’ve ever been is just a really ineffective mechanism for pushing further change. For me the best example of this is environmentalism. It’s a really big deal that our CO2 emissions have gone down. And to go further back, it’s a really big deal there’s no more acid rain, the rivers and lakes are cleaner and you don’t walk around with black haze in the air (go look up pictures of places like Cleveland in the 70s). If I’m a swing voter, if all I hear is nothing has gotten better the last 40 years my attitude is going to be “then why are we doing anything if none of this has worked. Why don’t you want me driving an SUV if has not benefit to the world. Let me drive the car I want damnit”.
I said this the other day but it’s why I’m actually gets plastic bag bans. Now as it turns out, they may actually be ineffective full stop. But let’s say they are effective. Is it worth it? I’m actually aware that plastic bags really do have a pretty negative impact on the environment. In theory, I’m not against banning them (and I’m happy that my wife and I bring our own bags to the grocery store). But if the very same people who say nothing has gotten better for forty years are also pushing plastic bag bans, talk about terrible messaging. As Matt alluded to, talk about a recipe for telling swing voters that environmentalism is pure virtue signaling or purely about feeling superior (even though again I’m aware that plastic bags really are bad and getting rid of them in theory is worthwhile goal).
* I’m really going to push back on using the broad term “Progressives” here and why I say “super lefties”. Matt alluded to this but he is underselling how few people are of this doomerist mindset but how many of them are overrepresented on social media. This is the place where I again note that most people on Twitter, including people commentating on American politics are not American
> I think by far the best argument to get more super lefties* on board with stop being “Debbie downers” is the practical argument; convincing people things are worse than they’ve ever been is just a really ineffective mechanism for pushing further change.
They don't want to win. They want to be right.
You're trying to argue about how best to peel an apple, but they're holding an abacus.
I can tell you from personal experience that's not true. If you're talking about some very loud super lefties on Twitter? Sure I can definitely buy you're argument. But there are plenty of very earnest people who really want to see real change in the world who genuinely think the best way to persuade people to back more substantive change is to talk about how the world is doomed. Again, I have talked to these people before. As Matt has repeatedly said, a small but significant percentage of people do change their minds about things.
I think the success of the Climate Change movement is the best example of "persuade people to back more substantive change is to talk about how the world is doomed".
But is that really why it was successful or has been successful? I actually give the climate movement a ton of credit for highlighting that global warming is a very real problem in the face of a pretty dishonest campaign from oil companies (I always keep in mind that it was scientists at Exxon who first discovered global warming and it was Exxon who first recognized that you can weaponize MSM "both sides" framing to serve your interests).
But as far as I can tell, the real success is just pointing out "hey these are problems that you really should be aware of". I mean ultimate example is the foundational work of modern environmentalism "Silent Spring". One reason it had impact is Rachel Carson was pointing out something the general public was just not aware of or not given thought to. Furthermore, stuff like pollution you could literally point to; hence my reference to Cleveland in the 70s. I brought up the soot you could literally see, but also see (again famously) the Cayahoga river catching fire. And you can turn around and say, you know what doesn't happen anymore? Rivers catching fire.
I'm willing to be persuaded by your argument. But I'd want a concrete example. Like IRA happened (in part) because it became clear (at least to me) that you can doom monger people into supporting stuff like a carbon tax. You need to make climate about investing for a better future. So is there an example we can point to where doomerism has been successful?
When the movement successfully gets President Biden, and many members of his Adminsitration, to call Climate Change an "existential threat" and "the ultimate threat to humanity", I would call that a successful case of doomerism.
I'd actually agree that climate change is an "existential threat".
But from the same article, directly from Biden "It shows that communities across America are taking more action than ever to reduce climate risks. It warns that more action is still badly needed. We can't be complacent. Let me say that again. We can't be complacent. We have to keep going. Above all, it shows us that climate action offers an opportunity for the nation to come together and do some really big things.". Doomerism would be "Climate change is a real threat that we've made no headway on for 40 years. That's why need to act now or humanity's time on earth will end very soon. Nothing has been done to address this issue in 40 years and we need to do something NOW!".
But just in general, this is a weak tea example to me. Nothing that a particular issue of your political coalition has paramount importance to address in a speech is pretty standard politics.
This language is exclusionary and does Violence to people who peel oranges, as well to those who cannot peel things. Interrogate your attitudes regarding citrus and its handling!
Some don't even want to be right. They just want to signal virtue and gain social status.
But most do want to win, I agree with Colin there. The problem is they often don't understand how their tactics are undermining their cause. And then the poseurs are truly damaging too.
>> And to go further back, it’s a really big deal there’s no more acid rain, the rivers and lakes are cleaner and you don’t walk around with black haze in the air
It's a huge mystery to me why environmentalists aren't talking up the very real benefits from reductions in pollution from clean tech. Coal emissions were responsible for something like 40k deaths per year in the US in 2000. That's down to under 2k deaths per year now, largely thanks to natural gas, but also from renewables.
The point is that cleaning up energy and transportation emissions delivers tangible pollution and health benefits that go a long way toward justifying the economic costs without even considering the benefits of CO2 reduction. Since pollution and health benefits are likely to seem more concrete and real to many voters than CO2 reduction benefits, winning over voters with these arguments could end up being easier than winning them with climate change arguments.
To me this is another case of the left failing to make voter persuasion a top priority. To win over voters to your side of an issue, you don't need to convince them to agree with everything you believe, you just need to find enough common ground to bring them over to your side.
A related note: I think "let's show leadership by making our community shittier" (for example, by banning gas ranges or reducing the viability of automobiles) is a really bad strategy, and one that's way too common in left-leaning jurisdictions.
If you can't coordinate action at a meaningfully higher level, you just become an irrelevant laughingstock.
Plastic doesn’t degrade easily and clogs things like rivers and animal throats. If you sequester them effectively in landfills they aren’t that bad, but the issue is that some fraction of them inevitably escape into the local ecosystem.
They’re not a global harm in any significant way - just a local one. But that doesn’t mean they’re not a harm.
If you want to cut down on litter, targeting litterers is not very effective. Cutting down on opportunities for litter is much better, and is kinder as well.
Biggest challenge with furthest left progressives is that they live in a pretend world where most people are inclined to join their side. Cannot shake their faith in the size of their coalition when everyone hears their case.
online progressives tend to think all center-left types (Yglesias, Nate Silver, etc.) are secretly rightwing radicals while all downscale rightwingers are secretly socialists
He calls himself a liberal in the way that most of the world uses the term, he places himself right in the center on economics, and has regularly voted for Democrats.
I didn't say Matt. Nate Silver has repeatedly gotten into fights with how much the Democratic party relies on expertise, it's extremely noticeable since COVID. That said, we'll see.
Doesn’t change they’re both progressive. The only places they’d be remotely considered center left is in large cities like DC, SF or NYC. People there run to defund the police or as socialist.
Nate silver is far to the left on nearly every issue from climate to abortion. He’s not center left at all.
Does Nate Silver have a far left view of abortion? Can you name one Democrat in Congress (other than Bob Casey) whose view on abortion is to the right of Nate Silver’s?
The fact that you think this makes some center-right says a lot more about your politics than Nate's. Would that make most leftists center-right since they ignore the expertise of economists? Police defunders are center-right because they contradict the advice of public safety experts? Or you're center-right if you've ever disagreed with Nate on polling or statistics?
No, I mean the entire style of citing an expert to make a political call is very 2010s progressive Democrat. This really came to a peak during COVID when we had to listen to public health experts explain public protests are allowed if they're for the right cause, unlike the Orthodox Jews which a then-popular NY Democratic governor (with large numbers of national fans at the time contrasting him favorably to Trump) called murderers for attending funerals.
Silver and I cannot unsee what these people are like when the chips are down in a crisis, and how they'll treat people's basic associative freedoms (which liberalism is fundamentally about, per Strauss on Spinoza, the public-private distinction.)
I don't think Silver is anywhere on a left-right spectrum. I think he's more of a higher-functioning troll who takes special delight in negging anyone to the left of Mitt Romney.
We can only dream of the day that they wrestle away control over the Republican party from the red faced, low IQ/low trust, conspiracy minded fascists.
The problem with books about how the conservative movement ruined the GOP is they all start the story after WW2. So they all politely ignore how much anti-immigration, Bible-thumping prohibition, conspiracy theories, etc played a role in the GOP back when it was run by genteel New England industrialists and liberal Republicans were more of a thing.
The good news is smart people can read about that period and then find out the GOP today isn't too far off from the GOP of Warren Harding. So I think there's a broader story to Matt's "unhinged moderation" thesis, and Nate Silver's increasing frustration with Democrats on Twitter is just one part of that.
I call this the “there’s hope in the proles” theory. I’m a social democrat (so, a leftist by a lot of definitions), but I know that people who aren’t currently politically engaged generally are like that because they don’t have strong political commitments, not because they’re latently on your side and waiting to be activated. You can never get out of the work of doing politics, persuading people, and governing well when you do get power.
Above all, most "proles" like law and order so you can't win their hearts by defunding the police and removing border controls. It never ends well for a left that doesn't put law and order at the front of their politics. whatever else it contains.
Giving up the state monopoly on the use of force is also just… an objectively bad policy by any metric. I’m glad that almost all actual electeds won’t touch police abolitionism with a ten foot pole.
There are still places (like mine) where the legislators still want to defund the police. They call it "reallocation of resources" or some such.
In any case, the damage is done. It has been made clear that endangering the public safety in response to agitators is a thing that can happen, even if only for a time. The cops are demoralized, crime remains high, police reform is nowhere, there is rampant mistrust among the citizens. Whatever problems there are, are going to have to wait a long time for attention.
I mean, this is common behavior in fundamentalist religious sects where truth is revealed. They are inherently right and those who disagree are inherently wrong. Since most people wish to be correct, they will be on their correct side.
The far left has been stuck in a mindset of doom and gloom since the late 60s, and in particular since the fall of communism. With no believable utopian leftist alternatives left standing, what remains for them is to rage rage rage against the dying of the light and to ignore the actual progress taking shape under the regime of the much dreaded capitalism (whether social democratic or neoliberal). NO to everything - stop, resist, hinder, smash, occupy etc!! All words of defensiveness, backwardness.
There was a time when the progressive left printed posters with muscular working class arms pointing towards a glorious future guided by rational policy and technological change. I sorely miss that left.
It represented the only alternative to capitalism and therefore functioned as a projection surface for all manners of left wing anti-capitalist hopes and dreams. When it collapsed the only thing remaining is cynicism and despair, and denial of the very real progress that is still happening.
That's a really weird aspect of Leftist politics. You can see this in their position on Israel-Palestine too. They have a bunch of critiques of Israel, and at least some of them are legitimate, but where that leads them is to supporting Hamas as the indigenous revolutionary movement striking a blow against their colonial oppressor. When in fact, Hamas would run Palestine in a far more "right wing" way than Israel does if they were able to get power.
It's like the Left doesn't connect their current positions to their long term goals. It's simplistic and reactionary-- these guys are fighting The Man, therefore they must be good.
Hamas isn't even the worst example. Large parts of the left were supporting the Houthi regime, who are radical Islamist traditionalists that practice actual slavery, just because they felt like the Houthis were Doing the Work to oppose the Empire
This seems a little under-baked, or at least not super supported--I am skeptical that large parts of *any* demographic were particularly aware of who the Houthis even were until they started taking pot shots at shipping.
Yglesias had a good article related to this a week or two back. Basically that the contemporary Left is in fact more oriented toward anarchism than communism.
This is massively underrated. As an aspiring armchair expert in the discourse, I prefer and personally enjoy Liberalism as an ideology both in theory and in application. From my point of view Leftism is actually bad! Communism was a bad thing and to the extent that Leftists slouch towards that vision, that's bad and I disagree with that!
People fairly, at times, mention that oh these people are not that numerous or influential and whatnot. That may or may not be true, but from my perspective it's bad that they are influential or could be, because I disagree with them!
>Americans have a lot of unmet social needs. And I think the key task to meeting those needs is to convince people that progressive stewardship of the country is effective.<
This. And convince them that America enjoys a broad prosperity seldom achieved by any society, ever. We saw the opposite of this illustrated vividly in the 2010s. Obama and the Democrats miraculously got the ACA enacted. But it was a very close affair. And its passage was met by little elation or voter gratitude. It seems plain in retrospect that the economy of that era made a lot of people distrustful and paranoid instead of optimistic and magnanimous. Contrast that, to, say, the Great Society era, when a booming economy and widely-shared gains made expansion of the safety net a much lighter political lift.
Given the structure of the ACA it would honestly be kind of weird if it *had* been met with elation and voter gratitude. Its biggest changes, such as pre-existing condition coverage and Medicaid expansion, covered a minority of people (and even fewer likely voters) but for a majority of Americans they were on “okay” employer-provided healthcare the day before it was passed and “okay” employer-provided healthcare the day after it was passed.
I am not trying to belittle the ACA as a piece of legislation - if it can be credited with bending the curve of healthcare cost growth that’s a BFD, and if you’re someone benefitting from medicaid or preexisting condition coverage or just a 24 year old with no experience dealing with America’s byzantine healthcare system yourself who would prefer to benefit from your parents’ healthcare plan instead of that at your entry-level job, its changes are all intensely meaningful, but the modal amount of change for a “comprehensive” healtchare bill on which Obama spent basically his entire first term’s political capital[1] seems to me to have been remarkably small for the modal voter, particularly in view of its character as *the* signature achievement of the administration.
[1] GFC bailouts / stimulus were in some cases polarizing but to the best of my recollection the attacks were primarily from the left and not a huge weakpoint for Republican attacks.
>> . Its biggest changes, such as pre-existing condition coverage and Medicaid expansion, covered a minority of people (and even fewer likely voters) but for a majority of Americans they were on “okay” employer-provided healthcare the day before it was passed and “okay” employer-provided healthcare the day after it was passed.
I get your point about voter apathy on ACA. It is real of course, but ACA does provide health insurance to a lot of people. Over 20 million people are covered by Medicaid expansion and another 18 million through marketplace coverage. Those aren't small numbers. But really, I think your overall framing is off.
