My anecdotal experience is that Hispanics are following the same path as past waves of Catholic immigrants. I come from a large-ish family originating in those waves in the late 19th and early 20th century. In the last 10-12 years we have incorporated some Hispanic (mostly Salvadoran) limbs. The other families I know like mine are also experiencing this, with so and so's sister or brother or cousin marrying a 2nd generation Hispanic. Based on this trajectory I think in a couple decades thinking about Hispanics as an insular minority will be as outdated as the doing the same with Irish or Italians. Sure people will be proud of their heritage (which will be more and more mixed) and there will be a few cultural hand me downs but it won't be a major factor in how people vote.
And all of this is a good thing. It's the path from starting out in a Democratic machine when people arrive to becoming fully assimilated, individualistic Americans. Democratic strategy should be forward looking about this process, instead of doing the ethnic-identitarian pigeonholing.
In the safety of anonymous comments - totally agree, and I often say privately that Mexicans are the new Italians.
I especially like to say this because I am in the Northeastern US and encounter a surprising number of mildly racist Italian-Americans. Which is hilarious, from a historical perspective! ITALIANS policing whiteness - what a future we live in.
Agreed, and I also generally keep my thoughts on this to myself and/or anonymous discussion. There's a certain ickiness, like you're scratching the surface of some kind of quack race pseudoscience from the 1800s even though that's not remotely the intent.
But anyway, my cousin who I am close with married a 2nd generation Salvadoran and they have 3 children. Those children are all growing up speaking English in a middle class exurb. I would never in a million years presume to know how they will identify in adulthood personally or politically. However, to the larger point, it's really hard for me to imagine that it will be within these increasingly dated late 20th century categories and assumptions.
Why is it hilarious? You think blacks can’t be racist ? Anyone can be racist, it’s human nature. Not according to the unhelpful attempt to redefine the term of course but according to the useful old definition that we all understand perfectly well.
Agree anyone can be racist. The hilarity is being confused about whether you are part of the in-group. It's why Chappelle's "Clayton Bigsby" character was hilarious, for example! Same thing here.
To be fair, at least in the Denver metro area, the kitchen staff of many Asian restaurants is majority Latino and I'm doubtful they are assimilating to Asianness.
Based on what, exactly? Of course American society was absolutely racist in regard to the divide between whites and blacks at the time, pretty complete segregation, so there were probably places that Italians could go that blacks couldn’t, but there were an awful lot of places where Italians were not accepted. Basically they did the many of the same low-paid labor jobs Latinos occupy today, they were suspected of being criminals and anarchists and suffered at the hands of law enforcement. There was a long-standing notion that the reason southern Italians had darker skin and curly hair was that they had African ancestry from when Hannibal invaded Italy in ancient times.
My family immigrated from Southern Italy to California in the early 1900's to pick fruit. They squeaked in right before immigration from Italy was banned based on the reasoning that they are unsophisticated knuckle-draggers who could never properly integrate into society. (This kind of language was used on the floor of the Senate; they created a legal test based on characteristics like hairlines and skin color to determine how "Southern" a European was and if they could be admitted.)
Needless to say, my grandparents faced a ton of racism and, like many Italians at the time, anglicized their names, dropped their accents and tried their best to hide their ethnicity. When they had kids, they forbade speaking Italian at home. Post civil-rights era, a lot if Italian-Americans got back to their roots; so many had immigrated to California that they started having pride parades broken out by province. But for decades, they kept all the ethnic (and Catholic) stuff private and made their children ashamed of their culture.
My grandpa was very much of the "look at what American did for us, what a great country" mindset. Later, "poor people must be lazy because we got where we are by working hard in the Land of Opportunity." Then "we came here legally, why can't the Mexicans do the same?" Finally, "poor people are all minorities, so minorities are lazy." He (like so many of his friends and other members of my family) became a staunch Republican and tossed around racial slurs so casually that it became embarrassing to go out in public with him. I watched this evolution take place.
My family history very much informs my views about immigrants and the absurdity of expecting "Latinos" or "Asians" to vote as a pro-immigrant woke progressive bloc.
My ancestors migrated around the same time to NE PA to mine coal, and then work in factories in Trenton, NJ by WWII. Got a similar arc in my grandparents generation as well.
When you look at the political figures today who are a Italian, sure we have Nancy Pelosi but I think Doug Mastriano is more typical of your average Italian American’s worldview, among the boomer-age folks know in my east coast Italian family.
Yes, but if you lump everyone with an Italian surname into "Italian-American" you'll just get a cross-section of random white people. Personally, I still know my family in Italy and grew up with a lot of 'cousins' visiting from abroad. I even got my Italian passport. But a lot of people picked up the surname many generations back and have no connection to Italian culture and a lot of people lost their name via marriage or anglicized it.
My point, if I have one, is that the immigrant arc is more important than racial/ethnic identity. Matt is quite right that Democrats looked at Latino voters and assumed they would behave identically to Black voters. But as many people have pointed out, "Latino" is about as useful a descriptor as European and that they are mostly just acting like any other immigrant population. Someone like Mastriano isn't a right-wing nut because of his Italian identity, just as Ted Cruz isn't a right-wing nut because of his Hispanic identity.
Italy is still a very racist country today, let alone during the waves of Italian immigration. Ask Asian and Black people about their experiences travelling there.
Oh Italians were certainly discriminated against, but few of those white ethnics are famous for their diverse tolerance of other groups. The fact Italians were discriminated against doesn't mean they themselves are tolerant, if anything it's the inverse.
Asians are also famously intolerant of blacks—but maybe that’s just the first thing they learn upon reaching American shores, same as the European immigrants in early 20th century did? Actually Koreans/Japanese probably didn’t even have to come here, they may have picked it up from GIs after WWII and Korean war.
No, Asians in Asia are also extremely racist against black people. They are also racist against each other. It’s hard to convey to white people what “just between us Asians” conversations sometimes sound like.
White people have this internalized Christian view that “god made us all in his image.” When they see disparity, they believe in their hearts that it must result from external circumstances. By contrast, Asian cultures, in both south and east Asia, are steeped in “just world” beliefs. They see disparity mainly in terms of personal or group failings. They also believe strongly in merit and virtue being hereditary, hence the focus in marrying someone “from a good family.”
This manifests to white people as “racism” though it’s actually somewhat distinct. Bangladeshis are likely to blame poverty in Africa on Africans. But they’re also likely to blame poverty in Bangladesh in Bangladeshis. By contrast racist Appalachians don’t blame their poverty on themselves.
Asians in Asia aren't particularly known for their love of each other, in particular itinerant Chinese not in China. I doubt they had to do all that much learning.
I kind of assumed that everyone in this conversation would be familiar with the famous Dennis Hopper/Christopher Walken scene in True Romance, but perhaps not. Warning to the uninitiated, “problematic” to say the least.
Maybe, although I'm pretty sure they faced a shit-ton of anti-Italian prejudice. This could be something of an urban legend, but I've always understood (to cite one crazy example) that, in Boston area Catholic parishes, Italians were sometimes required to attend Mass in the basement chapel. They were forbidden from worshipping upstairs, with the Irish who had arrived some decades prior.
Yep. In Philly there weren't enough Irish to force such outcomes, but my ancestors were still unwelcomed enough that they either built or demographically overran already-extant parishes and turned them into Italian Catholic churches, often coexisting with the Irish Catholic church two blocks away. And then the Polish wave in the 1900-1920 period added Polish Catholic parishes.
On top of the preexisting British-Scottish-Scots Irish-German divides that gave us 1 Anglican, 1 Presbyterian, 1 Lutheran, 1 Baptist, 1 Methodist, and 1 Quaker church every six blocks.
In my experience, Philly has even more churches per capita than Boston or NYC.
A town near where I grew up in New Jersey, less than a square mile, had two volunteer fire stations because the Italians and Irish couldn’t get along long enough to share. They somehow managed with only one Catholic Church though, and a lot of the folks my age were half Italian, half Irish.
generally agree with but to play devil’s advocate, the social context of the 21st century is a lot of different:
* because of social progress over the last century, there’s less of a need to assimilate into whiteness.
* we had an immigration moratorium in the middle of the 20th century which also saw american ethnic culture calcify as the older immigrant generation died off. there continues to be a steady trickle of latino immigration into the us, and it’s not crazy to think we’ll see more if bad things happen in latin america. (i think this most shows itself in the fact that we’re like 70 years into there being a major puerto rican population in a lot of northern us cities and most of them still have a distinct puerto rican vote.)
* modern communication technology makes it easier to keep in contact with culture of the motherland. the booming popularity of latin music is probably the best manifestation of this, but you see this in other places too.
* also not really pc i guess, but a lot of hispanics can’t pass as white
I agree with your bottom line, and I wonder if left wing resistance to it stems from some sort of innate cosmopolitan preference for being around people of different experiences. Which if true, seems straightforward to address: just keep bringing more immigrants in, and let the later generations assimilate as they wish.
