I think a big part of why this will continue to be unresolved is that no one in leadership (left or moderate) is willing to push back on the groups who are forcing electeds to take terrible positions and unpopular stances. As long as groups like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and certain Unions continue to behave incredibly irresponsibly and have tremendous endorsement power Democrats are going to be in trouble.
Furthermore, Republican media, influencers, campaign ads, etc have been much more effective at defining their opponents, & their tech, etc will likely become even more persuasive. This is all the more reason to 'open the tent' in both appearance and reality. Today's swing voters are so clearly low-info & appearances issues like "Harris is for they/them" may decide 2028. Where would four more years lead?
And right on queue, about thirty minutes after reading this, I got a communication from Janet Mills announcing her Senate run in Maine. Thus signaling she had fallen right in for Chuck Schmuer's "clique"-bait against Platner.
Janet Mill would be 85 when she completes her first term as a senator. Really? Haven't we learned anything? She would be twice the age that JFK and TR were when they became president.
I don't plan to vote for any candidate over 60. I know a lot of people who feel the same way. Time for the boomers to hand things over. Schumer doesn't understand this.
Perhaps it's my age, but I have a headache after trudging through Matt's jungle of words that supposedly clarified the positions and strategies of all the important factions of the Democratic Party.......... He wasn't of my religion, ethnicity or education level, but my pick of a model for president or congress member, from all the presidents I've lived under (starting with FDR) is HST. As a biological scientist, I am aware of how little we know about how the human mind works. That anyone can presume to know what that mind needs to become a civilized person, and to then design a system of government guaranteed to produce a society of such persons, is one of the best definitions of arrogance I can conceive of. I don't trust candidates who are ideologues. Socialists, capitalists, anarchists, theologists etc. are all people of faith to me, and therefore equivalent. The only worthwhile set of ideas to debate is WHAT a government has to do to create a society that can be sustained constructively, and HOW. Politics about implementing beliefs belongs in political "science" departments. Real life politics is a about developing and implementing tactics for reaching practical goals. I'm guessing that what will come out of an honest effort to practice such politics will look something like a mixture of socialistic and capitalistic thinking.
Say you are a Gen-Xer or elder Millenial who is fortunate enough to retire early. As a person who cares about abundance-oriented policy (specifically with respect to housing, but not necessarily limited to housing), what should the early retiree do with his or her time (let's put aside what the retiree should do with his or her money)? Would getting on a local/city planning commission make sense? A zoning board? Something else? The goal would be to steer policy toward abundance on an extremely micro level. Is that a laudable goal? Would you suggest a different tactic altogether?
"Democratic Party ... that proudly maintains a big tent on abortion rights while being led by self-identified progressives is going to be more appealing"
Sigh.
Look, I just gave birth at the age of 43. It was a very, very desired pregnancy, and it was also high-risk because of my age. Thankfully, all went smoothly, and Li'l Velociraptor is doing well. But what if had suddenly developed complications and my doctor said to me, "I'm so sorry, but you're risking your life by continuing with this pregnancy, you need an abortion"? It would have absolutely gutted me, but would I have gotten the abortion to stay alive and be there for my husband and son? Yes.
I'm in California, so my abortion rights would have been ok in any case. But what about women in analogous situations in Texas or other Red states? This is not a hypothetical. I've read of women bleeding to death because their state had really draconian anti-abortion laws, or, more frequently, the state *technically* had an exemption for saving the life of the mother, but the doctors couldn't tell if this particular case really-really qualified as "saving the life of the mother," and by the time they figured out, gee, this woman really did need the abortion, it was too late.
So, with all that in mind, I'd love Matt Y to tell us: when he says, "a big tent on abortion rights," what does he mean? Does he mean "abortion should be safe, legal and rare, we want to decrease the *demand* for abortions by making sure there are fewer unwanted pregnancies" or does he mean welcoming politicians who are like "abortion is a grave evil that makes Jesus cry, we want to ban abortion, period"?
Channeling my inner Jesse Ewiak: the reason left-wing people hold the positions they hold is not "we are brainwashed ideologues who love to lose elections," it's "these policies have REAL HUMAN COSTS that we don't want to lose track of in the quest to appeal to the Median Undecided Swing Voter in Wisconsin."
(i) a state where only a pro-life Senator can get elected. Would you take a pro-life Democratic senator who would still confirm judges nominated by a Democratic President? Or insist on nominating a pro-choice candidate who has say half the chance of getting elected?
(ii) The actual example that Matt gave is of a pro-life mayoral candidate - why do we care whether a mayor is pro-life or pro-choice?
Abortion isnt a federal issue anymore. It's not likely to become a federal issue. Should millions be thrown off their healthcare coverage for this? To me the answer is no..
The abortion stuff is a red herring centrists like to push because they don't actually want to hear what MGP, Jared Golden etc are asking on economics.
The rich elites that control the party would rather give up on abortion than concede on the neoliberal gravy train that props up their stock portfolios.
So they are saying: Will you stop asking for industry jobs and right to repair if we let you stop abortions?
Abortion has majority to supermajority support in many red states. The idea that you need to peel off the voter from the last 33% of conservatives is comical while you ignore what everyone in the 66% that voted for abortion rights is asking on other issues.
Sure and if you don't listen to them their districts will keep voting for fascists who will also make you much poorer and your kids will not know what it means to live free.
