What you're saying seems spot-on. However, I encountered a problem in your essay perhaps driven by your "inside-the-beltway" viewpoint: You generally work hard to make even subtle points clear and convincing to everyone. However, the word "infrastructure" was bewildering to me as an outsider; it wasn't until half-way through that I realized you were using jargon to refer to Democratic politics, not to roads and power grids.
The widespread consensus ratifies my sense that "infrastructure" is arcane jargon. I feel that this sort of Bubble Jargon is a marker of the disconnect between insiders and normies, and that insiders hoping to connect with the voting public need to modify their vocabulary. I'm afraid this is a lesson MAGA already knows.
No one paying to read this blog, probably including you, is a "normie". We are all somewhere outside the norm in both our desire for and our understanding of political information. To be fair, I too was confused by the term, but this blog generally isn't aimed at the voting public writ large.
Good point; you're right. At the same time, I do think there's a pathological element. I deal with annoying jargon in my field, and really dislike it. Math and science require jargon (I'm a scientist) but it's horribly overused, and I suspect its overuse becomes more profound elsewhere. Jargon simplifies and shortens communication amongst the cognoscenti, but it also has a social role. It reassures the insiders that they belong, while reminding the outsiders that they are Lesser Beings, unworthy of the Secrets of the Inner Circle.
The kind of "infrastructure" it refers to I think also deserves elaborating. Some kinds would be clearly helpful: Robust state and local party organizations + mass-membership groups. Even better if those are the same thing.
But now that's mostly either illegal or strongly disadvantaged by thinning social fabric and "Bowling Alone": The party is a hollow shell that's not allowed to choose its own candidates and doesn't really *do* anything. The typical state party is moribund and has a shockingly small number of people regularly involved in it.
The kind of "infrastructure" we get instead is foundation- or billionaire-funded DC-based NGOs, and those have bad incentives. They don't want to win local elections and be broadly appealing, they want to advance an ideological agenda. (Also incentives to advance the staff's career prospects, which leads up the incentive gradient to advancing the ideological agenda.)
This is a really good point. And, I suspect pursuing a membership model would also lead to some moderation in the party, as people tend to tone things down when they're talking face to face with people. Given the questionable benefits of things like door knocking, I think it'd be great if Democrats operated social clubs.
I always found the "Dems have structural disadvantages" cope to be very revealing. This is kind of true in the Electoral College (less so now), but that's about it. "The right wing controls the misinformation ecosystem!" "Dems would win if they had a Fox News and a Joe Rogan!"
In every area *other* than the EC, Dems have a massive structural advantage. Every institution that isn't explicitly conservative joined the Resistance and tried to sway voters towards Democrats. Art, science, journalism, you name it. There's no shortage of podcasters who will hew to the liberal/leftist line on every issue. And if people were so susceptible to "misinformation," why don't they just swallow all the lefty bullshit hook, line, and sinker?
At some point, the liberal/left establishment is going to need to come to terms with the fact that people don't really like them, and the more they put their message out, the worse the problem gets.
Matt has written about this before, but I think it’s so important for Democratic Party actors to realized the sheer limits of what politics can actually convince people of.
75% of America doesn’t like thinking about politics. It stresses them out and they just hate it. It’s hard to understand that when you’re like us and you’re obsessed with that stuff, but we all likely have some people in our life who fall in that 75% category. We need to take their apathy seriously.
And that obviously doesn’t mean people’s political and cultural views won’t change, it’s just we need to understand which means of communication have the most potency. Right now, that is art and communication spaces that are not overtly political.
For example, I think every American should go see Nickel Boys in theaters. That’s a much more effective educational tool than a corporate DEI program or a political speech. Stop lecturing people what to think, tell stories snd focus on education.
I found myself getting more and more infuriated reading through this comment. I have no doubt that you have, in fact, encountered these people in real life, but it’s like the dialogue was lifted from a Terry Pratchett bit. And then the participants all merrily rush off into the streets to provoke inevitable backlash…
Yeah, this is where a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking about messaging annoys me. The best crafted message in a focus group doesn't mean anything if people don't want to engage with the topic. We probably underestimate the role that Trump being a pop culture figure decades before he was a politician plays into his political success (in part because actually grappling with the implications is depressing).
This is true, and i think a contributor to the gerontocracy of the country (and honestly, there's a gerontocracy in popular culture as well- almost all the best known stars are old as all hell). The best way to get known is to have been known, in such a massive, diverse, and siloed in field.
It's amazing how many people who first became famous 20-40 years ago are still major entertainers (ranging from Tom Cruise and The Rock to Beyonce and Taylor Swift). It feels like a lot of the actors who were well-known in the 90's who had started in the 60's and 70's tended to be more well-respected thespians (Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman), but not necessarily summer blockbuster box office draws the way that Top Gun was a couple of years ago. How many active musicians from the 1970's had actual clout with young people in 1999?
Every liberal should have a conservative in their life at the very least to understand the arguments being made from that side, but I am always surprised when I talk to my conservative friends that argue in good faith how much we actually agree.
I think you just described the Biden coalition in 2020. The problem is that as soon as Dems take the presidency, a big proportion of that first group switches over to “why is Biden always stressing me out by making me think about politics?” simply because the news is covering him now. It is completely thermostatic.
During the campaign Kamala Harris went on SNL. Trump would never be invited to go on SNL, which of course made him very upset. Instead, to follow sort of federal air-time law, NBC gave Trump a commercial on Sunday Night Football, which has more viewers than SNL can ever dream of getting. And yet Trump was still upset about SNL and Harris didn't seem bothered about a Trump ad playing on the most watched TV show in America.
Was not only invited, he hosted! Usually presidential candidates get a cameo in a single sketch. It reminds me of how Trump implicitly complains about cultural elites never accepting him, while he was invited to introduce the segment on King Kong in AFI's first Top 100 television special. (He spent the entire time talking about how he owned the land the Empire State Building was on or something.)
It can't be overstated how much this drives conservatives crazy. Now, I don't think this justifies them electing a con-man, but the number one complaint from conservatives for decades has been the domination of cultural institutions by the broad left of center, and the refusal of the left of center to admit this (I'm using left of center because I don't want to get in a "left" vs "liberal" fight). To control Hollywood, Academia, and the mainstream news media except for one station and then pretend you don't is infuriating to some 30-40% of the public. During COVID, these mainstream institutions jumped the shark and got called out even by some of the center-left, for instance the CDC declaring racism to be a "pandemic." Since then, the credibility of these institutions is at the lowest point I've seen in my life, and the alternatives are not good. Joe Rogan is not a reliable source of information, but that window has only been created due to the intellectual laziness of mainstream institutions.
I understand this. I do think some of this would have been hard to combat by conservatives. A lot of these areas are either very focused on the youth or strongly downplay the profit motive (i.e., academia). The Conservative base skews much older and often doesn't seem to like their own children (note how much older rallies for Trump seem) but has the demographic weight to win elections. So things like art, film, music, fashion, etc. skew toward the less white, more 2nd generation immigrant, much more secular and non-Christian American youth population. I also think there is clear nuance here where the MSM is culturally liberal but economically conservative, so no one is really happy with them.
The MSM has a status quo bias that’s aligned with neoliberalism and the PMC. I consider that to be economically conservative but in the Mitt Romney sense not the populist, Tucker Carlson, sense.
I initially liked this comment but I think it actually does more harm than good to represent the economic goals of the PMC and Romney as being the same. There’s a big gap there! Romney was genuinely passionate about fiscal restraint and the deficit – the PMC cares about the performance of their portfolio. That leads to huge differences of opinion on stimulus spending, and the MSM has been firmly in the indigo-PMC camp for my entire political lifetime (since 2014, perhaps things were different previously).
It’s not like the NYT or PBS was up in arms about the sheer size of Biden’s stimulus package. They dutifully ran some editorials taking the other side, but by and large the opinion of the editorial boards of most of the larger media organs was completely in line with Dem economic goals.
Fair enough. I was thinking more so about being ok with private equity and vulture capitalists like Bain. I don’t watch Tucker, but I’ve heard of him going off about that kind of thing before from a populist perspective more than I’ve ever heard the MSM hold those monsters’ feet to the fire (to be clear I do like Romney on net, but the entire vulture capitalist stuff is totally fucked, and he did have a role in some of that.)
They may not be super socially conservative or MAGA, but I would say the world of police procedurals like Law and Order, NCIS, etc. are very much what I would call “normie conservative,” or center right. And they’re extremely popular.
Beyond that, what would an even more right wing prime time TV even look like? Modern retellings of Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation? A sympathetic miniseries of the Turner diaries? Nick at Nite, but forever?
They may have to satisfy themselves with making Disney stop making live action movies with black people or something, because I don’t think far right wing sitcoms and dramas would get very good ratings.
Yeah totally agree. I have been annoyed by lack of self awareness of Liberal/left establishment to the fact that ppl don’t like them - I think this is attributed to three things (I know I am very biased on this btw lol)
1. Those establishment grew up pretty much in a bubble
2. The sense of entitlement/lack of humility of them - I kinda blame the way they grew up (like Noah Smith, I think they are a bit too spoiled and I know I’m veeery biased on this as someone who grew up in East Asia)
3. I suspect a good chunk of them esp on academia are sorta kinda on spectrum - making them very oblivious overall to how ppl perceive them
I think he says Americans are praising their kids too much. And whet he comes at in my understanding is that leads to the overestimate of their potential (please chime in if I misunderstand or make things up)
Well, partially bc I grew up in Japan, his stance is not too surprising to me.
idk how much it is relevant to his stance but I’d say the Japanese sentiment towards China is very complicated but overall CCP is not liked or trusted unless you have a stake in the business. There is also an individual level antipathy/discrimination towards Chinese too.
Japanese overall like Taiwan a lot, have a very mixed feelings towards Korea (I think this feeling is mutual) fwiw
Many years ago, I was sitting in Sproul Plaza at Berkeley when a bus full of Japanese tourist girls (teenagers) disgorged itself. A young woman with a fully American accent approached one of them and said that she was Korean, and did this Japanese girl know what the Japanese had done to the Koreans? Well, listen up!
It wasn't clear to me that the Japanese girl even really spoke English, and boy did she look like a deer in the headlights.
So at least a few decades ago, there were still some hard feelings on the part of the Koreans.
Meh, I like Noah (he’s my only other paid substack), he’s just waaaaaaaay too Stanford-pilled. He’s ok with crypto, the tech industry, the existence of billionaires, and H1B visas/skilled immigration, for starters, and these things are bad. Really bad. I wanna say that he even wrote a column in favor of austerity, which should be prosecutable speech in my view. And my God his column about the good Elon and the evil Elon (Dec 21) sure didn’t age well!
But man, when it comes to China, state capacity, industrial policy, and abundance he’s so, so right.
I agree this was a problem pre-2024, but post-election it seems like most people are pretty clear-eyed about this. I'm sure you can still find smug liberals about there who think the public just wants an even purer version of liberalism/socialism (in fact I have a friend who thinks that), but among prominent intellectuals and politicians this view doesn't seem common anymore.
I guess I get that feeling, too, but I'm just curious where you pick that up most clearly? From chats with friends, online forums, podcasts, opinion pieces, activists? I realizes for myself that I sense that as well, but I don't know how I would objectively explain why I sense that to another person, so I was curious if you had any clues.
Mostly it's just from reading articles by prominent left-of-center pundits and politicians. There's a lot more talk about reaching out to Trump-voters and being out of touch with mainstream America. I have seen almost nothing from these folks post-election about mobilization being the key to victory. Arguably the most influential left-of-center pundit now is Ezra Klein, who was pretty critical of Biden in 2024 and has been talking a lot about how Democrats need a new message that appeals to more people. Whereas back in 2017 the most influential left-of-center pundit was arguably Ta-Neihisi Coates.
Thank you so much for explaining - and while I decided not to see Twitter/Bluesky (and even NYT lol) as much as possible for my mental health, I also feel that from the convo that I have w friends who are for the most part left of center. I think what is telling is a trans couple that I know were very critical of those “Puritanism on the left”
Yea, I highly doubt that the majority of them are “on spectrum” - if anything, a majority of them are conformist to the loud voice. That said, the flip side of it is if you filter it to influential (aka loud voice) and highly educated, I feel like the ratio of that is significantly higher than 1%. I could be well wrong about this and this not the hill for me to die on btw
I have to chuckle about the thinking "we need a Joe Rogan on the left" because there are literally dozens of non-political shows/podcasts in mainstream media that are left-coded (The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel, Colbert, SNL, The Ringer.
I will say though, are complaints about the toxicity of the Dem brand a bit overstated? It's not like they lost in a blow out. Trump won the popular vote by a single percentage point, the GOP has the narrowest lead in the House, a slim lead in the Senate, Dems continue to do well in special elections.
To paraphrase a tweet I saw “There can’t be a Joe Rogan of the left because his audience would constantly accuse him of being rightwing for no reason until that became his reputation and then the reality, which is exactly what happened to Joe Rogan”
Professional class left-wing Democrats also fail to understand what the poor and working class view as elites. It's not just Elon and the Wikipedia list of billionaires. The social science grad student is an elite. Upper middle class
adults who got opportunities they never could even consider is not seen as trustworthy or the populace.
A lot of the professional-class left-wing Democrats think (incorrectly) that those opportunities are open to anyone.
This is especially true of the people who went to a small town high school and got into the state flagship college and then did well there and went on to grad school - so many of them don't think that they were the lucky/privileged/elite one that got a bunch of opportunities, but that everyone could have left and those who stayed did so by choice.
To a certain extent, this is where the "the US is the richest nation in the world" and "everything is a hellscape" narratives run into each other. It's not just that a lot of people who succeed probably have unexamined privilege, but that in elite educational institutions, you meet people who have had harder lives than the average American make it. (And think how much backlash much of the discussion of privilege end up drawing in practice.) During my college orientation, our president mentioned that one of my fellow freshmen had to evacuate his village a couple of months earlier since rebels overran it. We've had people who either survived atrocities like the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, etc. (or their children) become success stories in the US. Even if we take a group that is mostly Republican like the Mormons, we see overall higher levels of education and income than average, despite being often mocked by mainstream America.
My point here is that even if you disregard privilege in the sense that some people have an advantage in getting into that state flagship (and note: not Ivy League) because of their sex or sexuality or race, there are still only so many spaces in that state flagship. Their high-school graduating class can't all get in.
As @BronxZooCobra says, half the people are under IQ 100, but even for the ones that aren't - say there are ten kids in one year that could thrive in a state flagship college: there's still only going to be one or two places.
Even if they did "earn" that place in the sense that they did achieve the highest academic level in their school through their own efforts - what about the rest? I guess some of them will have got into a college. A lower-tier state college, or worked through community college and then got into a 4-year college as a junior. And then got their bachelor's and headed off to get a job.
But is the differential between the valedictorian of a class of 100 kids and the rank-five high-school graduate really so wide as to result in the level of differential that there is going to be between someone who did grad school and got into a professional-class job and someone who worked hard for a bachelor's from Directional State College and then went on to end up as a middle manager in the mid-size city 100 miles from the town they grew up in? Much less the kid who was twentieth in that class who is, at 38, the store manager in the local Wal-Mart or whatever. Does that kid at #20 really deserve the sneer that the kid at #1 might have when he comes to the 20-year high school reunion.
Of course that #20 kid doesn't deserve scorn and the valedictorian is being a jerk if they're sneering at their old classmate at the 20-year reunion if they do that. But you have to cook up a very specific scenario where this would make sense as a basis for mass electoral politics for the past few years in a way that this valedictorian draws mass resentment, but the likes of Trump (Penn), Vance (Yale Law), and Musk (Stanford) don't. Vance's book that launched his fame is in some ways holds more contempt for the working class than just about any cultural piece from the past decade, and then he got a Netflix deal from it. (He was also close to Amu Chua at Yale, who is arguably the poster child of implying like large parts of America isn't pushing their kids to succeed academically.) It feels like a bit of Calvinball going on in how everyone is trying to understand the role of education and resentment in driving electoral outcomes.
Amy Chua's first book on market-dominant minorities explains well why a lot of MAGA Republicans hate Vivek Ramaswamy. I do think that is the basis for some hatred of "elites" in the MAGA movement.
The Republicans do this everytime they lose as well. "Stop the Steal" was just four years ago. The campaign against the mainstream media was exactly this.
I agree it's childish cope, but it's bipartisan childish cope.
>>the liberal/left establishment is going to need to come to terms with the fact that people don't really like them<<
Democrats basically won three of the last four elections. And even in 2024 most Americans voted for Harris or third party (and not Trump).
"People don't really like them" seems lazy. NOT ENOUGH people really like them (to sustain a governing majority over the longer term) is a better way to put it. Democrats need to do better in myriad ways, sure. But it helps to have accurate information when you're formulating a plan to do better. It would be great if Democrats could start crushing Republicans by ten points everywhere. But the reality is more like: they need to raise their floor by two or three points, consistently.
The nation is split 50/50 and power flips back and forth.
The difference between the parties is that the Democrats worry about how to expand beyond 50% but do nothing to achieve that, while the Republicans don't even worry about it.
The difference between the parties is that the Democrats try to be caretakers of government and the Republicans use their opportunities to burn it down.
If the “structural disadvantage” is nothing more than that fact that the particular bundle of political proposals and cultural ideas that the Democratic Party has on offer today is unpopular in small states, that’s not structural.
The Joe Rogan issue is something that probably occupies too much of my headspace as it does many dems coping with the election loss. Why don’t liberals have a Joe Rogan? Why is the Joe Rogan junior theo von also a basically right wing guy.? Why is the guy who has my favorite history guy (Gregory aldrete check him out) on his podcast, lex whatever, also conservative seeming? I don’t think there is a missing liberal media infrastructure here and there must be plenty of leftish talent almost all celebrities seem to be at least somewhat liberal. But there is a huge gap between someone like Jon Stewart which I kind of grew up on and these popular but right leaning podcasters. First of all Jon is all politics. It’s a bit exhausting for a podcast you’re going to listen to all the time. I think he has the issue of being way more left wing than he realizes and lecturing in tone. He pretends everything he believes is what basically anyone who’s not a complete asshole believes but that’s not true. There’s also maybe a bill Maher hole in the dem podcast space. I don’t agree with his views a lot of the time partly his views on race and some other issues don’t work. but i think his off color, common sense semi offensive way of talking about current events and important issues is cringey to too much of the left, but there is kind of a need for it. Anyway I think the main barrier to not having a leftish Joe Rogan is if that person emerged like a less out of touch Maher or whatever I think they’d be shot down by friendly fire before they got off the ground. There are some comedians who have popular podcasts that I think might be willing to do the job but I imagine it’s too narrow of a tightrope walk.