Economic trends back this up. Raj Chetty’s research shows that Hispanics and whites have similar economic mobility, and Hispanic immigrants get near parity with non-Hispanic whites within a couple of generations. That’s similar to the trajectories we saw with Italian and Irish immigrants.
By contrast, black-white income gaps haven’t narrowed at all since 1950.
Ha, you described exactly what my Dutch/English/Irish-descended self is doing - marrying an amazing, brilliant, and beautiful second generation Colombian woman. I can't even imagine what our kids' sense of identity will be, although I hope it includes some honoring of the traditions that our parents came out of.
I agree with you wholeheartedly but you are also stating why the demographics as destiny argument is and was so appealing. This diagnosis basically says we diverged from Europe on some elements of the state long ago for valid reasons, those reasons continue to be true and replicate themselves, and every year that passes we are more locked into our path. It’s a bit of a funeral for most of left liberal politics
As a recovering addict myself, I feel confident in asserting that Dems continue to be addicted to the high of moral superiority that comes with feeling confident your political opponents are drowning in their own racism. This creates a major blind spot where the only reason for supporting an R policy/opposing a D one is due to one’s racism/white supremacy. Of course this leaves one shocked if one goes to the effort of learning why a Latino voter might be uneasy with talk of open borders. What’s fascinating is that, when you look by racial group, Pew shows each group considers their racial identity to be of hugely different importance to their sense of self. Black people, and by extent Black voters, center their own “blackness” in their self-perception to a greater extent than do Latinos their Latinoness and a MUCH greater extent than whites. (Whites of all political backgrounds tend to have a taboo against building a sense of identity in their whiteness, for excellent reasons!!). It is perfectly logical that the more you center your racial identity in your sense of self, the more you see the actions of others through that lens.
"It is perfectly logical that the more you center your racial identity in your sense of self, the more you see the actions of others through that lens."
"Whites of all political backgrounds tend to have a taboo against building a sense of identity in their whiteness, for excellent reasons!!"
This would seem to be at odds with the large numbers of white progressives seeing the actions of others through a racial lens, no?
Yeah- whites actually do have two, diverging flavors of racial identity- self-declared “good white people” who differentiate themselves from the racist, bigoted heathens, and self-declared “real Americans” who differentiate themselves from the Godless, traitorous heathens. And those identities absolutely inform a self-confirming worldview. But it’s important to note that neither subgroup takes pride in just being “white.”
Have felt this way for a long time and its only intensified since Trump was elected.
It used to be a running joke between my wife and I that we were too "city" for the suburbs because we hated driving and Applebee's and liked public transit and walking, but too "suburban" for the urban affluent liberal set since we like watching domestic sports and own a big screen TV and eschew Whole Foods.
It's gotten more acute between the "wear masks everywhere forever, defund police, enforce no social norms or look to achieve any progress in the name of equity" urban set and the "gotta drive my F-250 with 3 concealed guns on me at all times in case MS-13 and/or antifa attacks the costco" exurban set.
With the internet flattening any regional deviations on politics, it can feel like this is a position without a home, except for in the comments of a center-left political blog.
Chilis > Ruby Tuesdays > Fridays > Applebees > getting hit by a bus > Olive Garden.
And really I should update my priors since all of the above are mostly down-market chains for small cities and the far exurbs. The suburbanites eat at Cheesecake Factory and PF Changs and their similar ilk, all of which feature food that goes from "fine" to "actually pretty good"
I'd say that's accurate for me, for my entire life where I've been politically aware, I've never felt comfortable with always identifying with one "team".
Yeah, Never Trumpers exist, though I think most are Democrat for the foreseeable future. Anecdotally, my mom voted Republican ever since I can remember until 2016, and after seeing the way Trump was enabled she voted blue all the way down the 2020 ballot. Though I think she’d vote for Romney or Liz Cheney in a heartbeat.
It bothers me that self perception tied to race is viewed negatively for some and positively for others. I'm proud of my ancestors: all four of my grandparents went to college in the 30s and 40s. My great grandfathers were a German farmer in southern Indiana, a German furniture dealer in upstate New York, a Hungarian electric plater from Queens and Scottish gas station and diner owner on the national road in Indiana. All hardworking, entrepreneurial couples. Go back 2 more generations further and you'll find soldiers on both sides of the war and Scottish transplants to West Virginia. Small farmers making a life in America.
Is this "white people" and "privilege"? probably yes, but it sure didn't feel that way behind the plow and building businesses. I feel like I can be proud of my family, heritage and culture while recognizing their good fortune. I don't associate really with white people generally, but I do associate with central European immigrants and old American small farmers. I think African Americans justifiably find commonality in the heritage of slavery and oppression of their families. I'd argue it's less about race more about relatively recent heritage. Recent African immigrants have a different heritage and the culture is distinct.
There is a healthy moderation of racial identity in the understanding of your family and community history, and finding communality in this. For example Germans in Germany are very aware of the common Nazi heritage in many families, and have responded by strong legal restrictions on those views. A culture is coping with it's past wrongs. In contrast, most white Americans are primarily post civil war immigrant heritage or fought for the Union, therefore they do not have deep guilt about slavery. Again in contrast African Americans remain deeply affected by the heritage of slavery and racism. People's self perception is largely reasonable, but doesn't fit a clean narrative of racial conflict.
Only Republicans talk of "open borders." But it is true that Democrats have not prioritized getting enough immigration judges to the border to process the asylum seekers. It would have been helpful if that was para of BBB that Republicand voted against.
I mean only Republicans characterize what we have as "Open Borders." Democrat do not support truly open borders or even less enforcement of existing border controls, though I will admit that the do not support proper funding of the existing system.
Yes Bryan Caplan does support real open borders, although implicitly he supports it only for those who find employment.
Yes, weird iconoclast person academic who isn’t in either party supports open borders is pretty sui generis and not really related to anything but what iconoclastic academics think.
He's a Libertarian and writes it (I think) only to virtue signal to other Libertarians without having to support any serious policy to reduce immigration restrictions.
It is frustrating to see local progressives assume that Indian, Korean, Chinese shopkeepers and professionals will be motivated to vote Democrat by appeals to protect undocumented immigrants from Central America and integrate public schools. Dividing the US into white and non-white doesn’t seem like an informative electoral strategy.
Wait, in my eyes in makes a lot more sense to speak about bipoc than people of color more generally - Blacks and Indigenous Americans didn't have the choice to immigrate and were systematically oppressed on scales no other group in the US can lay claim to. What's more, immigrants of color such as east and south Asians as well as Latinos are on average much more likely to accumulate generational wealth and integrate (aka the American dream) while Black and indigenous Americans are not.
I remember when Matt taught me that term on Twitter, saying pretty much what you did, me thinking it was a nothingburger tweet, yet he got ruthlessly dragged on it on there from his left flank.
"I don’t say “people of color”. People of color sounds like something you see when you are on mushrooms. Besides, the use of people of color is dishonest. It means precisely the same thing as colored people. If you’re not willing to say “colored people” you shouldn’t be saying “people of color”.
Besides, the whole idea of color is bullshit anyway. What should we call white people? “People of no color”? Isn’t pink a color? In fact, white people aren’t really white at all, they’re different shades of pink, olive and beige. In other words, they’re colored. And black people are rarely black. I see mostly different shades of brown and tan. In fact, some light-skinned black people are lighter than the darkest white people. Look how dark the people in India are. They’re dark brown but they’re still considered white people. What’s going on here? May I see the color chart? “People of color” is an awkward, bullshit , liberal-guilt phrase that obscures meaning rather than enhancing it. Shall we call fat people, “people of size”?"
"People of color" --- I'm mostly annoyed with the construction "People of X", which just hurts my ears. Just use a damn adjective! Where else is the construction used? I can only think of "People of faith". I realize that "colored" has loaded history, but if the NAACP can use it, I think it can be reclaimed.
For my money “X of color is even worse”. “Students of color”, “reporters of color”, “gamers of color” (yes, Kotaku has actually used that one), they’re all bad.
“People of color” never conferred a real advantage, just an illusion of advantage, which is probably not good if it keeps you from seeing things as they really are.
Uh, Thatcher never said anything about living "in a black and brown neighborhood." FrigidWind is rephrasing Thatcher's famous quote, "You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure."
That's an American stereotype, British race relations are very distinct as the country was essentially all-white until after the war, well after the decline of the domestic service sector
As a “brown” person this drives me nuts. But let’s not overlook the role of liberal white people in that. I always wonder why the brown people I see on TV as “representation” are so much more liberal than my Bangladeshi family and relatives. Then I realized: who decides which brown people get to speak for their race on TV?