American voters have plenty of compassion and empathy and are fully capable of giving credit for policy wins that don't affect them personally. As with so many other left-of-center issues, voter ambivalence about ACA is mainly a messaging/marketing failure coupled with the left's all-or-nothing thinking and general pessimistic attitude about most everything.
Many on the left completely dismiss ACA's accomplishments because what they want is a fully nationalized system and ACA didn't give them that. This is similar to how they pan Biden's IRA because it didn't immediately shut down all fossil fuel extraction despite being a huge and historic piece of climate legislation.
At the end of the day, both ACA and the IRA are great examples of the left's all-or-nothing thinking and their penchant for doom and gloom.
I don't think the goal for Democrats should be to get people deliriously happy and grateful to them for progressive legislation like the ACA. It should be to pass such legislation, get it successfully implemented and then have the population fight like hell against efforts by Republicans to overturn it. See Social Security, Medicare, and yes the ACA.
Getting stuffed passed is hard. Getting the natural conservatism of Americans to resist repealing it is actually not that hard.
I'm increasingly agog at how recklessly progressives are behaving. They're risking a Trump presidency/autocracy because the guy who beat them fair and square in the primary only tacked halfway towards them once in office? Defying historical precedent of tacking to the centre after winning?
Ditto. On the issues I’m with the progressive on most things (esp economic policy). But on the politics I’m increasingly disillusioned and angry with them as a political group. Early in the 2020 primaries I was on team Warren, and always had sympathy for Bernie sanders (still do!). But by and large today’s “progressives” esp the activists and media figures not to mention the cringe “squad”, strike me as somewhere on the spectrum between colossal fools and simply bad people.
I don’t disagree but this where I remind everyone that something Matt made passing reference to but worth emphasizing is that this group of doomer progressives is really active on social media but actually quite small. But because they are loud on social media they suck up a lot of the oxygen in the discourse.
Really hit home to me with these pro Palestinian protests. I know a few were pretty big. But look carefully at a lot them; it’s very often a handful of people with many many more onlookers and reporters. Pure”Streisand effect” all the way down.
It’s also just everywhere, you can’t find a lighthearted thread on Reddit about your favorite hobby that doesn’t degenerate into “Because Late Capitalism” by the end of it. Part of it ties into the depressive affect stuff that Greg Lukianoff talks about.
The "blame capitalism" stuff on reddit just drives me batty. It really reveals how the average user is in the early 20s and I'm just too damn old to be spending time there anymore. I wish there were other discussion platform options! (Substack serves decently enough in spots, of course.)
I'm surprised that Reddit still trends young, it's been around for a while.
I don't think it trends young per se - more like it trends lonely and unhealthy.
Reddit feels like the most conservative of the conventional social sites (and apart from substack, I think it’s the best one out there bc of how non social it is)
Reminds me so much of early 2000s when I was in college and I was on message boards or comment sections all the time (glad I got over that) including on Matt's original blog at The Atlantic. And invariably within a few comments Godwin's law would come up. "Bush is a Nazi", "Bush is bad but he's not a Nazi", "Tony Blair is worse than Hitler!"...blah, blah, blah.
I feel like "Because late capitalism" should some addendum to Godwin's law...let's call it "Godwin's razor". Also, sort of thing that gives me hope; internet forums and message boards being full of extremists or trolls or people with just general over the topic rhetoric has been an issue for a long time now and is not nearly as new as we think.
One of these days I'll get into the story of the first time I went on a message board circa 1995-1996. This chat room devoted to NFL talk. Let's just say a "canary in the coal mine" situation as far as what the internet would be in 2024.
The part I don't get is that the places they want the USA to become - Norway, Denmark - are...capitalist societies. Even if we become Norway, we're still gonna be capitalists. They can't square this circle very well, either, when I point that out.
Twitter’s decline has disempowered these nutters.
I think it has disempowered the old method of progressive influence, where Twitter exposed media professionals to the ideas of the extreme left vastly more often than they would've encountered them in reality.
But simultaneously and in parallel, TikTok has given progressive doomers new channels to reach a much larger audience in absolute terms, even if that audience is less elite. If you know the types of people who like to repost infographics on their instagram story about racism and LGBT rights and etc., a ton of those people are now reposting stuff about how Gaza is genocide and it's all Joe Biden's fault.
>but this where I remind everyone that something Matt made passing reference to but worth emphasizing is that this group of doomer progressives is really<
Bingo. For all the angst about the supposedly dangerous influence of the progressives (And, let's face it, a lot of the hand-wringers *enjoy* bitching about the hard left. They find it somehow comforting), decidedly centrist Scranton Joe is crushing it in the primaries. Not exactly 1980 redux.
Meanwhile, presumptive nominee and lunatic Donald J. Trump is about to get a lot more attention. That's probably not good for Republicans.
(That said, the Perry Bacon column is a doozy! But many of his columns are like that, and, I'd bet not one in twenty American voters could tell you who Bacon is.)
I mean Matt is one of them who enjoys bitching about the hard left in part for good reason if you read about what alienated him from Vox and why he left. So I do get it. But it's clearly biasing Matt's writing to the point you'd think the left wing non-profit complex is literally whispering in Biden's ear wormtongue style. I think a lot of Matt's criticisms of lefty non-profits is quite trenchant, but I'm sorry left wing non-profits can only dream of having the influence that Matt, or Josh Barro or Jonathan Chait think they have.
I mean, you saw where a bunch of White House staffers signed a petition about Biden taking firmer action vis a vis Gaza? It’s not actually that implausible that they are whispering in his ear.
With the end result that Biden took the action of (checks notes); pushing for a bill to give massive amount of aid to Israel, then trying to push for another bill that pushed aid to Israel and Ukraine by tying it to border security. To this day, the Biden administration is still trying to pass a bill giving aid to Israel despite the fact that Israel doesn't really need that aid given its huge military superiority over Hamas (as opposed to Ukraine).
I'm aware that behind the scenes reporting indicates that Biden is trying to put pressure on Netanyahu to pull back from the grossest and most extreme strategist currently being pursued by the Israeli government and IDF (which I 100% support btw) and is also trying to find some path to a ceasefire. But yeah, the Biden administration is still very clearly on the side of Israel here and has not come close to implementing these staffers demands (also, I'd love to know just how many staffers signed on to this).
That reads more like they are shitting where they eat.
Are you around young people often, specifically at colleges? I think the progressive message has really locked in in those spaces, and has influenced the politics of young people quite a bit.
Are they going to be a re-run of the boomers, with some of them being unironic diametrical flippers from one extreme to another, over life's journey? Like turning from hippie to anarcho-conservative libertarian over their lifetime?
Awesome. Just another public-spirited utilitarian generation we need. Not.
>I mean Matt is one of them who enjoys bitching about the hard left in part for good reason<
The comment wasn't directed at Yglesias although I can see why it might be construed that way. It's really just a plea (a futile one, to be sure) to not give the hard left so much oxygen, coupled with the observation that the Bari Weissian-Andrew Sullivanesque "cranky centrist" sector and the hard left co-enable each other. And in many cases make a nice living doing so!
Don't disagree with this. It's why I've used the phrase "Streisand effect" a lot because I think it sort of describes this phenomenon (that I think you're getting at) whereby someone (or some protestor or some tik tok influencer) gets way more attention than they should because someone with a big platform highlights this person. And I actually think you're right to say there's self-reinforcing mechanism going on. Sullivan is right now taking a victory lap over Ibram Kendi and his apparent fall from grace. But honestly my thought with Kendi that I wanted to yell at Sullivan for forever is "I had never heard of this person until you started ranting and raving about terrible he is. You realize you're ranting and raving is a real factor as to why Kendi gained such prominence in the first place given how hysterically you were writing about him and how much reach you have especially with other news reporters". Like in his more measured moments he made what I thought were reasonable criticisms of Kendi's work (unfortunately mixed with wild over the top rhetoric in other posts). But I honestly wonder if you were to give truth serum to Kendi he would say he was grateful to Sullivan for boosting his name so much.
As someone who lives in SF, where Non Profits have effectively rendered the government as useless, and cares about climate change where Non Profits routinely sue over clean energy projects, I think k we should bitch about them *more*.
"I'm sorry left wing non-profits can only dream of having the influence that Matt, or Josh Barro or Jonathan Chait think they have."
I very much doubt that is true. Compare a non-profit like the Sierra Club to Matt, and I would take the Sierra Club every time
The Leftist activists have even turned against The Squad — they just chased AOC out of a restaurant! Their ability to eat their own in truly amazing.
“The left- eating their own since 1789”
‘Nobody’ would be better than Trump
Edit: we should select a cabinet from the Who’s on First team roster!
Obviously, Who is the Veep, What is the Sec of State, and Why is Treasury
I mean some dude named ‘Nobody’ or alternatively, actually no one. Though I partly feel like we already have that with Biden being basically Bernie (not Sanders but the one from Weekend at Bernie’s). That being said, he generally has a competent team which is what matters
I would lean toward "colossal fools" with a side of "can't read the room," in accordance with Hanlon's Razor: "Do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity."
Biden has made concessions and overtures to progressives over and over. They always shift goalposts. Like the GOP.
He should kindly tell them to fuck off.
I mean the point of activism is to keep pushing for better but I agree it’s important to unite in the end
The problem is that these “activists” have no real concern for making material change. Addressing a problem and acknowledging that fact undermines their identity and the value they derive from advocating for the morally “correct” thing.
And for some of them who make money on this there is a perverse incentive for them to make problems worse (hence why so many astroturf for the GOP.)
I agree with you, for a loud but small fraction of activists. Though with all the noise it makes it hard to figure out what to think or do if you really care about an issue but rely on others for strategic guidance
The great irony being, had Bernie Sanders won the primary and miraculously the general, it’s not clear how he would have governed differently. Indeed, I think there’s an argument to be made that he would have been much less successful in implementing progressive priorities. But I guess he would have made a lot of speeches the activists agree with.
Post material politics means that actually accomplishing change or implementing policy means less than feeling validated.
I think because so much of the run up to the 2020 primary was fought over the differences of (dead on arrival) policy, I had a belief that the real blocking and tackling of politics was grounded in policy ideas as Matt tries to elevate. But seeing Biden achieve more policy than anyone could have possibly imagined on jan 20 2021, and getting essentially zero credit for it from progressives, genuinely makes me think most voters of all stripes simply have a Jed Bartlett theory of the Presidency. To them, the central job of POTUS is to make speeches and be seen taking sides, even if this kind of public issue taking often retards the opportunity for bipartisan legislating and policy implementation through raising the salience of partisanship. Biden is uniquely suited for this kind of somewhat secret congress dealmaking, and uniquely poor at the Bartlett Theory of the Presidency. Unsurprisingly, his immediate predecessors, a literal Television personality and one of the single most rhetorically talented politicians of all time, were better at that, but arguably worse at the actual meat and potatoes of policy making.
American voters don't elect a President so much as they cast one.
"and one of the single most rhetorically talented politicians of all time,"
Obama seemed rhetorically gifted and effective for campaigns. Persuasive enough to win.
Not so much rhetorically gifted and effective for the Presidency. He continued to sound smart, but boring, and not persuasive.
Hard disagree.
You took the words right out of my thumbs. Rhetorically talented and yet not a great persuader or negotiator.
Your Bartlett theory of the presidency is also supported by Trump. Many people referred to him at the time as "effective", despite accomplishing almost nothing. It was all position-taking theater.
It was just being in the right place at the right time, til Covid, where he couldn’t get out of his own way
Well yah...it's why direct voting is a bad system for picking a leader.
As a lone voter with negligible chance of deciding the issue my incentive is to use my vote (or claimed vote which ppl rarely lie about) the way one uses a bumper sticker -- as a way to broadcast my identity to my peers.
Direct elections suck. Parliamentary systems avoid this and even the us founding fathers didn't want them. They just were too shortsighted to realize you need to give electors another job like house member so they aren't just proxies.
Bernie would've lost the general once Republicans started digging up his old material and hammering him with the help of business donors and right-wing middle class voters. It never happened, because Bernie was never the Dem nominee.
Exactly. A Jewish socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Give me a break. I have stalwartly democratic friends who would sit that out, namely those from Eastern European, Chinese, or Korean backgrounds.
Hey the Republicans are the pro-Russian ones these days
He’s a team player, he’d have been fine but not changed a whole lot
"BuT tHe GeNoCiDe iN GaZa!!!"
I recall reading a quote by Hannah Arendt, I don't remember the exact wording, but it's something like: the dictator doesn't want your support. The dictator wants you to become totally cynical and disengaged and to say, "All those politicians are the damn same! It doesn't matter who is in power, things are going to suck anyway!" It's chilling.
Also, this is one reason why I no longer subscribe to Freddie "the US is the greatest source of evil since WWII" deBoer's Substack, even though he is a brilliant writer.
I don't really fault him for writing what he wants vs what's good business, since that's clearly an essential part of his motivation...but the ratio of beclowning-level posts went way up after 10/7, and that's been rather frustrating. You gotta give people some hope, a future to believe in, especially on the progressive left where the entire premise is to make huge sweeping systemic changes. Much harder to believe such outcomes will be good when so much ink is spilled about the seed being corrupt, the battle being pointless, America being in decline, the world being fallen, etc, etc. Like I get it, there's Problems. But such garment-rending is very, well, Debbie Downer as Matt puts it today. (I'd have gone with Negative Nancy.)
I don’t blame FdB for writing what he wants, either, but when “what he wants” = “hyperbole/nonsense on stilts,” it was time for me to nope on out.
So much of modern politics comes down to the question: “who do you fear more - left wing populists or right wing populists?” In 2020 people generally feared right-wing populists more, and so Biden won. In 2024, polls seem to indicate the opposite.
This is why, as much as I think Biden is likely to lose, that Ezra Klein is wrong to believe that dropping Biden would result in a better candidate. The progressives would pick up Bernie's charge that an economic warrior will drive democratic turnout and it would be the second coming of McGovern.
More likely it would be Kamala Harris: a cross between Michael Dukakis and Hillary Clinton.
As a wise man once said, Kamala would get boat raced by Trump. There arguably isn't a worse candidate to run against Trump.
Centrist establishment nominees do generally tack away from the center after winning the nomination to shore up their coalition.
H W Bush's "no new taxes" promise, for example. The last Democratic candidates to be both centrist and establishment were Kerry who moved left on Iraq after winning and H. Clinton who also moved left.