Yeah I agree though I’d argue that their economic policies are much closer to identity politics in that their purpose is to promote the interests of certain types of people rather than having much of anything to do with creating any vision of shared economic growth.
So, I'm one of those overeducated liberal elitists the Median Undecided Non-College Educated Swing Voter loves to hate. But my stance is 180 degrees opposite from what you say the "rich elites" want!
I would say to the Median Voter, "Will you stop asking for turning back the clock on social issues/stop supporting gross misogynists in power if I let you have industry jobs and right to repair?"
I guess I'm not rich enough? I'm the "earns a six-figure salary in a HCOL area and still has to work for a living" kind of rich, not the "has a net worth in the billions and could retire today and still live in greater luxury than 99.9999% of humanity" kind of rich.
Also, I wonder what you make of this: I get that you hate Biden, which, legit, but he *genuinely tried* to help the Forgotten Man in the Heartland. There was an article in the NYT a few weeks ago (I don't have the link) that described a big solar panel factory that just opened in Texarkana, that was going to provide well-paying jobs to local non-college-educated people. How did the good people of Texarkana thank Biden? Why, by voting for Trump by a bigger margin in 2024 than in 2020, of course!
What you're describing - the people want better economic policy - and what Matt Y and friends describe - it's not the economy, it's the culture war, stupid - are direct opposites. Is there a way to synthesize these positions into a coherent whole? If I understand you correctly, you believe Matt Y et al argue in bad faith - they intentionally refuse to change on economics, because that would piss off rich donors. Maybe I'm naive, but I'd like to think Matt Y argues in good faith and sincerely states what he believes.
I don't know anymore. When it comes to how to appeal to The Median Voter, I'm like Socrates: I only know that I know nothing.
I can't really say anything authoritative regarding the article or plant. Not subscribed to NYT, not in the green energy field. But looking up some of the details fills in the gaps, like one of the projects being $225 million towards a $1 Billion dollar Lithium processing plant, expected to open in 2029. Current planning indicates construction won't even begin until 2028. That doesn't sound like a terribly major delay, but it does mean residents wouldn't even be able to get jobs BUILDING the plant until the next presidential election comes around. Add to that high inflation hitting people just past the welfare cliff, and the number of planned initiatives under the Biden administration which were everything-bagel-ed into irrelevance, and you see a distinct lack of trust in the Democrat's plan to make things better.
The plan called for adding 10 to 12 Billion dollars over 5 years to assist in the hiring and training of those 100,000 officers, which, at a very conservative 50,000 per officer, comes out to a cost of $5 Billion per year, for 25 years to cover a full career. It put more money into questionable community resources up to and including expanding welfare benefits for felons than into law enforcement. The entire third section of the plan consisted of gun trafficking interdiction focused on the least impactful areas.
The additions to law enforcement resources were the equivalent of placing Band-Aids on arterial bleeds and sucking chest wounds. Couple that with incidents like the Biden DOJ issuing disparate impact lawsuits against police and fire departments for very basic entry tests, and you end up with proposals which read to the left as supportive of law enforcement, and read to a lot of people with skin in the game as tone deaf and useless. The same way the promise of 125-ish jobs in a metropolitan area of 147,000 reads as too little, too late.
>"Will you stop asking for turning back the clock on social issues/stop supporting gross misogynists in power if I let you have industry jobs and right to repair?"
I would ask them exactly the same thing.
>I guess I'm not rich enough?
Those of us that still work for a paycheck are by definition not rich enough even if we make healthy six figures. We are way outside the league.
The party's high level policy is set by people who already have bunkers in New Zealand in case things go south.
>you believe Matt Y et al argue in bad faith - they intentionally refuse to change on economics, because that would piss off rich donors.
No not at all! I believe there is a selection effect at play here. I believe 100% Matt is a genuine centrist, a great twitter dunker (which is a skill) and truly thinks neoliberalism is good for the world on some long enough time horizon. The DC discourse ecosystem simply selects for people that genuinely believe the status quo is the best of all possible worlds. These are the people that get invited to write for NYT, WaPo, Bloomberg and other respectability outlets we "not so rich liberals" consume.
In any political system or organization, the most power lies with the incumbents and those that naturally believe the status quo is optimal will succeed. Those that try to challenge it will be excommunicated. Everyone recognizes this type of dynamic when they are criticizing academia which is fashionable these days, but somehow DC is insulated from group think and selection effects?
>And strikingly, there actually wasn’t some huge intraparty backlash to Biden stepping up and actually acting like a moderate.
Biden's most disastrous pieces of political malpractice namely the migrant spike and trans title IX were not requests of the materialist Sanders left, they were engineered by the donor NGO Borg which is an entirely different beast. It was an astroturf phenomenon so there was never going to be a backlash.
The Democratic power structure is lawyers. Kamala Harris is a lawyer. Hakeem is a lawyer. Chuck Schumer is a lawyer. And, unsurprisingly, Janet Mills is a lawyer.
They always endorse and promote lawyers. And the voters view the Democratic Party as the party of elitists because they love lawyers.
Generally speaking, lawyers are not likable. So a political party that always backs lawyers in primaries is probably going to lose a lot of elections.
National-level Republican politicians were also mostly lawyers until the last 30 years or so and the decline in Republican lawyer-officeholders is almost certainly closely associated with the increasing retardation of the GOP.