What's made me saddest in the last decade or thereabouts when trying to discuss this with progressives...there's a strong desire not to give up the "demographic destiny dream", and that's very understandable. But it's been distressing to see cope of the specific variety "anyone who votes R was never progressive/D to begin with". A sort of misapplied internal-racism ideology which simply does not reflect actual election results, and stereotypes entire groups of diverse people. Turns out that democratic processes do not, in fact, inevitably deliver progressive victories - because the electorate isn't inevitably progressive. Feature Not Bug. If a persuaded bird in the hand is worth two mobilized birds in the bush, then that also applies to dis-persuaded ones...losing former voters is twice as bad. I think this is one of the strongest unearned R talking points, the whole your-vote-is-taken-for-granite thing which speaks to a certain kind of temperament. People just like feeling that they're actually listened to.
(It's been especially weird as "_________ people are not a monolith" has become an increasingly common soundbite.)
Progressives like the idea of demographic destiny for the reason Matt identified regarding Black voters: white Democrats can overrule more conservative Black voters on abortion, gay marriage, and other social issues, so long as they promise to protect them from Republican racism.
Of course progressives like this arrangement. Who wouldn’t want a huge bloc of votes from people they don’t have to compromise with? And for the same reason, they really resist the idea they’ll have to compromise with religious Latinos on abortion or with Muslim immigrants about what we teach kids in school about sex or gender.
I don't know if most even realize minorities in their own party are more moderate, when they are basically relying on testimony from members in academia and hollywood, basically tokenizing them. And that testimony can be pretty uncompromising.
I'll never forget a Hispanic actor on Bill Maher explaining why some hispanics vote R. Because "they hate themselves." Makes it pretty easy to unpeople them when you hear that.
Similarly I wish they would give up on the view that all these young people will keep voting D as they grow up. The hippies grew up and got mortgages and jobs and started voting more conservative. Gen z will do the exact same.
Thank you for reminding us of one of the few very optimistic things about the politics of the moment : racial depolarization. The US is facing very grave challenges to its domestic politics in the short term, but if it meets them successfully this welcome trend means the future may be bright.
Agreed. Frankly, if one of the "bad" outcomes is that more and more minority voters become Republicans, and as a result, the Republican party starts to worry about not being too racist, lest they alienate their minority bloc(s), so they, you know, start being less racist, this seems.... good for everyone?
It will be interesting to see how well the Republican party is able to "depolarize" racially given that white identity has become such an important part of its worldview and yet so many Latinos (and maybe in the future Asian Americans) are almost begging to join that coalition. Will the latter solve the puzzle by deciding they're white, or will whiteness become a less salient element of Republican thinking (e.g., eliminating all the Confederate imagery)?
I disagree. GOP might be the preferred home of the racist far right but it doesn’t follow that that’s an important constituency, despite the left’s efforts to brand the gop otherwise. Very few gop supporters consciously view themselves as racist and they had no problems supporting non white candidates (Ben Carson as you’d recall was the only one coming close to beating trump in the 2016 primaries). The gop certainly has strong anti democratic and authoritarian tendencies that are cause for serious concern, and it’s getting worse, but these are not racist even if racist dog whistles are used tactically in specific races. Non whites are already a growing percentage of gop voters and representatives at all levels and the trend will be sure to continue. The left wil do very well to stop telling itself ghost stories and face the real monsters that are no less disturbing.
I mean, come on. “Only candidate who came close” is pretty clear. To your point, no one came that close to Trump in the end, but in the early stages before everyone had dropped out Carson polled close and no one else.
"Will the latter solve the puzzle by deciding they're white"
That's has been happening for some time. E.g. from 2014: "More Hispanics Declaring Themselves White" [1] There have been other analyses along those lines. Pew has done some interesting surveys along similar lines (e.g. [2]). And FWIW, I'm pretty certain that European-decended Republicans will accept them.
Do Republicans even need to eliminate *all* Confederate imagery to pick up non-black votes? I'm pretty sure most Latino and Asian-American voters don't have that much more negative reactions to the appearance of the Confederate flag than most Anglo voters do.
That's a synecdoche for all the subtle and not so subtle centering of the white cause in America among Republicans. Like in, oh, any random five minutes of Tucker Carlson.
I want to pre-register my opinions about why Abrams is struggling to get the same share of the black vote as in 2018.
There is a fairly bitter divide between black women and low status black men. Marriage rates are low and illegitimacy is high. Many lower status black men are “on” child support for children they rarely see. The system tries to extract a portion of their income that country club Republicans would revolt at. Child support for three children in Georgia is ~45% of one’s income plus health care costs and work related child care costs. A person who makes $2500 a month can easily be on the hook for $1500 in child support. Try working full time and living on a grand a month and see how angry you become.
The system also polices single fathers’ private lives. If they want to exercise visitation, they often have to pee in a cup to prove they don’t smoke pot. The social workers and probation officers staffing this edifice of social control are often black women.
Higher status black men have the same reason to vote Republican as high status white men: lower taxes and fewer regulations. It’s unsurprising that 15-20% of black men will chose Kemp over Abrams. I do expect her to hold strong with black women.
How is that different since 2018 though? None of what you're describing are new developments, but you prefaced the comment by saying she wasn't getting the same vote share as in 2018. What happened in the last four years?
Your analysis also seems to ignore other factors that would be hugely important- liberal policies on marijuana laws, policies that would presumably support single mothers (thereby lessening the potential costs of child support), etc. etc. etc. What you point to is likely relevant to the discussion, but its a very narrow subset of issues that applies to a narrow subset of voters (how many voters are paying child support for 3 children while making $2,500 a month? How many of the individuals that you're referring to would be outraged by this and are both registered and actual voters? Etc. etc.). It's an interesting discussion to have, but I'm not sure it really gets over the hurdle necessary to say these issues are dispositive for why the race is somehow different than 2018, or that these issues are actually driving all that much actual voting behavior.
1. COVID happened. The biggest fans of coercive masking and distancing were female. Men were told to do sissy, risk averse things and shamed if they didn’t. Brian Kemp kept us free! That’s why I seriously considered voting for him, though I do plan on voting for Abrams.
2. Black female candidates have broken through in recent years. Harris is the most obvious example. What has she done for working stiffs?
In Henry County, where I practice law, every trial court judge had been a white male up until 2018. We now have three trial court judges who are black females. Clayton and Fulton county have black female district attorneys. In some ways, the system has become harsher on black men than the old lilly white courthouse gang. The proportion of domestic violence cases that are prosecuted as felonies rather than misdemeanors has exploded. The number of black men who go to prison for violence against blank women has exploded. Overall incarceration rates are flat. If black women are are more eager than their white predecessors to lock up black men, it’s perfectly rational for black men to look for other advocates, including but not limited to Brian Kemp.
Those are all different issues than you originally raised. But you’re now claiming black men will vote against black women because they’re upset about being prosecuted for domestic violence? How many men are we talking about being prosecuted? And how many men who aren’t committing domestic violence (which, one would hope and presume, is the overwhelming majority of men) are seeing domestic violence prosecutions go up and saying “we’ve got to put a stop to this!”
This sounds an awful lot like skewed thinking- you’re taking your personal experience and what you see and using it to explain things that seemingly have little (or literally nothing) to do with them.
There is a common thread between my original comment and my reply: the desire of black women to domesticate black men, and (some) black mens’ desire to avoid that. Remember, only about 1 in 15 black men will probably change their votes.
For sure. I think it's a pretty safe bet that Abrams will get a meaningfully higher % of the black female vote than black male. I'm just not sure the reasons you're giving will be able to explain the difference, or the drop off from 2018-2022 if she ends up with a statistically significant dip in BM votes between the two elections. Motives are tough to tease out, and a lot of the things you're discussing are things that have been issues for quite a while. COVID happened, and that seems to be the only point you've highlighted that actually could describe a meaningful change in voter behavior in the past 4 years.
I'm not sure if you're taking a position here or just describing, but it seems reasonable to me that child support would take 45% of income for 3 kids. I have fewer than 3 kids, but still spend at least 45% of my income on my family.
(The drug test for visitation is bad, but still, just don't smoke pot like the majority of parents?)
The details here might be extreme: I certainly disagree with the drug testing part, and maybe the precise amount of money here is punitive, I don't know. But in general, I'm pretty on board with vigorous child support laws.
I’m not commenting on whether child support laws are good policy. I’m saying they have the political effect of creating a lot of pissed off, low status men.
I'm very supportive of vigorous child support laws. But also recognize there is a big difference between being a father in the family with lots of say in how the money is spent, is spent with you doing things with your kids, and you get "thank you daddy" when you do something nice for your kids as opposed to someone whose wages are removed from their paycheck like a tax but gets none of those things.
That's fair, I'm quite open to tweaks from the status quo as appropriate. The goal should be maximizing the interest of the child, and it probably differs by each family. I could see that being equally involved parents in some cases, and in others, a clear custodial parent where the non-custodial parent's best primary contribution is financial.
If not, it’s hard to see why it would be relevant, and I think you’re just looking to explain why Black men are more conservative than Black women, and less likely to support female candidates than women. But I don’t think there’s likely to be a racially specific explanation for that, since we see it in most (all?) ethnic groups.
I also have some questions about both how real and how large this group is, but I don’t think that’s worth getting into since this doesn’t pass the first order sniff test as a driver of change.
