While well-meaning, I think this article gets a few things wrong at the fundamental level. The reason "game isn't fair" is primarily because of the policies favored and advocated by progressive wing of the democratic party. Policies such as open borders, defund the police and medicare for all scare the s@#$ out of rural voters and they seem to have decided that the democrats cannot be trusted with all branches of the government.
US has always been anti-left from its inception, and the sight of Bernie almost winning the democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020 only confirms that view of democrats amongst these rural voters. Democratic party needs to rebuild its image as a moderate, slightly left of center party to regain trust from these alienated voters.
While the article claims that dems' policies are generally more popular, that is not true in my opinion. Small business owners don't like $15 min wage, and they find hiring illegal aliens even more compelling. Medicare for all is popular only in abstraction; the moment voters learn that they will lose their current health insurance, their support drops precipitously. Similarly, open borders / eliminating ICE and defunding the police are not popular at all.
And while progressives think that these slogans are simply moving the overtone window, they are also terrifying and alienating many moderates in both parties.
Are there any political reforms that Republicans would support that would have the added benefit of addressing disproportion? I have seen person-in-the-street interviews at Trump "stop the steal" rallies with Trump supporters saying that electoral reforms should be a priority in 2021. The reforms they seek are usually not clear, but I wonder whether there are any that could have bipartisan support and/or benefit.
Thanks, Aaron for this thought full piece, but my primary issue is that it suggests a strategy that will help on the margins for an election or two before it likely gets co-opted or countered by conservatives. The bigger problem that you and many other Democratic strategists elide is that the Democratic Party doesn't seem to want to be a real labor party and is instead (for a number of historical reasons) trying to win as the party of the college-educated + marginal communities. What unites Democrats is cultural liberalism instead of economic leftism and until that changes all we're doing is eking out small victories in an unfair system.
I think this is a great summary for how Democrats could pursue better campaigning strategies, and that's all to the good. But behind it is this great fear that the system is structured against us, what with the Electoral College, the Senate skew, and gerrymandering. And those things are indeed factors. And yet . . . recent history shows that the Democrats do pretty well in terms of electoral results. Consider the results of the past 16 years of electoral outcomes (2006-2022, including the results of 2020):
White House: Democratic control for 10 years, Republicans for 6 years
Senate: Democratic control for 8 years (including 60 seats for a while), Republican for 8
House: Democratic control for 8 years, Republican for 8
If your criterion is that Democrats should dominate governmental control, then ok you have a case. If your criterion is Democratic competitiveness, then past history doesn't look all that bad.
The Republican advantages are known; the Democratic advantage is that they tend to get more votes, and Republicans are terrible at governing or figuring out how to expand their voter base, so they're vulnerable to swings in public opinion.
So sure, I'd love for the Democrats to be more dominant, and if these ideas work and can be implemented, great! But there is no reason for doomsaying.
The issue isn’t that it disadvantages the Democratic Party. It’s that American citizens are underrepresented in their government because of where they live. It’s not about Democratic or Republican control of the government - it’s about democracy.
It seems the logical end point of relational persuasion is simply to eliminate all non political spaces in society, butting into everything from family gatherings to knitting groups and making them about politics. I don't dispute that this works, but it seems like an unpleasant view of the future.
The only one of these that has any chance of working is #1. Taking popular positions will indeed result in more votes. The problem with #2 and #3 is that they are symmetric weapons (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/). Both sides can use them, and there is no systemic advantage to the party with the "better" position. So yes, we can innovate and try to use our personal relationships to persuade people, but so can the other side. Anything that's shown to work will just get copied.
This is a great article and really speaks to a path forward. One area I would like to see explored more is if there is a fundamental psychology difference that makes this sort of relational persuasion a harder lift for the current Democratic coalition, and much more organic for the modern Republican/Conservative coalition. Here's why: It's been kind of conventional wisdom / "good manners" that we shouldn't "talk politics" in polite society in precisely the way this piece is describing: to people that might be disagreeable to it. Democrats being the coalition of colege-educated professionals now, take to heart a lot more of this "good manners" cannon. Meanwhile, both because of the coalition being working class and fundamentally anti-politically correct folks, combined with the fact that Trump specifically as a candidate exuded having no shame, it's a heck of a lot easier for his followers to bulldoze their relations in the name of spreading the gospel of Trump.