Insurgent centrists (Bill Clinton, McCain) don't generally try to consolidate the base, but run on Sister Soujah moments.
Can't edit. Lost the final para about McCain running like an establishment centrist, appointing Palin to consolidate the base, even though his appeal was as an insurgent. Could have run against the Bush party and policies and called for the Republicans to change course, much as B. Clinton did in 1992, but didn't.
Etch-a-sketch Romney?
How did Hillary’s tack to the left work out?
Frothing misogyny from the “Left” and a perception that TFG was more moderate.
Hillary tacked left to win the primary against Bernie, not to shore up support afterward. She moved to the center, but not enough. Or the damage had already been done.
My memory is that she moved to the center on economics, but leaned into the identitarian left on sex & race.
This is clear in retrospect, but something funny is how little I remember being aware of it at the time. Definite vibes of throwing red meat to the starving dogs in the basement that I didn't know were down there.
All Democrats holding elected federal office have leaned hard into identitarianism.
For example, not a single one opposes the Equality Act (instantaneous at-will gender self-ID).
Also, not a single one had anything good to say about the SCOTUS decision against the egregious anti-asian racism at Harvard & UNC.
That has been the general direction of the American plutocracy.
I honestly despise these people more than I despise Trumpers. Trumpers are prima facie low IQ whereas these people are presumably smart but are fine with tossing a W to Trump - and for what reason?
Not to be a snarkosaurus, but "these people are presumably smart"? Wow, citation needed. I can assure you that from the point of view of professional folk (particularly in STEM) who have to make these calls for a living, "presumably smart" is _not_ how we think about educated progressives. Presumably verbally facile, sure, granted, but that's a hell of a long way from "presumably smart". A good life rule to remember is that no matter how smart you are, someone agreeing with you one a topic is usually totally uncorrelated with their intelligence.
I think it's pretty obvious that the educated progressives calling for a ceasefire and who want to cancel anyone to the right of Nina Turner, although very misguided, are on average much smarter than the median Trump rally attendee.
What is even the point of living in a democracy if you cannot risk losing an election to run a platform on things you believe in? It doesn't make sense why any political party would rationally sideline all interests within itself to win 100% of the time. Unsurprisingly, our parties don't. Because if they ever got enough power to do exactly that without any faction breaking off, we wouldn't live in a competitive democracy anymore.
What interests are they sidelining? The interests of people who think there should be better and broader medical coverage, better support for childcare, more support of union labor, more clean energy and transportation, more legal pathways to entry to the country? All those people are being supported by the Biden administration, even if some people want him to push things even farther on some of those policies than he already has been.
I think Bacon's view is very much of a progressive writer in the Democratic party world, demanding more commitment to more policies on the left. This has been very successful over the last decade of the Dem party platform and it completely makes sense why writers like him will keep doing it. The problem with bringing up the existential threat of fascism is these people already do the same thing on policing, immigration, climate, and so on. You can't out-existential someone, especially if they're a coalition member in your party who also writes about politics for a living.
But to answer your point on the substantive policy matter, I think it would be Biden talking more about his 2020 platform, expanding Medicare down the age group, clamping down on more fossil fuel production, not taking executive actions on immigration like Johnson wants and defending the status quo of it instead. That's completely possible for Bacon to push Biden on. Whether it's a good idea overall is another matter.
You don’t risk losing an election when the costs of losing are too high: democratic backsliding, complete reversal of policy gains, and an even more unhinged judiciary.
Biden's checks, asylum policy, EV tax credits, Ukraine counter-offensive, EPA rules, Dept of Educ. rules, there are plenty of policy examples where they've risked losing an election. Let's quit with the pretense they're taking zero risks on behalf of their coalition.
TBF one rational play in this scenario is to play chicken by claiming you'll defect unless Biden makes commitments to do more of what you want but not really do it.
The problem is that it's hard to actually do this without drawing votes away from your guy.
Left wing theory of progressive change: Keep telling people that things are terrible and that they should vote for the angry, bearded, wild eyed guy in the corner in order to fix everything.
Actual progressive change: Back a charismatic and/or folksy, competent person and gradually move things forward while pushing a message of progress, pride and patriotism.
Wait are you saying that real change is slow, boring?
Robert Reich has a pretty decent beard.
I think successful progressive government does a good job of serving the average person. That then creates a virtuous cycle of trust and willingness to invest in it (and of course also vote in that direction).
What is a real-world example of that kind of progressive government? As a resident of the biggest blue city, I experience progressive government as daily misrule. It doesn't do a good job at anything.
Arguably, mid-century America from the New Deal to the Great Society carried this out decently well. Societal trust in institutions was high, and the social safety net steadily expanded over three-and-a-half decades. Citizens saw the government meet the challenges of the Great Depression and WW2 and, not without some bumps or pushback, accepted this. Then Vietnam blew this up. It revealed widespread lying by government officials, polarized society, revealed incompetence, and cost a lot of money when the economy was at full employment, driving inflation. The New Deal consensus was never perfect, and cracks would've formed for other reasons, most likely. However, I think Vietnam really messed with a cycle of government trust and consensus.
I don't know that you'd call the New Deal "progressive". Liberal, more like. I agree with you about Vietnam - it is where our troubles began.
The only way to say the New Deal wasn't progressive is if you narrowly define 'progressive' to mean the annoying and self-defeating tendencies of the modern left
But the actual New Deal was a radical expansion of the government and public sector institutions, the creation of the American welfare state, corporate oversight, trust-busting, even the creation of a number of state-owned companies. It was about as progressive as progressive gets. Important to remember that the notion of a 'progressive' ideology emerges not 20 years ago but 120 years ago, with the ideology of using expanding the state to solve social problems.
I don't know - I'm wary of redefining historical terms.
In the past, "progressive" described a middle-class reform movement that concentrated on good government and restraint (not replacement) of capitalism. Theodore Roosevelt was a progressive. He was the one who did the trust-busting. He was a proud Republican and a great believer in American capitalism. Those progressives had no interest in a welfare state.
Did the New Dealers call themselves progressive? If so, I never heard of it. Franklin Roosevelt's appeal was in that he positioned himself as being for all the people, against the "money power." New Dealers emphasized work, and good wages for work, and treated what we think of as "the welfare state" as social insurance. In this, they were 100% in sync with the American people. No enterprises of any size were nationalized, except in wartime.
"Progressive" is a bit of wordplay in the current context. By the 1990's, I remember, both "liberal" and "socialist" were such toxic labels that those adherents started calling themselves "progressives" instead. Their (still-toxic) mix of middle-class performative socialism and identity politics has very little to do with either the Square Deal or the New Deal.
I don’t think of the 1950s as the high water point of progressivism in the country.
Depends on what your metric of progress is. Which, by the way, is very much why I avoid using the term progressive like the plague.
It potentially was a high water mark for state capacity, which enabled the delivery of public goods to the extent policy pushed such things. If the state can’t actually efficiently function … then pushing stronger social policy really is a waste of money. This is one of the reasons I really like Matt’s droll policy analysis - the details matter quite a bit.
We did really show Nevada who’s boss though.
Agree. My experience with urban progressive government is in Seattle and Portland. Very difficult for me to see these as successful, especially not Portland.
It's not just the (non) policies, it's that such governments surface some of the nastiest people, to the great damage of the rest of us (particularly net tax payers, who should get *some* credit).
Good governance in Seattle is significantly hamstrung by the limits on state or local government's ability to raise revenue through any form of progressive taxation.
The citizens of the City want good streets, good parks, good schools, the homeless housed, accessible behavioral health services, strong public safety, and good environmental stewardship. But those things are almost impossible to provide within our current budget restraints. We have had a pattern of electing people who sincerely promise to do all those things better than we are doing the now and then can't do what they promise. It gets worse and we kick the can on issues were we can't make wise up front investments and so go for inefficient short term fixes.
So we tend to vote in whoever promises to "change" the most. Always Dems but sometimes radically progressive, sometimes much more conservative. Not much changes on the street and we vote to "change" again. We don't reward effective governance because at best we can see people making the best of a really bad situation and that doesn't look that different from being incompetent. It hasn't led to a focus on good governance or really evaluating folks policy details and skills.
But when push comes to shove and everyone is forced to make the best of a really bad situation -- like Covid, our leaders actually did a much better job of keeping us alive and economy from tanking than many other locations - especially given that Covid came here first and we had less lead time than other locations. It gives me some hope about how well we could function if our state constitution didn't give us only bad options.
I’m optimistic that the current leadership in Seattle is cleaning things up. I drove through 12th and Jackson yesterday and it was much cleaner than it’s been over the past few years!
I do think things are gradually getting better in Seattle. The last City Council raised some real revenu with the jump tax and invested it in building some much needed housing options for the most at need. Some of that has finally gotten built and opened in the last year. (Ironically, part of what discourages proactive approaches in Seattle is that everything takes 3 years to build so you don't get credit for anything you started during your current term during you current term.) I think that has helped.
I also think the current mayor's UCC have done a good job of breaking up some of the most dangerous and problematic encampments and cleaning up some of the trash from sites. I don't think either of those are solutions to the actual problem of homelessness but I do think they have helped prevent some violence. I also think that just keeping the city clean helps with public safety from a broken windows approach. (I don't actually think the "broken windows policing" approach is that effective but I do think the actual findings about areas that look uncared for and where crime is already happening making crime more common is probably right and at minimum that suggests we should fix windows and do more to make our communities look safe.) I also think it has helped to quell come community anger which wasn't helping the issue.
But there has also been resources wasted on chasing a few individuals from spot to spot, park to park, without any real benefit except different neighbors have to take turns dealing with them. I wish some of that money had been put into tiny house villages instead since at least all the folks in my neighborhood who have been frequent fliers and been swept multiple times say they would take a place in a tiny house immediately if one was available.
The comment is aspirational.
This starts to sound like "no true Scotsman"
If it's helpful revise what I said to 'progressive government should aspire to serve the average person.' Yeesh.
Does the Biden administration not aspire to serve the average person?
Often times they seem to wage war against algebra.
But the left wing has been very good at getting policy concessions out of the Democratic party over the last decade. That's why the party platform is way bigger and more expensive, and it's why Biden says populist stuff like Georgia's voting laws make "Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle" (???)
It's just literally true progressives have been very good at pulling the party to their positions while the Democratic party wins elections 50% of the time. Everyone proceeds to scream 50% isn't enough, but their revealed preference says otherwise.
I remember the proposed Georgia election laws being called "Jim Crow 2.0" and realizing that they were actually *less* restrictive than the laws I first voted under.
Republicans winning ever is completely unacceptable until they throw out the crazies which is basically all of them now
I live in left-wing academia. It is shocking to see such insistent doomerism among young (ish) people who are securely employed, well compensated, partnered with children, and spending holidays in Italy. These are among the luckiest people who’ve ever walked the earth. And yet they feel constantly aggrieved.
Gratitude is unfashionable. Myopia and grievance are in vogue. It’s no wonder everyone’s falling apart at the seams psychologically.
I work in left-wing academia, but I live in right-wing America. And I never ceased to be amazed by how far everyone goes out of their way to be depressed or angry.
It's like the lefties feel guilty for daring to feel happy because there is still unfairness left in the world and the righties are certain that their current good fortune is fleeting because the woke sword of Damocles is hanging over them.
I'll admit that as a conservative employee, I definitely feel like that woke Sword of Damocles is real.
And as a conservative parent of several young kids, I definitely feel like I have to carefully titrate my kids exposure to popular culture in order to protect them from some of the more harmful woke (or at least left-coded) trends out there.
I'm financially secure and damned near unfireable unless I do something stupid, yet some I still feel like I'm in a very precarious social situation.
I can try to use reason all I want about about the true odds of catastrophe being small and The Economy Is Good, Actually...but the feeling of dread doesn't go away. It's kind of oppressive.
> I definitely feel like I have to carefully titrate my kids exposure to popular culture in order to protect them from some of the more harmful woke (or at least left-coded) trends out there.
That just sounds like good parenting!
> I'm financially secure and damned near unfireable unless I do something stupid, yet some I still feel like I'm in a very precarious social situation.
Have you noticed a shift at all in the last 2 years? I certainly have. At my very woke tech company, DEI is basically gone, pronouns-in-bio are no longer "suggested" during onboarding, and we actually fired some political troublemakers
I’ve noticed a similar shift in consulting. Things have cooled down quite a bit since 2020 at my company.
I'm a federal employee, so the main threat that I deal with is stagnating as they continue to promote and hire heavily based on identity.
And having to deal with even more stupid woke training.
"continue to promote and hire heavily based on identity"
And yet Nobel Prize winners are mystified as to why Trump is popular among whites.
>And as a conservative parent of several young kids, I definitely feel like I have to carefully titrate my kids exposure to popular culture in order to protect them from some of the more harmful woke (or at least left-coded) trends out there.
Wouldn't it be easier to preemptively expose the kids to the trends and then have a talk with them where you explain why the trends are stupid and the people promoting them are idiots? That way if you fail and your kids are exposed to them anyway, they are immunized.
Agreed.
That's what I meant by 'titrate'.
Controlled exposure so they build up resistance but not so much that they fall victim to it.
Immunization doesn't always work.
https://www.pittparents.com
It's true that, despite efforts to immunize them, lots of parents suffer from "Rapid Onset Gender Denial," a mental condition where exposure to dumb far-right trends on the Internet causes them to repeatedly deny and invalidate the gender identity of their transgender children. However, I still think that immunization is best on the net. I've read many accounts of loving parents who supported their child's transition, and now have happy adult children living as their true gender.
Kids are right to be concerned about their parent's media consumption, since parents have vast power over their children's lives, and often fall for all kinds of dumb and harmful parenting trends. But I don't think censorship is the right way to go. :-)
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files
Is it that bad? Jeez. I mean titrating your kids screen time is good but mostly bc of the freaking ads!
On the parenting front? I think so.
If you hold standard social conservative beliefs that were considered centrist (or even slightly liberal) 15-20 years ago, a lot of modern pop culture (especially the stuff targeted at kids) is basically...very fraught.
So unless I felt fine just throwing my kid's futures to the wind and wishing/praying for the best, then keeping it all at arms length and only allowing controlled exposure is required.