I don't have anything against lawyers. And I would prefer to live in a country where laws matter. But lawyers are boring and lose elections. Trump stream-rolled a bunch of lawyers in a primary in 2016 because voters think lawyers are boring. Janet Mills might beat Susan Collins (who is from a family of lawyers but just skipped that step and right into government), but generally speaking I think the Democratic Party needs to stop promoting lawyers or at least train them so they don't sound like lawyers because voters are not responding to it. I suspect the oyster farmer beats her in the primary and likely wins the seat over Collins by 55-45 in the end.
Perhaps the fundamental challenge is less Centrist versus Lefty aka Progressive, but
Muddlers versus Not-Muddlers.
Although it is true one has a sensation that a goodly portion of what passes as centrist Democrat is really just "Muddling along 2nd raters" which is not centrism it's just muddlers and clock-punchers. (fiery centrist - see France's President)
the D party seems to be suffering from large overweight of muddle-along tired old clock-punchers - which is not to take the view that being old or being a career political is bad as such - see Churchill for example - but being overweight on 2nd rate clock-punchers in Sr places does seem to be a broad D problem
I don't much like Mamdani but I do give credit his appearing not to be a muddler.
This is correct. The Clinton era Democratic party perhaps believing that it's analytical triangulation methods would "solve politics" cultivated two generations of cookie cutter careerists in congress who are good at taking orders from leadership and donors but have no original ideas and cannot utter anything that resonates with the public.
Well of course as a Lefty Left you want to tie to “Clinton era” - and talk about “taking orders” - however the idea that US parties which have about zero actual consistency power given the 70s era “reforms” this is nonsensical Just So Story making. (the illustration on another party side, the Republicans inability to control their brand for the hostile takeover by Trump, no real mechanisms to actually enforce, just mythologising post-fact) Rather more credible given the long time frame and the changes in the people - and the lack of actual mechanics - is Silver’s identification of the cultural orientation of the Democrats, his River versus Village metaphor (not that I am a great fan of the metaphor itself but the analysis holds). The highly conformist (within generally Lefty norm circle) elite college grad dominated culture of The Village, consensus driving. Combined with heavy jump into ethno-minoritarian identarianism first is much more explanatory of repeated patterns between various others different ideological colorings inside the general Left-Dem universe.
Having now read the NY Times interview with Pete Buttigieg, I think I get what bugs me so much about him. At first I thought it was just the over-digested pap that he offered up (we need consensus, we can't just defend the status quo blah blah blah). But then it struck me that he had no conception of the time we're living in. He is the reincarnation of Obama 2007/2008. And Obama 2007/2008 was great! If we were living in 2007 Pete could be great too. But we aren't. We're living in a time of sharp differences that can't be papered over. It's not time for someone who "brings us together" noting how Blue and Red America are basically on the same team and let's work to join hands. Instead, we need strong, forceful leadership that is almost fanatic in its desire to defend and fight for what is good in America against forces trying to destroy it.
I get absolutely zero sense of that from him. Yes, I'm sure the overeducated liberal elites will continue to swoon over him, but to me he has loser written all over him.
100%. I am skeptical of anyone that plans on becoming President of the USA from a young age and Pete and his GOP variant Vivek Ramaswamy seem to be of that ilk.
Pete wants to be Obama but you can't be Obama just by talking like him, Obama had street cred which he cultivated by opposing the Iraq War when it was popular. Pete has never taken any position that is controversial, he is a cog in the machine that happens to talk smoothly. Like Vacuous Kamala, no one knows what Pete's true calling is other than him becoming President.
That educated liberals fall for his empty shtick is really something.
The point of sounding like 2008 Obama isn't to win over the consciously illiberal and malign Trumpists. It's to win over the 56-year-old warehouse shift supervisor who did two semesters of community college and is making $51,000 in exurban Pittsburgh whose vote brought those illiberal Trumpists to power.
Exactly. The Democratic base might be jonesing for a tougher stance grounded in "resistance" to Trump. And fair play, Trump is evil, awful and incompetent. And he's incredibly dangerous, and is doing serious damage to the national interest.
But if we all should have learned anything reading this blog, it's that expanding the tent is what will take back the White House (and the Senate). The people showing up at No Kings rallies aren't the ones who need to be converted. It's the middle aged warehouse workers, as you put it.
And it seems entirely possible to me someone who can credibly talk (in Obama-like fashion) about "bringing the country together" might a better fit than a firebrand. Or not—I'm open to arguments the other way. But the road to election wins does indeed seem to go through the relatively modest (10-20%) share of voters who are up for grabs. And those folks tend to like centristy, reasonable types, such as Clinton, Obama and (frankly) pre 2021 Joe Biden.
I wonder how much of this terrible decade of Democratic politics is downstream of riding Hillary Clinton to zero in 2016. She was picked as the sole acceptable nominee behind the scenes, gave speeches to banks that made her a pariah. Bernie Sanders coasted off of protest votes and won states he would not win a single county in 4 years later. Rather than admit the mistake, we seem to just trudge on, convincing millions of young people that socialist politicians are the only tribe of people they can trust.
"What he thought he’d do was take advantage of Bernie’s presence in the race to extract policy concessions from Clinton — get her to break with Obama over the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And that’s how it’s been ever since, not just on T.P.P. but essentially across the whole broad suite of issues."