#1 Colbert / Maher / Stewart came-of-age professionally at a period when right-wing ideas were losing to left-wing ideas one after another. I'm referring to gay marriage, the invasion or Iraq, the Great Recession (not an idea, but the GOP took the blame) etc.. It was far easier to bash the Right and get a pass on why you didn't harass the left. It's far harder to play that role when you had Defund, Open Borders, certain aspects of Trans Issues, etc... being so prominent.
#2 A guy like Joe Rogan appeals to men without college degrees. His main audience is guys driving to work sites (maybe, I'm speculating, but you get the idea). The modern left isn't comfortable with that type of "bro" guy anymore. You don't slide into liberal spaces as easily as a bro, but you do if you're more educated or a woman.
Yes agree. I will say old Stewart and Colbert really did have a lot of centrist appeal I think they were still trying to build their audience. Those two shows were just too funny and that kind of supersedes politics my VERY Christian buddy watched it everyday and loved it.
Rogan, Von, and Fridman are not really right-wing at all. THey're just non-liberals who have been rejected by the left to varying extents and are willing to platform right-wingers (though they're also willing to platform left-wingers). So libs don't need their own Joe Rogan, they just need to stop rejecting Joe Rogan and promote politicians that are willing and able to have informal 2-3 hour conversations without preconditions.
I don't think Democrats did themselves any favors, but the Great Crank Realignment was likely going to result in Rogan ending up on the right regardless of what happened. Alex Jones wasn't always associated with the right, either.
To be “on the left” and in good standing as a public figure you have to profess belief in a lot of stupid shit. This serves as a very effective loyalty test but forfeits the “eppur si muove” demographic.
I agree with you about culture war issues, but for other policy things I think in some ways this is a structural disadvantage of taking the pro-intervention position that the left usually does. It's trivial to be "just a curious guy asking some questions about vaccines" and influence thousands of people to not get them by highlighting one bad-faith example of vaccine injury. It takes empathy, trust, tradeoffs and a nuanced understanding of the literature to make the case and agree to the idea that "everyone should be forced to get vaccines so that we don't all get measles."
The problem with a Bill Maher, like a Nate Silver, is that they revel in punching left too much for my liking. Sure, it's often necessary, but do you really have to show how much you're enjoying bashing the more problematic parts of your own team?
One point if you are going to do issue advocacy, or policy research. Make sure you have some moderates, or better yet somebody that disagrees with you on your team.
Listen to their arguments, think them through and respond to them. You will make better policy and do better advocacy from having to listen to their arguments.
I haven't done a deep dive on the Senate breakout recently, but for quite a while, the smallest states split equally between Democratic and Republican Senators. (E.g., yes yes California vs Wyoming. But what about Texas vs Vermont?) Where the Republicans tended to have a bigger advantage is in the next tier of states by population, which are dominated by ones in the South. But that's just saying that the Republicans dominate the South.
I mean, it's a "cope" because people apply it to areas that *aren't* the senate/EC. Areas where Democrats have obvious advantages and they can't tolerate the existence of even one thing that's conservative-leaning.
As far as alternative media goes, I predict that'll also be a dead end. We may see a proliferation of alternative Ezra Kleins who stream on Twitch but push all of the same ideas, sure. I think those people just won't manage to get the following of a Joe Rogan or a Lex Fridman, because no one will be interested in what they're saying.
At some point Democrats will just have to confront the fact that their problem is mostly that their ideas aren't super-popular, and funding more NGOs, changing media strategies, etc. isn't really going to change that.
Agree, but Dems/liberals need to become a party of ideas in general. All the fresh new ideas - almost all bad - are coming from the right. The Dems are left supporting liberal democracy status quo that people seem to be dissatisfied with. They need to present a different option, probably lots of different options. And it probably won't be as simple as "more left" or "more center", something more paradigm-breaking that transcends our current ideological lanes.
Because there seems to be a deep reservoir of resentment to the things that made us great and prosperous. Maybe it didn't make everyone great and prosperous? Or maybe it has lessened in effectiveness? Either way, people seem dissatisfied with it.
So either the defense of the status quo has to be repackaged somehow, or you need new ideas. The "new" ideas can be old ones repurposed - much of MAGA is antiquated nonsense that was discredited a long time ago but people forgot. But people now are tired of the old framework, they want something fresh.
And why are MAGA new ideas characterized as “bold”, “innovative”, etc., rather than “stupid”, “self-destructive”, etc. Tim Walz got a lot of traction with the label “weird”.
I don't Klein really has ideas here exactly. I think he wants to go back to a time when we could get things done, which means less ideas actually. Less "everything bagel".
The environment of things that are deemed most important to influencing elections seems to reinvented anew each election cycle. It's quite possible that Joe Rogan/Barstool etc won't be a significant factor in 2028 but it will be something entirely different that the winner will crow about and the loser will desperately try to replicate.
Once upon a time it was Facebook and the Victory Lab. Then it was Cambridge Analytics (a scam, but people believed it). Who knows what the next thing will be.
Especially since Spotify seems to think that their big investments in individual podcasters like Rogan were a mistake and are desperately trying to find a new pot of untapped profit.
I didn't know that. Kind of like how Netflix and the streaming companies showered supposed superstar creators with tons of money and are now cutting back like crazy?
But what I'm saying is that the problem here isn't structural -- it's not as though Republicans were handed spokespeople who were magically endowed with legions of followers.
The followers are downstream of the ideas. If the ideas are popular, the "structural" problems will be fixed. On the other hand, you can't fix the structural-seeming problem just by fiddling around with media strategies and keeping the ideas the same.
People like Tim Pool only became Russian-funded after building a considerable audience by themselves, often over the course of years while slowly transforming from woke-skeptic to full rightwinger.
There is so much money in politics and media that whatever funding the Russians provided is just a drop in the bucket. The fault, dear Andrei, is not in the Russians but in ourselves.
I don’t understand the Kamala Harris complaints here. She ran a pretty good campaign. Biden was actually the problem and left her in a very difficult position.
She ran about as good a campaign as she could, given her personal constraints; but she could not overcome that the more people got to know her, the more they disliked her. I realize why you would not want that to believe that, but outside the bubble, her best bet was to have as little public exposure as possible.
"she could not overcome that the more people got to know her, the more they disliked her."
Except that is exactly the opposite of the truth: net negative on July 23 2024 -- +14; net negative on Nov. 5 2024 -- +5 (and hit a low of +2 in October)
I don't think I understand what you mean here, exactly. "Personal constraints" could mean a lot of things. I also don't understand the dislike comment exactly. It's clear a lot of people on this comment section don't like her, but it would be useful to understand why.
I would be happy to give you a genuine answer, but are you asking to understand, or are you asking to repudiate? The latter (IMO) has been the single biggest roadblock to Dems understanding what went wrong.
I promise not to repudiate anything you say here. There’s clearly a lot of dislike for Kamala Harris here on slowboring and in the US in general. Favorable-unfavorable levels are bad. I want to understand what people think the problems are so they can be dealt with.
She lost hence why people aren't generous towards her, she did overperform and helped minimize losses. I do think if Shapiro was the VP nom Democrats would have kept the senate seat in PA.
This is absolutely true but I think it’s clear that the Biden alternative was a low bar. Isn’t it more useful to debate whether she underperformed relative to possible Democratic alternatives? Eliding the whole discussion about the downsides of a mini-primary format, it is certainly not clear to me that she overperformed relative to a hypothetical Shapiro or Whitmer campaign.
She could have won. She would have needed to make a few changes that would have upset the left. She wasn’t willing to do it. So we have Trump.
It’s true Biden left her in a difficult position but it’s also true she would have never had that opportunity in normal circumstances. She could not win a primary. He gifted her the nomination.
This conversation confuses me slightly. Debating the flaws of an individual candidate who, I think inarguably, ran a very good campaign under incredibly tough circumstances and actually performed well* instead of the context of the electorate she was dealing with.
I never saw this as Kamala losing the election so much as Trump winning, and that being the much more salient - and interesting - topic. Why did he win? IMO, Kamala’s flaws, such as they were, don’t explain it. (Tho perhaps her gender and race do.)
*it was, Dems’ post-election hysteria notwithstanding, a squeaker popular-vote-wise, and she was basically irrelevant to the Senate which was going to go R regardless, except maybe with a hyper-popular charismatic Dem like Obama
It’s in fact very arguable. Did Patrick Mahomes play well in the recent Super Bowl?
Kamala could have won. She would have needed to take some more centrist positions. She would have needed to say loudly that she was going to change some Biden Administration policies. She could have said we tried things and they didn’t work so we are changing course.
But when given the ball sitting on a tee like a five year old is provided she wiffed badly. “There is not a thing that comes to mind” Wow!! October 8, 2024, The View.
To go slightly off-topic, but I think in a relevant way. I watched the recent Superb Owl and I have to say that I don't think Patrick Mahomes suddenly turned into Tyler Palko. He never had time to get the ball off properly. The Eagles offense (and defense) had a good game plan and executed it very well. Mahomes could have played better, sure.
She gaffed for sure. But she had three months, dude. Even the most talented candidates make mistakes (“they cling to guns or religion”), but they have time to outrun them. I think you’re comparing her to some idealized, once-in-a-lifetime candidate. Kamala’s never been super quick in her feet, but she performed amazingly well under intense pressure at the DNC and the debate. She strikes me as that smart, practical girl who always loses to the douchebag because she’s not hot or funny (tho she could be) or dating the right guy.
Just so I'm clear, you're saying if Biden had dropped out early or made clear he wasn't running for reelection in 2023, you think she wouldn't have won the contested primary?
That's debatable. Yes, the VP is an advantage, which Biden gave to her - supporting my previous comment.
The smarter move for Democrats would have been to nominate someone outside the Biden Administration—someone who could credibly take different positions and avoid full accountability for Biden’s unpopular policies. But Democrats may not have figured that out. That's true.
Yes. He gave her an opportunity that she could not have attained on her own. It is one of the biggest political gifts in American history. Particularly when you consider the weakness of Trump as a candidate.
The "her staff decided against Rogan because they didn't want to platform Rogan" story is persuasive, particularly because I've heard people say the part in quotes, total evidence of head-up-the-ass in terms of priorities.
I'm not sure that was the whole problem, though.
Harris should have both
1) gone on Rogan, and
2) been the kind of candidate where going on Rogan would help her.
Without #2, #1 is a bad move.
She got caught flat-footed in a puff-piece on The View. What in the world would have happened with Rogan asking a bunch of questions over the course of an hour or two about every random topic that the conversation happens to go?
What about if "Progressives" just change their minds about policing/prosecuting, border control, trans issues as national issue, and blocking fossil fuel production and transportation projects and focused instead on revenue raising tax reform, merit based immigration and counter-China trade policy.
If progressives change their minds about trans issues, the current administration will announce the existence of prison camps for trans people (or something equally horrible, if less obviously illegal.) The trans issue wasn't raised by the left, it was a creation of the right that came along once Americans stopped responding forcefully to anti-gay arguments. No matter how much the left "concedes" on this issue, the right will just push it to new extremes that will compel moral human beings to respond.
Supportive mom of a kid who was trans for three years and imma disagree with you here. I think you weren’t hanging around in the media spaces where non-bigoted moderates expressed their discomfort with the (dominant) liberal stance on medical care for trans minors (if a child says they’re trans, they’re trans and shouldn’t be denied life-altering medical interventions) and, less pressing but still consternating, trans women in sports. Not to mention the “trans women are women” rallying cry and the great cancellation of those who suggested there was any difference, even just the formative experience of having grown up in the world as a female.
We were overtly, stubbornly, proudly outside the reasonable mainstream on this one, and I don’t think it would have been hard to have carved out a more cautious stance that was nevertheless full-throatedly supportive of trans rights and trans people qua people.
My point stands. If you carve out that more cautious stance, the right will react doing horrible things that require you to devote all your energy towards fighting.
The senate is barely a temporal disadvantage, let alone a structural one. One of the biggest signs of cope is perceiving facts (such as the current lean of the senate) as something way outside of the control of the Democratic party.
Well, I don't know. The way the Senate is set up, the states that are going to get outsized representation are going to be highly rural, and the states that get undersized representation are going to be more urban. All over the world, as I understand it, urban areas are more cosmopolitan and more left-wing than rural ones. It's true that America is a pretty conservative country in many ways, but it's also true that the Senate's composition heightens that tendency, especially as politics gets less local and more national.
Interesting points. There's a lot I would pick at here. I have to partly agree with these observations, but I would say there's way more that's temporal than structural in you're saying.
But on the observations themselves "urban areas are more cosmopolitan and more left-wing": Cosmopolitan, yes, but that only maps to left-wing when cultural issues are to the fore in the developed West. In many countries, and in the US in the recent past, economics was more salient and rural areas can be left-wing on those metrics.
"It's true that America is a pretty conservative country in many ways". I feel like Matt has written about, and convinced me, that this is only true in some ways, not others, and has become something of a cope on the Left.
"the states that are going to get outsized representation are going to be highly rural". Well, not exactly. The smaller states, population-wise, get more representation. So Rhode Island and Delaware and nearly all of New England, for instance, will probably always be Senate-privileged despite not being rural. Our correlation between rural-ness and population size just isn't that strong.
It also depends on how much of the population live in rural areas, which in the US is only 20% by county, and falling.
What are the issues we should look at to say that the US is *not* conservative relative to other countries? Or, what are the additional countries we should compare the US to?
You referred to "Rhode Island and Delaware and nearly all of New England, for instance," but that "for instance" is misleading—these are the *only* Senate-privileged urbanized states! Small, dense states are, as far as I can tell, pretty much restricted to the original colonies; since the Louisiana Purchase, you've mostly got big dense states and big sparse states. Excluding the original 13 colonies, the ten least populous states are Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Maine (part of Massachusetts in 1776), Hawaii, West Virginia (formerly part of Virginia), Idaho, Nebraska, and New Mexico. Among those ten states, the biggest metropolitan statistical area is Honolulu (#55 MSA in the nation by population), followed closely by Omaha (#56), Albuquerque (#61), Boise (#74), Portland Maine (#102), Anchorage (#137), Huntington (#152), Martinsburg (#168), and Fargo (#189). That's all I could find in the top 200. So I think "rural" (or if you prefer, "non-urban") works as a description. Of those ten states, only Hawaii and New Mexico have two Democratic senators, and Maine has one, so it's 15-5.
"It also depends on how much of the population live in rural areas, which in the US is only 20% by county, and falling."
Right, but that's exactly the case for a structural disadvantage! A very small number of Americans live in rural areas, but the overrepresented states in the Senate have a disproportionate number of those Americans.
Looking at these lists below it seems like there's some other Senate-privileged urban states. Utah, Hawaii, Oregon and Nevada would probably all make the cut.
Most of the distortion is the result of the California, Texas, NY and Florida getting only 2 senators. These are above-average urban states, though closer to the national urban / rural average than I have guessed. So that much is true and introduces some rural senate-privelage.
The Senate isn't really a structural disadvantage now either. If you apportioned the hundred seats as extra House seats, the states that would lose representation are basically: Wyoming/Vermont/the Dakotas/Alaska/Montana/New Hampshire/Maine/Rhode Island/Hawaii (lose 2), Delaware/West Virginia/Idaho (lose 1).
Well, it’s moving from blue states that are turning redder to red states that are mostly turning bluer. And likely the population movement is a big part of why these states are turning redder and bluer. That’s bad for democrats unlike these states actually switch color.
Speaking of too much infrastructure, I'm about to head to the polls in Wisconsin to pull an 0600-2200 shift. There is exactly one thing on the ballot, a primary for state superintendent of public instruction. A *primary* for that office, we'll vote again on it in April.
It's currently -9F. 9 voters is about how many I expect to see today. The county clerk explicitly encouraged us to bring a knitting project or a book.
This piece is just terrible lol, almost every factual assertion made by the author is just flat-out wrong:
1. 'Conventions are illegal, you legally have to do a primary'- totally made up. Famously Virginia Republicans in 2018 refused to hold a primary and switched to a convention, which is how they nominated Youngkin. Several states have been holding conventions for decades- for example Orrin Hatch in Utah was nominated by convention from 1976-2006.
Worst for the author's argument that his hypothetical Socialist party couldn't hold a nominating convention- the Green, Libertarian, and Constitution parties did exactly that in 2024, and every previous election for decades as far as I'm aware.
Plus- caucuses? Has the author ever heard of a caucus? They're not primaries, they're restricted to party members only, they're still in very widespread use......?
2. 'You legally can't restrict primaries to dues paying members'- of course you can, 10 US states still hold completely closed primaries. Plus again, caucuses
3. 'You legally couldn't use RCV in a primary'- I'm sorry what? NYC has famously been doing it for the last several years
Worst piece on US elections I've seen recently. The author claims to be a 'health policy researcher', for whatever that's worth
This is very, very bad. Having official political parties is what they do in Cuba and North Korea. It's not only bad by association; it's bad in principle, for some of the reasons in the article you linked to. It's also foreign to our constitutional order (though, tbf, I can't comment on whether it's foreign to *state* constitutional order).
In NYS this year, there were no third parties on the presidential ballot for the first time I'm aware of. NY *does* allow third parties, but the state government made the process of getting on the ballot onerous for third parties. This is not quite the issue you're referring to, but it's adjacent and also horrible.
As our history (and world history) has demonstrated, legacy political parties are not set in stone, even in FPTP systems. We don't need the government adding its thumb to the scale to continue the status quo.