It definitely makes me feel alienated from the rest of society, and I'm a pretty bog-standard conservative from a social POV.
Yeah, that checks out. I don't have any contact with right-wing America, but I wouldn't say they seem especially *well*
I am an economic historian. I practice gratitude. I am
happy to have life now than at any other point in time.
Practicing gratitude has been a vital part of my recovery from alcoholism. I espouse it as a tool constantly.
I was just going to write a post highlighting how good things have been over the past 80 years. My biggest fear is that because of idiots on the far right and left, we kill our own good fortune. I would challenge anyone to find a better 80 period than the time between the end of WWII and now. Lifespan, global famine, global violence, access to healthcare, education, liberation for women and minority groups.
I think we should all be very thankful we got to live in this era and try very hard not to screw it up for our kids and grandkids.
It strikes me as a mirror image of the "I built that" crowd, who believe everything they have and achieved is a product of their own work rather than mostly a product of a remarkable system and society underpinning that allows them to then take their luck, and add a little hard work and fall into something remarkable. They believe that they owe nothing to the rest of society that makes it all possible
Both sides ignore that it's the underpinning society that makes their lives anything other than nasty, brutish, and short. And that they both owe an obligation to, and should see it as in their self interest to, strengthen the society in which they live.
The "Self Made Man" is the biggest lie we've ever been told.
Yes. I'm also astonished at how many similarly-situated young(ish) people I know - through hobbies like knitting, no less - who say they are consumed by anxiety and depression and depend on cocktails of medication to get through a day that, TBH, doesn't seem all that stressful. I don't begrudge sick people their medication, but this "falling apart at the seams" phenomenon seems tragically costly, at both the individual and society-wide scales.
We went from therapy being shameful and scorned to it being almost glorified.
The glorification seems much worse, and more harmful to society.
It is the one ism that everyone can aspire to! You can’t change most of your identity easily, or without very strong social consequence, but you can be mentally ill. Congrats you are now part of an aggrieved group.
One criteria of finding out who is an actual intellectual person and who is merely a poseur is to find out if they believe that we live in the best epoch of humanity so far or not. Only the poseurs think that it used to be better (on a general level).
I think we’re living in the only era of humanity the previous ones were all just part of the simulation bc humans would have immediately killed themselves en masse when presented with a world without central heat and air
I thought gratitude was only for the 3 minutes of Shavasana at the end of yoga class. You're telling me it's supposed to be an all the time kind of thing?
I think it's a good question worth asking: Why are so many lefties/progressives so miserable?
Having a goal of improving the world often motivates people to spend time thinking about the things that can be improved, which means becoming very aware of badness that exists. Focusing on this can make you miserable.
Yes, but that's always been true. Why are progressives miserable *now*?
I think that's definitely an interesting question!
To some extent, I'd say there is a long-running aspect to this. Your prototypical 1970s leftist, who supported the Marxist Party of the United Kingdom or the UK Marxist Party or the Marxist-Leninist Party, or any of the other groups that Monty Python satirized at the end of Life of Brian, probably was just as miserable and depressed as your typical Twitter/TikTok Gen Z activist. But there weren't as many people who had fallen into this way of being. My guess is that somehow social media helps get more people into this mindset.
Also I think the sense of possibility that the Revolution really was coming soon has dissipated as the Revolution keeps failing to arrive.
I think this is it. Doomerism is the absence of hope. It isn’t just that things are bad, it is that this isn’t a clear path to fix catastrophic climate change / housing prices / enact leftist-utopia in their own eyes. There is no revolution in the wings.
"Your prototypical 1970s leftist…probably was just as miserable and depressed as your typical Twitter/TikTok Gen Z activist."
Yikes. The 1970s really were terrible.
(That is, thanks for teaching me a little history today.)
The sort of darkly humorous answer, I'm pretty sure, from someone who used to be immersed in those spaces and still has a lot of younger leftist friends, is that liberalism is working very well. The West is very far from perfect, there are many problems left to be solved and in the current moment much of it is in political or social turmoil, but as has been said many times in this comment section, this is the greatest age of human history. It is easier and better to be alive now as a human than any other time. Until two years ago territorial war was a thing of the past, and while many Western institutions and governments might be inefficient or corrupt, most of them are stable. In the advanced democracies, at least, the world is at peace, and as much as people complain or protest vote about things, most of them are pretty comfortable. And in a stable, comfortable world, what progressives want, or what they say they want, can never happen. If you have the leftist/Marxist worldview, which states that the current system is so fundamentally broken and unjust that it needs to be overturned, the modern systems of government and economy are largely fixed in place in terms of their overall structures, even if the details change over time. That means that the only way to achieve what they want is a literal violent uprising and overthrow of government - which is also not going to happen, for the same reasons. So if you are a leftist in the modern Western world, you are 100% convinced that the world needs to be fundamentally different, but it's also self-evidently obvious to your eyes that that degree of change is impossible. So the only thing left to do, basically, is be miserable, and try to get other people on the Internet to be as miserable as you.
It's a worldview that leads pretty much inexorably to nihilism, it's a really profoundly depressing headspace to be in. Obviously this is combined with the internet making it easier to know about every injustice happening all over the world that you're supposed to be miserable about. (I'm convinced that this is a secret reason for the emergence of the small but vocal pro-Hamas left - they see what Hamas did as aspirational from a philosophical perspective, they wish that they had an army and weapons and they could march into Wall Street and massacre the bankers and politicians they see as the source of all suffering the same way Hamas murdered all those Jews.)
I don't want to sound without sympathy here - on the actual issues I get where a lot of those folks are coming from, and at the base level I probably agree with them more often than not. But I've lost all patience with their complete refusal to think strategically and take practical steps to advance their goals and their neopuritan ideological attitude. And the pro-Hamas stuff is utterly inexcusable.
I think there’s a whole lot of Chinese and Russian saboteurs in leftist online spaces trying to weaken America
The news they consume is all scarebait and ragebait. Same problem on the right.
From the outside looking in, I definitely seems like a lot of younger liberal people have embraced this idea that they and society are broken and they need to talk about it constantly.
And now that 'talking about it constantly' bit has led them to reinforce the behavior more and more.
Positive feedback loop.
It's worth pointing out to those outside academia that most people in academia aren't core faculty, have lousy pay and aren't all that lucky (by contemporary American standaards). Even the minority who are core faculty in most cases would be better compensated doing other jobs. They aren't to be pitied, of course, they mostly do what they chose and love and are compensated in other ways (job security, huge autonomy etc), but they are certainly no more privileged than many professions, less than most of their peers, perhaps.
P.S.
At least from my experience most young tenure-track faculty, at least, are just super grateful that they were lucky enough to get their position despite fierce competition, and don't shy away from expressing their gratitude if you ask them, but ymmv.
Yep, but also there is an undercurrent of if not jealously as such, at least a sense of injustice in the world that their non-academic peers are more economically compensated.
I live in Florida and see the very same mindset but on the opposite end of the political spectrum - with small business owners, finance bros and personal injury attorneys. You would think we're living under Fidel Castro's Cuba during the Great Depression, while these very same people are taking multiple ski trips per year, driving around in Teslas and eating at Joe's Stone Crab.
The negativity bias and the “everything sucks” mentality among progressives is a product of the “oppression Olympics.” Among well to do, highly educated, and downwardly mobile progressives, people can gain social status by signaling their victimization. They use manufactured grievances to excuse their behavior and assert they are good people because they were wronged by those bad people.
It’s silly. It’s the product of capitalism’s abundance and success that this cohort of people have the luxury to fabricate such dismal fictions about the state of the world.
(This message was written by someone who gets joy from chasing ducks.)
I think it's the combination of what you are talking about and what Matt is talking about. There was already a theory of change on the Left with longstanding theoretical roots that says you get people pissed off and they vote for Left wing change, as well as the dynamic where Democratic politicians don't want to piss off The Groups. And then on top of it all, you have the Oppression Olympics which, let's be honest, is mostly a bunch of the most privileged people in the world cosplaying as if they personally face tons of oppression, in order to chase additional status in their elite realms by pretending everything in still terrible.
Put that all together and it's really hard for the Left to come together around a really optimistic message.
Some of these people are just joyless. My sister knew some of these types when she lived in Portland.
You can’t overstate the prevalence of psych problems in this cohort.
Perhaps, although I will also say that some of them are just losers, and being a loser is not a psych problem per se.
I would point most forcefully to the "wahhh, why do I have to work" brigade.
Portland is a good example of aggregative impacts of this kind of mentality. The more people act like that and give it legitimacy the more it becomes an option for others in a feedback loop.
Communists routinely discussed hastening the revolution. "Be sad about everything" has a long history, and is probably attractive to radicals on all sides of politics.
I didn’t know quail were predatory
They will eat bugs and gambels will go after small lizards.
From your quote from Perry Bacon: "...comparably little focus on the structural weaknesses of the U.S. economy."
The key word is "structural". Matt (and the rest of us, on the whole) has an appreciation for the fruits of a market economy. We want more of those fruits! Helping the less fortunate and expanding the safety net depends on the continuing growth of our economy. It is an abundance agenda.
But the people like Perry Bacon don't agree. They envision a different economy altogether -- hence the word "structural". Elsewhere in his essay, Bacon writes that "Most Americans are better off economically compared with 2010 and perhaps even compared with 1999 or 2018. Americans have more money per capita than the overwhelming majority of people around the world. But our system of hyper-capitalism still shouldn't be described as good or strong, because it leaves to many people either struggling or very nervous about their future."
The one positive about Donald Trump is that he unites the Democratic Party coalition in opposition to his criminality, incompetence and authoritarian inclinations. Once he is gone, I think we are going to have a serious problem in the Party holding together the professional and managerial class, who support and benefit from our market economy, with the growing number of young people who want to see "structural" changes to the capitalist system that has created -- and continues to create -- the best economy in the world.
I didn't come away from the good old 538 days thinking I could think a whole lot less of Perry Bacon, but *holy shit*, there was so much basement underneath that floor!
"there was so much basement underneath that floor"
That's a great expression!
It’s like WaPo wanted Jamelle Bouie and got Charles Blow instead.
His stuff is dreck of the highest order.
I used to frequent Slate and whole I disagreed with Bouie about almost everything...he definitely had too tier skills as a writer.
What happened with him?
He went deep into Black history, particularly post Civil War era, and wrote a number of very good things on that time. But he seems to have become stuck using those years as his framework for explaining everything in the country. He's become less insightful and repetitious as a result.
It so odd...I liked his articles and podcast appearances while at 538 (though he was no Harry Enten). But ever since...yikes, I can't even believe it's the same guy. Definitely one of the prominent writers I kind of reflexively disagree with the most.
I feel like Nate did a good job as editor in chief in getting his writers to stick to the goal of empirical data journalism even while acknowledging some of the takes they really wanted to cover.
I never thought it was above replacement-level content at 538, but he at least kept his feet on the ground.
Yeah I hoped he would offer more data driven opinion pieces bc of his background. I was deeply deeply wrong.
One of things most of us assumed at the end of the Cold War was that the capitalism vs. Communism argument would go away and the Overton Window would narrow to some spectrum such as Singapore to Sweden or the United States to Denmark.
But a lot of these loud folks really do talk as if "overthrowing capitalism" is a possible and desirable political outcome, even now.
Overthrowing capitalism, if you narrowly define capitalism as a system where a small number of capitalists (ie the owners of capital) direct the state to operate in their interests and prevent ostensibly democratic mechanisms from countering their control of the state, is a perfectly reasonable goal.
The problem is that the United States is not a capitalist country by that narrow definition. The Gilded Age ended 120 years ago. TR broke up the trusts.
These people are operating from a false understanding of how the USA operates. They should be seen as conspiracy theorists on a comparable scale to Qanon.
Also, there's a serious dose of motte and bailey going on here: switching between the strict Marxian definition of capitalism (roughly what I wrote) and the looser popular definition (a market system that isn't socialist) is something that happens a lot, and is used to conceal the fact that a lot of people are essentially conspiracy theorists about the economy and political system. If you say "the country is capitalist and capitalism is bad", then you could either be wildly hostile to all markets, or you could have false beliefs about how the country works, and you find people who buy into the conspiracy theory pretending to be wildly hostile to markets because that's much more socially acceptable.
But when you hear massively OTT descriptions of Citizens United: this is the conspiracy theory that lies behind them: every politician (or almost every politician) is explicitly being bribed by a conspiracy of billionaires, newly elected politicians are near-instantly corrupted by the system and there are only a handful of holdouts (usually: Bernie plus whoever the individual conspiracy theorist likes; AOC is now often seen as having been corrupted because she didn't refuse to associate herself with non-Squad Democrats). Only a revolution can clear out these Augean Stables; electing politicians always runs the risk that they will be corrupted. If you say this openly, it's laughable. But they don't; they use the ambiguity in "capitalism" to conceal it. Indeed, many are themselves caught in the ambiguity and aren't explicit believers, but repeat statements that only make sense from the conspiratorial context.
It is the abundance created by capitalism that gives these people the idleness and luxury to hold such asinine beliefs. They are materially protected from the consequences and costs they want to impose on others.
Maybe this is yet another consequence of having a two-party system? Here in Germany we have separate parties for the far-left and the far-right, and in the last election from 2021, they respectively received 4.9% and 10.3% of the vote. And of Germany's 7 big parties, these two are the only ones that have never been part of a federal coalition government.
In contrast, if you only have two parties, the far-left and far-right have little choice but to try and influence whichever of the two parties is closer to them. So how could the Overton Window narrow?
But rhetoric aside, to the extent they proposing policies vs platitudes, they are proposing largely the policies of an idealized Scandinavia not the USSR. The Overton window is about arguing the merits of Citizens United or expanding unions, not collectivizing the farmland and turning the Apple Store into a Co-op
I'm curious for readers of Slow Boring who apparently agree with Perry's analysis to enlighten me about the aspects of our economy that require deep structural change. This is a genuine question; I'm actually quite curious!
I don’t agree with Perry Bacon about the deep structural changes that are needed, but I do think there are deep structural that should be made. Pigouvian taxes (including carbon taxes), broad permitting reform for construction of housing and green infrastructure, probably a very different relationship between work, taxes, redistribution, health insurance, etc, especially as artificial intelligence reshapes the economy.