I saw that a lot in my neck of the woods. In local democratic groups, we emailed people asking them to share as much as they could posts by local candidates and Biden. Virtually no one seemed to do that among the Democratic groups. They were much more comfortable sharing random Vox articles about the news, if about politics at all. Hardly something that will really convince the marginal low-information voter. Wheras, if you looked at their opponents, their posts seemed to get ten to 100 times the shares and likes! And our neighbors that are very Trumpy share posts directly from Biden or Republicans all the time.
So I guess my questions are:
1. Does this liberal / conservative psychology idea have any empirical underpinnings?
2. What do we do to combat it besides sharing this article and yelling at others FOR REALS SHARE BIDEN MEMES!
3. Is there a playbook on how to create these groups and make sure people aren't immediately pissed off, burning relations that I think liberals worry about a lot more.
@Aaron - on the whole, do you think the AI project has been / continues to be a success? Feels like there was so much momentum around it 10 years ago but fear that the research has settled into a finding of 'campaign tactics don't actually move the needle that much when facing off against another active/sentient campaign organization' that makes the project not super relevant, particularly when the top campaigns have essentially unlimited resources now, so there's no sense of trade offs in priorities (see M.Y.'s other article on higher interest rates!). Feels a bit like we (n.b.: I was very lightly involved w/ the AI project in 2011/12) spent 12 years discovering that the old way of organizing (talking to friends & neighbors, letting TV reach strangers w/ middling turnout scores) kinda works pretty well.
See "The Year of Relational" for how AI can help activate a host of innovative activity. While the "old way of organizing" may have have been based on social networks, the standard operating procedure of campaigns from at least 1992 to 2016 was "recruit volunteers; give them a list". That desperately needed to change, and it is.
Both of those things are actually super effective. The part that's been found to be less and less effective is sitting down w/ the phone book and dialling numbers of strangers who don't pick up anyways.
If you look at Georgia on a net margin basis, Dekalb is the very lightest blue, Clayton is white, and Henry is deep blue. But in the real world of actual votes Dekalb netted Biden 52,000 more votes, Clayton 24,000 votes and Henry 21,000.
Not that any of this defeats the basic point of this post - rigorous causal evidence is good and we should use more of it! - but I would love to know if anyone here is aware of any academic papers around the Vote Forward campaigns. I say this as someone who wrote a bunch of letters this year (because why not give it a try, but then got curious about the evidence base and all I could find was their report on Virginia in 2019: https://votefwd.org/posts/Virginia-2019
What weirded me out is they do a very non-standard thing of showing error bars of 1 standard error in each direction (so basically a 67% confidence interval) which struck me as odd. I couldn't find any academic papers about it via the other routes like Google Scholar. So I'm just left wondering if there's something fishy here. But would love to be disabused of that worry.
This is only VERY tangentially related to your post, but since it did come up, I feel like it’s fair game to discuss. I just think it’s fascinating how often the critique of “Latinx” shows up on posts here, even posts like this one that aren’t really about that. It feels like such a small thing, but it comes up time and time again. I actually find the topic rather depressing; I totally get the critique that most Latino/a people don’t like the term, but the term was invented for queer and nonbinary people who don’t feel like the gender binary suits them. Do we really have to completely throw them and their needs/preferences under the bus to win elections? In big political calculus terms, obviously this constituency will benefit from Democrats winning elections more than they would from Democrats adopting certain language, but it still feels like there has to be a way to win while also respecting people’s gender identities and language choices. Why do we talk about the need to persuade voters on other issues, but this one is one we should just abandon rather than trying to persuade people on?
(Matt said in a tweet the other day that the term is an example “of how social justice concepts can end up being out of touch of some of its intended constituency.” I think that’s just incorrect, honestly, because it misunderstands what the intended constituency is. The intended constituency does very much resonate with the term; it’s just that the intended constituency is very small.)
If queer Latinos just wanted people to take the phrase “queer Latinos” with “Latinx” that would be fine, but in fact they want (and succeeded!) to replace “Latinos” with “Latinx” and that’s just a big overreach. This small subgroup shouldn’t get to dictate the terminology for the whole group.