Moreover, how was I supposed to protest-vote against Harris and Trump (in a state where I knew I would not be throwing the election to Trump)?
This is not really true, the requirements for parties to hold primaries, for example, were mostly created as part of good government reforms to eliminate smoke filled rooms, rather than because the parties wanted primaries.
Bro. The parties literally fucking pre-date those laws. Who do you think PASSED the laws mandating party primaries? It wasn't some depolarized mass of independent Jeffersonian yeoman farmer-politicians that magically appeared in the 1870's-1900s. It was members of both parties.
And they didn't want "good government"; that was the excuse they gave the voters. What they ACTUALLY wanted was to stop the cycle of frequent party collapses that led to the instability of plurality victories and an entire fucking *civil war*.
Seriously, if RCV (or even better, multi-member STV...) advocates were willing to tout "no more primaries" as a benefit (viz. include no more (or at least no more non-Presidential) primaries with the proposals), that would probably be ten plus more points of support.
Hell "we only vote twice a year" would be an improvement.
Actually, that's a good proposition for California (or other proposition states): there shall be two voting days per year. One day is only for primaries and cannot be used for a general election; the other is only for general elections (and propositions, referendums, etc) and cannot be used for primaries.
The sole exception should be special elections (and recalls, I guess), which may not be held on the same day as any other special election, or on either the primary or general election day.
We already have two voting days every two years, outside of special elections and recalls, in California, so your idea already exists *and* is stricter than you proposed.
It's officially a non-partisan position, so no parties are listed on the ballot and everyone is lumped into a single primary. The top two people go to the full election in April. (I'm not saying that it makes sense that this is an elected position in the first place, but it's not an "internal party decision".)
Everybody knows democracy is a good thing and therefore by definition you can't have too much of it. Why not allow high school students to elect high school principals? I feel this is a long overdue reform.
"Because almost everyone working on almost every cause is doing this, there’s an incredible amount of pressure on people who know better to also do it. "
This is what I call the "Baseball Steroids Problem". There's no such thing as a sports league where, say, 15% of the top athletes in a particular role use PED's and the rest do not. What happens is that once a critical mass of your competitors use PED's and you are aware of it, you have to use them. As a result, PED use ALWAYS comes in masses-- in baseball in the 1990's, every single great home run hitter, INCLUDING the ones who fans like to lie to themselves and pretend didn't use, most likely used PED's. You had to. If you didn't, you risked your salary and your professional achievements because you might hit 39 home runs clean while others in the league were hitting 50, 60, even 70.
In cycling, every major cyclist in the 1990's doped. It wasn't just Lance Armstrong. It was the entire top tier of the professional cycling tour. Because once your competitors cheated, you had to. You couldn't afford to be the chump while the others passed you.
In track and field, a sport that due to the experience with East Germany (and in more recent times Russia) loves to play heroes and villains with PED's, Ben Johnson was disqualified after running his world record 9.79 in the 100 meters dash in the Seoul Olympics. It turned out that every person on the starting line of that race but one was later implicated in PED use, including Carl Lewis of the United States who was held out as the "clean" guy who was "victimized" by Johnson. Again, once everyone else was doing it, you couldn't afford not to.
This extends to other walks of life too. When there are cheating scandals at colleges, they often involve large numbers of students. Because you can't be afford to be the chump who doesn't cheat and ends up at the bottom of the class behind all the cheaters.
So it doesn't surprise me one bit that the Baseball Steroids Problem extends to push-polling. Of course it does. Once the other organizations and Groups are doing it, you have to or your issue loses funding.
This is one of the big problems in media in general today. That the audience by and large doesn't really consider accuracy to be anywhere near as important as agreeability- a bullet in the magazine to be used against ones enemies rather than a place to be informed. People will look at stuff that's opposed to them, but only if it's extremely provocative, and then, not really to be informed, but more to get mad at it. That's how NYT gets as many faces slamming into paywalls as possible.
And if i'm selling polling info, i'm going to do a lot better if it confirms the priors of the customer than if it challenges them. Part of it is just we're going to have to try to be less affected by this but it's a very hard psychological effect to get away from in a very open information ecosystem.
But then, i think it affects our enemies as well and will inevitably hobble their campaigns as much as it does ours. Unfortunately, their policy is 'gut the government and hand it all over to the oligarchs' which is much easier to execute in the american system.
There was a bullying story in the NFL a few years ago that this week got exposed as being totally fabricated. One sports reporter tweeted that it sucked reporting on stuff he knew were lies. That's a big problem for the media - everyone goes along with a narrative even if they know it is a lie. I think this tends to get overrated by conservatives, but it very much is a real problem.
I read Jonathan Martin's comments and the report's too. So seems like it was overblown to an extent. But Richie Incongnito did call Martin the N word over voicemail and sent many crazy texts that included death threats.
I know context matters with all this stuff, but that concrete evidence shows that at least Inconginto is a bigoted asshole. I don't feel for him at all. And I think it's good for the league to call that type of behavior out and try to exorcise it.
For sure, Incognito seems like a jerk. Larger point is the lack of pushback and going along with narratives creates or at least is used by conservatives to exploit a lot of the mistrust we've seen with journalism.
That definitely happens. But in this case I feel like the backlash to the backlash is now actually at risk of understating what actually happened between those two. What triggered this revision is Martin saying he now actually didn't consider it bullying and the reporter tweeting how he thought people had report things they weren't true. I would love some further clarification on that comment because right now we know the facts to be:
- Incognito called him a racial slur (I'm gonna guess this didn't just happen once)
- Incognito threatened him with death threats and just tons and tons of really aggressive texts
- Martin checked himself into a mental hospital
I think that's grounds for some headlines and a suspension for Incognito. Now, a big part of why this got covered to death at the time was the fact that it seemed wild that one 300 pound professional athlete was bullying another 300 pound professional athlete. There was a lot of condemnation of Incognito, but also many jokes made at the expense of Martin and attacks on his masculinity for not being able to take it.
So now, we have Incognito taking a victory lap ten plus years later saying he wrongly accused. I disagree! Incognito seems like a real asshole and a bully. The story was overcovered, but I don't think it was 100% because of bias in the media, but rather because the story was just so odd.
This is not totally unlike the "Gresham's Law" effect in many comments sections where posting crude, aggressive comments eventually drives out the good commenters. This has historically been known in economic theory as "the tragedy of the comments."
(OK, it's not really like the PED analogy you are astutely making, but I just wanted to say "the tragedy of the comments.")
You can also see how this dynamic leads to other "tragedies" quite easily. I.e. if you don't have any restrictions on who can post what you risk ending up with a low quality cesspit. But as soon you have rules and restrictions there is a risk that those who design and enforce them do so unfairly to promote/suppress particular views (either openly, or opaquely). Whether this happens or not, there's now an incentive for people try to get control of the rules and seek to do this. There is also, in turn, also an incentive for others to seek to scrap all the rules and return to a free for all, and to try to spread criticism and dissent to effect this (or to lead an 'exit').
Therefore there is no perfect solution: there is always an ongoing tension inherent in establishing, developing, enforcing and defending norms in any community.
I think the most important thing is the set of norms in the commenting community and how well the members are at enforcing those norms. It seems to work pretty well for the SB comments section.
I think it helps that comments are often subscriber only and - maybe even more importantly - they are not the driving reason to be here. We're here to read our host and he sets the topic of discussion and framing. The dynamic is very different on social media and forums.
That said I have noticed more ad hominem and low content comments creep in over the years.
There is a reason why the Lance Armstrong Tours de France weren't allocated to another rider - it's because there weren't any clean riders in those races to allocate them to!
IIRC, there's one Tour where the highest-placed rider who wasn't subsequently accused or caught doping was something like 14th, and they were only not accused becuase they were weren't important enough for anyone to snitch on.
I remember having discussions ten years ago that running pro-life Democrats in red states is something that Democrats should tolerate. My leftie ex gave me pushback on that, because she didn't see the value of accepting political tradeoffs.
Fundamentally the problem with the Democratic coalition right now is that there are so many hyperactive partisans who reject the reality of tradeoffs.
I think the tough reality to navigate is that a big Democratic majority capable of legislating is going to involve including a lot of people closer to Joe Manchin than to AOC, or even necessarily Pete Buttigieg. Not really in the sense that the ancestral Democrats can be revived but in the sense that they will be people who are culturally alien to the overly polished leadership of today, to say nothing of the kind of people that went to a particular kind of college then went to work in the NGO space, and now exercises outsized influence.
Let's say the objective is to build a big majority that is capable of legislating that fundamentally regards cultural polish and intellectualism as a good thing and thinks that Donald Trump is a vulgar idiot and is revulsed by him on a visceral level: that is, not to appeal to that visceral revulsion that Trump triggers and the admiration that a successful well-educated woman like Harris or Clinton creates in the hearts of the Dem staffer base, but to make that the cultural norm of the nation so there's no need to appeal to it because it's just an accepted fact that voters want a leader who is smarter and more intellectual than they are themselves.
How would you set about doing that and how is it different from what the Dems are doing?
I think most voters would reject the premise. I think most voters don't think they'd do a good job running things and do want someone smarter than they are running things. They just don't think that's an actual description of the Democratic party.
The question isn't "how do we get voters to value this thing?" It's "how do we convince voters this is what we're actually doing?"
Given the difficulties in getting things done in the public sphere, I think the best chance would be to take someone already successful from the private sphere. Probably a business woman. Someone who can believably point to something and say "I built that". Unfortunately I think the current Democratic Party is pretty hostile to that sort of thing.
Sorry for not being clear: my point was that what the Democrats want is not to get people to value “smartness”, but to get people to judge smartness by the Democratic party’s standards.
Someone might describe Trump as “smart” because he’s a successful businessman, but I doubt anyone would describe him as “intellectual”. The idea that being AG of California is a better qualification for the Presidency than CEO of the Trump Organisation isn’t something that the Democrats want to argue; it’s something they want to have accepted as a fact.
To think that academic achievement is the ultimate accomplishment and (a) everyone should want it and (b) everyone should respect it and defer to those with more is a pretty standard professional-class view of the world.
I don't think that's possible, and I'd say it's impossible because it's wrong (and people can tell it's wrong).
Monolithically well-educated and intellectually inclined groups have characteristic groupthink: A lot of the failures of the public health apparatus during Covid were because of this kind of groupthink, as is the current Democratic party's love of process and paperwork. The 2010s social-justice excesses are another example.
It's important to have diverse leadership, including diversity of education. That's probably *harder* than it used to be, because there's more education now: More smart people are getting college degrees. But by no means all.
The broad left-of-center coalition has to give up on the idea that formal education and intellectual vibes are the central qualification for most of life.
Conversely the right-wing coalition really really has to stop valuing credulity, provocation, belief in conspiracies, I'd go so far as to say stupidity, for their own sake.
We need depolarization by education, though I can't say I know where our current split came from and have no idea how to accomplish that.
What I’m saying is that this means that the Democratic party has to change their values. They have to understand that their problem wasn’t lack of persuasion: it was that their values are incorrect.
My point is that they do in fact have to argue for their world view. They have to be willing to try and persuade people that they are correct. It's the Joe Rogan problem. They don't get to say "I don't like the terms of this debate." That just excludes them from the conversation.
I would tell them their effort is futile. The country is too big and culturally diverse. It's a recipe for Ohio-fication, where the once winnable leans blue is indefinitely out of reach.
By watching Trump (and Musk) fail so abysmally and destructively that the scales fall from people's eyes and they decide that maybe competence and belief in American values are in fact good things to desire in our leaders?
Yes, this means that Democrats have to be more passive and depend on Trump et al screwing up, but that's probably where we are. (In the meantime, the Democrats have to repair their brand by disowning the crazies.)
I'm glad you at least aren't engaging in the "But What If We Revived Ancestral Democratic Clintonism?" idiocy, but I think you're missing part of the formula for the solution.
IMO, right now we're kind of in a holding pattern where a lot of former Republicans -- the Kinzingers, the Cheneys, hell even Joe Walsh types -- have yet to fully commit to the Democratic Party. Those folks all know they're alien to the party, that they aren't welcome, but they all basically understand that the Democrats are the only viable vehicle for opposing Trumpism. They're currently waiting for the Democrats to get their shit together... and they're slowly getting fed up with the Democrats' inability to do it.
My prediction is that they're going to start declaring as Dems within the next 5-10 years, possibly even sooner. These guys have the sort of no-holds-barred aggression that would make a hostile takeover rather easy, and they've got the defiance and street cred to literally just run as some branding variation of "Conservative Democrats". Not to mention, the Abundance Agenda basically agrees with a huge chunk of their ideological priors about overregulation and economics.
I don't think they're going to look _anything_ like Manchin's idiot ass. I think they're going to remake the face of the party. They're just not fed up enough to pull the trigger yet. But trust me... they're close.
I agree with your implication that that’s a drawback of the theory, but I also think it’s kind of orthogonal to why it may well happen.
To wit, what I’m intoning is that (1) the hostile takeover itself would be a huge attention grabber, and (2) that the central skill of the people doing the takeover is that they already largely work in media and attention-grabbing, and their aggressive style of politics would help them corner the attention space from traditional Dems and bring a similar sort of popular energy into their challenge for power over the party as Donald Trump did in taking over the GOP.
Agreed. Being pro-choice helped Claire McCaskill for maybe like 5 minutes, but she could've just as easily gotten the same hype cycles (if not bigger ones!) she did if she'd been officially a pro-lifer but making the exact same arguments in defense of a moderate conception of abortion rights (IE the exceptions and a reasonable state ban cutoff point).
And no, I'm not saying she'd have won her last election if she'd flipflopped, I'm saying she'd have had an easier time winning in the first place and then KEPT winning if she'd been a pro-life Dem her whole career.
Having watched my whole life as the Missouri Dem party chased out every single pro-lifer, and then the state going solid red despite being relatively moderate on most issues that favor Dems... was eye-opening.
I think infrastructure would actually help here. If there was a separate organization standing outside the Democratic Party, operating only in red states and coordinating pro-life politicians and voters who otherwise dislike Republican policy, then that could potentially get some people elected. Perhaps it could flesh out a whole Dan Osborn-like platform. Perhaps there could be two different organizations like this, one operating in Southern red states (which are more pro-life), and another one operating in Western red states (which aren't).
Genuinely curious, though, if you think there should be any bright lines for a party.
Say I want tax cuts for the wealthy and don’t want to expand the safety net or help poor kids, but believe in climate change, abortion rights and gun control. Can I attempt to run as a Democrat? Or would the party be right to tell me that my values are non consistent with what it stands for?
The parties used to have MUCH deeper intraparty ideological splits than what you describe.
The past misalignment of party and ideology made it easier for solid majorities to pass legislation. Today, the alignment of party and ideology makes it nearly impossible for majorities to come together like that.
The point is, you're not actually describing "values", you're describing "positions". And a party is more than just a set of positions OR values. At its root, a party is just a bunch of people who vote together in the legislature.
If I were Emperor Of The Democratic Party, I'd accept both people with the positions you describe AND people with the exact opposite positions on each issue. In fact, I'd accept anyone with any position on any of those six issues, IF they could agree to vote with the rest of the party roughly 90% of the time.
Vote with the rest of the party 90% of the time on what, though?
If my hypothetical candidate disagrees the bulk of the party on fiscal issues, and your hypothetical candidate with the opposite views disagrees with the bulk of the party on social issues, and you’re ok with both of them — then what types of issues do you expect to have ~100% party consensus on?
So you’re saying get 67 Democrats elected and allow a different 10% to defect on each issue? I mean sure, sounds great, but that’s pretty unrealistic in a two-party system.
Well, I think the principle still holds in a more realistic model. If 10 D's and 10 R's each are not merely allowed, but EXPECTED to defect on basically any given issue in a 50-50 Senate, then that's a 60-vote majority.
That's how things used to work. Neither party works like that anymore, though.
"pro life" as in the whole "Safe, legal, and rare" thing, and where a politician says that they have a religious objection to it, but do not plan to litigate it, is probably fine.
The "Want to make abortion illegal" position, though, is every bit as politically toxic as the "I want to make guns illegal" position, just in the other direction. A non-trivial minority of Republicans want abortion to be legal (but restricted). I don't think this issue is a winning one to "move right" on.
I definitely agree with you, but I think everyone needs be realistic about how much can be accomplished with this type of strategy. People are much better informed about politics now, which means that across the board there’s a higher ideological match between voters and the politicians that represent them.
I think this could help push Democrats over the line in purple or light red states, but the days of Democrats winning Senate seats in deep red states are over.
When Trump starts screwing up badly (and he already is) the Democrats will gain popularity. The problem is that they won't have to do anything right themselves, just not be the idiots trying to cut the deficit while slashing taxes. The Democrats could keep doing silly things and adopt silly policies and still win. It's a recipe for people continuing to be infuriated by the choices put in front of them at the ballot box.
Oh they do have an interest in building a long-term governing coalition. But they want a coalition that will long-term enable them to do the things they want to do, which includes some unpopular things.
The progressive concept of the coalition is that everyone in it has "their issue" and they will therefore put up with 99 issue they don't like in order to get the 1 they do.
So, for Latinos, it's immigration: as long as the Dems are more open to immigration than the Republicans, Latinos will reliably vote Dem and they can ignore them on all other issues. For LGBTQ+ people it's trans issues. For Black people, it's Civil Rights / anti-racism, for Greens, it's the environment, etc, etc. This doesn't actually work.
This is why there isn't a coherent governing approach from the Dems - because their entire concept of coalition-building is to do what each group wants.
The Republicans have a coherent agenda (cut taxes for the rich, abolish a bunch of government programs) which is very unpopular, so they have systemically learned to adopt broadly popular positions that are compatible with it (e.g. "cut waste", "cut taxes for the middle class").
The problem with both of these is that they are incompatible with building a long-term governing coalition, because actually convincing people that their positions are correct (the only way you can build a long-term coalition) is a strategy for losing a lot until you succeed.