Also worth considering what proportion of the Black male vote you think she’ll get this time if you think that will be the difference maker. She got 88% of Black men in 2018. 85% is only a couple of points off, probably within the margin of error, seems possible. 80% seems low.
I've written this before, but I find it fascinating that a political party dominated by rich, professional class, secular people wants millions of poor, working class, Catholics and Evangelicals to join their party, and assumes that these millions of people will vote for their same professional class, progressive priorities. Seems like the pinnacle of naivite.
Also, the 2008 and 2014 elections horribly scrambled the parties' brains. After 2008 both parties bought the "demographics is destiny" canard and after 2014 both parties bought the "Republicans can only win in low turnout elections" canard. So since then Democrats have been complacent, waiting for their ascension to eternal power, and Republicans have doing everything they can to keep turnout low. In reality 2008 was just a really bad year for incumbents (Republicans) because of the financial crisis and Democrats had an incredible politician that the media and Hollywood collectively orgasmed over, which gave Democrats large coattails. And in 2014, turnout was low, but it was also a really bad Senate map for Democrats. All those senators who were elected in the Obama blowout of 08 had to face re-election under much worse political conditions.
It seems to me that you could take your first paragraph, substitute the word "conservative" for "progressive" and it would apply equally well to the Republican as the Democratic party.
I know that most Latinos don't prioritize those two issues as much as many progressives think they do (or should!) but to the extent that Democrats highlight them, is that an actual negative for party support among Latinos?
It's certainly a negative among recent legal immigrants, but I doubt their numbers are large enough to make a major impact overall. The biggest negative impact is just the general vibes that working class, religious people feel from being looked down upon by the professional class and simultaneously being expected to vote for people who publically disapprove of their lifestyle.
The immigration thing is probably the most complicated and it breaks down over intra-Hispanic/Latino divisions. Like, Latino voters of Mexican origin are all usually for amnesty for well-established (10+ years in country) undocumented immigrants because of a perception that these people are Mexican (which, to be fair, they mostly are), but actively oppose liberalizing the asylum regime for new arrivals from Central and South America. (Source: Conversations with my future in-laws, who are of Mexican origin.)
I think you kind of hit the nail on the head that the emerging CW on this front is stuff that was obvious to anyone who has spent a significant amount of quality time (i.e., not interviewing them in a diner or whatever) with Latino folks here in the US.
I am a college-educated Caucasian guy in my late-30s, but the area I've lived since I was about 9 is heavily Latino, and mostly Mexican. It's basically been the entire social life for my siblings and I; most of my childhood was spent hanging out with first and second generation Mexican-Americans and their families, and nothing about that experience would lead a person to automatically assume that these voters are automatic "gimmes" for progressive candidates, and it was always weird to me when people in college acted like that would be the case.
I’m about your age and the 2nd/3rd generation Mexican families I grew up with were very conservative Catholics that, more often than not, really didn’t like recent Mexican immigrants. You could probably get them to vote Democratic for $$$ reason but the second you start talking about abortion or immigration, you’re going to lose them.
My experience is that there is kind of a divide between first generation folks and their kids. Most of my friends parents are pretty fine with immigration, but are very hardline on crime and especially abortion, for sure. My second-generation friends are, in my experience, kind of personally squeamish on the idea of abortion, but think it should be legal.
As an example, a 17-year-old young lady I know was pregnant with her second child. She comes from a family where having children while in high school is, unfortunately, kind of the norm. The idea of having an abortion was not something discussed openly in polite company (read: folks her parent's age/generation) but the idea was definitely whispered around amongst her brothers and sisters as a viable option, and all of these folks were raised extremely Catholic.
The biggest political divide is not skin color, it’s whether your ancestors came here voluntarily or in chains. Any voluntary immigrant would, tautologically, rather be subject to American institutions than those of their native land. If you thought the US were irredeemably anti-Latino, you would be very reluctant to come here.
Conversely, the black institutions that evolved during segregation incorporate a racialized world view. Black elites, be they politicians, lawyers, or ministers, draw their status from being near the top of a racialized hierarchy. This system won’t last forever. There are now quite a few black college grads who haven’t made it into the black elite and have the education and strength of mind to question how well their professional betters are serving the black community.
There's also, of course, an increasing population of voluntary black immigrants from the West Indies and Africa, whom data suggests so far have a largely similar experience to other immigrants. Those populations are still small enough (and often recent enough immigrants to not be citizens) to not have too much political effect, but I suspect that over the next 50 to 100 years that's going to start complicating the the black political narrative.
I have had a number of West African clients, there’s a significant community of them in southern metro Atlanta. One does not get from West Africa to the US in the 21st century by being average. They are classic strivers and usually very intelligent. Also pretty socially conservative. I doubt they will be a solid D voting block.
Obviously Republicans bear the moral blame for the growing Republican contempt for representative democracy, but I think a lot of it is driven by fear that the "emerging Democratic majority"; the flip side of Democratic complacency. If Republicans understand that Hispanic votes are up for grabs and demographics does not equal destiny, it may help cool some of the right's distaste for representative government. (here's hoping!)
It also strikes me as odd when Democrats criticize whatever they think "replacement theory" is. I'm sure there are awful versions of it out there, but the Tucker Carlson version sounds almost exactly like "emerging Democratic majority" but with a negative, instead of a positive spin. Although the Tucker version might be called more xenophobic, it's also less racist since it seems to be more about immigrants than ethnicity like the Dem theory.
This was always a stupid and dangerous line of political argument. You can’t argue, “the immigrants will all vote D,” and then expect Rs to favor immigration. You’ve just said it’s against their political self-interest!
C'mon man, this is such an "well acktually" kind of criticism. The substance of the argument doesn't require that a native born GOP voter dies every time an immigrant naturalizes or has a child. It just means that the new population gradually replaces the old population, over time.
As an example, there used to be a bunch of Dutch settlers in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley, but over time they were replaced by incoming waves of immigrants and other colonial populations with higher birthrates. Now there are very few people with any Dutch ancestry in the area. Colloquially, they've been replaced. It's very pedantic to disagree on the grounds you're using.
"But Abrams has the misfortunate of needing to run against a pretty strong opponent. . . "
It was not misfortune; it was a choice. Abrams could have run for Senate in 2020 (and many begged her to do so) but refused and instead chose to run against a fairly strong Republican incumbent for governor in a year where history screamed that Democrats would be at a disadvantage. So she will lose and will deservedly become a footnote in Democratic politics. She could have been a contender but refused to do so.
I like her; she's very smart; and from most accounts has done a great job with voter registration and mobilization. But the bottom line in politics is winning elections and there, for whatever reason, she dropped the ball.
my half baked theory is that the talk about the "coalition of the ascendent" w.r.t. hispanic immigration and obama made immigration reform impossible for decades
You are correct. You can’t tell everyone that immigrants will vote Dem and then scratch your head at GOP opposition to immigration. Why would they support something that’s against their political self-interest? Same thing applies to Puerto Rican and DC statehood. There are strong principled arguments why statehood is appropriate. But if Dems are going to explicitly make the case that it will politically benefit them, they can’t blame Republicans for objecting.
I think you are right, but only because Republicans bought the "demographics is destiny" canard too, which is quite astounding if you think about it. Most Republicans believe that Democrats' only goal in immigration reform is to gain millions of new, loyal voters. And let's be honest, this is the actual goal of many Democrats. So why would Republicans sign their political death warrant?
Now that more Latinos are moving into the Republican column, should we see a change in the Republican position? (And, heck, maybe in the Democratic position as well?)
My fantasy is a 50/50 Latino vote split leads to both parties agreeing to let the illegals living in the shadows come out have a decent and legalized life.
Well if Latinos were to become become split 50/50 then Democrats would need to pickup a bunch of votes from other groups to remain competitive at the national level.
I don't think we'll see any change on the illegal immigration side of things, because conservatives are almost inherently going to oppose that from a sovereignty/control perspective.
But hopefully it mellows the hostility to legal immigration some.
This piece gets in another way at something I have been thinking about since listening to Bad Takes yesterday. I tend to find Matt's argument about the need for candidates to distinguish themselves, move to the center, go for persuasion, etc. compelling. I tend to think he's right.
But you can't talk about the Obama years without reminding yourself that we DID have a group of Dems who prominently tried to tack to the center and distinguish themselves from the party, particularly on the highest profile issue of all: health care. And they uniformly got wiped out in the next election.
You can find a lot of versions of that story. Testor was a great candidate who really overperformed by tacking to the center. He lost. Seems likely that the same thing will happen in Ohio this year. As Matt often points out, Donald Trump moderated the GOP's positions on stuff like social spending in 2016. But Trump barely won in a squeaker against the most unpopular candidate in history, and then lost his next election. There are races that go the other way, but the overall story leads me to wonder if this is just the classic case where the road to winning is actually pretty narrow, and politics is difficult, and the moderation strategy is really not as good as advertised. Situationally useful, but just that.