But when we use just Latino (or Latino/a) to refer to the whole group, then we’re *also* dictating the terminology for the whole group, even if a part of the group objects.
Yes, you have to pick a word. But different subgroups like different words. Small-d democratic considerations suggest you should pick the most popular word, which “Latinx” is obviously not. If people who prefer “Latinx” don’t like that, they should persuade the other people in the group to agree with them.
Instead they persuaded media/dems to ignore the majority and go with their preferred terminology. This is/was undemocratic, and it shouldn’t have happened.
It's a good lesson in linguistics, that you can't just invent a new term for a group and then expect a broad swathe of that group to accept the term. Language tend to evolve naturally, and the way Spanish evolved is that "Latino" is both a general non-gendered term and a masculine-specific term at the same time. Is it problematic that the general term is also the masculine term? Sure. But it's how the language has worked for centuries and not easy to change. And Spanish doesn't have a neutral ending as an alternative. So "Latinx" comes off as extremely forced, given that it doesn't conform to any normal use of the language and it's not even obvious how to pronounce it. I suspect many or most Latino people don't see this as a problem that ever needed solving in the first place, because Latino as used to refer to the general population is not a gendered term.
> the term was invented for queer and nonbinary people who don’t feel like the gender binary suits them. Do we really have to completely throw them and their needs/preferences under the bus to win elections?
I think this unintentionally gets to the core of the problem. One group of truly marginalized but also relatively educated, relatively middle class people started referring to themselves as this in a highly theorized, mostly english language context. And because of that, deferring to a much larger, poorer (but in some real ways less marginalized) group about how they are referred to in their mother tongue is throwing the first group under the bus.
This whole analytical framework inevitably leads to these irreconcilable clashes, where if you want to has a "right" answer, you have to implicitly build a hierarchy of identities to decide what wins out. In reality I don't think it's possible to do that in many cases, but even to the extent you can say one group is objectively more oppressed than another, I think the ways we actually mediate these conflicts have more to do with who has access to elite cultural discourse than any objective measure. Ironically, I think this is one case where the idea that capability with written language carries some privilege has some real validity.
I think the answer is largely to accept that there is no "correct" resolution to this and accept that the answer is situational. If you're talking to/about an individual or group that have made their preference clear, use latinx. To the extent there's a cost to that, accept it as the cost for standing up for a principle of self determination about such things. But also know that there's a lot more people who identify as latino than latinx, and let that inform your more general usage.
This is a super thoughtful answer, thank you! I feel like there’s a lot of dunking on people who use these terms but instead trying to understand them and the effects they have and how to balance electoral political strategies with legitimate identitarian concerns is important stuff and also super difficult.
I agree with you, ideally there would be a way to both win and not disrespect people. I think part of it is how much you want to win in a zero-sum trench warfare style of politics, and what you are willing to sacrifice to do it. A definition of "marginalized" could be how quickly you are thrown under the bus as groups go down their trade-off list in the quest to win. In today's (perceived) environment of "we need to save liberal democracy," the question is very relevant of to what degree do we ignore groups of people in the zero-sum today, in order to make sure we have a positive sum future in 20 years where they can be respected. Brutal trade offs.
I think you have to draw a distinction between throwing the term out entirely and using the terminology the people you are actually talking to prefer. If someone self-identifies as Latinx then that is the term you should use, but I think the vast majority of Latin people in the US don't use that term and a certain subset see it as actively offensive (by implying that the grammar of their native tongue is somehow problematic and so a bunch of white intellectuals are going to "fix" it form them)
Good stuff for the electoral strategy. As Keith Ellison observed 4 years ago, Ds need to campaign 365 days a year, every year, for offices at every level of government.
D's need to work on their "workers first" and "middle class first" messaging. Merkel's speech at the 2018 Petersberg Climate Dialog in which she assured workers they would not be left behind in Germany’s climate policies: “Changes are going to happen, but we are thinking of you first, and not of the CO2 emissions first" is a good example.
Ds would also do well to figure out how to get bipartisan support for raising and allocating capital to projects on the energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, housing, education and health care fronts that are innovative, have significant potential to become popular and persuasive, and which the private sector is unable or unwilling to finance. David Roberts' 10/21/20 story about the potential of geothermal energy to "solve energy" is one example. Surely an important lesson from the pandemic is that the private sector can do amazing things when governments provide some of the capital. Demonstration projects, like vaccine trials, are key. Nothing is more persuasive than success. Ask Elon.