I don’t think that is completely right. The Republicans want a governing coalition so they can support businesses and the wealthy. The Democrats want one to advance specific economic and cultural changes. The problem is that the Democratic position, while more popular than the Republican one, is constantly kneecapped by their own side for not going far enough. It makes the dynamics unstable.
If that was actually the case, each party would focusing on winning the first midterm election after winning a federal trifecta, instead of doing a bunch of unpopular stuff that ensures they lose the midterm.
Almost any long term national shift is going to have to come through a winning Presidential candidate. In today's media and political landscape that's the most likely way to get enough attention and get people in line.
Biden, obviously, wasn't up to the task, and likely didn't have a viable political strategy to do so even if he was at his best. But, I think that's a reason for Democrats to prioritize charisma and vision again.
It’s way too close to for the democrats to rely on Elons screw ups. The senate alone is going to be very hard for them next cycle. They need to listen to people like iglesias and the liberal patriot Substack
I had no doubts about my political identity when I ran for the Georgia General Assembly in 2017. Trump was icky and Kemp had refused to expand Medicaid. Easy peasay. Then the Democrats won two elections, “saved Democracy,” and proceeded to prioritize climate change over the precariat. My old friends started ostracizing me for heterodoxy. My own wife has said dozens of times I’m for Trump just because I think he has the seeds of a few good ideas. I will not give up my power of independent thought. I’d rather live as a hermit than sell my mind. I feel lost politically.
Thank you Matt for making the think the Democratic Party might still have a home for me.
I’d say this article presents a more nuanced framing:
A) Democrats in safe seats represent constituencies that are to the left of the median Democrat, so it isn’t particularly important for them to know or appreciate the difference.
B) In contrast, Democrats in competitive races generally understand and appreciate some of these differences—perhaps only qualitatively—but they risk attacks from their left flank (including the potential funding of a primary challenger) if they adopt a more electorally optimal position.
Moreover, left-leaning influencers and funders who target moderate-leaning Democrats use these biased statistics to justify their actions, with little regard for accuracy.
Yes, I agree to an extent; but I think there is a limit to how far any moderate would move on an issue with accurate polling where they fundamentally disagree with the voters.
Are you certain a Slow Boring think tank isn’t the answer? I could sincerely imagine you adding a ton of value directing good political research. And I’m sure many of your readers would willingly donate to such a cause. And it could inform your writing!
To the extent that a more SB-aligned think tank is needed, is Yglesias the right person to build, lead, and manage it? I recall him expressing some disinterest in those responsibilities—based on his Vox experience—in an SB article or mailbag answer.
Even if he could do it well enough, is that his comparative advantage relative to more writing, research, and targeted networking? I.e., consider the opportunity costs. I imagine there are numerous people in Yglesias' orbit with the résumé, aptitude, and interest to do that job at least as well as he could. If anything, the abundance agenda coalition likely has an excess of competent leadership, management, and coordination professionals.
SO, I think about these things a bit differently. I think the left and dems in general have a problem that is far more fundamental than infrastructure and how much pressure there is to be ‘correct’ on so many different issues. I think the bigger issue is that we educated dems operate primarily with an ‘academic’ approach to life’s issues and problems, rather than a hand’s-on approach. I’l just use immigration as an example:
Dems and liberal/left folks (hereinafter “we”) overall focus on enabling ‘liberal’ immigration policy for all sorts of good reasons. I won’t go into all of those. But, regardless of our immigration policy, what do we have to do in a ‘hands-on’ way with, say, Latin American immigrants once they’ve made it through whatever gauntlet to be here? Nothing, basically. In fact, it’s less than nothing, because as soon as we are dealing with people rather than policy and academically- structured debate, we don’t have or do anything but our left-wing equivalent of ‘hopes and prayers’ — along with a lot of judgmental paternalism. While we pontificate about e pluribus unum, we can’t and won’t deal with the ‘unwashed’ e pluribus.
Immigrants like those fleeing conditions in Latin America come here with very different social and cultural experiences and beliefs. We have no idea about or interest in knowing those or ‘doing’ anything with them essentially because they are so different. We just don’t meet them where they are either when they arrive or many years later when perhaps they are more firmly established with work and family, etc. We effectively hang them out to dry and expect that by assimilation osmosis, they will ‘cure’ themselves. One day, in other words, we believe they will be palatable to us — and of course, us to them — and then we’ll get their votes.
This issue, more generally, is that we long ago stopped devoting ourselves to the hands-on, slow-boring(!) work of bringing people along. Of winning hearts and minds. Of actually effectuating the very ideas that we so carefully parse and refine among ourselves and to which we hold our candidates and electeds as Matt so well describes. Perhaps we have simply come to think that we, as a class, are so to be admired and emulated that everyone will identify with us and want to be with us.
This far from benign neglect of the duties not just of politics, but of citizenship and neighborliness writ large, it’s terribly hypocritical and elitist. And this inability and unwillingness to relate to ‘others,’ to be ‘hands-on’ with ‘regular’ people, including most of the working class, has become our biggest failing. And we should all be embarrassed as hell to realize that Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and Joe Rogan get this and we don’t.
It’s far past time for Democrats to engage the living, breathing humans of our e pluribus. Otherwise, we will never have an Unum that isn’t imposed by force from the right.
Shouldn’t we be building actual infrastructure instead: roads, bridges, buildings, power plants, transmission lines, trains? How many well-funded “progressive” organizations do we need? Is elite overproduction really the explanation here?
I don't think we are building infrastructure. The overall state of American infrastructure is poor and getting worse. The bridge collapses we are seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. Amtrak is a disgrace. I'm not going to quibble about whether it should be at the federal or state or metropolitan area level (e.g. NY/NJ or PA/NJ). I would like the Democratic party to figure out how to build the required physical infrastructure and enact policies or regulation changes of whatever sort needed so that it happens.
There’s a huge highway upgrade happening a mile from here. Major renovation at the DC airport. Adding lanes to I-95 to a significant stretch in the Carolinas. That’s just off the top of my head.
You can’t demonstrate that, overall, American infrastructure is poor, let alone that it’s getting worse. (And please, spare me the self-serving studies from interested groups.)
Also, trains and buildings don’t count? The studies saying it is more expensive to build here are well-supported. The CA high-speed rail line was a disaster.
Here's why you can't have a "Joe Rogan of the Left" - Rogan's schtick is "I'm not sayin', I'm just askin' questions," basically. Leftists don't like when you ask questions. Rogan is fundamentally a dissenter, and leftists don't tolerate dissent. A "Joe Rogan of the Left" would face unending demands for performances of progressive orthodoxy that would be off-putting to normal people.
Building off your last paragraph, the extent to which Democrats would stand well to try to emulate Donald Trump is quite shocking at first but makes a lot of sense. Not in policy substance, personal style, or rank corruption and norm breaking obviously but in what one might call his positioning method. That is, turning the party away from its most high salience and unpopular ideas and reorienting it's purpose around different ideas that are more popular and that connect with a different and wider group of voters.
Democrats need to do to their issue drags what Trump did rhetorically to Bush's foreign policy and Ryan Fiscal politics and replace it with something akin to his laser focus on immigration enforcement where the public was largely behind him. An analogous dem version of this could be Shiving the excesses of woke identity politics, hammering Biden's failures on inflation, and taking seriously being the party of abundant housing construction everywhere.
I think the factional infighting can’t be resolved bc we don’t have a parliamentary system or proportional system. If there was one, centrist Dems would have to give *some* explicit concessions to more left wing parties to form a majority govt and on everything else they would tell leftists to shut it. Matt Bruenig explains the dynamics of dysfunctional coalition politics well: https://mattbruenig.com/2023/10/26/dysfunctional-coalition-politics/
From an international standpoint, it is just true that the revolving door that existed between big tech and big business during Obama era was unusual. It doesn’t exist in most socially democratic parties in Europe. But the Dem party is an interest group brokerage party, not an ideologically pure party no matter how much the leftists whine.
On infrastructure, personally I would like to see some realist (left-wing?) foreign policy think tanks that promotes military restrain but isn’t full of tankies and idiots. Quincy is too isolationist and CAP is too reflexively interventionist. Cato prob has the most rigorous foreign policy realists. But something in between Quincy and CAP, where a future Dem president could potentially staff their team from.
Has there been any sign that the left is at all willing to prioritize their wishlist? Absent such a willingness, there's not really a point to offering any concession, because it's only prioritization that allows one to decide that shutting it on everything else in exchange for getting that concession is worth it.
There's an unwillingness to admit within the broad center-to-left coalition that anything positive for any element of the coalition could be negative for some other element of of the coalition (as a simple example, commitment to more functional public transit and increased EV adoption is highly likely to be net negative for unionized labor).
There isn't a left that is coherent enough to do that. Let's say a center-left government offered a deal where they significantly liberalised abortion in exchange for the left shutting up about building up fossil-fuel extraction infrastructure.
I'm sure Planned Parenthood would celebrate. But I don't think Sunrise would shut up. Because those are two different groups that comprise different people.
"Has there been any sign that the left is at all willing to prioritize their wishlist?"
Yes. Planned Parenthood prioritises abortion; Sunrise prioritizes climate change; HRC prioritizes LGBTQ+ rights, etc. Nearly everyone on the left does that prioritization - but the result is that you can't the left to collectively pick a priority precisely because they (individually) already did.
The point that Bruenig is missing is that there is no "the left" that pulls these together to negotiate with "the center-left", exactly because the political system (which includes but is not only the voting system) doesn't incentivize one.
It's actually worse than you describe, because Planned Parenthood wouldn't take the deal, either (see "racism is a public health issue" from 2020). Among The Groups, you have to accept the entire omnicause.
I think that the problem is not simply that we have subdivided ourselves and built separate infrastructures along various priorities. I think the problem is that we’ve migrated over time away from what should be a common priority: Hands-on engagement with the actual people who are not we academically acculturated elites. Who is prioritizing engagement with the working class and unions? Who is prioritizing working with immigrant communities? Hands-on engagement with “The People” should be our overriding priority. See my comment way at the bottom of these comments where I elaborate on this.
Read Matt Bruenig’s article. The current idiotic state of the left in American politics is, in part, a manifestation of a system in which they haven’t had to actually represent their faction in concrete ways.
There is no reason there can’t be a professional organized left wing faction, just like the actual policy positions of MAGA original ( Econ moderation + cultural conservatism + foreign policy realism) can def be a faction in Republican politics. It’s just the case that most ppl that represent that faction are the lowest quality ppl.
I did read the article. The left has no interest in a system where they'd have to represent their faction in concrete ways (because the faction is small). It's the wonky center that would like RCV, and the left groups fairly consistently manage to join various right groups in opposing such reforms.
I don’t understand why spend time complaining about them if they are so small. It’s bc they are loud and have a big microphone? Well, if we accept that important industry people are going to have a bigger voice just bc they have more money, we are just going to have to accept that young online ppl who are most invested are going to have a disproportionate say. It’s just reality. Either you try to reconcile with that reality or try to change their minds. I genuinely find it difficult to understand what all this whining about them amounts to, what are we hoping is going to happen? As we tell leftists scorn, derision, and shame doesn’t work on moderate/rightists if we want to persuade them, I’m not sure it works on leftists either if we genuinely want to persuade them on the merits.
Yes I agree what I’m trying to say is that is the direct result of the left not having to actually be responsible for governing, which is, in turn, a result of the way our system is structured. It’s chicken and egg.
There is Big Business, if not Big Tech in Europe. Mostly luxury brands. The social democratic parties there don’t have the kind of chummy relationship Obama White House had. It’s considered weird to work for VP communications for Amazon after being communications director for a social Democratic Party, see Jay Carney.
I think ppl over estimate how close Dems were to Big Business before Obama made it cool. Most Big Donors gave to Republicans before Obama.
Yglesias could probably turn A Common Sense Democrat Manifesto [1] and associated articles into a short, self-published book fairly easily. Richard Hanania is doing something similar with his Elite Human Capital book, and he makes a strong case for why it’s not worth investing the additional time in a traditionally published book. [2]
Ben Thompson, however, was the OG in this space with his 2017 free article, Books and Blogs [3], where he explains why he won’t dedicate the time to writing a proper book that collects and organizes key ideas from his paid newsletter. Moreover, Thompson chose to keep his general articles free for marketing purposes and his site has curated topic collections that function similarly to a self-published book made up of prior free newsletter articles.
Yglesias could take a similar approach, organizing his manifesto articles as a self-published book and also as a free guide to Yglesias Thought. Both could be useful marketing tools to attract more subscribers and also to influence the Democratic Party. However, a traditionally published book would likely demand too much of his time and attention for the limited additional benefits in terms of both financial returns and influence.
I often want to try to submit a mailbag question that is simpyl "Are you writing another book?" I think relative to his existing influence, probably the highest WAR thing Matt could probably do for the Democratic Party is to write a splashy book on how to save the party and hammer the podcast circuit and get people talking about The Gospel According to MattY.
I just re-re-read Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country. The whole time I was thinking about MY's manifesto. We need to jettison the bullshit revolutionary cosplay and rededicate ourselves to real, slow, and very boring reform.
What you're saying seems spot-on. However, I encountered a problem in your essay perhaps driven by your "inside-the-beltway" viewpoint: You generally work hard to make even subtle points clear and convincing to everyone. However, the word "infrastructure" was bewildering to me as an outsider; it wasn't until half-way through that I realized you were using jargon to refer to Democratic politics, not to roads and power grids.
Thanks for the feedback! Definitely a beltway term, but hope it was clear from the context of the piece
Yeah, I just commented on that also. I saw the title and was bewildered: why doesn't Matt Y want more solar panels and wind turbines?
The widespread consensus ratifies my sense that "infrastructure" is arcane jargon. I feel that this sort of Bubble Jargon is a marker of the disconnect between insiders and normies, and that insiders hoping to connect with the voting public need to modify their vocabulary. I'm afraid this is a lesson MAGA already knows.
No one paying to read this blog, probably including you, is a "normie". We are all somewhere outside the norm in both our desire for and our understanding of political information. To be fair, I too was confused by the term, but this blog generally isn't aimed at the voting public writ large.
Good point; you're right. At the same time, I do think there's a pathological element. I deal with annoying jargon in my field, and really dislike it. Math and science require jargon (I'm a scientist) but it's horribly overused, and I suspect its overuse becomes more profound elsewhere. Jargon simplifies and shortens communication amongst the cognoscenti, but it also has a social role. It reassures the insiders that they belong, while reminding the outsiders that they are Lesser Beings, unworthy of the Secrets of the Inner Circle.
The article was written for the donor class. Matt gets to do that occasionally.
The kind of "infrastructure" it refers to I think also deserves elaborating. Some kinds would be clearly helpful: Robust state and local party organizations + mass-membership groups. Even better if those are the same thing.
But now that's mostly either illegal or strongly disadvantaged by thinning social fabric and "Bowling Alone": The party is a hollow shell that's not allowed to choose its own candidates and doesn't really *do* anything. The typical state party is moribund and has a shockingly small number of people regularly involved in it.
The kind of "infrastructure" we get instead is foundation- or billionaire-funded DC-based NGOs, and those have bad incentives. They don't want to win local elections and be broadly appealing, they want to advance an ideological agenda. (Also incentives to advance the staff's career prospects, which leads up the incentive gradient to advancing the ideological agenda.)
This is a really good point. And, I suspect pursuing a membership model would also lead to some moderation in the party, as people tend to tone things down when they're talking face to face with people. Given the questionable benefits of things like door knocking, I think it'd be great if Democrats operated social clubs.
Same here — came just to make this comment!
Same here I had to read 2 paragraphs before I was sure about what infrastructure it was
I always found the "Dems have structural disadvantages" cope to be very revealing. This is kind of true in the Electoral College (less so now), but that's about it. "The right wing controls the misinformation ecosystem!" "Dems would win if they had a Fox News and a Joe Rogan!"
In every area *other* than the EC, Dems have a massive structural advantage. Every institution that isn't explicitly conservative joined the Resistance and tried to sway voters towards Democrats. Art, science, journalism, you name it. There's no shortage of podcasters who will hew to the liberal/leftist line on every issue. And if people were so susceptible to "misinformation," why don't they just swallow all the lefty bullshit hook, line, and sinker?
At some point, the liberal/left establishment is going to need to come to terms with the fact that people don't really like them, and the more they put their message out, the worse the problem gets.
Matt has written about this before, but I think it’s so important for Democratic Party actors to realized the sheer limits of what politics can actually convince people of.
75% of America doesn’t like thinking about politics. It stresses them out and they just hate it. It’s hard to understand that when you’re like us and you’re obsessed with that stuff, but we all likely have some people in our life who fall in that 75% category. We need to take their apathy seriously.
And that obviously doesn’t mean people’s political and cultural views won’t change, it’s just we need to understand which means of communication have the most potency. Right now, that is art and communication spaces that are not overtly political.
For example, I think every American should go see Nickel Boys in theaters. That’s a much more effective educational tool than a corporate DEI program or a political speech. Stop lecturing people what to think, tell stories snd focus on education.
Conversation I've witnessed in person several times, at a Democratic organizing meeting
Person 1: We need to get out there.
Person 2: But, don't forget, we're weird, lots of people don't like to talk about politics. We don't want to backfire.
Crowd: (vague mutters of agreement)
Person 1: People are stupid
Person 3: THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS BUT POLITICS CARES ABOUT THEM
Crowd: (less vague and more concrete mutters of agreement)
Person 5: Who cares if some people yell at you? We need to get out there and MAKE OUR VOICES HEARD! Politics is not a spectator sport!
Crowd: (full throated agreement, the concept that *this might be harmful of our goals* having been completely discarded long ago)
Eventually Person 2 just realizes they should shut up and not talk.
I found myself getting more and more infuriated reading through this comment. I have no doubt that you have, in fact, encountered these people in real life, but it’s like the dialogue was lifted from a Terry Pratchett bit. And then the participants all merrily rush off into the streets to provoke inevitable backlash…
Yeah, this is where a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking about messaging annoys me. The best crafted message in a focus group doesn't mean anything if people don't want to engage with the topic. We probably underestimate the role that Trump being a pop culture figure decades before he was a politician plays into his political success (in part because actually grappling with the implications is depressing).