Like I said, I'm not sure; I tend to find Matt's analysis compelling. But I remember feeling like the clear takeaway from several of the big fights in the Obama years was that the moderates in the Democratic both made the legislative politics ugly (drawn out fights, no public option, etc.), had nothing to show for it at the end, and might even--through the ugliness--have contributed to the public backlash and GOP gains. A lot of folks walked away with a "hang together or hang separately" analysis.
If/when Tim Ryan loses, it won’t be because he tacked center. It will be because too many Ohioans have turned against the entire party. I saw this feature on WaPo the other day where they interviewed people at NFL games about who they’re voting for, a guy said he voted for Biden but was now voting Vance even though he doesn’t really like him, actually likes Ryan a lot, but just doesn’t trust the Dems to hold power in Congress.
My takeaway from the "ask the voters" pieces is that most people have really weird reasons when choosing who to vote for, and it's something that smart and politically knowledgeable people really struggle with understanding.
These "ask the voters" pieces are actually worse than you think. Yes you are correct that one problem with these pieces is that voters often have very idiosyncratic reasons why they vote the way they do which are often not applicable to the electorate at large. But there are bigger problems.
One is selection bias. What I mean is that in many cases the reporter has likely spoken to a number of voters and chosen to include the most interesting" one. What I mean is, the "I voted for Biden, but now I'm voting for J.D. Vance" voter is way way more likely to be put into an article than "I'm voting for J.D. Vance because I'm a Republican and I usually vote Republican" even though the latter is the much much more typical voter.
But the second issue is much worse. Reporters making it seems like they are talking to some random regular person they stopped on the street, when in fact the person in question is often an activist, head of political organization or in some cases connected to the GOP or Democratic Party. Selena Zito is probably the most famous and egregious of these cases (see https://www.huffpost.com/entry/columnist-salena-zito-trump-swing-voters_n_5b8581afe4b0162f471cf3ac), but I have to tell you, she's far from the only one who does stuff like this. I'm telling you, go read an article and look up some the names of "random" voters that reporters talk to and you'll discover how often they aren't so random. There's a reason NYtimespitchbot has as running gag on twitter "I was a lifelong Democrat, but then Joe Biden said...".
I'm reminded of the time the NYT published a piece interviewing a bunch of supposedly random suburban Atlanta voters of which one was actually the President of the Atlanta Young Republicans and would go on to run for Congress as a Republican this year:
Someday someone will (or maybe already has, and I'm just not aware of it) analyze voter choices through Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory, because I'm genuinely more and more convinced that it explains a lot about voter behavior and especially less educated voters' behavior.
Jaynes' theory was that humans before the late Bronze Age were not "conscious" in the way modern humans are. They were obviously *sapient*, but they lacked what might be better described as "narrative consciousness" or "conscious interiority" -- they did not have the same ability to consciously play out, theorize, self-interrogate, etc. that we take for granted.
Jaynes attributed this to lack of integration between the right and left hemispheres of the brain and believed that humans of this era perceived their own thoughts generated in the so-called "silent" right brain ("silent" in that even though the structure of the human brain is symmetrical, language functions are overwhelmingly concentrated in the left brain) as external voices, visions, etc. Effectively, when ancient people (and for that matter people living in Neolithic societies quite recently) talked about the gods, ancestors, spirits, etc. speaking to them, they weren't being figurative -- they were 100% correct in that they were "hearing" *something*, but the something was their own right hemispheric thoughts.
Jaynes described the foregoing as the "bicameral mind." He then further hypothesized that the Bronze Age "collapse" of the 12th Century BC was the result of the bicameral mind breaking down in civilizations of the Mediterranean and Middle East due to a combination of increased population and the influence of increased literacy. Then over the next several centuries human consciousness was reordered into the "unicameral consciousness" form that dominates today.
Jaynes' interest in this theory was not primarily political (his main testable hypothesis is actually about various psychiatric disorders, especially schizophrenia, being the product of incomplete integration of left/right consciousness). However, there's facially a strong *historical* political implication in it: the bicameral mind explains the ancient "god-kings" and a bunch of other Neolithic and Bronze Age socio-political phenomena that faded post-Bronze Age collapse (e.g., deliberate human sacrifice).
Where some people take this, and what I was alluding to in my comment, is that the bicameral mind is not as long-dead as one might suppose. Jaynes himself viewed it as mostly disappearing by the late Axial Age outside of people who were identifiable as mentally ill. But what if it has persisted, albeit in a reduced way, among a large part of humanity -- people operating on a day-to-day basis largely deferring to this "unconscious" right-hemispheric guidance that they don't really interrogate? The modern political implications of this is that some, possibly electorally significant, part of the population approaches politics in the way an ancient Sumerian would have had they suddenly been asked to decide who should rule their city-state: they would focus on the most immediate question of material conditions without consideration of whether there were longer-term implications because, in the absence of narrative consciousness, they wouldn't be able to understand the "big picture."
Matt actually in the last few months, presumably inadvertently, touched on this concept when he joked in a tweet about Biden's approval going up in response to falling gas prices using language that sounded like he was speaking about a Mesopotamian god-king (something like "Dark Brandon hath delivered a bounteous harvest of regular unleaded and it was good," or something like that). But I genuinely think there's something there that's worth exploring and trying to understand. For further context, I actually started to think about this before ever reading Jaynes' writings based on a couple of years post-college that I spent working in an office where I and the manager were the only people with bachelor degrees and most of the other staff were high school grads -- any sort of discussion about current events was absolutely horrifying in terms of the sheer lack of understanding about politics and economics and made clear to me that for probably a lot of people the President is functionally a semi-divine figure with near omnipotent power over the economy, legislation, social ills, etc.
So where were these “bicameral mind” folks 50 years ago? Or 30 years ago? The main thing that’s changed is communication technology. We have the same minds but are confronted with suddenly hearing from so many more outside sources—unless the idea is that psychosis is becoming normalized because people get to share their crazy thoughts online? Responding to rising and falling prices (or employment/unemployment) is nothing new, there is a wealth of historical data showing how US elections track economic indicators. The only way this “bicameral mind” thing seems relevant is if it has to do with the rise of paranoia, for example the notion that politicians are not merely dishonest (as always) but actively conspiring to our lives miserable in service of some powerful cabal.
I doubt many scholars take Jaynes' theory seriously these days but if they do, given the huge advances in paleo-genetic research, it would be interesting to find out if there's any DNA-based evidence for Jaynes' claim.
I completely understand where this guy is coming from. As someone who votes pretty uniformly Democratic, it really takes a truly incompetent and genuinely awful candidate to get me to look at the Republican. The status of who chairs congressional committees, or can veto legislation, and or who can simply bring legislation to the floor is really too important to me. The only real exceptions are local elections, where most problems lack clear ideological framing and are limited in scope, and state level executive positions like attorneys general or secretaries of state, where I can trust the party won't have much influence over them. It would be nice if we had some sort of party-slate system like the German Bundestag does to get around this, but that's obviously never happening.
This is depressing to me, because it essentially means that the only vote that most people care about is the first vote - who should be majority leader/speaker. This is entirely true in the house since they have consolidated almost complete control in the speakers hands and absolutely nothing happens without her doing it. Then we wonder why candidate quality has dropped...
I would argue the PPACA (Obamacare) was only moderate when compared to other, more progressive policies. Relative to the status quo ante, it was a very progressive change. It fundamentally altered the way health care (~17% of the economy at the time) was paid for and delivered. It changed a system that had been resisting change for decades. Could it have gone further? Of course. But it was a big deal. Take the W!
some might even say "A big f***ing deal", right? :)
It also doesn't fit the bill of centrist IMHO because most people have insurance coverage through their job, Medicare, or Tricare, and did not perceive a need (or get a noticeable result) from the legislation.
A fun counterfactual - maybe Matt could take a swing some day - would be if Congress had just passed a simple Medicaid expansion bill. I mean, don't we acknowledge that was the bulk of the heavy lifting (re increased coverage) from the ACA in the end?
People tend to be down on the exchanges (not Matt though!) for not leading to a revolution in American healthcare, but there were so many things in the ACA, beyond Medicaid expansion that Americans rightly value: keeping kids on family plans until 26, community ratings (can't be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions), 80% minimum payout rate, and who knows maybe even someday electronic health records.
I'm very glad the Democrats didn't just pass a Medicaid expansion bill.
But the insurance industry needed the promise of an increased customer base to agree to reform. And just because most middle class people were insured (a great many of them retired or disabled on Medicare) didn’t mean there wasn’t a need for reform—employer-based insurance was getting more expensive and less complete all the time. A large reason why Medicaid expansion was such a large part was that we were in a prolonged recession and a lot of working people fell below the poverty line. Medicaid expansion that covered non-poor people whose medical needs precluded private insurance would have been impossibly expensive.
I'm not saying PPACA was a loss; I think it's a bill that did a lot of good things and also did not work out as envisioned, which is itself pretty interesting.