I think one thing that is emblematic of this, and, if we're being real, kind of at the heart of the culture war, is the Democratic approach to "race issues." Generally speaking, the party seems to consider it to be an absolute disaster if their share of the black vote drops below 90%. This leads to them taking unpopular positions, in both substantive ways (like supporting affirmative action well past its sell-by date, or "defund the police") and stylistic ways (using Beyoncé for a campaign theme song, outrage at Trump's comments about Harris's ancestry) to keep as much of that group as possible.
But WHY should Democrats win 90% of black people? WHY should voting be racially polarized? Doesn't that seem... bad? Are they sure they're not losing 5% of white people to keep 10% of black people? Because in absolute numbers that is a really bad trade!
"The cause is Joe Biden and, to a lesser extent, Democratic leaders in Congress."
I mean, the cause is a flood of propaganda 10 feet deep covering half the country. But I know pundits want to keep being mad at Joe Biden forever.
Biden will go down as one of the most failed Presidents in history but I agree with your contention that the party choosing to self-polarize along the black-white race line in 2025 as if it is 1965 is a terrible tactical mistake. Not only is it alienating to geographically powerful rural whites, it is also suboptimal given that the many millions of post 1965 Asian and Latin American immigrants do not see American politics from the lens of civil rights era fights and they will just vote GOP if they see Dems as centering the black-white dichotomy.
Biden "failed" but it's really, really important to not just consider him a "failure" without acknowledging the nuance that his governance was, you know, fucking great. You could have surveyed 100 economists about the economic performance of 2021-2025, or especially since 2023, and he would have outperformed literally every single one of their projections and it would not have been close.
We need to know the SPECIFIC problem. The only problem with his presidency (give or take a foreign policy issue or two) is that he lost, and that happened because of propaganda, and Biden's main problem was that he couldn't speak well enough to counter any of it.
And it's too bad, because he was one of the only people in the party who was actually TRYING to counter it, rather than immediately jumping on the defensive and accepting Fox News framing of every issue. (A tack that many in our party are going to continue forever, because they forgot somewhere in the years since 2016 that it's possible to do anything else.)
(edit: It occurs to me that Carter ALSO had a form of politics that Democrats decided sucked, incorrectly, even though they only lost because of stagflation - he was absolutely pivoting towards the moderate tone that Clinton would end up winning with, but the party retreated back into Yankee liberalism in response to his loss, to horrible results.)
I thought similarly regarding Fox News framing and so forth but I changed my mind in 2023 once it started becoming obvious that Democratic cities were being really stressed by the migrant spike and so it was not just propaganda. It was very real and it triggered a significant amount of "last place aversion" among poor urban voters.
I did not blame Biden for inflation. It was probably baked in no matter what he did given the stimulus + money supply already passed under Trump.
But in my view Biden committed two pieces of epic political malpractice:
1. He allowed a gigantic migration spike that had real impacts on the ground in the low-end economy. The biggest swings against Biden-Harris 2024 occurred in blue states and cities and along the border districts in TX, AZ etc where it was a blood bath.
2. He issued nation wide title IX rules on trans inclusion in schools which created a nation-wide moral panic around children on an issue that affects << 0.1% of the population
I think Harris could have won if it was only inflation. But inflation + migrants + trans sunk her.
I'm always the first to defend Biden but Matt was right here, but didn't go deep enough. Biden was President and had the responsibility to try to steer the party and his administration in the right direction and he manifestly did not do that. But the deeper reason is that the center of gravity was with the progressives and the moderates were weak and demoralized. Biden for his entire career was a consensus-maker and a seeker of the center of the party. And so he tilted left after winning the nomination because he was following the party, and he followed it right off the cliff with the rest of the fools.
It's reasonable, I guess, but it's unproductive. Counterproductive, even. The total and uncompromising "concession" that Carter was a terrible failure was a big part of what made the Democrats so moribund in the 80s. (And for some reason they ALSO tried to run his VP while bashing the administration he was part of, constantly, and it worked even worse.)
There's no reason to talk about your party being shitty if it's not SUBSTANTIVE, if it's not towards an end (like Matt's inveighs against "the groups" are, or Ezra Klein's criticism of an ossified regulatory process is), and being mad at Joe Biden is not substantive. It's kind of the opposite, because his policymaking was admirable, and plenty of people want to throw that baby - both the content and the process - out with the stuttering bathwater.
Partisanship exists for a reason, and I can't help but notice that the side that practices it more shamelessly appears to be punching above their weight electorally, when you consider how unpopular their actual policies are, whenever they bother even trying to articulate them.
Reagan's 11th commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican."
'20s online liberals: "I'm too ~intellectually honest~ to point out my party is orders of magnitude better than the other one when I could be nitpicking them instead."
Also '20s online liberals: "Why are the VIBES so bad?"
I never expected this from Matt, who seemed determined to alienate everyone he wants to convince instead of persuade them. This is the kind of argument that invites people to agree instead of pushing them away.
I think a big part of why this will continue to be unresolved is that no one in leadership (left or moderate) is willing to push back on the groups who are forcing electeds to take terrible positions and unpopular stances. As long as groups like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and certain Unions continue to behave incredibly irresponsibly and have tremendous endorsement power Democrats are going to be in trouble.
Furthermore, Republican media, influencers, campaign ads, etc have been much more effective at defining their opponents, & their tech, etc will likely become even more persuasive. This is all the more reason to 'open the tent' in both appearance and reality. Today's swing voters are so clearly low-info & appearances issues like "Harris is for they/them" may decide 2028. Where would four more years lead?