This is true, and i think a contributor to the gerontocracy of the country (and honestly, there's a gerontocracy in popular culture as well- almost all the best known stars are old as all hell). The best way to get known is to have been known, in such a massive, diverse, and siloed in field.
It's amazing how many people who first became famous 20-40 years ago are still major entertainers (ranging from Tom Cruise and The Rock to Beyonce and Taylor Swift). It feels like a lot of the actors who were well-known in the 90's who had started in the 60's and 70's tended to be more well-respected thespians (Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman), but not necessarily summer blockbuster box office draws the way that Top Gun was a couple of years ago. How many active musicians from the 1970's had actual clout with young people in 1999?
Meet voters where they are rather than cajoling them into positions they don't find salient.
Every liberal should have a conservative in their life at the very least to understand the arguments being made from that side, but I am always surprised when I talk to my conservative friends that argue in good faith how much we actually agree.
"Stop lecturing people what to think, tell stories and focus on education."
Amen!
I just read the book Nickel Boys, I didn't even realize the movie came out last year. Thanks for the plus.
I think you just described the Biden coalition in 2020. The problem is that as soon as Dems take the presidency, a big proportion of that first group switches over to “why is Biden always stressing me out by making me think about politics?” simply because the news is covering him now. It is completely thermostatic.
During the campaign Kamala Harris went on SNL. Trump would never be invited to go on SNL, which of course made him very upset. Instead, to follow sort of federal air-time law, NBC gave Trump a commercial on Sunday Night Football, which has more viewers than SNL can ever dream of getting. And yet Trump was still upset about SNL and Harris didn't seem bothered about a Trump ad playing on the most watched TV show in America.
Trump was invited on SNL in 2016
Was not only invited, he hosted! Usually presidential candidates get a cameo in a single sketch. It reminds me of how Trump implicitly complains about cultural elites never accepting him, while he was invited to introduce the segment on King Kong in AFI's first Top 100 television special. (He spent the entire time talking about how he owned the land the Empire State Building was on or something.)
And the staff was pissed about it. Lorne Micheals insisted, said something about how SNL isn't Samantha Bee..
Sure but the claim Sean O. made was “Trump would never be invited to go on SNL” which is factually untrue because he did go on SNL as a candidate.
I agreed with you.
Whoops
Maybe she should have been considering the outcome.
It can't be overstated how much this drives conservatives crazy. Now, I don't think this justifies them electing a con-man, but the number one complaint from conservatives for decades has been the domination of cultural institutions by the broad left of center, and the refusal of the left of center to admit this (I'm using left of center because I don't want to get in a "left" vs "liberal" fight). To control Hollywood, Academia, and the mainstream news media except for one station and then pretend you don't is infuriating to some 30-40% of the public. During COVID, these mainstream institutions jumped the shark and got called out even by some of the center-left, for instance the CDC declaring racism to be a "pandemic." Since then, the credibility of these institutions is at the lowest point I've seen in my life, and the alternatives are not good. Joe Rogan is not a reliable source of information, but that window has only been created due to the intellectual laziness of mainstream institutions.
I understand this. I do think some of this would have been hard to combat by conservatives. A lot of these areas are either very focused on the youth or strongly downplay the profit motive (i.e., academia). The Conservative base skews much older and often doesn't seem to like their own children (note how much older rallies for Trump seem) but has the demographic weight to win elections. So things like art, film, music, fashion, etc. skew toward the less white, more 2nd generation immigrant, much more secular and non-Christian American youth population. I also think there is clear nuance here where the MSM is culturally liberal but economically conservative, so no one is really happy with them.
I don't have time to elaborate but I don't agree that the news media is economically conservative.
It is in the sense that it is a for profit business run by rich people.
The MSM has a status quo bias that’s aligned with neoliberalism and the PMC. I consider that to be economically conservative but in the Mitt Romney sense not the populist, Tucker Carlson, sense.
I initially liked this comment but I think it actually does more harm than good to represent the economic goals of the PMC and Romney as being the same. There’s a big gap there! Romney was genuinely passionate about fiscal restraint and the deficit – the PMC cares about the performance of their portfolio. That leads to huge differences of opinion on stimulus spending, and the MSM has been firmly in the indigo-PMC camp for my entire political lifetime (since 2014, perhaps things were different previously).
It’s not like the NYT or PBS was up in arms about the sheer size of Biden’s stimulus package. They dutifully ran some editorials taking the other side, but by and large the opinion of the editorial boards of most of the larger media organs was completely in line with Dem economic goals.
Fair enough. I was thinking more so about being ok with private equity and vulture capitalists like Bain. I don’t watch Tucker, but I’ve heard of him going off about that kind of thing before from a populist perspective more than I’ve ever heard the MSM hold those monsters’ feet to the fire (to be clear I do like Romney on net, but the entire vulture capitalist stuff is totally fucked, and he did have a role in some of that.)
They may not be super socially conservative or MAGA, but I would say the world of police procedurals like Law and Order, NCIS, etc. are very much what I would call “normie conservative,” or center right. And they’re extremely popular.
Beyond that, what would an even more right wing prime time TV even look like? Modern retellings of Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation? A sympathetic miniseries of the Turner diaries? Nick at Nite, but forever?
They may have to satisfy themselves with making Disney stop making live action movies with black people or something, because I don’t think far right wing sitcoms and dramas would get very good ratings.
Yeah totally agree. I have been annoyed by lack of self awareness of Liberal/left establishment to the fact that ppl don’t like them - I think this is attributed to three things (I know I am very biased on this btw lol)
1. Those establishment grew up pretty much in a bubble
2. The sense of entitlement/lack of humility of them - I kinda blame the way they grew up (like Noah Smith, I think they are a bit too spoiled and I know I’m veeery biased on this as someone who grew up in East Asia)
3. I suspect a good chunk of them esp on academia are sorta kinda on spectrum - making them very oblivious overall to how ppl perceive them
Hey what did Noah Smith ever do?
I think he says Americans are praising their kids too much. And whet he comes at in my understanding is that leads to the overestimate of their potential (please chime in if I misunderstand or make things up)
I like Noah. But he's dramatically pro-Japan and dramatically anti-China, which I sometimes find puzzling.
I think he is very anti-CCP, which isn't the same as being anti-China. He likes Taiwan and Chinese culture just fine.
Yeah I think this is a very fair and accurate description.
Well, partially bc I grew up in Japan, his stance is not too surprising to me.
idk how much it is relevant to his stance but I’d say the Japanese sentiment towards China is very complicated but overall CCP is not liked or trusted unless you have a stake in the business. There is also an individual level antipathy/discrimination towards Chinese too.
Japanese overall like Taiwan a lot, have a very mixed feelings towards Korea (I think this feeling is mutual) fwiw
Many years ago, I was sitting in Sproul Plaza at Berkeley when a bus full of Japanese tourist girls (teenagers) disgorged itself. A young woman with a fully American accent approached one of them and said that she was Korean, and did this Japanese girl know what the Japanese had done to the Koreans? Well, listen up!
It wasn't clear to me that the Japanese girl even really spoke English, and boy did she look like a deer in the headlights.
So at least a few decades ago, there were still some hard feelings on the part of the Koreans.
The rabbits know, but they aren't talking . . . .
Meh, I like Noah (he’s my only other paid substack), he’s just waaaaaaaay too Stanford-pilled. He’s ok with crypto, the tech industry, the existence of billionaires, and H1B visas/skilled immigration, for starters, and these things are bad. Really bad. I wanna say that he even wrote a column in favor of austerity, which should be prosecutable speech in my view. And my God his column about the good Elon and the evil Elon (Dec 21) sure didn’t age well!
But man, when it comes to China, state capacity, industrial policy, and abundance he’s so, so right.
I agree this was a problem pre-2024, but post-election it seems like most people are pretty clear-eyed about this. I'm sure you can still find smug liberals about there who think the public just wants an even purer version of liberalism/socialism (in fact I have a friend who thinks that), but among prominent intellectuals and politicians this view doesn't seem common anymore.
I guess I get that feeling, too, but I'm just curious where you pick that up most clearly? From chats with friends, online forums, podcasts, opinion pieces, activists? I realizes for myself that I sense that as well, but I don't know how I would objectively explain why I sense that to another person, so I was curious if you had any clues.
Mostly it's just from reading articles by prominent left-of-center pundits and politicians. There's a lot more talk about reaching out to Trump-voters and being out of touch with mainstream America. I have seen almost nothing from these folks post-election about mobilization being the key to victory. Arguably the most influential left-of-center pundit now is Ezra Klein, who was pretty critical of Biden in 2024 and has been talking a lot about how Democrats need a new message that appeals to more people. Whereas back in 2017 the most influential left-of-center pundit was arguably Ta-Neihisi Coates.
Thank you so much for explaining - and while I decided not to see Twitter/Bluesky (and even NYT lol) as much as possible for my mental health, I also feel that from the convo that I have w friends who are for the most part left of center. I think what is telling is a trans couple that I know were very critical of those “Puritanism on the left”
Since ~1% of people are estimated to be "on the spectrum," it seems implausible that a "good chunk" of Liberals/Left/Academia are.
Yea, I highly doubt that the majority of them are “on spectrum” - if anything, a majority of them are conformist to the loud voice. That said, the flip side of it is if you filter it to influential (aka loud voice) and highly educated, I feel like the ratio of that is significantly higher than 1%. I could be well wrong about this and this not the hill for me to die on btw
I think musing about how many of these people are "on the spectrum" is the kind of thing best left on the cutting room floor.
Anyway, it’s the spectrum-y-ness of the other side that’s the issue at the moment: Revenge of the Nerds II, the Reign of the Tech Overlords
I mean, isn't Trump just about the biggest example of #2 of anyone in the entire country?
Yeah he def is and so is Musk - I don’t necessarily think it is limited to the left
I have to chuckle about the thinking "we need a Joe Rogan on the left" because there are literally dozens of non-political shows/podcasts in mainstream media that are left-coded (The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel, Colbert, SNL, The Ringer.
I will say though, are complaints about the toxicity of the Dem brand a bit overstated? It's not like they lost in a blow out. Trump won the popular vote by a single percentage point, the GOP has the narrowest lead in the House, a slim lead in the Senate, Dems continue to do well in special elections.
To paraphrase a tweet I saw “There can’t be a Joe Rogan of the left because his audience would constantly accuse him of being rightwing for no reason until that became his reputation and then the reality, which is exactly what happened to Joe Rogan”
Much as I hated so much about Limbaugh, his "Equal time? I *am* equal time!" really hit home.
Professional class left-wing Democrats also fail to understand what the poor and working class view as elites. It's not just Elon and the Wikipedia list of billionaires. The social science grad student is an elite. Upper middle class
adults who got opportunities they never could even consider is not seen as trustworthy or the populace.
A lot of the professional-class left-wing Democrats think (incorrectly) that those opportunities are open to anyone.
This is especially true of the people who went to a small town high school and got into the state flagship college and then did well there and went on to grad school - so many of them don't think that they were the lucky/privileged/elite one that got a bunch of opportunities, but that everyone could have left and those who stayed did so by choice.
Both sides struggle mightily with the knowledge that half the population has an IQ below 100.
This is one area where Freddie DeBoer has done good and necessary work that has gone largely unnoticed. The Cult Of Smart layed it out in plain terms.
To a certain extent, this is where the "the US is the richest nation in the world" and "everything is a hellscape" narratives run into each other. It's not just that a lot of people who succeed probably have unexamined privilege, but that in elite educational institutions, you meet people who have had harder lives than the average American make it. (And think how much backlash much of the discussion of privilege end up drawing in practice.) During my college orientation, our president mentioned that one of my fellow freshmen had to evacuate his village a couple of months earlier since rebels overran it. We've had people who either survived atrocities like the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, etc. (or their children) become success stories in the US. Even if we take a group that is mostly Republican like the Mormons, we see overall higher levels of education and income than average, despite being often mocked by mainstream America.
My point here is that even if you disregard privilege in the sense that some people have an advantage in getting into that state flagship (and note: not Ivy League) because of their sex or sexuality or race, there are still only so many spaces in that state flagship. Their high-school graduating class can't all get in.
As @BronxZooCobra says, half the people are under IQ 100, but even for the ones that aren't - say there are ten kids in one year that could thrive in a state flagship college: there's still only going to be one or two places.
Even if they did "earn" that place in the sense that they did achieve the highest academic level in their school through their own efforts - what about the rest? I guess some of them will have got into a college. A lower-tier state college, or worked through community college and then got into a 4-year college as a junior. And then got their bachelor's and headed off to get a job.
But is the differential between the valedictorian of a class of 100 kids and the rank-five high-school graduate really so wide as to result in the level of differential that there is going to be between someone who did grad school and got into a professional-class job and someone who worked hard for a bachelor's from Directional State College and then went on to end up as a middle manager in the mid-size city 100 miles from the town they grew up in? Much less the kid who was twentieth in that class who is, at 38, the store manager in the local Wal-Mart or whatever. Does that kid at #20 really deserve the sneer that the kid at #1 might have when he comes to the 20-year high school reunion.
Of course that #20 kid doesn't deserve scorn and the valedictorian is being a jerk if they're sneering at their old classmate at the 20-year reunion if they do that. But you have to cook up a very specific scenario where this would make sense as a basis for mass electoral politics for the past few years in a way that this valedictorian draws mass resentment, but the likes of Trump (Penn), Vance (Yale Law), and Musk (Stanford) don't. Vance's book that launched his fame is in some ways holds more contempt for the working class than just about any cultural piece from the past decade, and then he got a Netflix deal from it. (He was also close to Amu Chua at Yale, who is arguably the poster child of implying like large parts of America isn't pushing their kids to succeed academically.) It feels like a bit of Calvinball going on in how everyone is trying to understand the role of education and resentment in driving electoral outcomes.
Amy Chua's first book on market-dominant minorities explains well why a lot of MAGA Republicans hate Vivek Ramaswamy. I do think that is the basis for some hatred of "elites" in the MAGA movement.
^^^ The person described here was me for maybe the first 25 years of my life. AMA
Those opportunities are in the process of people eliminated, fairly for everyone.
They don’t even know what the working class is. At this point most “working class” people are service workers, not guys in a union wearing hard hats.
The Republicans do this everytime they lose as well. "Stop the Steal" was just four years ago. The campaign against the mainstream media was exactly this.
I agree it's childish cope, but it's bipartisan childish cope.
... and I hope Republicans embrace the cope even harder than Democrats.
Depends. Let's hope they don't embrace "stop the steal" so hard that they actually steal an election "back."
>>the liberal/left establishment is going to need to come to terms with the fact that people don't really like them<<
Democrats basically won three of the last four elections. And even in 2024 most Americans voted for Harris or third party (and not Trump).
"People don't really like them" seems lazy. NOT ENOUGH people really like them (to sustain a governing majority over the longer term) is a better way to put it. Democrats need to do better in myriad ways, sure. But it helps to have accurate information when you're formulating a plan to do better. It would be great if Democrats could start crushing Republicans by ten points everywhere. But the reality is more like: they need to raise their floor by two or three points, consistently.
The nation is split 50/50 and power flips back and forth.
The difference between the parties is that the Democrats worry about how to expand beyond 50% but do nothing to achieve that, while the Republicans don't even worry about it.
The difference between the parties is that the Democrats try to be caretakers of government and the Republicans use their opportunities to burn it down.
If the “structural disadvantage” is nothing more than that fact that the particular bundle of political proposals and cultural ideas that the Democratic Party has on offer today is unpopular in small states, that’s not structural.
The Joe Rogan issue is something that probably occupies too much of my headspace as it does many dems coping with the election loss. Why don’t liberals have a Joe Rogan? Why is the Joe Rogan junior theo von also a basically right wing guy.? Why is the guy who has my favorite history guy (Gregory aldrete check him out) on his podcast, lex whatever, also conservative seeming? I don’t think there is a missing liberal media infrastructure here and there must be plenty of leftish talent almost all celebrities seem to be at least somewhat liberal. But there is a huge gap between someone like Jon Stewart which I kind of grew up on and these popular but right leaning podcasters. First of all Jon is all politics. It’s a bit exhausting for a podcast you’re going to listen to all the time. I think he has the issue of being way more left wing than he realizes and lecturing in tone. He pretends everything he believes is what basically anyone who’s not a complete asshole believes but that’s not true. There’s also maybe a bill Maher hole in the dem podcast space. I don’t agree with his views a lot of the time partly his views on race and some other issues don’t work. but i think his off color, common sense semi offensive way of talking about current events and important issues is cringey to too much of the left, but there is kind of a need for it. Anyway I think the main barrier to not having a leftish Joe Rogan is if that person emerged like a less out of touch Maher or whatever I think they’d be shot down by friendly fire before they got off the ground. There are some comedians who have popular podcasts that I think might be willing to do the job but I imagine it’s too narrow of a tightrope walk.
There are probably two things going on:
#1 Colbert / Maher / Stewart came-of-age professionally at a period when right-wing ideas were losing to left-wing ideas one after another. I'm referring to gay marriage, the invasion or Iraq, the Great Recession (not an idea, but the GOP took the blame) etc.. It was far easier to bash the Right and get a pass on why you didn't harass the left. It's far harder to play that role when you had Defund, Open Borders, certain aspects of Trans Issues, etc... being so prominent.
#2 A guy like Joe Rogan appeals to men without college degrees. His main audience is guys driving to work sites (maybe, I'm speculating, but you get the idea). The modern left isn't comfortable with that type of "bro" guy anymore. You don't slide into liberal spaces as easily as a bro, but you do if you're more educated or a woman.
Yes agree. I will say old Stewart and Colbert really did have a lot of centrist appeal I think they were still trying to build their audience. Those two shows were just too funny and that kind of supersedes politics my VERY Christian buddy watched it everyday and loved it.
Thinking of my favorite Jon Stewart rant. https://youtu.be/pzXIpp59eoU?si=6CtNGYxB4xkYH0MP
Joe Rogan is primarily a UFC and Comedian podcast, which also dabbles in hunting, alternative health, and politics.