And not run on unpopular ideas like say increasing immigration, forgiving student loans or defunding the police. Or if you want to run on those ideas you need to rebrand them. Think estate tax vs. death tax. Say for example police accountability rather than defund the police as an example.
Dems, particularly the more lefty ones, would benefit enormously from a basic understanding of sales and marketing. One thing the GOP are masters of is controlling the branding of an idea. "Fair Tax" sounds so good for people that don't understand tax brackets. The whole death panels thing. The banned cheeseburgers from the GND document.
It’s not just the rebranding. Republicans have an entire media apparatus that is very disciplined into using those phrases. And they don’t delve into egghead arguments about whether or not the policy is popular or not publicly which dilutes the brand.
Hey Aaron! Thanks for writing this, and specifically mentioning how important unions are to long-term success. I think a "what if" scenario that doesn't get discussed enough is "What if Democrats had gone all-in on EFCA/card check in 2009 instead of health care?" Obamacare has certainly been a boon to Democrats over the past couple of cycles (which I think progressives should bring up more as an example of how going out on a limb for big policies that benefit lots of people in a concrete way is a good thing in the long run, even if it's unpopular in the short run). At the same time, though, I feel like Democrats underestimate the difference between a growing union movement and a shrinking one, or assume that we're on a permanent slide away from unionization and can't turn things around. There's no messaging or organizing silver bullet that can keep culturally conservative voters in a liberal party, but unions give people both clear financial incentives to support the Democratic Party, and an identity + a social network that ties them to the party.
While well-meaning, I think this article gets a few things wrong at the fundamental level. The reason "game isn't fair" is primarily because of the policies favored and advocated by progressive wing of the democratic party. Policies such as open borders, defund the police and medicare for all scare the s@#$ out of rural voters and they seem to have decided that the democrats cannot be trusted with all branches of the government.
US has always been anti-left from its inception, and the sight of Bernie almost winning the democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020 only confirms that view of democrats amongst these rural voters. Democratic party needs to rebuild its image as a moderate, slightly left of center party to regain trust from these alienated voters.
While the article claims that dems' policies are generally more popular, that is not true in my opinion. Small business owners don't like $15 min wage, and they find hiring illegal aliens even more compelling. Medicare for all is popular only in abstraction; the moment voters learn that they will lose their current health insurance, their support drops precipitously. Similarly, open borders / eliminating ICE and defunding the police are not popular at all.
And while progressives think that these slogans are simply moving the overtone window, they are also terrifying and alienating many moderates in both parties.
Are there any political reforms that Republicans would support that would have the added benefit of addressing disproportion? I have seen person-in-the-street interviews at Trump "stop the steal" rallies with Trump supporters saying that electoral reforms should be a priority in 2021. The reforms they seek are usually not clear, but I wonder whether there are any that could have bipartisan support and/or benefit.
Thanks, Aaron for this thought full piece, but my primary issue is that it suggests a strategy that will help on the margins for an election or two before it likely gets co-opted or countered by conservatives. The bigger problem that you and many other Democratic strategists elide is that the Democratic Party doesn't seem to want to be a real labor party and is instead (for a number of historical reasons) trying to win as the party of the college-educated + marginal communities. What unites Democrats is cultural liberalism instead of economic leftism and until that changes all we're doing is eking out small victories in an unfair system.
I think this is a great summary for how Democrats could pursue better campaigning strategies, and that's all to the good. But behind it is this great fear that the system is structured against us, what with the Electoral College, the Senate skew, and gerrymandering. And those things are indeed factors. And yet . . . recent history shows that the Democrats do pretty well in terms of electoral results. Consider the results of the past 16 years of electoral outcomes (2006-2022, including the results of 2020):
White House: Democratic control for 10 years, Republicans for 6 years
Senate: Democratic control for 8 years (including 60 seats for a while), Republican for 8
House: Democratic control for 8 years, Republican for 8
If your criterion is that Democrats should dominate governmental control, then ok you have a case. If your criterion is Democratic competitiveness, then past history doesn't look all that bad.