And right on queue, about thirty minutes after reading this, I got a communication from Janet Mills announcing her Senate run in Maine. Thus signaling she had fallen right in for Chuck Schmuer's "clique"-bait against Platner.
Janet Mill would be 85 when she completes her first term as a senator. Really? Haven't we learned anything? She would be twice the age that JFK and TR were when they became president.
I don't plan to vote for any candidate over 60. I know a lot of people who feel the same way. Time for the boomers to hand things over. Schumer doesn't understand this.
Perhaps it's my age, but I have a headache after trudging through Matt's jungle of words that supposedly clarified the positions and strategies of all the important factions of the Democratic Party.......... He wasn't of my religion, ethnicity or education level, but my pick of a model for president or congress member, from all the presidents I've lived under (starting with FDR) is HST. As a biological scientist, I am aware of how little we know about how the human mind works. That anyone can presume to know what that mind needs to become a civilized person, and to then design a system of government guaranteed to produce a society of such persons, is one of the best definitions of arrogance I can conceive of. I don't trust candidates who are ideologues. Socialists, capitalists, anarchists, theologists etc. are all people of faith to me, and therefore equivalent. The only worthwhile set of ideas to debate is WHAT a government has to do to create a society that can be sustained constructively, and HOW. Politics about implementing beliefs belongs in political "science" departments. Real life politics is a about developing and implementing tactics for reaching practical goals. I'm guessing that what will come out of an honest effort to practice such politics will look something like a mixture of socialistic and capitalistic thinking.
Say you are a Gen-Xer or elder Millenial who is fortunate enough to retire early. As a person who cares about abundance-oriented policy (specifically with respect to housing, but not necessarily limited to housing), what should the early retiree do with his or her time (let's put aside what the retiree should do with his or her money)? Would getting on a local/city planning commission make sense? A zoning board? Something else? The goal would be to steer policy toward abundance on an extremely micro level. Is that a laudable goal? Would you suggest a different tactic altogether?
"Democratic Party ... that proudly maintains a big tent on abortion rights while being led by self-identified progressives is going to be more appealing"
Sigh.
Look, I just gave birth at the age of 43. It was a very, very desired pregnancy, and it was also high-risk because of my age. Thankfully, all went smoothly, and Li'l Velociraptor is doing well. But what if had suddenly developed complications and my doctor said to me, "I'm so sorry, but you're risking your life by continuing with this pregnancy, you need an abortion"? It would have absolutely gutted me, but would I have gotten the abortion to stay alive and be there for my husband and son? Yes.
I'm in California, so my abortion rights would have been ok in any case. But what about women in analogous situations in Texas or other Red states? This is not a hypothetical. I've read of women bleeding to death because their state had really draconian anti-abortion laws, or, more frequently, the state *technically* had an exemption for saving the life of the mother, but the doctors couldn't tell if this particular case really-really qualified as "saving the life of the mother," and by the time they figured out, gee, this woman really did need the abortion, it was too late.
So, with all that in mind, I'd love Matt Y to tell us: when he says, "a big tent on abortion rights," what does he mean? Does he mean "abortion should be safe, legal and rare, we want to decrease the *demand* for abortions by making sure there are fewer unwanted pregnancies" or does he mean welcoming politicians who are like "abortion is a grave evil that makes Jesus cry, we want to ban abortion, period"?
Channeling my inner Jesse Ewiak: the reason left-wing people hold the positions they hold is not "we are brainwashed ideologues who love to lose elections," it's "these policies have REAL HUMAN COSTS that we don't want to lose track of in the quest to appeal to the Median Undecided Swing Voter in Wisconsin."
My "like" has the strength of ten "likes" because my heart is pure.
I can't speak for Matt but consider two cases -
(i) a state where only a pro-life Senator can get elected. Would you take a pro-life Democratic senator who would still confirm judges nominated by a Democratic President? Or insist on nominating a pro-choice candidate who has say half the chance of getting elected?
(ii) The actual example that Matt gave is of a pro-life mayoral candidate - why do we care whether a mayor is pro-life or pro-choice?
Abortion isnt a federal issue anymore. It's not likely to become a federal issue. Should millions be thrown off their healthcare coverage for this? To me the answer is no..
The abortion stuff is a red herring centrists like to push because they don't actually want to hear what MGP, Jared Golden etc are asking on economics.
The rich elites that control the party would rather give up on abortion than concede on the neoliberal gravy train that props up their stock portfolios.
So they are saying: Will you stop asking for industry jobs and right to repair if we let you stop abortions?
Abortion has majority to supermajority support in many red states. The idea that you need to peel off the voter from the last 33% of conservatives is comical while you ignore what everyone in the 66% that voted for abortion rights is asking on other issues.
Jared Golden and MGP's economic theories would definitely make us poorer though.
Sure and if you don't listen to them their districts will keep voting for fascists who will also make you much poorer and your kids will not know what it means to live free.
Yeah I agree though I’d argue that their economic policies are much closer to identity politics in that their purpose is to promote the interests of certain types of people rather than having much of anything to do with creating any vision of shared economic growth.
So, I'm one of those overeducated liberal elitists the Median Undecided Non-College Educated Swing Voter loves to hate. But my stance is 180 degrees opposite from what you say the "rich elites" want!