But I also think the way you get there safely is through the slow boring of hard boards, not through a revolution that could just as easily go the way of the Iranian, Chinese, Russian, or French revolutions as the American one.
Yes to all of this. I want significant change but I don't trust revolutions at all!
Housing costs need to be significantly lower.
Health care should be universally guaranteed to every American.
Income and wealth inequality should decrease to at least 50s/60s levels.
Private sector union density should be a lot higher.
Childcare, child activities like sports and summer camp, and college should be a lot more affordable to parents.
The FIRE sector should comprise a much smaller share of overall profits/economic activity.
There should be a lot more support in terms of welfare and programs for people who are down on their luck, lose a job, get out of prison.
Ideally we should get ~100% of our energy from non-carbon-emitting sources.
Would endorse this list as pretty comprehensive.
I unironically don’t think this requires structural reforms but simply raising taxes and getting rid of zoning, with some sprinkle of pro union legislation.
I say tho because I don’t think the US actually is far off from much of these things and doesn’t requires a massive overhaul to get there (like it didn’t in the earlier 20th century).
I had a feeling someone might reply with something like this, and I suppose it depends on your definition of "structural." But are you saying the New Deal wasn't structural reform? It created huge new agencies, created millions of jobs, and changed the economy in pretty fundamental ways. It wasn't the Bolshevik Revolution, but it also wasn't simply a higher EITC. Even getting rid of zoning is a pretty damn radical change that would alter quite literally the structures in our country. It's not structural in that it wouldn't require a new government association, but it is a soft appropriation, in that people bought property believing it would have exclusionary zoning and we'd be taking that away. I fully support getting rid of zoning, and I certainly get downplaying its radicalness in public communication, but among friends we can admit it's a big fucking deal.
I don't know that I fully agree with Perry's analysis but I am probably closer to him than most readers. I would say that the biggest structural issues would be that we are using the free market to provide some essential services where the free market is not going to create the best possible outcomes, most significantly health care. I also think we are being sufficiently progressive in our taxation system and so are not adequately distributing wealth out of the system in a fair way. We are also allowing corporations to participate too much in the political system as the equals of people and this has created distorted policies that focus too much on protecting corporate profits over protecting the public (ie banking deregulation).
If only we could have a free-market in healthcare OR a more social policy things would be so much better. The current market is so distorted it isn’t much of a market at all. High regulation across the board, limited numbers of participants, no pricing transparency, almost no ability to negotiate at the services level either due to exigent circumstances, being tied to employer plans of which you have almost no say over, or strong regulation that limits what is on the market anyway. You have government controlled credentials and residency supply. It is a mess. A more free-market solution would be less fair to the least advantaged but probably much more efficient. And so would a single-payer system that just operated a top down service. Personally I’d prefer something closer to the dual tack system the Dutch have with single-payer “long term” care and private “short term” insurance for things like a broken arm. The shorty term market can actually function as real insurance because expense is capped and you can subsidize those that can’t pay via the functioning market. Not a perfect system,
But seems to have strengths of both approaches and is actually pretty close to what we have with some tweaks. “Medicare for all … long term care” is not far off from the current system and it would enable us to fix some the issues with competitiveness of the exchanges by capping costs (to insurers)
Nah, free Cadillac care for everyone, don’t let everyone become a doctor but increase the number of residency spots by a LOT, and reduce the population by using Republicans for LD50 chemical testing so that we have more doctors per capita
I feel like the one that keeps coming up in my life and social circle is childcare and to a large extent healthcare, and I actually mean this in a much larger sense than just how it's typically used (Like including measures of stress, anxiety and other mental health problems). Education and housing are also structurally unequal and not just something that everyone gets a good one of like without any special work on their part.
It's funny because the "structural change" energy in education seems to be coming from the right these days--which aligns with Matt's observation that "change" is no longer necessarily a left-oriented disposition.
And is there any "structural change" momentum in health care currently? Seems more like a "slow boring of hard boards" situation of voting for officials that expand ACA subsidies and cap drug costs (Democrats at the federal government level) and expand medicare (Democrats at the state level) which has yielded the lowest health uninsured rate in the country's history.
I think with healthcare a lot of the structuralist fervor right now is in nurses unions. Like the whole staff system at major hospitals in my area have been wholly gutted by the pandemic. My wife had to be in the hospital for a few days earlier this year and it was obviously a pale shade of what that same hospitals non-doctoring staff was like.
I don't know that there's a political block for this but I think just in general we don't have anything close to the number of care professionals that we'd really need to make sure everyone was really healthily handling shit. Like I'm a foster parent and the demand for youth mental health services like kind of outstrips the supply by a nearly immeasurable amount. The healthcare system has reached a capacity for diagnosis that is orders of magnitude beyond its ability to provide treatment.
As for education I'm not so sure it's so much that conservatives have more ideas about this or if they're just more organized about their ideas. Like get into school TikTok and tell me there's not a lot of left wing ferment going on there. It's just not that salient for some reason. I'd be open to some of the right wing ideas if they werent' just dripping with homophobia and racism. Have the gay penguin book in the library, have respect for the way your students walk in the door if they want to be queer or genderfluid or w/e and suspend them with an option to expel when they become unruly little bastards.
If the conservative parents are racist and/or homophobic, it seems like you would want them safely segregated (of their own volition) in their own schools and away from everyone else.
Better they have their school choice rather than take over public schools.
I didn't have "Belisarius channels Zora Neale Hurston" on my Slow Boring bingo card for this week . . . .
I mean I'm a charter school teacher and I think more of a free market for policies around these things would be fine if it isn't sanctioning outright discrimination. I think I'd be unwilling to countenance a no blacks or gays are allowed to attend here but a hey at this school we teach a fairly conventional American history, at this school we teach the 1619 project or whatever and at this school we can have inclusive books and at another we carefully review the materials to keep all but the most inoffensive content out of students reading.
Like it strikes me as insane how much conservatives have become statists once they started losing elite culture. I used to be a much more conflicted voter and think things should just be left up to individuals to find what was right for them but when they really started down this road of using preemption all the time it makes me skeptical that any compromise that has provisions for marginalized people at all is going to be tenuous at best and a house of cards more often than not.
I don't blame kids for their parents being racist or homophobic and I don't want to see them denied an evidence based education that includes learning how to function in a pluralistic society just because I don't like sitting at PTA meetings with their asshole parents.
I'll confess that here is a part of me that is selfishly a little bit relieved when wealthy, high-competition, smug parents pull their kids out of SPS and put them in private schools. The high minded part of me worries about the resource hoarding and segregation that brings. But I also don't want to have to sit with them at PTA meeting and, unlike the racist and homophobs who won't talk to me once they get to know me for more than five minutes, they guys will torture me with entitled stories about their previous geniuses for hours. There have definitely been some loud exits where I have muttered "don't let the door hit your ass on the way out under my breath."
In my state there is still a lot of momentum for a public option health system of insurance that operates like Medicaid for all.
I agree with many of the responses and would add that I'd like at least a trial of sectoral wage bargaining.
There's an inherent contradiction here that you are deploying all this rhetoric to defend a market economy, but also say the expansion of the social safety net are consequence of it.
You probably are plenty aware of the existence of market externalities, market failures, state capture, and that social safety net programs explicitly remove distribution of goods and services out of the market.
You're probably also aware of American history having access to centuries of untapped resources, so it's not exactly clear this is fundamentally resultant of capitalism. In fact, the Chinese economy has experienced more rapid growth, in such a short time frame, than any other nation in the history of the world.
Would you yourself accept this kind of inconsistent reasoning for any other topic, if it didn't wind up leading to the conclusion that capitalism is more important than politics?
China got to benefit (less so now) from having a functional government (so they could implement changes and foreign investors didn't have to worry about too much instability) and being able to take advantage of technological advances elsewhere so they can do a lot of "install what already works elsewhere to catch up"
If they _hadn't_ had a lot of growth (like India) I'd have been surprised.
That's part of the tragedy of Africa is that it's failing to be able to use these same factors.
By highlighting China's more rapid growth performance, are you trying tohighlight Socialist performance over Capitalist? Because it doesn't quite work. However, you want to label China's system, while it is way more central and receptive to government demands from the commanding heights, it is far from oblivious to market forces domestically and internationally, including the all-important price system, and it certainly has not been the type of system that American and western leftists aim for of prioritizing equality of public consumption uber alles.
The Democrats need to be on the bench for 8 or 12 years, meditating on their sins and figuring out a new approach. Meanwhile, the Republicans will run riot (for ill and maybe some good). Hopefully Trump will leave (or be kicked out) of office when the time comes.
The GOP fully supports a would-be dictator and all-around d-bag, but it's the *Democrats* who need to sit on the bench for 8 years and meditate on their sins? Gotcha. Glad we cleared that up.
One of my least favorite takes in sports is the idea that a team has to suck badly in order to get better, usually pinning their hopes on a high draft pick to turn things around. Most of time...the team just keeps sucking. Always try to win as much as you can.
And this applies much, much more to things that actually matter in life.
Both parties are unworthy. But we have only two choices, so we work with what we've got. I'd be more comfortable in November if I knew that a vote for Biden would not be a vote for four more years of even worse incompetence than we've seen in the last four. If they win by a hair, the party factions will decide that their failed policies are actually perfect and a-okay with the people (except the deplorables who can be ignored) and they will never fix their problems. The bench is a good place to do that. Just because Trump talks big about being a dictator, doesn't mean the Americans will let him be one.
"four more years of even worse incompetence than we've seen in the last four..." What in the world are you talking about? Things aren't perfect, but they haven't been catastrophic either, and did you live through the Trump administration? Matt's article may be about Debbie Downer progressives, but I don't understand Debbie Downer centrists either.
https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/804163097149599745
Tom Nichols the other day said on Twitter that he's starting to think it's a 50/50 shot we're in for a dark 20 years if Trump wins and I'm starting to think that might be true...
I have felt it's over 50 percent for some weeks now. The New York Times poll yesterday (10% of Biden 2020 voters actively plan to vote for Trump in 2024) is disastrous for the Democrats, who have richly earned a place on the bench. At this point, I'm trying to talk myself into the possibility that Trump will be President again. I'm repeating the mantra "I have faith in the American people."
It's a revolutionary situation. Trump is just surfing the wave. As Jefferson said "a little rebellion is a good thing, now and again." I just wish we didn't have a malignant narcissist at the head of it. But, if Trump is that bad, the Republicans won't have 20 years.
Do you really believe that we should run a country by punishing people appropriately for their sins, regardless of what that does to everyone else who has to live in the country while you’re doing that?
It's a turn of phrase - don't take it too literally. I think if you want to run an excellent organization, you have to be ruthless with failure. It might be nice to wait until Trump is off the scene before taking time to do that, but the situation doesn't permit that, so there we are. Part of being an American is accepting it when a majority of your fellow Americans install someone you don't prefer, even if you think he's a dirtbag. If Trump wins by a good margin (distinctly possible, in my view) then that's that.
I agree that part of being an American is accepting it when a majority of your fellow Americans install someone you don’t prefer, even if you think he’s a dirtbag.
But doesn’t that precisely contradict what you said when you said the Democrats deserve to be punished? Shouldn’t we be accepting them, and trying to make them better, rather than encouraging people to replace them with someone worse?
The Democrats have no vested rights to be in power. That's what "sitting on the bench" means. They are out of power until they can convince a majority that they are trustworthy enough to put them back in again. I think this will take more than 4 years, because the dysfunction goes deep.
*No one* has a "right" to be in power.
However, someone *will* be in power.
I want it to be the people that will do less bad and more good, no matter how dysfunctional or untrustworthy they are.
Clearly an economy managed democratically by the electorate, which is always a hair’s breadth away from a GOP majority, would never leave anyone struggling or uncertain about the future.
Dismissing conservatives as being "for selfishness" is an easy way to miss something important.
Progressives have done everything they can to define "virtue" as "being hostile to the United States in all its works." In so doing, they make the message loud and clear, that they don't really belong, or want to belong to the American project, and that they have no commitment to their fellow citizens as Americans. In time of war, they are perfectly comfortable supporting our enemies.
Now, conservatives tend to be patriotic, as do centrists and a lot of liberals like me, and we all tend to hate this stuff. Let's not pretend that this negativity and hostility represents "high-minded principle." How can anyone claim the right to direct the future of our nation, when they don't want to be associated with its most basic principles? Loud progressives aren't everyone, but the inexplicable failure of responsible people in that camp to protest against this remotely enough, says volumes to the rest of us.
Who do you think is more patriotic: Joe Biden or Donald Trump?
Old Joe, of course. But he isn't in control of the Democratic ship and that has resulted in some unpatriotic results.
I think you're allowing yourself to confuse extreme left Democrats who control a handful of local governments on the Pacific coast and like 5 congressional seats with the actually-existing Democratic party, which is so committed to the American project it was willing to sacrifice left-wing priorities on immigration to get Ukraine aid passed.
Also consider that virtually every staffer who presents themselves for employment in a Democratic administration is a PMC who adheres to left-wing policy and cultural ideas. They don't even fathom that the rest of the country doesn't share them. This is why you have lowly staffers writing publicly to the President to denounce his policy in the Middle East, which is in strong support of one of our major allies. In any functional organization, they'd be on the street the very next day. They are the worst people possible to be leading a party that needs its working-class votes.
Yes and then you have the Republican staffers who are actual Nazis making campaign videos with sonnenrads and shit
Who are they?
The left is a strong faction in the Democratic Party, strong enough to block and redirect if not to rule. Exhibit one is the shambles created at the border, where countless attempts by the President to get it solved were ignored or slow-walked by the "loyal" staffers to whom he assigned the problem, starting with the Vice President. This year it is far, far too late. He wasn't "willing" to sacrifice left-wing priorities on immigration: he was going hat-in-hand from a position of weakness that that very faction put him in. Now it will cost him his presidency.
So who are the patriots running the Republican ship?
I simply can't credit this as an explanation of anything. I don't like lima beans. That doesn't mean I have to order a double bacon cheeseburger with fries and a shake, and if I did, you'd have the right to be skeptical when I said I was on Atkins.
I don't understand the analogy - say again? Both parties are a disaster.
Far left = lima beans
Republicans = Supersize combo meal
Atkins = Patriotism
Specifically, if you vote for people who promote Russian disinfo campaigns, you might not be motivated by patriotism.