The Republican advantages are known; the Democratic advantage is that they tend to get more votes, and Republicans are terrible at governing or figuring out how to expand their voter base, so they're vulnerable to swings in public opinion.
So sure, I'd love for the Democrats to be more dominant, and if these ideas work and can be implemented, great! But there is no reason for doomsaying.
The issue isn’t that it disadvantages the Democratic Party. It’s that American citizens are underrepresented in their government because of where they live. It’s not about Democratic or Republican control of the government - it’s about democracy.
It seems the logical end point of relational persuasion is simply to eliminate all non political spaces in society, butting into everything from family gatherings to knitting groups and making them about politics. I don't dispute that this works, but it seems like an unpleasant view of the future.
The only one of these that has any chance of working is #1. Taking popular positions will indeed result in more votes. The problem with #2 and #3 is that they are symmetric weapons (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/). Both sides can use them, and there is no systemic advantage to the party with the "better" position. So yes, we can innovate and try to use our personal relationships to persuade people, but so can the other side. Anything that's shown to work will just get copied.
"These candidates need not be ideologues" seems to be understating the case quite a bit! More like can't be, until proven otherwise.
This is a great article and really speaks to a path forward. One area I would like to see explored more is if there is a fundamental psychology difference that makes this sort of relational persuasion a harder lift for the current Democratic coalition, and much more organic for the modern Republican/Conservative coalition. Here's why: It's been kind of conventional wisdom / "good manners" that we shouldn't "talk politics" in polite society in precisely the way this piece is describing: to people that might be disagreeable to it. Democrats being the coalition of colege-educated professionals now, take to heart a lot more of this "good manners" cannon. Meanwhile, both because of the coalition being working class and fundamentally anti-politically correct folks, combined with the fact that Trump specifically as a candidate exuded having no shame, it's a heck of a lot easier for his followers to bulldoze their relations in the name of spreading the gospel of Trump.
I saw that a lot in my neck of the woods. In local democratic groups, we emailed people asking them to share as much as they could posts by local candidates and Biden. Virtually no one seemed to do that among the Democratic groups. They were much more comfortable sharing random Vox articles about the news, if about politics at all. Hardly something that will really convince the marginal low-information voter. Wheras, if you looked at their opponents, their posts seemed to get ten to 100 times the shares and likes! And our neighbors that are very Trumpy share posts directly from Biden or Republicans all the time.
So I guess my questions are:
1. Does this liberal / conservative psychology idea have any empirical underpinnings?
2. What do we do to combat it besides sharing this article and yelling at others FOR REALS SHARE BIDEN MEMES!
3. Is there a playbook on how to create these groups and make sure people aren't immediately pissed off, burning relations that I think liberals worry about a lot more.
@Aaron - on the whole, do you think the AI project has been / continues to be a success? Feels like there was so much momentum around it 10 years ago but fear that the research has settled into a finding of 'campaign tactics don't actually move the needle that much when facing off against another active/sentient campaign organization' that makes the project not super relevant, particularly when the top campaigns have essentially unlimited resources now, so there's no sense of trade offs in priorities (see M.Y.'s other article on higher interest rates!). Feels a bit like we (n.b.: I was very lightly involved w/ the AI project in 2011/12) spent 12 years discovering that the old way of organizing (talking to friends & neighbors, letting TV reach strangers w/ middling turnout scores) kinda works pretty well.
See "The Year of Relational" for how AI can help activate a host of innovative activity. While the "old way of organizing" may have have been based on social networks, the standard operating procedure of campaigns from at least 1992 to 2016 was "recruit volunteers; give them a list". That desperately needed to change, and it is.
But Matthew, this all sounds so *hard*. Why can't we all just donate to actblue.com and post responses to our crazy aunt's FB posts ? (SMH)
Both of those things are actually super effective. The part that's been found to be less and less effective is sitting down w/ the phone book and dialling numbers of strangers who don't pick up anyways.
If you look at Georgia on a net margin basis, Dekalb is the very lightest blue, Clayton is white, and Henry is deep blue. But in the real world of actual votes Dekalb netted Biden 52,000 more votes, Clayton 24,000 votes and Henry 21,000.