But I'm saying that the evidence on the ground for Matt's thesis about how Dems could win more seems to me to be at least a little thin, or maybe that there is also other evidence out there that it appears to me might weigh against his claims. Like I said, I'm of two minds about this. Partly that's because I'm a GOP -> Dem voter over my lifetime with a basket of positions that in some ways is pretty moderate / normie. So of course I find Matt's logic compelling.
But when I think about it a lot, I can't help but notice that I feel like a lot of evidence might pull the other way. Not for sure, but it looks like less of a slam dunk the more I think about my own political experiences and the political moves and outcomes I have seen over my own voting life. And the fact that so many people yearn for "moderates" or "centrists" when you talk to them also raises a red flag for me, in the sense that people often claim they want one thing that is seen as socially desirable, but their behavior does not actually reflect that belief. I'm probably jaundiced in this partly because of being a minister's son. But people's stated preferences are not always a great guide to their behavior.
The members with the toughest districts are going to tend to have sharper messages than members who have safe seats. And yet it’s going to be the tough district members that lose most often. Does this mean their messages were actually bad?
Edit: and I should add the bill was always no public option etc etc etc, just as fair to say progs made it a drawn out fight and gained nothing in the end. It was played out for left leaning audiences as ‘oh these few mods are stopping x y z’ while in actuality the moderate plan had been agreed upon long before.
I absolutely agree that the drawn out nature of the internal Democratic fight was a big political own goal. Similar with the Build Back Better negotiations, where they could have taken Manchin's July 2021 deal and been better off.
here’s where corruption charges from the left and discussion of political messaging from moderates combines to obscure the truth that folks like Baucus, Manchin, etc have real views (or their close community does) and as pivotal members are just going to fight for something close to their vision no matter what because it’s theirs and they have the power.
Argh! You're right. This is why I shouldn't write stuff on the way out the door at 7 am. Who am I thinking of? Moderate Dem ran a good campaign, outperformed the partisan lean, but still lost in the last election?
Steve Bullock. Montana's partisan lean is like +20, per 538, and Bullock, who had won the governorship twice, lost by ten points. Which means he ran a great campaign! He really did better than you would expect! And he lost.
OTOH, Tester's continued presence (sorry, Jon!) could be your evidence the other way. (Another obvious one from the same election might be Susan Collins.) As I said at the top, I'm not really strongly committed either way on this analysis. My inclination is to think Matt is right, but I feel like there's some pretty solid evidence that goes the other way, which makes me wonder if it is more situational and messy.
I think a lot of this was that the centrists tended to pick the wrong fights? They focused on stuff like the War on Terror or the size of the deficit, which aren't really part of "normie" centrism.
It's sort of like Sinema defending the carried interest thing.
Yeah, I don't know what is behind the tendency of "centrist" Democrats in Congress to have pro-corporate and pro-austerity views, but I think that has done a lot to discredit centrism among rank-and-file Democratic voters. I've often heard progressives refer to centrist Democrats as "corporate Democrats", and use that as a rhetorical bludgeon against centrism in general. If you're a "normie" liberal who wants to think of yourself as progressive, would you want to be associated with that? I think this helps explain the party's drift to the left over the past decade.
The centrists sho got wiped out lost because they were in R leaning states and districts. Tester would have lost by more if he had been a normal Democrat
I think the politics is hard piece is true, but these kinds of tidal wipeouts that occurred after passage of the ACA are just part of our system. It's easy to forget that leading to passage the Democrats had a 60 vote majority in the Senate until the last moment when Ted Kennedy died, plus a significant majority in the house which of course included a lot of marginal and toss up districts that were highly vulnerable. But a mere 6 years before that at the height of the war on terrorism all of the punditocracy was about the permanent Republican majority being established. That of course gave way to a Democratic trifecta in 2008.
This comment actually does remind me that while I think Matt is right to say that too many Democrats bought into the coalition of the ascendant theory and are probably leaning too far left and losing some winnable seats, I do want to defend the Progressive side of the Democratic party here by taking our minds back to 2008-2009. The fact that there were many more centrist Democrats in 2009 does NOT mean these same Democrats were actually following a "popularist" strategy. A lot of their centrism really was stuff like deregulation and being probably too friendly to business interests. That centrism also manifested itself into stuff like helping the make the Stimulus smaller than it should have been just so you could get approval of Fred Hiatt and David Brooks. Or Joe Liberman nuking the "public option" just to show he was centrist and "independent" (and just a big F U to Obama to be frank).
If there is one part the Progessive side did get right (and I think Matt would be included in this is) it's that those Centrists Democrats would have been much better off voting for more stimulus and more measures to help the economy; a better economy would have done more to lessen losses in 2010 than anything else.
"Voting for more measures to help PEOPLE COPING WITH with the economy" such as reforming unemployment insurance to a) tie it to lost income and b) make eligibility depend on the state of the economy, not some arbitrary date on the calendar. Grants in aid to States and cities should have been tied to indicators of need like the decline in tax revenues.
I suspect Matt might be the first to tell you that the biggest reason for the 2010 midterm wipeout is A) unemployment was close to 10%, B) the usual reason that the "out" party gains in midterms c) the 2008 election was so overwhelming for Democrats that they were defending a large number of marginal seats in what were ultimately pretty red districts or states (Obama won Indiana for example (?!?)). People cite ACA or Democrats not doing "enough", but whatever damage ACA did to Democrats electoral prospects was dwarfed by the three reasons above.
But, like in this year's election, it's so much more fun to discuss Democrats' "missteps" or "bad messaging" than to try to say something interesting day after day about what is basically just a structural issue: midterms are typically bad for the incumbent party.
Just to add it's critical to remember those big Democratic majorities were themselves in place, largely as a rebuke to Republicans on the situation in Iraq and the then in progress financial catastrophe.
I think this is something that Matt has talked about several times, including his podcast with Ezra Klein recently. In 2008, Democrats were elected with a large majority as a significant rebuke to Republicans, but used that to pass some MAJOR changes which then led to massive blow-back on them. Biden has done less (with much smaller majorities), but had Progressives been able to do everything they wanted in the last two years, Democrats would probably get wiped out here.
A major difference between the two parties is that when Democrats grab a temporary majority they accomplish (imo) amazing things -- ACA, IRA, etc -- and those then get embedded in our system. When the Republicans grab a temporary majority, they pass tenuous tax cuts for rich people and corporations and do lots of lib trolling investigations but pretty much nothing else.
Even if we lose Congress this year, I'll be very happy about so many things Biden and the Democrats got passed in their two years.
One could also see the 2010 wipeout as coming from the Democrats failing to do much that addressed the immediate need of people, i.e. something to get people back in work and getting an income (and staying in their homes). The stock market recovered pretty miraculously, the labor market not so much. Health Care reform was mainly objectionable for not being the main thing people most people needed.
I hate to say it, but Republicans found a villain in 2010, and Democrats didn’t. People wanted someone held accountable for 2008. If Obama had done a little going after “fat cats” I think it would’ve made a difference.
Bailing out those responsible, then they give themselves bonuses? Didn’t sit well.
THAT was Bernanke's fault, just like the inflation anchor is Powell's fault.
Democrats have to accept that what they do or do not do will have no influence of macroeconomic aggregates. Obama should have been praising Bernanke for QE and (hint, hint) suggesting that there could have been lot more of it. He could have very publicly defended the Fed from the idiots denouncing the Fed for "debasing the currency." And Biden should have been "expressing total confidence" that the FED would make sure that inflation WAS temporary. ARA should have been designed and more importantly SOLD as relief to people suffering from the COVID recession. Differences of opinion about who should get the relief and how much were inevitable; how nyc "stimulus" the economy needed were not.
Back when I was a communist and hung out with lots of radicals there was this view that anti-Black racism was distinctive and unique and much worse than racism against other groups in that Black culture was seen a thing to be wiped out and destroyed and 'good' Black people were the ones who were basically not culturally Black. I think that probably left the lefty conversation as generic anti-racist politics started its rise. I did not like this view at the time, but I have come around to it. Black voters have supported Democrats for so long not because of specific policy issues that benefit Black voters, nor because Black voters think Democrats aren't racist (many Black dems think white dems ARE racist), but because the Democrats have been allies of Black self-empowerment and institutional development. This relies on the variety of Black institutions you mention, which are now sadly weakening. The Democrats and Black institutions had a mutually beneficial relationship where the unique character of Black civil society was preserved and assimilation was *not* the objective. Anti-black racism required this strategy, because mainstream institutions could not be trusted.
When Dems tried to set up parallel political institutions to cater to Hispanic voters they just recreated white institutions that are built around the narrow values of affluent college-educated whites and handed a bunch of power to young Hispanic people who are the most similar to young white people. You could critique this and say well, they should have made more Catholic institutions or etc. But the reality is, the goal for Hispanic voters is (mostly, obviously this isn't monolithic) to gain representation and power within the white-dominated mainstream civil society, not to construct a parallel one, because they don't really need a parallel one.