"if you vote for people who promote Russian disinfo campaigns"
To be fair to her voters, it didn't come out until well after the election that Hillary was responsible for the Steele Dossier.
It's all a matter of perspective. Our country was born in revolution. If you think it is being run into the ground by corrupt people who despise American values, then you might view yourself as being patriotically motivated to throw them out. Americans have seen Trump a lot and they know everything about him, January 6 and all the rest. If enough of them vote for him anyway, that's the end of the matter: its the American people talking. At that point, personal opinions about Trump's unlovely behaviors kind of fade in importance.
Yeah let’s stop elevating selfishness *and* anti-Americanism and get back to elevating virtue, including appropriate recognition of the suffering of those who are worse off in one way or another, without centering it in such a way that makes us negative about all attempts to help.
What is virtue?
Aristotle said it was something but I forget what
Something about a Golden Mean? Striking the proper balance between two vicious poles...? Centrist bootlicker that Aristotle
Yeah that was it
Recognizing the suffering of those worse off and trying to do effective things to help them.
Being effective means to be cold-eyed as to causes and effects. That may involve tough judgments on some of the people who need help and are suffering. For example, my city spends more than $1b/year on homeless services, yet many homeless people prefer to sleep on the street rather than go into dangerous and degrading barracks shelters. But why don't we have better, single-room shelters? Because the government defers to advocates who are ideologically invested in "compassion" and not stigmatizing any of the behaviors that get people into homelessness, or obstruct their getting out of it. They believe in building free apartments for people who can't manage their own lives, with services to manage it for them. Those apartments are very expensive, can be built only slowly, and take away a lot of money that could be spent on better shelters and services. So maybe we should make results matter more than compassion? Like, accepting that we should spend that money making the shelters safe and humane? And helping developers to build what used to be called SRO's (which most young people call "living with roommates") at market rates that are affordable for people who have modest jobs. And trying to help people down on their luck to get accountable drug treatment and a job so they can move out and pay rent like everyone else.
I agree with all that!
I think that virtue consists in doing things that actually effectively help those who are worse off. Some people don't care about helping those who are worse off, and vote against policies that cost something in order to help those who are worse off. Other people want to distinguish themselves from that group, so they start with the first step of elevating caring about helping those who are worse off. Making it very obvious that you care about those who are worse off makes it clear you're not in the first group.
But sometimes, the actions that make it most clear that one isn't in the first group aren't the most effective actions at actually benefiting those who are worst off. I think real virtue requires taking this second step, and actually doing the things that are helpful (or at least, making the effort to try to figure out which things are in fact helpful) rather than just taking the first step of distinguishing oneself from those who actually don't care.
The in-between group consists of people who are "virtue signaling". I think that virtue signaling is in fact a good thing, but we shouldn't let the signaling of virtue outweigh real virtue. Sometimes when people complain about virtue signaling they take this complaint as a reason to reject virtue itself, when I think we should take it to be a reason to embrace virtue above and beyond mere signaling, even when it conflicts with sending the most effective signals.
I seem to remember that some of the most right-wing people are church people who give a lot of money to charitable causes (not just the collection plate). Mormons, famously, give 10%. Believing that the government shouldn't be doing something, or that it shouldn't be doing it that way, is not the same as believing that it shouldn't be done. You can't conclude that, because they vote against something, they therefore don't care to help. They may just not like the way it's being done.
The most basic principle of this country is popular sovereignty. Government of, by, and for the people. The Democratic Party believes in that. Trump’s GOP thinks your vote only counts if you vote for him.
I think both Democrat and Republican voters believe in that. I believe that parties and politicians believe in what helps them stay in power, and that can get away with.
"In so doing, they make the message loud and clear, that they don't really belong, or want to belong to the American project, and that they have no commitment to their fellow citizens as Americans. In time of war, they are perfectly comfortable supporting our enemies."
Oh my God! We have a believer in the "Green Lantern" Theory of Geopolitics.
An oldie but goodie penned by Matt Y. himself. Jeebus Christmas. You lose your license for being taken seriously believing in that kind of garbage. You think foreign policy and national security outcomes don't hinge on countries' material interests, capabilities, and how policy iand strategy are executed, competently or incompetently? It's just about willpower, and will to win, vs. cheering for the enemy or blaming America first? That the Republican Party is superior at National Security, defense policy, foreign policy, simply on the say-so, its own say-so, that it hates America's enemies more, and the other party, or people somehow adjacent to it, don't hate them enough?
That's a load of cock-a-mamie BS pollluting our national discourse for decades. And I love the latest exceptions, which seem to be, "but as soon as a Republican says an enemy isn't an enemy (Russia), well then it is not an enemy".
Since you need an Atlantic subscription for the original Green Lantern theory article, I'll try to find a free one.
https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/21/the-empirical-basis-of-the-green-lantern-theory/
https://gregsanders.typepad.com/blog/2007/08/the-green-lante.html
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2009/09/27/kimmitt/
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/537372-lebron-james-cleveland-and-the-green-lantern-theory
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/a-will-and-a-way-c64162d5032c/
I fear much further discussion with you on these matters would turn into that cartoon of....
"What are you doing honey, time to come to bed."
"But someone is *wrong* on the internet!"
This is gibberish. Wanna pick *one* thing to say? Or not?
Patriotism can have multiple definitions. I would argue that the Progressive cause has been hostile the history of the United States and some of its symbols and national identity but is very much concerned with the welfare of the American People. Conservatives are much more positive about US History and identity but are less concerned about the universal welfare of the American People. We may differ about which counts as love of country. (Ironically on the Left I am seeing people exhibit a lot more concern about the history and identity of the nation of Palestine and less on the long term welfare of the Palestinian people.)
I define it simply: understanding yourself as part of the American project and accepting that you have a bond of citizenship with other Americans. We all have different views of how to express and act on that, which is fine, we need that diversity of voices.
That said, I don't see any of this basic realization in progressives. They just trash the entire idea of America, period. They aren't even proud of being American themselves (polls show this). Thus I would argue that they can't be truly concerned about the welfare of all Americans because they are disdainful of those very bonds of citizenship in both theory and practice. Of course this is very painfully obvious in the Israel-Hamas situation, where they support people who are designated enemies of the United States, and behave terribly towards American Jews who are their fellow citizens. I conclude some of the Palestinian-Americans among them are not, in their own heads, Americans at all - they are basically Palestinians who happen to live comfortably in the United States where they have liberal free speech rights and can get away with hate speech against Jews. As for the others in the protests, well: education in civics and American history has declined badly, so I think they have a very rudimentary idea of what American citizenship is.
Conservatives might say "I don't think those people are deserving or real Americans" and that's bad in my books, but at least they acknowledge bonds of citizenship with the rest of us, and are proud to be part of the American project.
"In time of war, they are perfectly comfortable supporting our enemies."
"They aren't even proud of being American themselves"
I think there's some severe stated-vs.-revealed preference issues going on here. It may be fashionable to dissociate oneself from America, but nobody's burning their draft cards or refusing to pay their taxes.
"Conservatives might say 'I don't think those people are deserving or real Americans' and that's bad in my books, but at least they acknowledge bonds of citizenship with the rest of us, and are proud to be part of the American project."
(1) If somebody says that "those people are [not] real Americans", then I don't think you can really claim that they "acknowledge bonds of citizenship with" those people. (2) I'm much more comfortable with somebody who would deny themselves the right to be American than with someone who would deny me the right to be an American.
If what you mean is, do I support the Israelis in this conflict, yes, that is the case. I do that very largely because of the atrocious behavior that the pro-Palestinian protestors have indulged themselves in, and its clear relationship with leftist anti-American ideology, and how powerful this is in spite of it very much not approved of by 90% or more of the voters. I see a whole bunch of people who don't understand that they are American first, and have a responsibility to behave decently to their Jewish fellow citizens before they have any responsibility for "From the River to the Sea" or other foreign causes.
If these protestors' impact on our vacillating government get us into a shooting war with Iran, they may well have draft cards (boys and girls both, this time), and uniforms, and assault rifles with which to kill Muslims as part of their American duty. And they had better be prepared to do it. That kind of protest is a little harder than what they've been used to - you can actually go to jail for it.
"If what you mean is, do I support the Israelis in this conflict"
No. That's not what I mean at all.
What I mean is: there's a gigantic distinction between "wishing the US to support a different side in an armed conflict and attacking other Americans for not sharing one's political views on that topic" and "in times of war...supporting our enemies". It is the distinction between political dispute (loyal, albeit uncivil, opposition) and treason. And I do not think it is appropriate (indeed it is un-American!) to cloud that distinction.
There's a degree to which I am highlighting this to make a point (though if we get dragged into a big war with Iran, it may be literally accurate). Recognize, though, that these protests are not acts of civil disobedience nor are they about freedom or civil rights for citizens. They are street actions on behalf of a foreign power that is inimical to us.
People who openly supported communism during the Cold War had a very hard time even though we weren't actually in a formal state of war with the Soviet Union. Even the communists understood that they were being unpatriotic: were proud of it, in fact. They said that they were exercising their free speech rights, and they were, but a large majority saw that what the communists were freely speaking about is overthrowing our political system. This was over the line for them, and, in my mind, justifiably so.
The Bill of Rights guarantees our right to peaceably assemble for redress of grievances. These protests are neither peaceable nor related to any grievances they might have as American citizens about their own government and our collective life together. It's a big stretch to extend that right to the importation of a foreign dispute to our shores. There is nothing "loyal" about this, as is clear from what they openly shout in these protests and what they say in their social media feeds. In a big national crisis these would almost certainly earn them a trip to preventive detention. The situation is not that severe (yet) but the acts are the same even if the consequences are not.
If you like a history lesson, in the last big national crisis, the vast majority of German- and Italian-born citizens were at great pains to stress their American loyalty. So were the Japanese citizens, who were treated shamefully, yet who were 100% loyal in word and practice. I'm not hearing any of that from the Palestinian or other Arab communities, most of whose members are American citizens. Maybe there are cooler heads there, but I'm not hearing anything about it.
Hum. I would say that I understand myself to be part of the American Project. I understand the "American Project" to be an ongoing experiment of providing strong individual civil liberties and democratic rule in a large and growing pluralistic society in which every generation has face challenges and generally expanded access to democracy and expanded liberty as our understanding of the needs of neighbors and the recognition of the truly equality of all has grown through a combination of us living as neighbors and the brave activism of people fights for liberty and justice for all. I understand my role in that project to be key to my entity.
I also feel a strong bond of citizenship with other Americans. That is why I want all of them to have the right to vote, the right to practice their faith, get excellent health care if they get sick, and be supported by a strong social safety net in times of trouble and am willing to pay more in taxes to provide all that even to folks who hate my guts and wouldn't wish the same to me. You can't acknowledge your bonds of citizenship only with the folks you think should count as real Americans. That isn't a bond of citizenship. That is a bond of tribalism.
I'm not "proud to be an American" per se. I am an American because I was born here. I did nothing to earn it. Why would I be proud of it. I think I am a good neighbor and citizen and I am proud of that. I am not proud of parts of our history like Native American genocide and slavery. I am proud of parts of our history like the civil rights movement and New Deal although I think neither was perfect or complete.
I'm with James Baldwin when he said "I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."
Folks can wear a flag shirt and carry a tiki torch - that flag shirt doesn't make them a patriot.
As far as I am concerned the best gauge of patriotism is your willingness to serve your country and your neighbors. If you, like me, believe that justice is what love looks like out in public, than a fight for just isn't a fight against your country is your way of showing you love your country.
I support strong individual civil liberties and democratic rule in a large and growing pluralistic society as well. But I also understand that some of us have other things (such as religion) that are equally protected and equally part of our liberties. I've seen a lot of stuff in this "fight for justice" movement that is heedless of those things. We forget about the "e pluribus unum" thing, but it's needed now more than ever.
I am actually a very religious person. I would say that my faith is a guiding principlel in much if not most of my political thinking. My faith also requires things of me that depend on protection of freedom of religion. For example I can't say the pledge of allegiance. I'm an attorney and I can't take oaths or say "Your Honor" to a judge. I've had many cases where I have had to directly rely upon our constitutional protections of freedom of religion for myself and my daughter. I consider religious liberty to be a core part of civil liberties and one of America's most important contributions to the development of human rights world wide.
I have definitely had the experience of others on the Left saying things to me that I found insulting about religion and religious people but I am not aware of any attempt by any progressive politician to limit people's ability to freely practice their religion. In general, progressive communities tend to be more protective of minority rights such as the right of Muslim women to wear a hijab than more conservative communities. The only really arguments that I have heard on the Right is that they object to public officials not being able to discriminate against who gets access to public services because it would permit other people to do something that they themselves are precluded to do under their religion (same sex marriage registrations) and Pharmacists not being able to refuse to dispense medication that their religion says would be a sin for them to take. Neither of those things are actual limits on people's religious liberties just their ability to require others to act as members of their own faith community.
I do think that there are factions of the Left should be more respectful of people of faith. I think it would be a better match to their stated values if they were more inclusive. But there are also lots of people like me who on the Left because of faith based commitments. A lot of the activism I do is with other people of faith.
This is very interesting - thank you for taking the time to explain this. Much for me to think about here.
This is why I love the terms prosocial and antisocial. You can put things on an axis of selfish/altruistic, or tolerant/intolerant, but I think prosocial/antisocial is the best axis for defining virtue. People hate cancel culture because it's tolerant in an antisocial way, and doomers are annoying because they're altruistic and empathetic in an antisocial way. Meanwhile, lots of selfish conservative behavior winds up being neither prosocial nor antisocial, just neutral. So we should try to reserve our judgement for people who are actually being antisocial and reserve our praise for people who are actually being prosocial.
I think it's pretty clear that progressive doomerism is more about signaling one's leftwing bonafides than a clear-eyed tactical decision to effect change.
I’m glad that Perry made an explicit strategic argument for doomerism, but I think that like 90% of the time, the behavior is just backfilled from the speaker’s existing sense of doom. I think the underlying drivers are:
1– Journalism and academia, where professional discourse-makers live, actually are in a horrible economic state that’s not getting better. Even people who are smart enough to know better emotionally over-index on their immediate conditions.