Rogan, Von, and Fridman are not really right-wing at all. THey're just non-liberals who have been rejected by the left to varying extents and are willing to platform right-wingers (though they're also willing to platform left-wingers). So libs don't need their own Joe Rogan, they just need to stop rejecting Joe Rogan and promote politicians that are willing and able to have informal 2-3 hour conversations without preconditions.
I don't think Democrats did themselves any favors, but the Great Crank Realignment was likely going to result in Rogan ending up on the right regardless of what happened. Alex Jones wasn't always associated with the right, either.
In re Alex Jones not always being associated with the right, I like to point to his segment from "Waking Life" (2001): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5HLn3eYLSo
I don’t think I show up as a guest to trumps inauguration if u are just “no liberal” IMO.
To be “on the left” and in good standing as a public figure you have to profess belief in a lot of stupid shit. This serves as a very effective loyalty test but forfeits the “eppur si muove” demographic.
"He (Stewart) pretends everything he believes is what basically anyone who’s not a complete asshole believes but that’s not true."
If you listen to 'right wing' podcasts, they don't do this. They're actually fairly curious.
This tone is the reverse magic sauce of progressivism that makes people hate them.
I agree with you about culture war issues, but for other policy things I think in some ways this is a structural disadvantage of taking the pro-intervention position that the left usually does. It's trivial to be "just a curious guy asking some questions about vaccines" and influence thousands of people to not get them by highlighting one bad-faith example of vaccine injury. It takes empathy, trust, tradeoffs and a nuanced understanding of the literature to make the case and agree to the idea that "everyone should be forced to get vaccines so that we don't all get measles."
The problem with a Bill Maher, like a Nate Silver, is that they revel in punching left too much for my liking. Sure, it's often necessary, but do you really have to show how much you're enjoying bashing the more problematic parts of your own team?
One point if you are going to do issue advocacy, or policy research. Make sure you have some moderates, or better yet somebody that disagrees with you on your team.
Listen to their arguments, think them through and respond to them. You will make better policy and do better advocacy from having to listen to their arguments.
echo chambers are BAD!
"In every area *other* than the EC, Dems have a massive structural advantage." I invite you to learn more about the US Senate, and as a result SCOTUS.
How does the Republican party have a structural advantage in the Senate?
https://prospect.org/power/republican-structural-advantage/
Meh.
I haven't done a deep dive on the Senate breakout recently, but for quite a while, the smallest states split equally between Democratic and Republican Senators. (E.g., yes yes California vs Wyoming. But what about Texas vs Vermont?) Where the Republicans tended to have a bigger advantage is in the next tier of states by population, which are dominated by ones in the South. But that's just saying that the Republicans dominate the South.
I mean, it's a "cope" because people apply it to areas that *aren't* the senate/EC. Areas where Democrats have obvious advantages and they can't tolerate the existence of even one thing that's conservative-leaning.
As far as alternative media goes, I predict that'll also be a dead end. We may see a proliferation of alternative Ezra Kleins who stream on Twitch but push all of the same ideas, sure. I think those people just won't manage to get the following of a Joe Rogan or a Lex Fridman, because no one will be interested in what they're saying.
At some point Democrats will just have to confront the fact that their problem is mostly that their ideas aren't super-popular, and funding more NGOs, changing media strategies, etc. isn't really going to change that.
I think that Klein's ideas about growth/abundance can be popular.
Agree, but Dems/liberals need to become a party of ideas in general. All the fresh new ideas - almost all bad - are coming from the right. The Dems are left supporting liberal democracy status quo that people seem to be dissatisfied with. They need to present a different option, probably lots of different options. And it probably won't be as simple as "more left" or "more center", something more paradigm-breaking that transcends our current ideological lanes.
Say what you will about wokeness, but it’s a set of ideas.
Fair!
Why does it always have to be "new ideas"? How about "stay true to our values and protect the things that make us great and prosperous"?
Because there seems to be a deep reservoir of resentment to the things that made us great and prosperous. Maybe it didn't make everyone great and prosperous? Or maybe it has lessened in effectiveness? Either way, people seem dissatisfied with it.
So either the defense of the status quo has to be repackaged somehow, or you need new ideas. The "new" ideas can be old ones repurposed - much of MAGA is antiquated nonsense that was discredited a long time ago but people forgot. But people now are tired of the old framework, they want something fresh.
And why are MAGA new ideas characterized as “bold”, “innovative”, etc., rather than “stupid”, “self-destructive”, etc. Tim Walz got a lot of traction with the label “weird”.
Something “Radically Centered” :)
I don't Klein really has ideas here exactly. I think he wants to go back to a time when we could get things done, which means less ideas actually. Less "everything bagel".
Removing “everything bagel” barnacles is one way of increasing growth.
The environment of things that are deemed most important to influencing elections seems to reinvented anew each election cycle. It's quite possible that Joe Rogan/Barstool etc won't be a significant factor in 2028 but it will be something entirely different that the winner will crow about and the loser will desperately try to replicate.
Once upon a time it was Facebook and the Victory Lab. Then it was Cambridge Analytics (a scam, but people believed it). Who knows what the next thing will be.
Especially since Spotify seems to think that their big investments in individual podcasters like Rogan were a mistake and are desperately trying to find a new pot of untapped profit.
I didn't know that. Kind of like how Netflix and the streaming companies showered supposed superstar creators with tons of money and are now cutting back like crazy?
But what I'm saying is that the problem here isn't structural -- it's not as though Republicans were handed spokespeople who were magically endowed with legions of followers.
The followers are downstream of the ideas. If the ideas are popular, the "structural" problems will be fixed. On the other hand, you can't fix the structural-seeming problem just by fiddling around with media strategies and keeping the ideas the same.
People like Tim Pool only became Russian-funded after building a considerable audience by themselves, often over the course of years while slowly transforming from woke-skeptic to full rightwinger.
There is so much money in politics and media that whatever funding the Russians provided is just a drop in the bucket. The fault, dear Andrei, is not in the Russians but in ourselves.
I think people knowingly taking funding from Russia are traitors, but also important for us to remember that funding ≠ followers.
Who’s the Friedman that you say was funded by Russia?
I don’t understand the Kamala Harris complaints here. She ran a pretty good campaign. Biden was actually the problem and left her in a very difficult position.
She ran about as good a campaign as she could, given her personal constraints; but she could not overcome that the more people got to know her, the more they disliked her. I realize why you would not want that to believe that, but outside the bubble, her best bet was to have as little public exposure as possible.
"she could not overcome that the more people got to know her, the more they disliked her."
Except that is exactly the opposite of the truth: net negative on July 23 2024 -- +14; net negative on Nov. 5 2024 -- +5 (and hit a low of +2 in October)
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/kamala-harris/
I don't think I understand what you mean here, exactly. "Personal constraints" could mean a lot of things. I also don't understand the dislike comment exactly. It's clear a lot of people on this comment section don't like her, but it would be useful to understand why.
I would be happy to give you a genuine answer, but are you asking to understand, or are you asking to repudiate? The latter (IMO) has been the single biggest roadblock to Dems understanding what went wrong.
I promise not to repudiate anything you say here. There’s clearly a lot of dislike for Kamala Harris here on slowboring and in the US in general. Favorable-unfavorable levels are bad. I want to understand what people think the problems are so they can be dealt with.
She lost hence why people aren't generous towards her, she did overperform and helped minimize losses. I do think if Shapiro was the VP nom Democrats would have kept the senate seat in PA.
Overperformed compared to what though? If she overperformed her polls, the polls are endogenous to her.
(FWIW I don't think underperformed necessarily, just performed at about replacement-level)
Over performing relative to the Biden alternative and running a much better campaign than most were anticipating given her negatives.
This is absolutely true but I think it’s clear that the Biden alternative was a low bar. Isn’t it more useful to debate whether she underperformed relative to possible Democratic alternatives? Eliding the whole discussion about the downsides of a mini-primary format, it is certainly not clear to me that she overperformed relative to a hypothetical Shapiro or Whitmer campaign.
She could have won. She would have needed to make a few changes that would have upset the left. She wasn’t willing to do it. So we have Trump.
It’s true Biden left her in a difficult position but it’s also true she would have never had that opportunity in normal circumstances. She could not win a primary. He gifted her the nomination.
This conversation confuses me slightly. Debating the flaws of an individual candidate who, I think inarguably, ran a very good campaign under incredibly tough circumstances and actually performed well* instead of the context of the electorate she was dealing with.
I never saw this as Kamala losing the election so much as Trump winning, and that being the much more salient - and interesting - topic. Why did he win? IMO, Kamala’s flaws, such as they were, don’t explain it. (Tho perhaps her gender and race do.)
*it was, Dems’ post-election hysteria notwithstanding, a squeaker popular-vote-wise, and she was basically irrelevant to the Senate which was going to go R regardless, except maybe with a hyper-popular charismatic Dem like Obama
It’s in fact very arguable. Did Patrick Mahomes play well in the recent Super Bowl?
Kamala could have won. She would have needed to take some more centrist positions. She would have needed to say loudly that she was going to change some Biden Administration policies. She could have said we tried things and they didn’t work so we are changing course.
But when given the ball sitting on a tee like a five year old is provided she wiffed badly. “There is not a thing that comes to mind” Wow!! October 8, 2024, The View.
To go slightly off-topic, but I think in a relevant way. I watched the recent Superb Owl and I have to say that I don't think Patrick Mahomes suddenly turned into Tyler Palko. He never had time to get the ball off properly. The Eagles offense (and defense) had a good game plan and executed it very well. Mahomes could have played better, sure.
She gaffed for sure. But she had three months, dude. Even the most talented candidates make mistakes (“they cling to guns or religion”), but they have time to outrun them. I think you’re comparing her to some idealized, once-in-a-lifetime candidate. Kamala’s never been super quick in her feet, but she performed amazingly well under intense pressure at the DNC and the debate. She strikes me as that smart, practical girl who always loses to the douchebag because she’s not hot or funny (tho she could be) or dating the right guy.
Just so I'm clear, you're saying if Biden had dropped out early or made clear he wasn't running for reelection in 2023, you think she wouldn't have won the contested primary?
I think she would have won a contested 2024 primary, because she was VP, but of course she lost the contested 2020 primary without that advantage.
That's debatable. Yes, the VP is an advantage, which Biden gave to her - supporting my previous comment.
The smarter move for Democrats would have been to nominate someone outside the Biden Administration—someone who could credibly take different positions and avoid full accountability for Biden’s unpopular policies. But Democrats may not have figured that out. That's true.
Yes. He gave her an opportunity that she could not have attained on her own. It is one of the biggest political gifts in American history. Particularly when you consider the weakness of Trump as a candidate.
Yes, this seems to be a case where her staff made poor decisions and she went along with it.
The "her staff decided against Rogan because they didn't want to platform Rogan" story is persuasive, particularly because I've heard people say the part in quotes, total evidence of head-up-the-ass in terms of priorities.
I'm not sure that was the whole problem, though.
Harris should have both
1) gone on Rogan, and
2) been the kind of candidate where going on Rogan would help her.
Without #2, #1 is a bad move.
She got caught flat-footed in a puff-piece on The View. What in the world would have happened with Rogan asking a bunch of questions over the course of an hour or two about every random topic that the conversation happens to go?
Agree, that moment on the View was not a high point.
What about if "Progressives" just change their minds about policing/prosecuting, border control, trans issues as national issue, and blocking fossil fuel production and transportation projects and focused instead on revenue raising tax reform, merit based immigration and counter-China trade policy.
If progressives change their minds about trans issues, the current administration will announce the existence of prison camps for trans people (or something equally horrible, if less obviously illegal.) The trans issue wasn't raised by the left, it was a creation of the right that came along once Americans stopped responding forcefully to anti-gay arguments. No matter how much the left "concedes" on this issue, the right will just push it to new extremes that will compel moral human beings to respond.
Supportive mom of a kid who was trans for three years and imma disagree with you here. I think you weren’t hanging around in the media spaces where non-bigoted moderates expressed their discomfort with the (dominant) liberal stance on medical care for trans minors (if a child says they’re trans, they’re trans and shouldn’t be denied life-altering medical interventions) and, less pressing but still consternating, trans women in sports. Not to mention the “trans women are women” rallying cry and the great cancellation of those who suggested there was any difference, even just the formative experience of having grown up in the world as a female.
We were overtly, stubbornly, proudly outside the reasonable mainstream on this one, and I don’t think it would have been hard to have carved out a more cautious stance that was nevertheless full-throatedly supportive of trans rights and trans people qua people.
My point stands. If you carve out that more cautious stance, the right will react doing horrible things that require you to devote all your energy towards fighting.
“The trans issue wasn't raised by the left, it was a creation of the right…”
Where you live it was folks on the right using the term “birthing persons”?
I doubt that’s true.
The Right is creating men barging their way into women's spaces and insisting that everyone else pretend that there's nothing happening?
Big if true.
The right supports domestic violence- that's what "traditional values" means.
Wat
The senate is barely a temporal disadvantage, let alone a structural one. One of the biggest signs of cope is perceiving facts (such as the current lean of the senate) as something way outside of the control of the Democratic party.
Well, I don't know. The way the Senate is set up, the states that are going to get outsized representation are going to be highly rural, and the states that get undersized representation are going to be more urban. All over the world, as I understand it, urban areas are more cosmopolitan and more left-wing than rural ones. It's true that America is a pretty conservative country in many ways, but it's also true that the Senate's composition heightens that tendency, especially as politics gets less local and more national.
Interesting points. There's a lot I would pick at here. I have to partly agree with these observations, but I would say there's way more that's temporal than structural in you're saying.
But on the observations themselves "urban areas are more cosmopolitan and more left-wing": Cosmopolitan, yes, but that only maps to left-wing when cultural issues are to the fore in the developed West. In many countries, and in the US in the recent past, economics was more salient and rural areas can be left-wing on those metrics.
"It's true that America is a pretty conservative country in many ways". I feel like Matt has written about, and convinced me, that this is only true in some ways, not others, and has become something of a cope on the Left.
"the states that are going to get outsized representation are going to be highly rural". Well, not exactly. The smaller states, population-wise, get more representation. So Rhode Island and Delaware and nearly all of New England, for instance, will probably always be Senate-privileged despite not being rural. Our correlation between rural-ness and population size just isn't that strong.
It also depends on how much of the population live in rural areas, which in the US is only 20% by county, and falling.
Yep, I think that calling America conservative usually is downstream of two things:
i. Using issues that are divisive in the US to judge whether other countries are conservative or liberal.
ii. Comparing the US to about five countries in Europe + Canada and ignoring the rest of the world.
What are the issues we should look at to say that the US is *not* conservative relative to other countries? Or, what are the additional countries we should compare the US to?
You referred to "Rhode Island and Delaware and nearly all of New England, for instance," but that "for instance" is misleading—these are the *only* Senate-privileged urbanized states! Small, dense states are, as far as I can tell, pretty much restricted to the original colonies; since the Louisiana Purchase, you've mostly got big dense states and big sparse states. Excluding the original 13 colonies, the ten least populous states are Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Maine (part of Massachusetts in 1776), Hawaii, West Virginia (formerly part of Virginia), Idaho, Nebraska, and New Mexico. Among those ten states, the biggest metropolitan statistical area is Honolulu (#55 MSA in the nation by population), followed closely by Omaha (#56), Albuquerque (#61), Boise (#74), Portland Maine (#102), Anchorage (#137), Huntington (#152), Martinsburg (#168), and Fargo (#189). That's all I could find in the top 200. So I think "rural" (or if you prefer, "non-urban") works as a description. Of those ten states, only Hawaii and New Mexico have two Democratic senators, and Maine has one, so it's 15-5.
"It also depends on how much of the population live in rural areas, which in the US is only 20% by county, and falling."
Right, but that's exactly the case for a structural disadvantage! A very small number of Americans live in rural areas, but the overrepresented states in the Senate have a disproportionate number of those Americans.
Looking at these lists below it seems like there's some other Senate-privileged urban states. Utah, Hawaii, Oregon and Nevada would probably all make the cut.
Most of the distortion is the result of the California, Texas, NY and Florida getting only 2 senators. These are above-average urban states, though closer to the national urban / rural average than I have guessed. So that much is true and introduces some rural senate-privelage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-rural-states
The Senate isn't really a structural disadvantage now either. If you apportioned the hundred seats as extra House seats, the states that would lose representation are basically: Wyoming/Vermont/the Dakotas/Alaska/Montana/New Hampshire/Maine/Rhode Island/Hawaii (lose 2), Delaware/West Virginia/Idaho (lose 1).
So if you remove the disadvantage, it’s not there anymore?
Did you not notice the high number of Democratic aligned states that are overrepresented in the Senate?
I count five Democratic-aligned states, seven Republican-aligned states, and two mixed states. Do you get the same count?
I was under the impression that the Senate / EC is very much breaking towards redder states given post-pandemic population change.
e.g.
https://x.com/mcpli/status/1737171882623820142
Well, it’s moving from blue states that are turning redder to red states that are mostly turning bluer. And likely the population movement is a big part of why these states are turning redder and bluer. That’s bad for democrats unlike these states actually switch color.
Yet another reason for YIMBYism.
Good points!
Don’t forget the filibuster. Also a problem.
Speaking of too much infrastructure, I'm about to head to the polls in Wisconsin to pull an 0600-2200 shift. There is exactly one thing on the ballot, a primary for state superintendent of public instruction. A *primary* for that office, we'll vote again on it in April.
It's currently -9F. 9 voters is about how many I expect to see today. The county clerk explicitly encouraged us to bring a knitting project or a book.
What are we even doing here?
And specifically, why is taxpayer money being used to subsidize an internal party decision about which candidate it wants to nominate like this?
Because the two party system with parties is part of our state mandated electoral system, not an internal decision by a private organization.