I would say to the Median Voter, "Will you stop asking for turning back the clock on social issues/stop supporting gross misogynists in power if I let you have industry jobs and right to repair?"
I guess I'm not rich enough? I'm the "earns a six-figure salary in a HCOL area and still has to work for a living" kind of rich, not the "has a net worth in the billions and could retire today and still live in greater luxury than 99.9999% of humanity" kind of rich.
Also, I wonder what you make of this: I get that you hate Biden, which, legit, but he *genuinely tried* to help the Forgotten Man in the Heartland. There was an article in the NYT a few weeks ago (I don't have the link) that described a big solar panel factory that just opened in Texarkana, that was going to provide well-paying jobs to local non-college-educated people. How did the good people of Texarkana thank Biden? Why, by voting for Trump by a bigger margin in 2024 than in 2020, of course!
What you're describing - the people want better economic policy - and what Matt Y and friends describe - it's not the economy, it's the culture war, stupid - are direct opposites. Is there a way to synthesize these positions into a coherent whole? If I understand you correctly, you believe Matt Y et al argue in bad faith - they intentionally refuse to change on economics, because that would piss off rich donors. Maybe I'm naive, but I'd like to think Matt Y argues in good faith and sincerely states what he believes.
I don't know anymore. When it comes to how to appeal to The Median Voter, I'm like Socrates: I only know that I know nothing.
I can't really say anything authoritative regarding the article or plant. Not subscribed to NYT, not in the green energy field. But looking up some of the details fills in the gaps, like one of the projects being $225 million towards a $1 Billion dollar Lithium processing plant, expected to open in 2029. Current planning indicates construction won't even begin until 2028. That doesn't sound like a terribly major delay, but it does mean residents wouldn't even be able to get jobs BUILDING the plant until the next presidential election comes around. Add to that high inflation hitting people just past the welfare cliff, and the number of planned initiatives under the Biden administration which were everything-bagel-ed into irrelevance, and you see a distinct lack of trust in the Democrat's plan to make things better.
This reminds me somewhat of how Noah Smith wrote about Biden's Safer America Plan. He took it as Biden being supportive of law enforcement, quoting the intent to hire 100,000 additional police officers nationwide. I read the plan. The link is here https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/08/01/fact-sheet-president-bidens-safer-america-plan-2/.
The plan called for adding 10 to 12 Billion dollars over 5 years to assist in the hiring and training of those 100,000 officers, which, at a very conservative 50,000 per officer, comes out to a cost of $5 Billion per year, for 25 years to cover a full career. It put more money into questionable community resources up to and including expanding welfare benefits for felons than into law enforcement. The entire third section of the plan consisted of gun trafficking interdiction focused on the least impactful areas.
The additions to law enforcement resources were the equivalent of placing Band-Aids on arterial bleeds and sucking chest wounds. Couple that with incidents like the Biden DOJ issuing disparate impact lawsuits against police and fire departments for very basic entry tests, and you end up with proposals which read to the left as supportive of law enforcement, and read to a lot of people with skin in the game as tone deaf and useless. The same way the promise of 125-ish jobs in a metropolitan area of 147,000 reads as too little, too late.
>"Will you stop asking for turning back the clock on social issues/stop supporting gross misogynists in power if I let you have industry jobs and right to repair?"
I would ask them exactly the same thing.
>I guess I'm not rich enough?
Those of us that still work for a paycheck are by definition not rich enough even if we make healthy six figures. We are way outside the league.
The party's high level policy is set by people who already have bunkers in New Zealand in case things go south.
>you believe Matt Y et al argue in bad faith - they intentionally refuse to change on economics, because that would piss off rich donors.
No not at all! I believe there is a selection effect at play here. I believe 100% Matt is a genuine centrist, a great twitter dunker (which is a skill) and truly thinks neoliberalism is good for the world on some long enough time horizon. The DC discourse ecosystem simply selects for people that genuinely believe the status quo is the best of all possible worlds. These are the people that get invited to write for NYT, WaPo, Bloomberg and other respectability outlets we "not so rich liberals" consume.
In any political system or organization, the most power lies with the incumbents and those that naturally believe the status quo is optimal will succeed. Those that try to challenge it will be excommunicated. Everyone recognizes this type of dynamic when they are criticizing academia which is fashionable these days, but somehow DC is insulated from group think and selection effects?
>And strikingly, there actually wasn’t some huge intraparty backlash to Biden stepping up and actually acting like a moderate.
Biden's most disastrous pieces of political malpractice namely the migrant spike and trans title IX were not requests of the materialist Sanders left, they were engineered by the donor NGO Borg which is an entirely different beast. It was an astroturf phenomenon so there was never going to be a backlash.
The Democratic power structure is lawyers. Kamala Harris is a lawyer. Hakeem is a lawyer. Chuck Schumer is a lawyer. And, unsurprisingly, Janet Mills is a lawyer.
They always endorse and promote lawyers. And the voters view the Democratic Party as the party of elitists because they love lawyers.
Generally speaking, lawyers are not likable. So a political party that always backs lawyers in primaries is probably going to lose a lot of elections.
National-level Republican politicians were also mostly lawyers until the last 30 years or so and the decline in Republican lawyer-officeholders is almost certainly closely associated with the increasing retardation of the GOP.