Not that any of this defeats the basic point of this post - rigorous causal evidence is good and we should use more of it! - but I would love to know if anyone here is aware of any academic papers around the Vote Forward campaigns. I say this as someone who wrote a bunch of letters this year (because why not give it a try, but then got curious about the evidence base and all I could find was their report on Virginia in 2019: https://votefwd.org/posts/Virginia-2019
What weirded me out is they do a very non-standard thing of showing error bars of 1 standard error in each direction (so basically a 67% confidence interval) which struck me as odd. I couldn't find any academic papers about it via the other routes like Google Scholar. So I'm just left wondering if there's something fishy here. But would love to be disabused of that worry.
This is only VERY tangentially related to your post, but since it did come up, I feel like it’s fair game to discuss. I just think it’s fascinating how often the critique of “Latinx” shows up on posts here, even posts like this one that aren’t really about that. It feels like such a small thing, but it comes up time and time again. I actually find the topic rather depressing; I totally get the critique that most Latino/a people don’t like the term, but the term was invented for queer and nonbinary people who don’t feel like the gender binary suits them. Do we really have to completely throw them and their needs/preferences under the bus to win elections? In big political calculus terms, obviously this constituency will benefit from Democrats winning elections more than they would from Democrats adopting certain language, but it still feels like there has to be a way to win while also respecting people’s gender identities and language choices. Why do we talk about the need to persuade voters on other issues, but this one is one we should just abandon rather than trying to persuade people on?
(Matt said in a tweet the other day that the term is an example “of how social justice concepts can end up being out of touch of some of its intended constituency.” I think that’s just incorrect, honestly, because it misunderstands what the intended constituency is. The intended constituency does very much resonate with the term; it’s just that the intended constituency is very small.)
If queer Latinos just wanted people to take the phrase “queer Latinos” with “Latinx” that would be fine, but in fact they want (and succeeded!) to replace “Latinos” with “Latinx” and that’s just a big overreach. This small subgroup shouldn’t get to dictate the terminology for the whole group.
But when we use just Latino (or Latino/a) to refer to the whole group, then we’re *also* dictating the terminology for the whole group, even if a part of the group objects.
Yes, you have to pick a word. But different subgroups like different words. Small-d democratic considerations suggest you should pick the most popular word, which “Latinx” is obviously not. If people who prefer “Latinx” don’t like that, they should persuade the other people in the group to agree with them.
Instead they persuaded media/dems to ignore the majority and go with their preferred terminology. This is/was undemocratic, and it shouldn’t have happened.
It's a good lesson in linguistics, that you can't just invent a new term for a group and then expect a broad swathe of that group to accept the term. Language tend to evolve naturally, and the way Spanish evolved is that "Latino" is both a general non-gendered term and a masculine-specific term at the same time. Is it problematic that the general term is also the masculine term? Sure. But it's how the language has worked for centuries and not easy to change. And Spanish doesn't have a neutral ending as an alternative. So "Latinx" comes off as extremely forced, given that it doesn't conform to any normal use of the language and it's not even obvious how to pronounce it. I suspect many or most Latino people don't see this as a problem that ever needed solving in the first place, because Latino as used to refer to the general population is not a gendered term.
> the term was invented for queer and nonbinary people who don’t feel like the gender binary suits them. Do we really have to completely throw them and their needs/preferences under the bus to win elections?
I think this unintentionally gets to the core of the problem. One group of truly marginalized but also relatively educated, relatively middle class people started referring to themselves as this in a highly theorized, mostly english language context. And because of that, deferring to a much larger, poorer (but in some real ways less marginalized) group about how they are referred to in their mother tongue is throwing the first group under the bus.
This whole analytical framework inevitably leads to these irreconcilable clashes, where if you want to has a "right" answer, you have to implicitly build a hierarchy of identities to decide what wins out. In reality I don't think it's possible to do that in many cases, but even to the extent you can say one group is objectively more oppressed than another, I think the ways we actually mediate these conflicts have more to do with who has access to elite cultural discourse than any objective measure. Ironically, I think this is one case where the idea that capability with written language carries some privilege has some real validity.