Here's a good discussion related to this topic: https://jwmason.org/slackwire/political-parties-are-illegal-in-the-united-states/
This piece is just terrible lol, almost every factual assertion made by the author is just flat-out wrong:
1. 'Conventions are illegal, you legally have to do a primary'- totally made up. Famously Virginia Republicans in 2018 refused to hold a primary and switched to a convention, which is how they nominated Youngkin. Several states have been holding conventions for decades- for example Orrin Hatch in Utah was nominated by convention from 1976-2006.
Worst for the author's argument that his hypothetical Socialist party couldn't hold a nominating convention- the Green, Libertarian, and Constitution parties did exactly that in 2024, and every previous election for decades as far as I'm aware.
Plus- caucuses? Has the author ever heard of a caucus? They're not primaries, they're restricted to party members only, they're still in very widespread use......?
2. 'You legally can't restrict primaries to dues paying members'- of course you can, 10 US states still hold completely closed primaries. Plus again, caucuses
3. 'You legally couldn't use RCV in a primary'- I'm sorry what? NYC has famously been doing it for the last several years
Worst piece on US elections I've seen recently. The author claims to be a 'health policy researcher', for whatever that's worth
This is very, very bad. Having official political parties is what they do in Cuba and North Korea. It's not only bad by association; it's bad in principle, for some of the reasons in the article you linked to. It's also foreign to our constitutional order (though, tbf, I can't comment on whether it's foreign to *state* constitutional order).
In NYS this year, there were no third parties on the presidential ballot for the first time I'm aware of. NY *does* allow third parties, but the state government made the process of getting on the ballot onerous for third parties. This is not quite the issue you're referring to, but it's adjacent and also horrible.
It's bad in principle but in FPTP elections it doesn't really matter that much.
As our history (and world history) has demonstrated, legacy political parties are not set in stone, even in FPTP systems. We don't need the government adding its thumb to the scale to continue the status quo.
Moreover, how was I supposed to protest-vote against Harris and Trump (in a state where I knew I would not be throwing the election to Trump)?
The parties made the laws; the laws didn't make the parties.
This is not really true, the requirements for parties to hold primaries, for example, were mostly created as part of good government reforms to eliminate smoke filled rooms, rather than because the parties wanted primaries.
AYFKM?
Bro. The parties literally fucking pre-date those laws. Who do you think PASSED the laws mandating party primaries? It wasn't some depolarized mass of independent Jeffersonian yeoman farmer-politicians that magically appeared in the 1870's-1900s. It was members of both parties.
And they didn't want "good government"; that was the excuse they gave the voters. What they ACTUALLY wanted was to stop the cycle of frequent party collapses that led to the instability of plurality victories and an entire fucking *civil war*.
Seriously, if RCV (or even better, multi-member STV...) advocates were willing to tout "no more primaries" as a benefit (viz. include no more (or at least no more non-Presidential) primaries with the proposals), that would probably be ten plus more points of support.
Hell "we only vote twice a year" would be an improvement.
Actually, that's a good proposition for California (or other proposition states): there shall be two voting days per year. One day is only for primaries and cannot be used for a general election; the other is only for general elections (and propositions, referendums, etc) and cannot be used for primaries.
The sole exception should be special elections (and recalls, I guess), which may not be held on the same day as any other special election, or on either the primary or general election day.
I bet that would get a lot of votes.
We already have two voting days every two years, outside of special elections and recalls, in California, so your idea already exists *and* is stricter than you proposed.
How do you handle primary runoffs? Usually at least one
Change the rules to abolish them? California doesn't have them.
So plurality wins? You'd need IRV or something otherwise.
"subsidize an internal party decision"
It's officially a non-partisan position, so no parties are listed on the ballot and everyone is lumped into a single primary. The top two people go to the full election in April. (I'm not saying that it makes sense that this is an elected position in the first place, but it's not an "internal party decision".)
Everybody knows democracy is a good thing and therefore by definition you can't have too much of it. Why not allow high school students to elect high school principals? I feel this is a long overdue reform.
TOO MUCH DEMOCRACY!
Oh, that’s today. Thank you for working it, despite frankly how little the difference the outcome in this particular election will make.
You are doing democracy.
I don't know -- in my area, nothing gets the local Moms group more riled up than the education-related decisions.
"Because almost everyone working on almost every cause is doing this, there’s an incredible amount of pressure on people who know better to also do it. "
This is what I call the "Baseball Steroids Problem". There's no such thing as a sports league where, say, 15% of the top athletes in a particular role use PED's and the rest do not. What happens is that once a critical mass of your competitors use PED's and you are aware of it, you have to use them. As a result, PED use ALWAYS comes in masses-- in baseball in the 1990's, every single great home run hitter, INCLUDING the ones who fans like to lie to themselves and pretend didn't use, most likely used PED's. You had to. If you didn't, you risked your salary and your professional achievements because you might hit 39 home runs clean while others in the league were hitting 50, 60, even 70.
In cycling, every major cyclist in the 1990's doped. It wasn't just Lance Armstrong. It was the entire top tier of the professional cycling tour. Because once your competitors cheated, you had to. You couldn't afford to be the chump while the others passed you.
In track and field, a sport that due to the experience with East Germany (and in more recent times Russia) loves to play heroes and villains with PED's, Ben Johnson was disqualified after running his world record 9.79 in the 100 meters dash in the Seoul Olympics. It turned out that every person on the starting line of that race but one was later implicated in PED use, including Carl Lewis of the United States who was held out as the "clean" guy who was "victimized" by Johnson. Again, once everyone else was doing it, you couldn't afford not to.
This extends to other walks of life too. When there are cheating scandals at colleges, they often involve large numbers of students. Because you can't be afford to be the chump who doesn't cheat and ends up at the bottom of the class behind all the cheaters.
So it doesn't surprise me one bit that the Baseball Steroids Problem extends to push-polling. Of course it does. Once the other organizations and Groups are doing it, you have to or your issue loses funding.
This is one of the big problems in media in general today. That the audience by and large doesn't really consider accuracy to be anywhere near as important as agreeability- a bullet in the magazine to be used against ones enemies rather than a place to be informed. People will look at stuff that's opposed to them, but only if it's extremely provocative, and then, not really to be informed, but more to get mad at it. That's how NYT gets as many faces slamming into paywalls as possible.
And if i'm selling polling info, i'm going to do a lot better if it confirms the priors of the customer than if it challenges them. Part of it is just we're going to have to try to be less affected by this but it's a very hard psychological effect to get away from in a very open information ecosystem.
But then, i think it affects our enemies as well and will inevitably hobble their campaigns as much as it does ours. Unfortunately, their policy is 'gut the government and hand it all over to the oligarchs' which is much easier to execute in the american system.
There was a bullying story in the NFL a few years ago that this week got exposed as being totally fabricated. One sports reporter tweeted that it sucked reporting on stuff he knew were lies. That's a big problem for the media - everyone goes along with a narrative even if they know it is a lie. I think this tends to get overrated by conservatives, but it very much is a real problem.
I read Jonathan Martin's comments and the report's too. So seems like it was overblown to an extent. But Richie Incongnito did call Martin the N word over voicemail and sent many crazy texts that included death threats.
I know context matters with all this stuff, but that concrete evidence shows that at least Inconginto is a bigoted asshole. I don't feel for him at all. And I think it's good for the league to call that type of behavior out and try to exorcise it.
But why couldn't they use the bully's real name? :-)
For sure, Incognito seems like a jerk. Larger point is the lack of pushback and going along with narratives creates or at least is used by conservatives to exploit a lot of the mistrust we've seen with journalism.
That definitely happens. But in this case I feel like the backlash to the backlash is now actually at risk of understating what actually happened between those two. What triggered this revision is Martin saying he now actually didn't consider it bullying and the reporter tweeting how he thought people had report things they weren't true. I would love some further clarification on that comment because right now we know the facts to be:
- Incognito called him a racial slur (I'm gonna guess this didn't just happen once)
- Incognito threatened him with death threats and just tons and tons of really aggressive texts
- Martin checked himself into a mental hospital
I think that's grounds for some headlines and a suspension for Incognito. Now, a big part of why this got covered to death at the time was the fact that it seemed wild that one 300 pound professional athlete was bullying another 300 pound professional athlete. There was a lot of condemnation of Incognito, but also many jokes made at the expense of Martin and attacks on his masculinity for not being able to take it.
So now, we have Incognito taking a victory lap ten plus years later saying he wrongly accused. I disagree! Incognito seems like a real asshole and a bully. The story was overcovered, but I don't think it was 100% because of bias in the media, but rather because the story was just so odd.
This is not totally unlike the "Gresham's Law" effect in many comments sections where posting crude, aggressive comments eventually drives out the good commenters. This has historically been known in economic theory as "the tragedy of the comments."
(OK, it's not really like the PED analogy you are astutely making, but I just wanted to say "the tragedy of the comments.")
You can also see how this dynamic leads to other "tragedies" quite easily. I.e. if you don't have any restrictions on who can post what you risk ending up with a low quality cesspit. But as soon you have rules and restrictions there is a risk that those who design and enforce them do so unfairly to promote/suppress particular views (either openly, or opaquely). Whether this happens or not, there's now an incentive for people try to get control of the rules and seek to do this. There is also, in turn, also an incentive for others to seek to scrap all the rules and return to a free for all, and to try to spread criticism and dissent to effect this (or to lead an 'exit').
Therefore there is no perfect solution: there is always an ongoing tension inherent in establishing, developing, enforcing and defending norms in any community.
I think the most important thing is the set of norms in the commenting community and how well the members are at enforcing those norms. It seems to work pretty well for the SB comments section.
I think it helps that comments are often subscriber only and - maybe even more importantly - they are not the driving reason to be here. We're here to read our host and he sets the topic of discussion and framing. The dynamic is very different on social media and forums.
That said I have noticed more ad hominem and low content comments creep in over the years.
I agree pretty much. Though for me it’s about 50/50 MY post and comments. On some days more like 10/90.
There is a reason why the Lance Armstrong Tours de France weren't allocated to another rider - it's because there weren't any clean riders in those races to allocate them to!
IIRC, there's one Tour where the highest-placed rider who wasn't subsequently accused or caught doping was something like 14th, and they were only not accused becuase they were weren't important enough for anyone to snitch on.
Thanks for the “Baseball Steroids Problem" explanation. It’s such a great way to explain those situations.
I would call that an arms race.
I remember having discussions ten years ago that running pro-life Democrats in red states is something that Democrats should tolerate. My leftie ex gave me pushback on that, because she didn't see the value of accepting political tradeoffs.
Fundamentally the problem with the Democratic coalition right now is that there are so many hyperactive partisans who reject the reality of tradeoffs.
I think the tough reality to navigate is that a big Democratic majority capable of legislating is going to involve including a lot of people closer to Joe Manchin than to AOC, or even necessarily Pete Buttigieg. Not really in the sense that the ancestral Democrats can be revived but in the sense that they will be people who are culturally alien to the overly polished leadership of today, to say nothing of the kind of people that went to a particular kind of college then went to work in the NGO space, and now exercises outsized influence.
Let's say the objective is to build a big majority that is capable of legislating that fundamentally regards cultural polish and intellectualism as a good thing and thinks that Donald Trump is a vulgar idiot and is revulsed by him on a visceral level: that is, not to appeal to that visceral revulsion that Trump triggers and the admiration that a successful well-educated woman like Harris or Clinton creates in the hearts of the Dem staffer base, but to make that the cultural norm of the nation so there's no need to appeal to it because it's just an accepted fact that voters want a leader who is smarter and more intellectual than they are themselves.
How would you set about doing that and how is it different from what the Dems are doing?
I think most voters would reject the premise. I think most voters don't think they'd do a good job running things and do want someone smarter than they are running things. They just don't think that's an actual description of the Democratic party.
The question isn't "how do we get voters to value this thing?" It's "how do we convince voters this is what we're actually doing?"
Given the difficulties in getting things done in the public sphere, I think the best chance would be to take someone already successful from the private sphere. Probably a business woman. Someone who can believably point to something and say "I built that". Unfortunately I think the current Democratic Party is pretty hostile to that sort of thing.
Sorry for not being clear: my point was that what the Democrats want is not to get people to value “smartness”, but to get people to judge smartness by the Democratic party’s standards.
Someone might describe Trump as “smart” because he’s a successful businessman, but I doubt anyone would describe him as “intellectual”. The idea that being AG of California is a better qualification for the Presidency than CEO of the Trump Organisation isn’t something that the Democrats want to argue; it’s something they want to have accepted as a fact.
To think that academic achievement is the ultimate accomplishment and (a) everyone should want it and (b) everyone should respect it and defer to those with more is a pretty standard professional-class view of the world.
I don't think that's possible, and I'd say it's impossible because it's wrong (and people can tell it's wrong).
Monolithically well-educated and intellectually inclined groups have characteristic groupthink: A lot of the failures of the public health apparatus during Covid were because of this kind of groupthink, as is the current Democratic party's love of process and paperwork. The 2010s social-justice excesses are another example.
It's important to have diverse leadership, including diversity of education. That's probably *harder* than it used to be, because there's more education now: More smart people are getting college degrees. But by no means all.
The broad left-of-center coalition has to give up on the idea that formal education and intellectual vibes are the central qualification for most of life.
Conversely the right-wing coalition really really has to stop valuing credulity, provocation, belief in conspiracies, I'd go so far as to say stupidity, for their own sake.
We need depolarization by education, though I can't say I know where our current split came from and have no idea how to accomplish that.
I agree with you.
What I’m saying is that this means that the Democratic party has to change their values. They have to understand that their problem wasn’t lack of persuasion: it was that their values are incorrect.
My point is that they do in fact have to argue for their world view. They have to be willing to try and persuade people that they are correct. It's the Joe Rogan problem. They don't get to say "I don't like the terms of this debate." That just excludes them from the conversation.
I would tell them their effort is futile. The country is too big and culturally diverse. It's a recipe for Ohio-fication, where the once winnable leans blue is indefinitely out of reach.
By watching Trump (and Musk) fail so abysmally and destructively that the scales fall from people's eyes and they decide that maybe competence and belief in American values are in fact good things to desire in our leaders?
Yes, this means that Democrats have to be more passive and depend on Trump et al screwing up, but that's probably where we are. (In the meantime, the Democrats have to repair their brand by disowning the crazies.)
I'm glad you at least aren't engaging in the "But What If We Revived Ancestral Democratic Clintonism?" idiocy, but I think you're missing part of the formula for the solution.
IMO, right now we're kind of in a holding pattern where a lot of former Republicans -- the Kinzingers, the Cheneys, hell even Joe Walsh types -- have yet to fully commit to the Democratic Party. Those folks all know they're alien to the party, that they aren't welcome, but they all basically understand that the Democrats are the only viable vehicle for opposing Trumpism. They're currently waiting for the Democrats to get their shit together... and they're slowly getting fed up with the Democrats' inability to do it.
My prediction is that they're going to start declaring as Dems within the next 5-10 years, possibly even sooner. These guys have the sort of no-holds-barred aggression that would make a hostile takeover rather easy, and they've got the defiance and street cred to literally just run as some branding variation of "Conservative Democrats". Not to mention, the Abundance Agenda basically agrees with a huge chunk of their ideological priors about overregulation and economics.
I don't think they're going to look _anything_ like Manchin's idiot ass. I think they're going to remake the face of the party. They're just not fed up enough to pull the trigger yet. But trust me... they're close.
Do those people come with voters? I'm not totally sure they do.
I agree with your implication that that’s a drawback of the theory, but I also think it’s kind of orthogonal to why it may well happen.
To wit, what I’m intoning is that (1) the hostile takeover itself would be a huge attention grabber, and (2) that the central skill of the people doing the takeover is that they already largely work in media and attention-grabbing, and their aggressive style of politics would help them corner the attention space from traditional Dems and bring a similar sort of popular energy into their challenge for power over the party as Donald Trump did in taking over the GOP.
Yes! I think you are getting at the real issues. See my post way down the list here where I elaborate on this.
Agreed. Being pro-choice helped Claire McCaskill for maybe like 5 minutes, but she could've just as easily gotten the same hype cycles (if not bigger ones!) she did if she'd been officially a pro-lifer but making the exact same arguments in defense of a moderate conception of abortion rights (IE the exceptions and a reasonable state ban cutoff point).
And no, I'm not saying she'd have won her last election if she'd flipflopped, I'm saying she'd have had an easier time winning in the first place and then KEPT winning if she'd been a pro-life Dem her whole career.
Having watched my whole life as the Missouri Dem party chased out every single pro-lifer, and then the state going solid red despite being relatively moderate on most issues that favor Dems... was eye-opening.
I think infrastructure would actually help here. If there was a separate organization standing outside the Democratic Party, operating only in red states and coordinating pro-life politicians and voters who otherwise dislike Republican policy, then that could potentially get some people elected. Perhaps it could flesh out a whole Dan Osborn-like platform. Perhaps there could be two different organizations like this, one operating in Southern red states (which are more pro-life), and another one operating in Western red states (which aren't).
Well put. That should be the rallying cry, "ACCEPT. POLITICAL. TRADEOFFS."
Choose one or two things. Make that our priority.
Genuinely curious, though, if you think there should be any bright lines for a party.
Say I want tax cuts for the wealthy and don’t want to expand the safety net or help poor kids, but believe in climate change, abortion rights and gun control. Can I attempt to run as a Democrat? Or would the party be right to tell me that my values are non consistent with what it stands for?
The parties used to have MUCH deeper intraparty ideological splits than what you describe.
The past misalignment of party and ideology made it easier for solid majorities to pass legislation. Today, the alignment of party and ideology makes it nearly impossible for majorities to come together like that.
The point is, you're not actually describing "values", you're describing "positions". And a party is more than just a set of positions OR values. At its root, a party is just a bunch of people who vote together in the legislature.
If I were Emperor Of The Democratic Party, I'd accept both people with the positions you describe AND people with the exact opposite positions on each issue. In fact, I'd accept anyone with any position on any of those six issues, IF they could agree to vote with the rest of the party roughly 90% of the time.
Vote with the rest of the party 90% of the time on what, though?