I don't have anything against lawyers. And I would prefer to live in a country where laws matter. But lawyers are boring and lose elections. Trump stream-rolled a bunch of lawyers in a primary in 2016 because voters think lawyers are boring. Janet Mills might beat Susan Collins (who is from a family of lawyers but just skipped that step and right into government), but generally speaking I think the Democratic Party needs to stop promoting lawyers or at least train them so they don't sound like lawyers because voters are not responding to it. I suspect the oyster farmer beats her in the primary and likely wins the seat over Collins by 55-45 in the end.
Google AI summaries told me it's 100% the Mariners v Brewers in the world series. Not a prediction but fact. LLMs are such a joke.
Perhaps the fundamental challenge is less Centrist versus Lefty aka Progressive, but
Muddlers versus Not-Muddlers.
Although it is true one has a sensation that a goodly portion of what passes as centrist Democrat is really just "Muddling along 2nd raters" which is not centrism it's just muddlers and clock-punchers. (fiery centrist - see France's President)
the D party seems to be suffering from large overweight of muddle-along tired old clock-punchers - which is not to take the view that being old or being a career political is bad as such - see Churchill for example - but being overweight on 2nd rate clock-punchers in Sr places does seem to be a broad D problem
I don't much like Mamdani but I do give credit his appearing not to be a muddler.
This is correct. The Clinton era Democratic party perhaps believing that it's analytical triangulation methods would "solve politics" cultivated two generations of cookie cutter careerists in congress who are good at taking orders from leadership and donors but have no original ideas and cannot utter anything that resonates with the public.
Well of course as a Lefty Left you want to tie to “Clinton era” - and talk about “taking orders” - however the idea that US parties which have about zero actual consistency power given the 70s era “reforms” this is nonsensical Just So Story making. (the illustration on another party side, the Republicans inability to control their brand for the hostile takeover by Trump, no real mechanisms to actually enforce, just mythologising post-fact) Rather more credible given the long time frame and the changes in the people - and the lack of actual mechanics - is Silver’s identification of the cultural orientation of the Democrats, his River versus Village metaphor (not that I am a great fan of the metaphor itself but the analysis holds). The highly conformist (within generally Lefty norm circle) elite college grad dominated culture of The Village, consensus driving. Combined with heavy jump into ethno-minoritarian identarianism first is much more explanatory of repeated patterns between various others different ideological colorings inside the general Left-Dem universe.
Having now read the NY Times interview with Pete Buttigieg, I think I get what bugs me so much about him. At first I thought it was just the over-digested pap that he offered up (we need consensus, we can't just defend the status quo blah blah blah). But then it struck me that he had no conception of the time we're living in. He is the reincarnation of Obama 2007/2008. And Obama 2007/2008 was great! If we were living in 2007 Pete could be great too. But we aren't. We're living in a time of sharp differences that can't be papered over. It's not time for someone who "brings us together" noting how Blue and Red America are basically on the same team and let's work to join hands. Instead, we need strong, forceful leadership that is almost fanatic in its desire to defend and fight for what is good in America against forces trying to destroy it.
I get absolutely zero sense of that from him. Yes, I'm sure the overeducated liberal elites will continue to swoon over him, but to me he has loser written all over him.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of reading it!
100%. I am skeptical of anyone that plans on becoming President of the USA from a young age and Pete and his GOP variant Vivek Ramaswamy seem to be of that ilk.
Pete wants to be Obama but you can't be Obama just by talking like him, Obama had street cred which he cultivated by opposing the Iraq War when it was popular. Pete has never taken any position that is controversial, he is a cog in the machine that happens to talk smoothly. Like Vacuous Kamala, no one knows what Pete's true calling is other than him becoming President.
That educated liberals fall for his empty shtick is really something.
The point of sounding like 2008 Obama isn't to win over the consciously illiberal and malign Trumpists. It's to win over the 56-year-old warehouse shift supervisor who did two semesters of community college and is making $51,000 in exurban Pittsburgh whose vote brought those illiberal Trumpists to power.
Exactly. The Democratic base might be jonesing for a tougher stance grounded in "resistance" to Trump. And fair play, Trump is evil, awful and incompetent. And he's incredibly dangerous, and is doing serious damage to the national interest.
But if we all should have learned anything reading this blog, it's that expanding the tent is what will take back the White House (and the Senate). The people showing up at No Kings rallies aren't the ones who need to be converted. It's the middle aged warehouse workers, as you put it.
And it seems entirely possible to me someone who can credibly talk (in Obama-like fashion) about "bringing the country together" might a better fit than a firebrand. Or not—I'm open to arguments the other way. But the road to election wins does indeed seem to go through the relatively modest (10-20%) share of voters who are up for grabs. And those folks tend to like centristy, reasonable types, such as Clinton, Obama and (frankly) pre 2021 Joe Biden.
Maybe that's a smart strategy for accomplishing that. I highly doubt it.
Maybe it’s a little off base but in terms of just doing the right policies and not jockeying for factional advantage or lying about tradeoffs, this is interesting: https://missionlocal.org/2025/10/scott-wiener-has-been-cast-as-the-upzoning-heavy-hes-fine-with-that/
I wonder how much of this terrible decade of Democratic politics is downstream of riding Hillary Clinton to zero in 2016. She was picked as the sole acceptable nominee behind the scenes, gave speeches to banks that made her a pariah. Bernie Sanders coasted off of protest votes and won states he would not win a single county in 4 years later. Rather than admit the mistake, we seem to just trudge on, convincing millions of young people that socialist politicians are the only tribe of people they can trust.