I think the answer is largely to accept that there is no "correct" resolution to this and accept that the answer is situational. If you're talking to/about an individual or group that have made their preference clear, use latinx. To the extent there's a cost to that, accept it as the cost for standing up for a principle of self determination about such things. But also know that there's a lot more people who identify as latino than latinx, and let that inform your more general usage.
I think Matt Bruenig has written about this fairly well: https://medium.com/@MattBruenig/identitarian-deference-continues-to-roil-liberalism-6a1fc88e7f34
This is a super thoughtful answer, thank you! I feel like there’s a lot of dunking on people who use these terms but instead trying to understand them and the effects they have and how to balance electoral political strategies with legitimate identitarian concerns is important stuff and also super difficult.
I agree with you, ideally there would be a way to both win and not disrespect people. I think part of it is how much you want to win in a zero-sum trench warfare style of politics, and what you are willing to sacrifice to do it. A definition of "marginalized" could be how quickly you are thrown under the bus as groups go down their trade-off list in the quest to win. In today's (perceived) environment of "we need to save liberal democracy," the question is very relevant of to what degree do we ignore groups of people in the zero-sum today, in order to make sure we have a positive sum future in 20 years where they can be respected. Brutal trade offs.
I think you have to draw a distinction between throwing the term out entirely and using the terminology the people you are actually talking to prefer. If someone self-identifies as Latinx then that is the term you should use, but I think the vast majority of Latin people in the US don't use that term and a certain subset see it as actively offensive (by implying that the grammar of their native tongue is somehow problematic and so a bunch of white intellectuals are going to "fix" it form them)
Good stuff for the electoral strategy. As Keith Ellison observed 4 years ago, Ds need to campaign 365 days a year, every year, for offices at every level of government.
D's need to work on their "workers first" and "middle class first" messaging. Merkel's speech at the 2018 Petersberg Climate Dialog in which she assured workers they would not be left behind in Germany’s climate policies: “Changes are going to happen, but we are thinking of you first, and not of the CO2 emissions first" is a good example.
Ds would also do well to figure out how to get bipartisan support for raising and allocating capital to projects on the energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, housing, education and health care fronts that are innovative, have significant potential to become popular and persuasive, and which the private sector is unable or unwilling to finance. David Roberts' 10/21/20 story about the potential of geothermal energy to "solve energy" is one example. Surely an important lesson from the pandemic is that the private sector can do amazing things when governments provide some of the capital. Demonstration projects, like vaccine trials, are key. Nothing is more persuasive than success. Ask Elon.
"Democrats should run on popular ideas."
And not run on unpopular ideas like say increasing immigration, forgiving student loans or defunding the police. Or if you want to run on those ideas you need to rebrand them. Think estate tax vs. death tax. Say for example police accountability rather than defund the police as an example.
Dems, particularly the more lefty ones, would benefit enormously from a basic understanding of sales and marketing. One thing the GOP are masters of is controlling the branding of an idea. "Fair Tax" sounds so good for people that don't understand tax brackets. The whole death panels thing. The banned cheeseburgers from the GND document.
Agree 100%. Republicans focus group everything. That's how we got phrases like:
Death tax
Partial birth abortion
Death panels
...and many more, all thanks to Frank Luntz
Andrew Yang's branding of UBI as "freedom dividend" was brilliant. Put him in charge!
It’s not just the rebranding. Republicans have an entire media apparatus that is very disciplined into using those phrases. And they don’t delve into egghead arguments about whether or not the policy is popular or not publicly which dilutes the brand.
Hey Aaron! Thanks for writing this, and specifically mentioning how important unions are to long-term success. I think a "what if" scenario that doesn't get discussed enough is "What if Democrats had gone all-in on EFCA/card check in 2009 instead of health care?" Obamacare has certainly been a boon to Democrats over the past couple of cycles (which I think progressives should bring up more as an example of how going out on a limb for big policies that benefit lots of people in a concrete way is a good thing in the long run, even if it's unpopular in the short run). At the same time, though, I feel like Democrats underestimate the difference between a growing union movement and a shrinking one, or assume that we're on a permanent slide away from unionization and can't turn things around. There's no messaging or organizing silver bullet that can keep culturally conservative voters in a liberal party, but unions give people both clear financial incentives to support the Democratic Party, and an identity + a social network that ties them to the party.