2– Heavy X.com use is both a symptom of and contributor to depression, and depressed people are inclined to interpret all information negatively.
In the short run, if you’re an electoral politician, you should avoid relying on journalists and heavy X.com users to push your optimistic message. Instead, go on TV or do livestreams and push your optimistic narrative, with a level of sunniness and conviction which might initially seem a bit weird. Play DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win.” If the media push back against you, call them out of touch. Make ad spots where normal-seeming people talk about how they’re doing well.
In the long run, it would probably be good to find some ways to alleviate the material situation for academics and journalists, because their situation creates bad incentives and distorts their perceptions, in ways that are bad for a complex society that needs researchers and information-providers. And we might also want a stronger state effort to measure and regulate down the negative externalities of social media.
I strongly agree, but wonder what if any policies could possibly recreate the media and discourse environment of 2012.
On the media side— maybe just creating a bunch high-quality state-sponsored outlets, sort of like NPR or PBS* but for text media. It would create a bigger group of stably-employed journalists with relatively less incentive and inclination to be hyper-negative.
Overall discourse environment— something like forcing social media companies let you default to a chronological feed of posts from people you follow rather than an algorithmically curated feed, creating settings that let people precommit to limiting their time in the site, strictly enforcing an age limit of 15 or 16– other people probably have more good ideas on this front.
* Two outlets where the overall “temperature” of coverage tends to be relatively even-keeled, in a way that you mostly see elsewhere in the business-oriented press. Having stability and financial security tends to make people act less crazy.
EDIT: I mostly think these changes would make people less doomer-y/angry, but I don’t think they’d reset object-level beliefs to their 2012 state— and as somebody who supports trans rights, Big Fiscal, and some other recent opinion developments, I don’t really want that to happen.
Yea by “make America 2012 again” I’m definitely thinking more about tone than content, although definitely some things (especially the “no coercion by the government no matter what the consequences of our inaction” moves of places like Portland and Seattle) were better left untried.
If Biden loses this election after all the work he's done to cater to progressives, the lesson isn't going to be that the next Democratic candidate just needs to be more left wing. The lesson will be that progressives are unreliable liabilities as coalition partners, and much more useful as hippy-punching foils than as policy influencers.
I think this is presuming the outcome of a post-defeat debate. I fear that a Biden loss will lead to horrific chaos in the Democratic party and bellum omnium contra omnes.
Matt’s reminds me of yet more reasons why I think Biden is the best president of our lifetime. I do wonder why the common perception of him is so different. I can’t help but think it’s depressingly simple: lack of charisma. We all like to think we’re sophisticated and high minded but at the end of the day for our impression of a leader perhaps the razzle dazzle of a confident inspiring speech is worth a thousand policy achievements and subtle threadings of the needle?
Biden has seemingly pursued a "secret congress" strategy of being a minimal public presence while pushing insider legislative wins. It has worked on the legislative side, but it's been, I think, a contributor to his popularity problem.
But, I guess we'll see if that was a strategy of necessity as the election kicks off.
"...strategy of being a minimal public presence..."
His people surely understand that the more the public sees of (and hears from - ice cream cone photo ops, if overdone, can come off as cavalier, but at least he can't speak while eating) Biden, the more obvious his mental condition will be.
Counterpoint: you seem to be perfectly content with speaking your mind in public
So is Biden. That's the problem.
Is it time to become one of those weird countries with an elected figurehead president and a separate head of government?
Maybe we need a constitutional monarch to be our figurehead of state.
That system really seems flat-out better than ours where the president is both the politically most powerful person in the country *and* the national figurehead. Think the 2000 election where Gore was excoriated for being stiff and wooden while Bush was the guy people wanted to have a beer with.
Love Biden but I think he's the second best president of my lifetime. My vote for #1 still goes to Eisenhower.
Ike had his good points, but perhaps was not the best at pre-clearing some of the landmines left for his successors that he would have been better off taking the shrapnel from than they.
I am thinking on matters of Iran, Vietnam, Bay of Pigs go or no go or don't let Castro happen in the first place, more stable settlement of Berlin & European security and recognition issues, Civil Rights enforcement.
There could have been plenty worse Presidents in Ike's place, plenty of worse outcomes. I won't downplay it. He was lucky and good. And when you're lucky, being good often has something to do with it, but not everything. Sometimes you benefit from wasting assets, like Ike did. Among the ones Ike benefitted from were a few years of Soviet strategic timidity and caution, in the wake of Stalin's death, and the assumption of collective leadership and then Khrushchev's consolidation of dominant power, the Soviets' and Soviet bloc's still incomplete reconstruction from WWII damage, Asian Communists' postwar focus on domestic reconstruction and basic agricultural modernization and industrialization, and America's lead in inventory and productive capacity for intercontinental aircraft, rockets, submarines, and nuclear and thermonuclear bombs for the decade. These all provided an edge that was not going to last through the 60s and the natural build-up of Sino-Soviet industrial and technical capacity, so allowed relatively cheap defense of status quos without *either* negotiation or new regional wars. Third or Fourth term Eisenhower would have been faced with new choices, requiring fighting or retreating someplace. And domestically, putting up or shutting up on Civil Rights versus massive resistance.
Good points and worth discussing. But I'll just leave it at the greatest presidential effort in terms of its vast impact on American economic growth:
The Interstate Highway System.
Abso-freaking-lutely. The "American System" and "Internal Improvement" of the 20th century!
Good type of class and redistribution-agnostic national building investments characteristic of the Federalist-Whig-GOP (esp. Lincoln through Taft) legacy, and that type of energy.
Wow, you remember 1959?
Well, first the claim was "in my lifetime" not whether I remembered it, so the clock for that started ticking in April 1954 (or, if you're the Alabama Supreme Court, July 1953). And while I really don't remember Eisenhower as President, I do remember the 1960 presidential race.
As I wrote it I hesitated whether to phrase it as “my millennial lifetime” but decided that the more inclusive if generalizing articulation sounds nicer…
I agree that Biden is the best President of my lifetime. The problem is we are in a very smell minority, only 38% approve of him at all. That makes him a dubious candidate.
Can I draw out the discussion on what it means to be conservative a bit? In a literal sense conservative means resistance to change, and that's a bit incongruous with today's self styled conservative movements. They style themselves as conservative because their goal is to return us to "the good old days" when society was undeniably more conservative. If anything, this makes them reactionary, and I think classifying these movements as reactionary instead of conservative is both more correct and illustrative of their political goals.
I once had an English teacher who said "you can't argue semantics with someone who doesn't care" so semantic discussion over.
I think reactionary populist movements have been effective politically because while they are doomers today, to the right kind of low-information or so-inclined voter, they actually paint a great picture of "how things used to be". Society was orderly, jobs were plentiful and had dignity, you could achieve the full shebang American dream with only one member of the household working and the other staying home with the 2.5 kids, you went on a nice vacation once a year and your kids were guaranteed to be better off than you were. It's a false picture, we here all know that, but many many voters take it as fact, look around at the present situation, find it lacking in comparison, and buy into the reactionary narrative that the halcyon past was taken from you by [insert bogeman here] and the solution is to [be selfish/mean to x group but really we're just going to create an economy more favorable to the rich and enhance their already high extractive power].
But I get it. Life is tough. Having to be the party that wants to stay grounded in reality competing against a party that pushes nothing but reactionary vibes is hard. Obama could square that circle pretty well, but I am afraid the lift requires generational talent to do it.
You sniped one of the points I was going to make--reactionaries are the better descriptor there.
The best analysis I've seen makes a distinction between being a conservative in temperament and methods (i.e. cautious, pragmatic, incremental with the notion that the status quo contains accumulated wisdom) vs conservative in ideology (pro-certain values, often to do with promoting dominance for one social class). One can be a temperamental conservative and an ideological liberal at the same time.
*raises hand*
I believe that’s what the slow boring of hard boards is about.
Two points:
1) Framing 'conservative' as simply 'resisting change' is...well, simplistic. It's correct in very broad strokes, but does that mean that once liberals/progressives manage to overcome them and change things, conservatives are required to stupidly 'resist change' to the new status quo? Obviously not. That would be dumb.
But then you go "AHA! Now you are trying to change things (back), so you aren't conservative anymore, you're a reactionary!"
No one in their right mind would say that that is a valid working/functional definition of conservativism, even if 'resist change' is the overall goal of conservatives. We don't have the memory and tactical acumen of mere goldfish.
2) We all know that those pushing to define us as 'reactionary' are doing so merely because it is one or two steps closer to 'fascist' and/or 'nazi' in the general public's political word cloud.
It's primarily a rhetorical tactic/game.
For what it's worth, as someone who sees merit in drawing distinction between "conservative" and "reactionary", there is no group of "us" that I would ever describe that includes both you and, say, Stephen Miller.
I think 'conservative' and 'far right' is sufficient.
I'm sure many center left liberals don't like being associated with antifa or whatever other extreme left wing groups, but they are still part of the same broad coalition.
I think of conservatism being about "go slow and carefully, maybe too carefully". Not sufficient in itself, but useful baggage to the reforming impulse that wants to fix everything today without thinking too deeply about the second- and third-order consequences.
Yup. I do to.
But sometimes that involves trying to actively roll back changes that we think are mistakes.
The 'just resist change, the end' definition basically makes it a one-way ratchet.
Resist change, and if you ever fail and change happens anyways (which is inevitable), now you can't push back. Without becoming 'reactionary'.
Those were the days
Didn't need no welfare state
ev'rybody pulled his weight
gee our old LaSalle ran great
Those were the days
And you knew who you were then
girls were girls and men were men
Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again
People seemed to be content
fifty dollars paid the rent
freaks were in a circus tent
Those were the days
If you meet well-to-do voters for the Democratic party, it's not very clear that selfish motives are a uniquely conservative phenomenon. But more importantly, this response to Perry Bacon would benefit from mentioning actual fiscal constraints to what he's discussing.
At no point does Bacon suggest we should raise income and consumption taxes on everyone. Yet if he wants a transformed political economy, that is really the approach he'll have to sell to voters. It's simply untrue that raising taxes a bit more on the richest people in the US can finance vast universal public goods idealized with the nostalgia for mid-century European social democracy. But his essay is stuck with that belief, going to explain Biden needs to give bold plans and talk about the ways he'll tax the rich to deliver them.
The math doesn't add up very well. But if you don't know the math, then objections just come off as political cynicism or worse in the face of inequality. The greatest opposition to expanding the welfare state with broad tax rises is fundamentally democratic, and comes from the working class as much as the richest. People are genuinely skeptical the government can do a better job with their money than they can. I leave it to the reader if that worldview, or one of the intellectual who ignores it, is selfish.
I always respected Bernie Sanders for being the only candidate that was willing to actually say this, regardless of the merits.
I think by far the best argument to get more super lefties* on board with stop being “Debbie downers” is the practical argument; convincing people things are worse than they’ve ever been is just a really ineffective mechanism for pushing further change. For me the best example of this is environmentalism. It’s a really big deal that our CO2 emissions have gone down. And to go further back, it’s a really big deal there’s no more acid rain, the rivers and lakes are cleaner and you don’t walk around with black haze in the air (go look up pictures of places like Cleveland in the 70s). If I’m a swing voter, if all I hear is nothing has gotten better the last 40 years my attitude is going to be “then why are we doing anything if none of this has worked. Why don’t you want me driving an SUV if has not benefit to the world. Let me drive the car I want damnit”.
I said this the other day but it’s why I’m actually gets plastic bag bans. Now as it turns out, they may actually be ineffective full stop. But let’s say they are effective. Is it worth it? I’m actually aware that plastic bags really do have a pretty negative impact on the environment. In theory, I’m not against banning them (and I’m happy that my wife and I bring our own bags to the grocery store). But if the very same people who say nothing has gotten better for forty years are also pushing plastic bag bans, talk about terrible messaging. As Matt alluded to, talk about a recipe for telling swing voters that environmentalism is pure virtue signaling or purely about feeling superior (even though again I’m aware that plastic bags really are bad and getting rid of them in theory is worthwhile goal).
* I’m really going to push back on using the broad term “Progressives” here and why I say “super lefties”. Matt alluded to this but he is underselling how few people are of this doomerist mindset but how many of them are overrepresented on social media. This is the place where I again note that most people on Twitter, including people commentating on American politics are not American
> I think by far the best argument to get more super lefties* on board with stop being “Debbie downers” is the practical argument; convincing people things are worse than they’ve ever been is just a really ineffective mechanism for pushing further change.
They don't want to win. They want to be right.
You're trying to argue about how best to peel an apple, but they're holding an abacus.
I can tell you from personal experience that's not true. If you're talking about some very loud super lefties on Twitter? Sure I can definitely buy you're argument. But there are plenty of very earnest people who really want to see real change in the world who genuinely think the best way to persuade people to back more substantive change is to talk about how the world is doomed. Again, I have talked to these people before. As Matt has repeatedly said, a small but significant percentage of people do change their minds about things.
I think the success of the Climate Change movement is the best example of "persuade people to back more substantive change is to talk about how the world is doomed".
But is that really why it was successful or has been successful? I actually give the climate movement a ton of credit for highlighting that global warming is a very real problem in the face of a pretty dishonest campaign from oil companies (I always keep in mind that it was scientists at Exxon who first discovered global warming and it was Exxon who first recognized that you can weaponize MSM "both sides" framing to serve your interests).
But as far as I can tell, the real success is just pointing out "hey these are problems that you really should be aware of". I mean ultimate example is the foundational work of modern environmentalism "Silent Spring". One reason it had impact is Rachel Carson was pointing out something the general public was just not aware of or not given thought to. Furthermore, stuff like pollution you could literally point to; hence my reference to Cleveland in the 70s. I brought up the soot you could literally see, but also see (again famously) the Cayahoga river catching fire. And you can turn around and say, you know what doesn't happen anymore? Rivers catching fire.
I'm willing to be persuaded by your argument. But I'd want a concrete example. Like IRA happened (in part) because it became clear (at least to me) that you can doom monger people into supporting stuff like a carbon tax. You need to make climate about investing for a better future. So is there an example we can point to where doomerism has been successful?