Great summary. If you go to little Texas towns, you will find roughly the same cultural markers in mostly Hispanic ones as you do with most white ones - lots full of deer blinds, gun shops, churches (though different denominations, to be sure) and really conspicuous references to law enforcement. I've been rolling my eyes somewhat at predictions of a blue Texas and I wish more people would truly explore the state. If you go to an HEB in, say, Lockhart you will find a mix of black, brown and white people and not as much cultural diversity among them than you might expect.
My anecdotal experience is that Hispanics are following the same path as past waves of Catholic immigrants. I come from a large-ish family originating in those waves in the late 19th and early 20th century. In the last 10-12 years we have incorporated some Hispanic (mostly Salvadoran) limbs. The other families I know like mine are also experiencing this, with so and so's sister or brother or cousin marrying a 2nd generation Hispanic. Based on this trajectory I think in a couple decades thinking about Hispanics as an insular minority will be as outdated as the doing the same with Irish or Italians. Sure people will be proud of their heritage (which will be more and more mixed) and there will be a few cultural hand me downs but it won't be a major factor in how people vote.
And all of this is a good thing. It's the path from starting out in a Democratic machine when people arrive to becoming fully assimilated, individualistic Americans. Democratic strategy should be forward looking about this process, instead of doing the ethnic-identitarian pigeonholing.
In the safety of anonymous comments - totally agree, and I often say privately that Mexicans are the new Italians.
I especially like to say this because I am in the Northeastern US and encounter a surprising number of mildly racist Italian-Americans. Which is hilarious, from a historical perspective! ITALIANS policing whiteness - what a future we live in.
Agreed, and I also generally keep my thoughts on this to myself and/or anonymous discussion. There's a certain ickiness, like you're scratching the surface of some kind of quack race pseudoscience from the 1800s even though that's not remotely the intent.
But anyway, my cousin who I am close with married a 2nd generation Salvadoran and they have 3 children. Those children are all growing up speaking English in a middle class exurb. I would never in a million years presume to know how they will identify in adulthood personally or politically. However, to the larger point, it's really hard for me to imagine that it will be within these increasingly dated late 20th century categories and assumptions.
This thread makes me proud to be an American, frankly.
Why is it hilarious? You think blacks can’t be racist ? Anyone can be racist, it’s human nature. Not according to the unhelpful attempt to redefine the term of course but according to the useful old definition that we all understand perfectly well.
Agree anyone can be racist. The hilarity is being confused about whether you are part of the in-group. It's why Chappelle's "Clayton Bigsby" character was hilarious, for example! Same thing here.
The greatest Chappelle show segment!
Having recently moved to NYC it’s striking how literally true this can seem when you see how many Latinos are working at Italian restaurants.
Anthony Bourdain always maintained Latinos basically ARE the US restaurant sector. The whole damn industry would collapse without them.
To be fair, at least in the Denver metro area, the kitchen staff of many Asian restaurants is majority Latino and I'm doubtful they are assimilating to Asianness.
Bah, that's old hat. Latinos have been cooking in Vietnamese and Korean restaurants for years now.
I'm gonna guess the Italian immigrants were generally pretty racist at the time they came as well.
Based on what, exactly? Of course American society was absolutely racist in regard to the divide between whites and blacks at the time, pretty complete segregation, so there were probably places that Italians could go that blacks couldn’t, but there were an awful lot of places where Italians were not accepted. Basically they did the many of the same low-paid labor jobs Latinos occupy today, they were suspected of being criminals and anarchists and suffered at the hands of law enforcement. There was a long-standing notion that the reason southern Italians had darker skin and curly hair was that they had African ancestry from when Hannibal invaded Italy in ancient times.
My family immigrated from Southern Italy to California in the early 1900's to pick fruit. They squeaked in right before immigration from Italy was banned based on the reasoning that they are unsophisticated knuckle-draggers who could never properly integrate into society. (This kind of language was used on the floor of the Senate; they created a legal test based on characteristics like hairlines and skin color to determine how "Southern" a European was and if they could be admitted.)
Needless to say, my grandparents faced a ton of racism and, like many Italians at the time, anglicized their names, dropped their accents and tried their best to hide their ethnicity. When they had kids, they forbade speaking Italian at home. Post civil-rights era, a lot if Italian-Americans got back to their roots; so many had immigrated to California that they started having pride parades broken out by province. But for decades, they kept all the ethnic (and Catholic) stuff private and made their children ashamed of their culture.
My grandpa was very much of the "look at what American did for us, what a great country" mindset. Later, "poor people must be lazy because we got where we are by working hard in the Land of Opportunity." Then "we came here legally, why can't the Mexicans do the same?" Finally, "poor people are all minorities, so minorities are lazy." He (like so many of his friends and other members of my family) became a staunch Republican and tossed around racial slurs so casually that it became embarrassing to go out in public with him. I watched this evolution take place.
My family history very much informs my views about immigrants and the absurdity of expecting "Latinos" or "Asians" to vote as a pro-immigrant woke progressive bloc.
My ancestors migrated around the same time to NE PA to mine coal, and then work in factories in Trenton, NJ by WWII. Got a similar arc in my grandparents generation as well.
When you look at the political figures today who are a Italian, sure we have Nancy Pelosi but I think Doug Mastriano is more typical of your average Italian American’s worldview, among the boomer-age folks know in my east coast Italian family.
Yes, but if you lump everyone with an Italian surname into "Italian-American" you'll just get a cross-section of random white people. Personally, I still know my family in Italy and grew up with a lot of 'cousins' visiting from abroad. I even got my Italian passport. But a lot of people picked up the surname many generations back and have no connection to Italian culture and a lot of people lost their name via marriage or anglicized it.
My point, if I have one, is that the immigrant arc is more important than racial/ethnic identity. Matt is quite right that Democrats looked at Latino voters and assumed they would behave identically to Black voters. But as many people have pointed out, "Latino" is about as useful a descriptor as European and that they are mostly just acting like any other immigrant population. Someone like Mastriano isn't a right-wing nut because of his Italian identity, just as Ted Cruz isn't a right-wing nut because of his Hispanic identity.
Italy is still a very racist country today, let alone during the waves of Italian immigration. Ask Asian and Black people about their experiences travelling there.
Oh Italians were certainly discriminated against, but few of those white ethnics are famous for their diverse tolerance of other groups. The fact Italians were discriminated against doesn't mean they themselves are tolerant, if anything it's the inverse.
Asians are also famously intolerant of blacks—but maybe that’s just the first thing they learn upon reaching American shores, same as the European immigrants in early 20th century did? Actually Koreans/Japanese probably didn’t even have to come here, they may have picked it up from GIs after WWII and Korean war.
No, Asians in Asia are also extremely racist against black people. They are also racist against each other. It’s hard to convey to white people what “just between us Asians” conversations sometimes sound like.
White people have this internalized Christian view that “god made us all in his image.” When they see disparity, they believe in their hearts that it must result from external circumstances. By contrast, Asian cultures, in both south and east Asia, are steeped in “just world” beliefs. They see disparity mainly in terms of personal or group failings. They also believe strongly in merit and virtue being hereditary, hence the focus in marrying someone “from a good family.”
This manifests to white people as “racism” though it’s actually somewhat distinct. Bangladeshis are likely to blame poverty in Africa on Africans. But they’re also likely to blame poverty in Bangladesh in Bangladeshis. By contrast racist Appalachians don’t blame their poverty on themselves.
Asians in Asia aren't particularly known for their love of each other, in particular itinerant Chinese not in China. I doubt they had to do all that much learning.
That was one of those films I didn't expect to like, but caught it on a long flight, and thought it was pretty entertaining.
It was a very enjoyable movie which suffered the reputation-destroying injury of winning the Oscar for best picture, unfortunately.
I kind of assumed that everyone in this conversation would be familiar with the famous Dennis Hopper/Christopher Walken scene in True Romance, but perhaps not. Warning to the uninitiated, “problematic” to say the least.
Maybe, although I'm pretty sure they faced a shit-ton of anti-Italian prejudice. This could be something of an urban legend, but I've always understood (to cite one crazy example) that, in Boston area Catholic parishes, Italians were sometimes required to attend Mass in the basement chapel. They were forbidden from worshipping upstairs, with the Irish who had arrived some decades prior.
Yep. In Philly there weren't enough Irish to force such outcomes, but my ancestors were still unwelcomed enough that they either built or demographically overran already-extant parishes and turned them into Italian Catholic churches, often coexisting with the Irish Catholic church two blocks away. And then the Polish wave in the 1900-1920 period added Polish Catholic parishes.
On top of the preexisting British-Scottish-Scots Irish-German divides that gave us 1 Anglican, 1 Presbyterian, 1 Lutheran, 1 Baptist, 1 Methodist, and 1 Quaker church every six blocks.
In my experience, Philly has even more churches per capita than Boston or NYC.
And I'm sure the Italians just loved the Irish. Especially when the Irish were the police and running political machines.