"What he thought he’d do was take advantage of Bernie’s presence in the race to extract policy concessions from Clinton — get her to break with Obama over the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And that’s how it’s been ever since, not just on T.P.P. but essentially across the whole broad suite of issues."
I think one thing that is emblematic of this, and, if we're being real, kind of at the heart of the culture war, is the Democratic approach to "race issues." Generally speaking, the party seems to consider it to be an absolute disaster if their share of the black vote drops below 90%. This leads to them taking unpopular positions, in both substantive ways (like supporting affirmative action well past its sell-by date, or "defund the police") and stylistic ways (using Beyoncé for a campaign theme song, outrage at Trump's comments about Harris's ancestry) to keep as much of that group as possible.
But WHY should Democrats win 90% of black people? WHY should voting be racially polarized? Doesn't that seem... bad? Are they sure they're not losing 5% of white people to keep 10% of black people? Because in absolute numbers that is a really bad trade!
"The cause is Joe Biden and, to a lesser extent, Democratic leaders in Congress."
I mean, the cause is a flood of propaganda 10 feet deep covering half the country. But I know pundits want to keep being mad at Joe Biden forever.
Biden will go down as one of the most failed Presidents in history but I agree with your contention that the party choosing to self-polarize along the black-white race line in 2025 as if it is 1965 is a terrible tactical mistake. Not only is it alienating to geographically powerful rural whites, it is also suboptimal given that the many millions of post 1965 Asian and Latin American immigrants do not see American politics from the lens of civil rights era fights and they will just vote GOP if they see Dems as centering the black-white dichotomy.
Biden "failed" but it's really, really important to not just consider him a "failure" without acknowledging the nuance that his governance was, you know, fucking great. You could have surveyed 100 economists about the economic performance of 2021-2025, or especially since 2023, and he would have outperformed literally every single one of their projections and it would not have been close.
We need to know the SPECIFIC problem. The only problem with his presidency (give or take a foreign policy issue or two) is that he lost, and that happened because of propaganda, and Biden's main problem was that he couldn't speak well enough to counter any of it.
And it's too bad, because he was one of the only people in the party who was actually TRYING to counter it, rather than immediately jumping on the defensive and accepting Fox News framing of every issue. (A tack that many in our party are going to continue forever, because they forgot somewhere in the years since 2016 that it's possible to do anything else.)
(edit: It occurs to me that Carter ALSO had a form of politics that Democrats decided sucked, incorrectly, even though they only lost because of stagflation - he was absolutely pivoting towards the moderate tone that Clinton would end up winning with, but the party retreated back into Yankee liberalism in response to his loss, to horrible results.)
I thought similarly regarding Fox News framing and so forth but I changed my mind in 2023 once it started becoming obvious that Democratic cities were being really stressed by the migrant spike and so it was not just propaganda. It was very real and it triggered a significant amount of "last place aversion" among poor urban voters.
I did not blame Biden for inflation. It was probably baked in no matter what he did given the stimulus + money supply already passed under Trump.
But in my view Biden committed two pieces of epic political malpractice:
1. He allowed a gigantic migration spike that had real impacts on the ground in the low-end economy. The biggest swings against Biden-Harris 2024 occurred in blue states and cities and along the border districts in TX, AZ etc where it was a blood bath.
2. He issued nation wide title IX rules on trans inclusion in schools which created a nation-wide moral panic around children on an issue that affects << 0.1% of the population
I think Harris could have won if it was only inflation. But inflation + migrants + trans sunk her.
I'm always the first to defend Biden but Matt was right here, but didn't go deep enough. Biden was President and had the responsibility to try to steer the party and his administration in the right direction and he manifestly did not do that. But the deeper reason is that the center of gravity was with the progressives and the moderates were weak and demoralized. Biden for his entire career was a consensus-maker and a seeker of the center of the party. And so he tilted left after winning the nomination because he was following the party, and he followed it right off the cliff with the rest of the fools.
It's reasonable, I guess, but it's unproductive. Counterproductive, even. The total and uncompromising "concession" that Carter was a terrible failure was a big part of what made the Democrats so moribund in the 80s. (And for some reason they ALSO tried to run his VP while bashing the administration he was part of, constantly, and it worked even worse.)
There's no reason to talk about your party being shitty if it's not SUBSTANTIVE, if it's not towards an end (like Matt's inveighs against "the groups" are, or Ezra Klein's criticism of an ossified regulatory process is), and being mad at Joe Biden is not substantive. It's kind of the opposite, because his policymaking was admirable, and plenty of people want to throw that baby - both the content and the process - out with the stuttering bathwater.
Partisanship exists for a reason, and I can't help but notice that the side that practices it more shamelessly appears to be punching above their weight electorally, when you consider how unpopular their actual policies are, whenever they bother even trying to articulate them.
Reagan's 11th commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican."
'20s online liberals: "I'm too ~intellectually honest~ to point out my party is orders of magnitude better than the other one when I could be nitpicking them instead."
Also '20s online liberals: "Why are the VIBES so bad?"
I never expected this from Matt, who seemed determined to alienate everyone he wants to convince instead of persuade them. This is the kind of argument that invites people to agree instead of pushing them away.