If my hypothetical candidate disagrees the bulk of the party on fiscal issues, and your hypothetical candidate with the opposite views disagrees with the bulk of the party on social issues, and you’re ok with both of them — then what types of issues do you expect to have ~100% party consensus on?
You don’t need 100% consensus, you need 60 votes in the Senate.
So you’re saying get 67 Democrats elected and allow a different 10% to defect on each issue? I mean sure, sounds great, but that’s pretty unrealistic in a two-party system.
Well, I think the principle still holds in a more realistic model. If 10 D's and 10 R's each are not merely allowed, but EXPECTED to defect on basically any given issue in a 50-50 Senate, then that's a 60-vote majority.
That's how things used to work. Neither party works like that anymore, though.
"pro life" as in the whole "Safe, legal, and rare" thing, and where a politician says that they have a religious objection to it, but do not plan to litigate it, is probably fine.
The "Want to make abortion illegal" position, though, is every bit as politically toxic as the "I want to make guns illegal" position, just in the other direction. A non-trivial minority of Republicans want abortion to be legal (but restricted). I don't think this issue is a winning one to "move right" on.
I definitely agree with you, but I think everyone needs be realistic about how much can be accomplished with this type of strategy. People are much better informed about politics now, which means that across the board there’s a higher ideological match between voters and the politicians that represent them.
I think this could help push Democrats over the line in purple or light red states, but the days of Democrats winning Senate seats in deep red states are over.
When Trump starts screwing up badly (and he already is) the Democrats will gain popularity. The problem is that they won't have to do anything right themselves, just not be the idiots trying to cut the deficit while slashing taxes. The Democrats could keep doing silly things and adopt silly policies and still win. It's a recipe for people continuing to be infuriated by the choices put in front of them at the ballot box.
Neither party has any interest in building a long-term governing coalition.
Oh they do have an interest in building a long-term governing coalition. But they want a coalition that will long-term enable them to do the things they want to do, which includes some unpopular things.
The progressive concept of the coalition is that everyone in it has "their issue" and they will therefore put up with 99 issue they don't like in order to get the 1 they do.
So, for Latinos, it's immigration: as long as the Dems are more open to immigration than the Republicans, Latinos will reliably vote Dem and they can ignore them on all other issues. For LGBTQ+ people it's trans issues. For Black people, it's Civil Rights / anti-racism, for Greens, it's the environment, etc, etc. This doesn't actually work.
This is why there isn't a coherent governing approach from the Dems - because their entire concept of coalition-building is to do what each group wants.
The Republicans have a coherent agenda (cut taxes for the rich, abolish a bunch of government programs) which is very unpopular, so they have systemically learned to adopt broadly popular positions that are compatible with it (e.g. "cut waste", "cut taxes for the middle class").
The problem with both of these is that they are incompatible with building a long-term governing coalition, because actually convincing people that their positions are correct (the only way you can build a long-term coalition) is a strategy for losing a lot until you succeed.
I don’t think that is completely right. The Republicans want a governing coalition so they can support businesses and the wealthy. The Democrats want one to advance specific economic and cultural changes. The problem is that the Democratic position, while more popular than the Republican one, is constantly kneecapped by their own side for not going far enough. It makes the dynamics unstable.
If that was actually the case, each party would focusing on winning the first midterm election after winning a federal trifecta, instead of doing a bunch of unpopular stuff that ensures they lose the midterm.
Well, maybe. There’s a lot of pent up pressure to do something when you win an election and then the thermostatic reaction kicks in.
Almost any long term national shift is going to have to come through a winning Presidential candidate. In today's media and political landscape that's the most likely way to get enough attention and get people in line.
Biden, obviously, wasn't up to the task, and likely didn't have a viable political strategy to do so even if he was at his best. But, I think that's a reason for Democrats to prioritize charisma and vision again.
It’s way too close to for the democrats to rely on Elons screw ups. The senate alone is going to be very hard for them next cycle. They need to listen to people like iglesias and the liberal patriot Substack
I had no doubts about my political identity when I ran for the Georgia General Assembly in 2017. Trump was icky and Kemp had refused to expand Medicaid. Easy peasay. Then the Democrats won two elections, “saved Democracy,” and proceeded to prioritize climate change over the precariat. My old friends started ostracizing me for heterodoxy. My own wife has said dozens of times I’m for Trump just because I think he has the seeds of a few good ideas. I will not give up my power of independent thought. I’d rather live as a hermit than sell my mind. I feel lost politically.
Thank you Matt for making the think the Democratic Party might still have a home for me.
I think dealing with climate change is important. I'm glad the IRA became the law of the land.
I think climate change is important too.
But the way we are going about trying to fix it as stupid
Throwing a bunch of money at it instead of fixing the. Regulatory barriers that are actually preventing think from happening
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/capitolism/inflation-reduction-act-failures-2/
You are entitled to your minority opinion.
Whew!
It is chilling to read that, regardless of their own position, electeds are not experts on where the electorate stands on issues.
I’d say this article presents a more nuanced framing:
A) Democrats in safe seats represent constituencies that are to the left of the median Democrat, so it isn’t particularly important for them to know or appreciate the difference.
B) In contrast, Democrats in competitive races generally understand and appreciate some of these differences—perhaps only qualitatively—but they risk attacks from their left flank (including the potential funding of a primary challenger) if they adopt a more electorally optimal position.
Moreover, left-leaning influencers and funders who target moderate-leaning Democrats use these biased statistics to justify their actions, with little regard for accuracy.
I wish I could heart this comment 100x
I don't think that's true. They just don't like where the electorate stands on issues.
The specific example was the moderate Democrat being led astray by bad polling
Yes, I agree to an extent; but I think there is a limit to how far any moderate would move on an issue with accurate polling where they fundamentally disagree with the voters.
Right. In those cases the best thing is probably not to talk about it
Are you certain a Slow Boring think tank isn’t the answer? I could sincerely imagine you adding a ton of value directing good political research. And I’m sure many of your readers would willingly donate to such a cause. And it could inform your writing!
To the extent that a more SB-aligned think tank is needed, is Yglesias the right person to build, lead, and manage it? I recall him expressing some disinterest in those responsibilities—based on his Vox experience—in an SB article or mailbag answer.
Even if he could do it well enough, is that his comparative advantage relative to more writing, research, and targeted networking? I.e., consider the opportunity costs. I imagine there are numerous people in Yglesias' orbit with the résumé, aptitude, and interest to do that job at least as well as he could. If anything, the abundance agenda coalition likely has an excess of competent leadership, management, and coordination professionals.
Matt Yglesias has been very clear about his lack of managerial acumen, I respect him for it.
He's already a senior fellow at think tank. Hard to see a pressing case for starting another one
https://www.niskanencenter.org/author/myglesias/
Ben can do it.
SO, I think about these things a bit differently. I think the left and dems in general have a problem that is far more fundamental than infrastructure and how much pressure there is to be ‘correct’ on so many different issues. I think the bigger issue is that we educated dems operate primarily with an ‘academic’ approach to life’s issues and problems, rather than a hand’s-on approach. I’l just use immigration as an example:
Dems and liberal/left folks (hereinafter “we”) overall focus on enabling ‘liberal’ immigration policy for all sorts of good reasons. I won’t go into all of those. But, regardless of our immigration policy, what do we have to do in a ‘hands-on’ way with, say, Latin American immigrants once they’ve made it through whatever gauntlet to be here? Nothing, basically. In fact, it’s less than nothing, because as soon as we are dealing with people rather than policy and academically- structured debate, we don’t have or do anything but our left-wing equivalent of ‘hopes and prayers’ — along with a lot of judgmental paternalism. While we pontificate about e pluribus unum, we can’t and won’t deal with the ‘unwashed’ e pluribus.
Immigrants like those fleeing conditions in Latin America come here with very different social and cultural experiences and beliefs. We have no idea about or interest in knowing those or ‘doing’ anything with them essentially because they are so different. We just don’t meet them where they are either when they arrive or many years later when perhaps they are more firmly established with work and family, etc. We effectively hang them out to dry and expect that by assimilation osmosis, they will ‘cure’ themselves. One day, in other words, we believe they will be palatable to us — and of course, us to them — and then we’ll get their votes.
This issue, more generally, is that we long ago stopped devoting ourselves to the hands-on, slow-boring(!) work of bringing people along. Of winning hearts and minds. Of actually effectuating the very ideas that we so carefully parse and refine among ourselves and to which we hold our candidates and electeds as Matt so well describes. Perhaps we have simply come to think that we, as a class, are so to be admired and emulated that everyone will identify with us and want to be with us.
This far from benign neglect of the duties not just of politics, but of citizenship and neighborliness writ large, it’s terribly hypocritical and elitist. And this inability and unwillingness to relate to ‘others,’ to be ‘hands-on’ with ‘regular’ people, including most of the working class, has become our biggest failing. And we should all be embarrassed as hell to realize that Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and Joe Rogan get this and we don’t.
It’s far past time for Democrats to engage the living, breathing humans of our e pluribus. Otherwise, we will never have an Unum that isn’t imposed by force from the right.
Great article! Because it’s great and everone should read it, I want to just point out a couple of typos that caught my eye:
“Candidates don’t certainly don’t necessarily need a lot of infrastructure to execute on them.”
“officials who try to break from the heard with negative attention”
Shouldn’t we be building actual infrastructure instead: roads, bridges, buildings, power plants, transmission lines, trains? How many well-funded “progressive” organizations do we need? Is elite overproduction really the explanation here?
But a lot of that would require getting rid of bureaucratic red tape
“Shouldn’t we be building actual infrastructure instead: roads, bridges, buildings, power plants, transmission lines, trains?”
We are. But if by “we” you meant the federal government, then, no, mostly “we” should not be building infrastructure.
I don't think we are building infrastructure. The overall state of American infrastructure is poor and getting worse. The bridge collapses we are seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. Amtrak is a disgrace. I'm not going to quibble about whether it should be at the federal or state or metropolitan area level (e.g. NY/NJ or PA/NJ). I would like the Democratic party to figure out how to build the required physical infrastructure and enact policies or regulation changes of whatever sort needed so that it happens.
“I don't think we are building infrastructure”
There’s a huge highway upgrade happening a mile from here. Major renovation at the DC airport. Adding lanes to I-95 to a significant stretch in the Carolinas. That’s just off the top of my head.
You can’t demonstrate that, overall, American infrastructure is poor, let alone that it’s getting worse. (And please, spare me the self-serving studies from interested groups.)
Aren’t you in Minneapolis? Remember this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge
Also, trains and buildings don’t count? The studies saying it is more expensive to build here are well-supported. The CA high-speed rail line was a disaster.
I still can’t see a metro stop out my window; we still have room to go!
Here's why you can't have a "Joe Rogan of the Left" - Rogan's schtick is "I'm not sayin', I'm just askin' questions," basically. Leftists don't like when you ask questions. Rogan is fundamentally a dissenter, and leftists don't tolerate dissent. A "Joe Rogan of the Left" would face unending demands for performances of progressive orthodoxy that would be off-putting to normal people.
Building off your last paragraph, the extent to which Democrats would stand well to try to emulate Donald Trump is quite shocking at first but makes a lot of sense. Not in policy substance, personal style, or rank corruption and norm breaking obviously but in what one might call his positioning method. That is, turning the party away from its most high salience and unpopular ideas and reorienting it's purpose around different ideas that are more popular and that connect with a different and wider group of voters.
Democrats need to do to their issue drags what Trump did rhetorically to Bush's foreign policy and Ryan Fiscal politics and replace it with something akin to his laser focus on immigration enforcement where the public was largely behind him. An analogous dem version of this could be Shiving the excesses of woke identity politics, hammering Biden's failures on inflation, and taking seriously being the party of abundant housing construction everywhere.
I think the factional infighting can’t be resolved bc we don’t have a parliamentary system or proportional system. If there was one, centrist Dems would have to give *some* explicit concessions to more left wing parties to form a majority govt and on everything else they would tell leftists to shut it. Matt Bruenig explains the dynamics of dysfunctional coalition politics well: https://mattbruenig.com/2023/10/26/dysfunctional-coalition-politics/
From an international standpoint, it is just true that the revolving door that existed between big tech and big business during Obama era was unusual. It doesn’t exist in most socially democratic parties in Europe. But the Dem party is an interest group brokerage party, not an ideologically pure party no matter how much the leftists whine.
On infrastructure, personally I would like to see some realist (left-wing?) foreign policy think tanks that promotes military restrain but isn’t full of tankies and idiots. Quincy is too isolationist and CAP is too reflexively interventionist. Cato prob has the most rigorous foreign policy realists. But something in between Quincy and CAP, where a future Dem president could potentially staff their team from.
Has there been any sign that the left is at all willing to prioritize their wishlist? Absent such a willingness, there's not really a point to offering any concession, because it's only prioritization that allows one to decide that shutting it on everything else in exchange for getting that concession is worth it.
There's an unwillingness to admit within the broad center-to-left coalition that anything positive for any element of the coalition could be negative for some other element of of the coalition (as a simple example, commitment to more functional public transit and increased EV adoption is highly likely to be net negative for unionized labor).
The left thinks that the concept of “tradeoffs” are a fiction created by the “priests of capitalism” (economists.)
I am just so miffed that the left just free rode the anti Trump backlash and bullied Democrats into adopting unpopular social positions.
There isn't a left that is coherent enough to do that. Let's say a center-left government offered a deal where they significantly liberalised abortion in exchange for the left shutting up about building up fossil-fuel extraction infrastructure.
I'm sure Planned Parenthood would celebrate. But I don't think Sunrise would shut up. Because those are two different groups that comprise different people.
"Has there been any sign that the left is at all willing to prioritize their wishlist?"
Yes. Planned Parenthood prioritises abortion; Sunrise prioritizes climate change; HRC prioritizes LGBTQ+ rights, etc. Nearly everyone on the left does that prioritization - but the result is that you can't the left to collectively pick a priority precisely because they (individually) already did.
The point that Bruenig is missing is that there is no "the left" that pulls these together to negotiate with "the center-left", exactly because the political system (which includes but is not only the voting system) doesn't incentivize one.
It's actually worse than you describe, because Planned Parenthood wouldn't take the deal, either (see "racism is a public health issue" from 2020). Among The Groups, you have to accept the entire omnicause.
I think that the problem is not simply that we have subdivided ourselves and built separate infrastructures along various priorities. I think the problem is that we’ve migrated over time away from what should be a common priority: Hands-on engagement with the actual people who are not we academically acculturated elites. Who is prioritizing engagement with the working class and unions? Who is prioritizing working with immigrant communities? Hands-on engagement with “The People” should be our overriding priority. See my comment way at the bottom of these comments where I elaborate on this.
But the elected politicians need to be able to prioritize and say to group X "sorry"
Read Matt Bruenig’s article. The current idiotic state of the left in American politics is, in part, a manifestation of a system in which they haven’t had to actually represent their faction in concrete ways.
There is no reason there can’t be a professional organized left wing faction, just like the actual policy positions of MAGA original ( Econ moderation + cultural conservatism + foreign policy realism) can def be a faction in Republican politics. It’s just the case that most ppl that represent that faction are the lowest quality ppl.
I did read the article. The left has no interest in a system where they'd have to represent their faction in concrete ways (because the faction is small). It's the wonky center that would like RCV, and the left groups fairly consistently manage to join various right groups in opposing such reforms.
I don’t understand why spend time complaining about them if they are so small. It’s bc they are loud and have a big microphone? Well, if we accept that important industry people are going to have a bigger voice just bc they have more money, we are just going to have to accept that young online ppl who are most invested are going to have a disproportionate say. It’s just reality. Either you try to reconcile with that reality or try to change their minds. I genuinely find it difficult to understand what all this whining about them amounts to, what are we hoping is going to happen? As we tell leftists scorn, derision, and shame doesn’t work on moderate/rightists if we want to persuade them, I’m not sure it works on leftists either if we genuinely want to persuade them on the merits.
Yes I agree what I’m trying to say is that is the direct result of the left not having to actually be responsible for governing, which is, in turn, a result of the way our system is structured. It’s chicken and egg.
Europe doesn't have a tech industry.
Sure they do, it’s just not as strong.
There is Big Business, if not Big Tech in Europe. Mostly luxury brands. The social democratic parties there don’t have the kind of chummy relationship Obama White House had. It’s considered weird to work for VP communications for Amazon after being communications director for a social Democratic Party, see Jay Carney.
I think ppl over estimate how close Dems were to Big Business before Obama made it cool. Most Big Donors gave to Republicans before Obama.
Matthew, you are obviously writing a book. May I suggest the title "Project 2029"?
Yglesias could probably turn A Common Sense Democrat Manifesto [1] and associated articles into a short, self-published book fairly easily. Richard Hanania is doing something similar with his Elite Human Capital book, and he makes a strong case for why it’s not worth investing the additional time in a traditionally published book. [2]
Ben Thompson, however, was the OG in this space with his 2017 free article, Books and Blogs [3], where he explains why he won’t dedicate the time to writing a proper book that collects and organizes key ideas from his paid newsletter. Moreover, Thompson chose to keep his general articles free for marketing purposes and his site has curated topic collections that function similarly to a self-published book made up of prior free newsletter articles.
Yglesias could take a similar approach, organizing his manifesto articles as a self-published book and also as a free guide to Yglesias Thought. Both could be useful marketing tools to attract more subscribers and also to influence the Democratic Party. However, a traditionally published book would likely demand too much of his time and attention for the limited additional benefits in terms of both financial returns and influence.
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-common-sense-democrat-manifesto
[2] https://www.richardhanania.com/p/announcing-book-on-elite-human-capital
[3] https://stratechery.com/2017/books-and-blogs/
I often want to try to submit a mailbag question that is simpyl "Are you writing another book?" I think relative to his existing influence, probably the highest WAR thing Matt could probably do for the Democratic Party is to write a splashy book on how to save the party and hammer the podcast circuit and get people talking about The Gospel According to MattY.
I just re-re-read Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country. The whole time I was thinking about MY's manifesto. We need to jettison the bullshit revolutionary cosplay and rededicate ourselves to real, slow, and very boring reform.
Yes! Re-architect that mess for vigorous left-liberalism.