When the movement successfully gets President Biden, and many members of his Adminsitration, to call Climate Change an "existential threat" and "the ultimate threat to humanity", I would call that a successful case of doomerism.
https://news.yahoo.com/biden-calls-climate-change-ultimate-165040948.html
I'd actually agree that climate change is an "existential threat".
But from the same article, directly from Biden "It shows that communities across America are taking more action than ever to reduce climate risks. It warns that more action is still badly needed. We can't be complacent. Let me say that again. We can't be complacent. We have to keep going. Above all, it shows us that climate action offers an opportunity for the nation to come together and do some really big things.". Doomerism would be "Climate change is a real threat that we've made no headway on for 40 years. That's why need to act now or humanity's time on earth will end very soon. Nothing has been done to address this issue in 40 years and we need to do something NOW!".
But just in general, this is a weak tea example to me. Nothing that a particular issue of your political coalition has paramount importance to address in a speech is pretty standard politics.
This language is exclusionary and does Violence to people who peel oranges, as well to those who cannot peel things. Interrogate your attitudes regarding citrus and its handling!
Some don't even want to be right. They just want to signal virtue and gain social status.
But most do want to win, I agree with Colin there. The problem is they often don't understand how their tactics are undermining their cause. And then the poseurs are truly damaging too.
>> And to go further back, it’s a really big deal there’s no more acid rain, the rivers and lakes are cleaner and you don’t walk around with black haze in the air
It's a huge mystery to me why environmentalists aren't talking up the very real benefits from reductions in pollution from clean tech. Coal emissions were responsible for something like 40k deaths per year in the US in 2000. That's down to under 2k deaths per year now, largely thanks to natural gas, but also from renewables.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/particulate-pollution-from-coal-associated-with-double-the-risk-of-mortality-than-pm2-5-from-other-sources/
The point is that cleaning up energy and transportation emissions delivers tangible pollution and health benefits that go a long way toward justifying the economic costs without even considering the benefits of CO2 reduction. Since pollution and health benefits are likely to seem more concrete and real to many voters than CO2 reduction benefits, winning over voters with these arguments could end up being easier than winning them with climate change arguments.
To me this is another case of the left failing to make voter persuasion a top priority. To win over voters to your side of an issue, you don't need to convince them to agree with everything you believe, you just need to find enough common ground to bring them over to your side.
A related note: I think "let's show leadership by making our community shittier" (for example, by banning gas ranges or reducing the viability of automobiles) is a really bad strategy, and one that's way too common in left-leaning jurisdictions.
If you can't coordinate action at a meaningfully higher level, you just become an irrelevant laughingstock.
In what way are plastic bags bad for the environment?
Plastic doesn’t degrade easily and clogs things like rivers and animal throats. If you sequester them effectively in landfills they aren’t that bad, but the issue is that some fraction of them inevitably escape into the local ecosystem.
They’re not a global harm in any significant way - just a local one. But that doesn’t mean they’re not a harm.
I agree that littering harms the environment. Targeting litterers is a sound policy, but not being pursued in any real way.
If you want to cut down on litter, targeting litterers is not very effective. Cutting down on opportunities for litter is much better, and is kinder as well.
Seems analogous to saying we want to cut down on speeding, so we outlaw automobiles.
It's more like saying we want to cut down on speeding, so we stop building streets with wide lanes and long straightaways.
Biggest challenge with furthest left progressives is that they live in a pretend world where most people are inclined to join their side. Cannot shake their faith in the size of their coalition when everyone hears their case.
online progressives tend to think all center-left types (Yglesias, Nate Silver, etc.) are secretly rightwing radicals while all downscale rightwingers are secretly socialists
But is Nate Silver center-left? He seems to be center, trending to becoming a new type of liberal Republican.
We can just listen to Nate himself on this: https://www.natesilver.net/p/not-everyone-who-disagrees-with-you
He calls himself a liberal in the way that most of the world uses the term, he places himself right in the center on economics, and has regularly voted for Democrats.
Well I didn't say he was a right-winger, I said he could become a liberal Republican. Not the same thing.
Liberal Republicans don't really exist anymore, so it's a weird projection.
They're coming back and, like the early 20th century GOP, they're going to be a bit weird.
I'm trying to imagine what Teddy Roosevelt would be like in today's environment. An explosion!
Matt and Nate are left wing. If Susan Collin is center right, what issues are Nate and Matt just to the left of her?
LBGT, immigration, healthcare,
abortion, gun control, policing, taxes. What?
They will both be voting for the democratic nominee. There’s no chance they’d vote for Trump or Nikki Hailey.
If Matt and Nate fall on the center for you, you’re far left. They’re both left wing progressives.
I didn't say Matt. Nate Silver has repeatedly gotten into fights with how much the Democratic party relies on expertise, it's extremely noticeable since COVID. That said, we'll see.
Doesn’t change they’re both progressive. The only places they’d be remotely considered center left is in large cities like DC, SF or NYC. People there run to defund the police or as socialist.
Nate silver is far to the left on nearly every issue from climate to abortion. He’s not center left at all.
Does Nate Silver have a far left view of abortion? Can you name one Democrat in Congress (other than Bob Casey) whose view on abortion is to the right of Nate Silver’s?
The fact that you think this makes some center-right says a lot more about your politics than Nate's. Would that make most leftists center-right since they ignore the expertise of economists? Police defunders are center-right because they contradict the advice of public safety experts? Or you're center-right if you've ever disagreed with Nate on polling or statistics?
No, I mean the entire style of citing an expert to make a political call is very 2010s progressive Democrat. This really came to a peak during COVID when we had to listen to public health experts explain public protests are allowed if they're for the right cause, unlike the Orthodox Jews which a then-popular NY Democratic governor (with large numbers of national fans at the time contrasting him favorably to Trump) called murderers for attending funerals.
Silver and I cannot unsee what these people are like when the chips are down in a crisis, and how they'll treat people's basic associative freedoms (which liberalism is fundamentally about, per Strauss on Spinoza, the public-private distinction.)
Silver would probably argue that much of that expertise is "expertise".
Yes, exactly, that's what a Republican would say!
No, he's repeatedly gotten into fights about how expertise* should guide policymaking but is not a substitute for it.
* really, plural expertises, because almost no interesting problems are up to and have an effect on just a single narrow field of study
I don't think Silver is anywhere on a left-right spectrum. I think he's more of a higher-functioning troll who takes special delight in negging anyone to the left of Mitt Romney.
I feel like I know the type from hanging out with fellow right of center types in DC. That's why I'm making the bold prediction about his trajectory.
Nate is a big gay rich libertarian who likes metrics.
Fiscally conservative, socially liberal.
With no sense of that fiscal conservatism consolidates power away from social liberals.
Gay rich libertarians obsessed with metrics are a bit more open to Republicans than they were 20 years ago.
We can only dream of the day that they wrestle away control over the Republican party from the red faced, low IQ/low trust, conspiracy minded fascists.
The problem with books about how the conservative movement ruined the GOP is they all start the story after WW2. So they all politely ignore how much anti-immigration, Bible-thumping prohibition, conspiracy theories, etc played a role in the GOP back when it was run by genteel New England industrialists and liberal Republicans were more of a thing.
The good news is smart people can read about that period and then find out the GOP today isn't too far off from the GOP of Warren Harding. So I think there's a broader story to Matt's "unhinged moderation" thesis, and Nate Silver's increasing frustration with Democrats on Twitter is just one part of that.
I call this the “there’s hope in the proles” theory. I’m a social democrat (so, a leftist by a lot of definitions), but I know that people who aren’t currently politically engaged generally are like that because they don’t have strong political commitments, not because they’re latently on your side and waiting to be activated. You can never get out of the work of doing politics, persuading people, and governing well when you do get power.
Above all, most "proles" like law and order so you can't win their hearts by defunding the police and removing border controls. It never ends well for a left that doesn't put law and order at the front of their politics. whatever else it contains.
Giving up the state monopoly on the use of force is also just… an objectively bad policy by any metric. I’m glad that almost all actual electeds won’t touch police abolitionism with a ten foot pole.
There are still places (like mine) where the legislators still want to defund the police. They call it "reallocation of resources" or some such.
In any case, the damage is done. It has been made clear that endangering the public safety in response to agitators is a thing that can happen, even if only for a time. The cops are demoralized, crime remains high, police reform is nowhere, there is rampant mistrust among the citizens. Whatever problems there are, are going to have to wait a long time for attention.
I mean, this is common behavior in fundamentalist religious sects where truth is revealed. They are inherently right and those who disagree are inherently wrong. Since most people wish to be correct, they will be on their correct side.
It’s dumb.
The mobilization myth!
https://www.slowboring.com/p/progressives-mobilization-delusion
The far left has been stuck in a mindset of doom and gloom since the late 60s, and in particular since the fall of communism. With no believable utopian leftist alternatives left standing, what remains for them is to rage rage rage against the dying of the light and to ignore the actual progress taking shape under the regime of the much dreaded capitalism (whether social democratic or neoliberal). NO to everything - stop, resist, hinder, smash, occupy etc!! All words of defensiveness, backwardness.
There was a time when the progressive left printed posters with muscular working class arms pointing towards a glorious future guided by rational policy and technological change. I sorely miss that left.
The problem with that left is that substantial parts of it were legitimately warm to literal communism.
It represented the only alternative to capitalism and therefore functioned as a projection surface for all manners of left wing anti-capitalist hopes and dreams. When it collapsed the only thing remaining is cynicism and despair, and denial of the very real progress that is still happening.
That's a really weird aspect of Leftist politics. You can see this in their position on Israel-Palestine too. They have a bunch of critiques of Israel, and at least some of them are legitimate, but where that leads them is to supporting Hamas as the indigenous revolutionary movement striking a blow against their colonial oppressor. When in fact, Hamas would run Palestine in a far more "right wing" way than Israel does if they were able to get power.
It's like the Left doesn't connect their current positions to their long term goals. It's simplistic and reactionary-- these guys are fighting The Man, therefore they must be good.
Hamas isn't even the worst example. Large parts of the left were supporting the Houthi regime, who are radical Islamist traditionalists that practice actual slavery, just because they felt like the Houthis were Doing the Work to oppose the Empire
This seems a little under-baked, or at least not super supported--I am skeptical that large parts of *any* demographic were particularly aware of who the Houthis even were until they started taking pot shots at shipping.
Oh to be clear I mean they started supporting the Houthis *because* of the pot shots at shipping, not that they've been Houthi stans the whole time.
I’m skeptical that this is “large”.
Yglesias had a good article related to this a week or two back. Basically that the contemporary Left is in fact more oriented toward anarchism than communism.
This is massively underrated. As an aspiring armchair expert in the discourse, I prefer and personally enjoy Liberalism as an ideology both in theory and in application. From my point of view Leftism is actually bad! Communism was a bad thing and to the extent that Leftists slouch towards that vision, that's bad and I disagree with that!
People fairly, at times, mention that oh these people are not that numerous or influential and whatnot. That may or may not be true, but from my perspective it's bad that they are influential or could be, because I disagree with them!
>Americans have a lot of unmet social needs. And I think the key task to meeting those needs is to convince people that progressive stewardship of the country is effective.<
This. And convince them that America enjoys a broad prosperity seldom achieved by any society, ever. We saw the opposite of this illustrated vividly in the 2010s. Obama and the Democrats miraculously got the ACA enacted. But it was a very close affair. And its passage was met by little elation or voter gratitude. It seems plain in retrospect that the economy of that era made a lot of people distrustful and paranoid instead of optimistic and magnanimous. Contrast that, to, say, the Great Society era, when a booming economy and widely-shared gains made expansion of the safety net a much lighter political lift.
"... America enjoys a broad prosperity seldom achieved by any society, ever."
How about "America enjoys a broad prosperity NEVER ELSEWHERE achieved by any [large, diverse] society, ever."
Given the structure of the ACA it would honestly be kind of weird if it *had* been met with elation and voter gratitude. Its biggest changes, such as pre-existing condition coverage and Medicaid expansion, covered a minority of people (and even fewer likely voters) but for a majority of Americans they were on “okay” employer-provided healthcare the day before it was passed and “okay” employer-provided healthcare the day after it was passed.
I am not trying to belittle the ACA as a piece of legislation - if it can be credited with bending the curve of healthcare cost growth that’s a BFD, and if you’re someone benefitting from medicaid or preexisting condition coverage or just a 24 year old with no experience dealing with America’s byzantine healthcare system yourself who would prefer to benefit from your parents’ healthcare plan instead of that at your entry-level job, its changes are all intensely meaningful, but the modal amount of change for a “comprehensive” healtchare bill on which Obama spent basically his entire first term’s political capital[1] seems to me to have been remarkably small for the modal voter, particularly in view of its character as *the* signature achievement of the administration.
[1] GFC bailouts / stimulus were in some cases polarizing but to the best of my recollection the attacks were primarily from the left and not a huge weakpoint for Republican attacks.
>> . Its biggest changes, such as pre-existing condition coverage and Medicaid expansion, covered a minority of people (and even fewer likely voters) but for a majority of Americans they were on “okay” employer-provided healthcare the day before it was passed and “okay” employer-provided healthcare the day after it was passed.
I get your point about voter apathy on ACA. It is real of course, but ACA does provide health insurance to a lot of people. Over 20 million people are covered by Medicaid expansion and another 18 million through marketplace coverage. Those aren't small numbers. But really, I think your overall framing is off.
American voters have plenty of compassion and empathy and are fully capable of giving credit for policy wins that don't affect them personally. As with so many other left-of-center issues, voter ambivalence about ACA is mainly a messaging/marketing failure coupled with the left's all-or-nothing thinking and general pessimistic attitude about most everything.
Many on the left completely dismiss ACA's accomplishments because what they want is a fully nationalized system and ACA didn't give them that. This is similar to how they pan Biden's IRA because it didn't immediately shut down all fossil fuel extraction despite being a huge and historic piece of climate legislation.
At the end of the day, both ACA and the IRA are great examples of the left's all-or-nothing thinking and their penchant for doom and gloom.
I don't think the goal for Democrats should be to get people deliriously happy and grateful to them for progressive legislation like the ACA. It should be to pass such legislation, get it successfully implemented and then have the population fight like hell against efforts by Republicans to overturn it. See Social Security, Medicare, and yes the ACA.
Getting stuffed passed is hard. Getting the natural conservatism of Americans to resist repealing it is actually not that hard.