A town near where I grew up in New Jersey, less than a square mile, had two volunteer fire stations because the Italians and Irish couldn’t get along long enough to share. They somehow managed with only one Catholic Church though, and a lot of the folks my age were half Italian, half Irish.
"a lot of the folks my age were half Italian, half Irish."
This is causes a lot of conflict to start, but resolves a lot of conflict in the end.
In America the one ethnic stereotype that's always allowed is that any particular ethnic group is overwhelming racist!
generally agree with but to play devil’s advocate, the social context of the 21st century is a lot of different:
* because of social progress over the last century, there’s less of a need to assimilate into whiteness.
* we had an immigration moratorium in the middle of the 20th century which also saw american ethnic culture calcify as the older immigrant generation died off. there continues to be a steady trickle of latino immigration into the us, and it’s not crazy to think we’ll see more if bad things happen in latin america. (i think this most shows itself in the fact that we’re like 70 years into there being a major puerto rican population in a lot of northern us cities and most of them still have a distinct puerto rican vote.)
* modern communication technology makes it easier to keep in contact with culture of the motherland. the booming popularity of latin music is probably the best manifestation of this, but you see this in other places too.
* also not really pc i guess, but a lot of hispanics can’t pass as white
I agree with your bottom line, and I wonder if left wing resistance to it stems from some sort of innate cosmopolitan preference for being around people of different experiences. Which if true, seems straightforward to address: just keep bringing more immigrants in, and let the later generations assimilate as they wish.
Economic trends back this up. Raj Chetty’s research shows that Hispanics and whites have similar economic mobility, and Hispanic immigrants get near parity with non-Hispanic whites within a couple of generations. That’s similar to the trajectories we saw with Italian and Irish immigrants.
By contrast, black-white income gaps haven’t narrowed at all since 1950.
Ha, you described exactly what my Dutch/English/Irish-descended self is doing - marrying an amazing, brilliant, and beautiful second generation Colombian woman. I can't even imagine what our kids' sense of identity will be, although I hope it includes some honoring of the traditions that our parents came out of.
I agree with you wholeheartedly but you are also stating why the demographics as destiny argument is and was so appealing. This diagnosis basically says we diverged from Europe on some elements of the state long ago for valid reasons, those reasons continue to be true and replicate themselves, and every year that passes we are more locked into our path. It’s a bit of a funeral for most of left liberal politics
As a recovering addict myself, I feel confident in asserting that Dems continue to be addicted to the high of moral superiority that comes with feeling confident your political opponents are drowning in their own racism. This creates a major blind spot where the only reason for supporting an R policy/opposing a D one is due to one’s racism/white supremacy. Of course this leaves one shocked if one goes to the effort of learning why a Latino voter might be uneasy with talk of open borders. What’s fascinating is that, when you look by racial group, Pew shows each group considers their racial identity to be of hugely different importance to their sense of self. Black people, and by extent Black voters, center their own “blackness” in their self-perception to a greater extent than do Latinos their Latinoness and a MUCH greater extent than whites. (Whites of all political backgrounds tend to have a taboo against building a sense of identity in their whiteness, for excellent reasons!!). It is perfectly logical that the more you center your racial identity in your sense of self, the more you see the actions of others through that lens.
"It is perfectly logical that the more you center your racial identity in your sense of self, the more you see the actions of others through that lens."
"Whites of all political backgrounds tend to have a taboo against building a sense of identity in their whiteness, for excellent reasons!!"
This would seem to be at odds with the large numbers of white progressives seeing the actions of others through a racial lens, no?
Yeah- whites actually do have two, diverging flavors of racial identity- self-declared “good white people” who differentiate themselves from the racist, bigoted heathens, and self-declared “real Americans” who differentiate themselves from the Godless, traitorous heathens. And those identities absolutely inform a self-confirming worldview. But it’s important to note that neither subgroup takes pride in just being “white.”
Right on the nose.
I feel like I am on "Team Slow Boring," where we clearly see everyone else's flaws and are, ourselves, flawless. 💅
Have felt this way for a long time and its only intensified since Trump was elected.
It used to be a running joke between my wife and I that we were too "city" for the suburbs because we hated driving and Applebee's and liked public transit and walking, but too "suburban" for the urban affluent liberal set since we like watching domestic sports and own a big screen TV and eschew Whole Foods.
It's gotten more acute between the "wear masks everywhere forever, defund police, enforce no social norms or look to achieve any progress in the name of equity" urban set and the "gotta drive my F-250 with 3 concealed guns on me at all times in case MS-13 and/or antifa attacks the costco" exurban set.
With the internet flattening any regional deviations on politics, it can feel like this is a position without a home, except for in the comments of a center-left political blog.
Chilis > Ruby Tuesdays > Fridays > Applebees > getting hit by a bus > Olive Garden.
And really I should update my priors since all of the above are mostly down-market chains for small cities and the far exurbs. The suburbanites eat at Cheesecake Factory and PF Changs and their similar ilk, all of which feature food that goes from "fine" to "actually pretty good"
Applebees FTW, especially before the pandemic when they did the dollar drink of the month.
I'd say that's accurate for me, for my entire life where I've been politically aware, I've never felt comfortable with always identifying with one "team".
Yeah, Never Trumpers exist, though I think most are Democrat for the foreseeable future. Anecdotally, my mom voted Republican ever since I can remember until 2016, and after seeing the way Trump was enabled she voted blue all the way down the 2020 ballot. Though I think she’d vote for Romney or Liz Cheney in a heartbeat.
Came across this which I think most of us can relate to (using the Archive link as I don’t imagine many of us pay for National Review): https://archive.ph/2022.10.29-224958/https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/11/07/why-i-keep-getting-mistaken-for-a-conservative/
It bothers me that self perception tied to race is viewed negatively for some and positively for others. I'm proud of my ancestors: all four of my grandparents went to college in the 30s and 40s. My great grandfathers were a German farmer in southern Indiana, a German furniture dealer in upstate New York, a Hungarian electric plater from Queens and Scottish gas station and diner owner on the national road in Indiana. All hardworking, entrepreneurial couples. Go back 2 more generations further and you'll find soldiers on both sides of the war and Scottish transplants to West Virginia. Small farmers making a life in America.
Is this "white people" and "privilege"? probably yes, but it sure didn't feel that way behind the plow and building businesses. I feel like I can be proud of my family, heritage and culture while recognizing their good fortune. I don't associate really with white people generally, but I do associate with central European immigrants and old American small farmers. I think African Americans justifiably find commonality in the heritage of slavery and oppression of their families. I'd argue it's less about race more about relatively recent heritage. Recent African immigrants have a different heritage and the culture is distinct.
There is a healthy moderation of racial identity in the understanding of your family and community history, and finding communality in this. For example Germans in Germany are very aware of the common Nazi heritage in many families, and have responded by strong legal restrictions on those views. A culture is coping with it's past wrongs. In contrast, most white Americans are primarily post civil war immigrant heritage or fought for the Union, therefore they do not have deep guilt about slavery. Again in contrast African Americans remain deeply affected by the heritage of slavery and racism. People's self perception is largely reasonable, but doesn't fit a clean narrative of racial conflict.
Only Republicans talk of "open borders." But it is true that Democrats have not prioritized getting enough immigration judges to the border to process the asylum seekers. It would have been helpful if that was para of BBB that Republicand voted against.
I mean only Republicans characterize what we have as "Open Borders." Democrat do not support truly open borders or even less enforcement of existing border controls, though I will admit that the do not support proper funding of the existing system.
Yes Bryan Caplan does support real open borders, although implicitly he supports it only for those who find employment.
Wanna bet? https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration/dp/1250316960/
Bryan Caplan is now a democrat? The guy who is against school almost the entire state?
I mean, he’s no Republican!
Yes, weird iconoclast person academic who isn’t in either party supports open borders is pretty sui generis and not really related to anything but what iconoclastic academics think.
He's a Libertarian and writes it (I think) only to virtue signal to other Libertarians without having to support any serious policy to reduce immigration restrictions.
It is frustrating to see local progressives assume that Indian, Korean, Chinese shopkeepers and professionals will be motivated to vote Democrat by appeals to protect undocumented immigrants from Central America and integrate public schools. Dividing the US into white and non-white doesn’t seem like an informative electoral strategy.
I feel like the whole fabrication of 'BIPOC' is an attempt to forge a single large identity group that is aligned with progressives.
And to a less extent 'people of color'.
Basically just use terminology to lump all non-white people into a group that is on their side.
The purpose of BIPOC is to cut Asian-Americans out of the group. Nobody in electoral politics should use it.
Wait, in my eyes in makes a lot more sense to speak about bipoc than people of color more generally - Blacks and Indigenous Americans didn't have the choice to immigrate and were systematically oppressed on scales no other group in the US can lay claim to. What's more, immigrants of color such as east and south Asians as well as Latinos are on average much more likely to accumulate generational wealth and integrate (aka the American dream) while Black and indigenous Americans are not.
BIPOC seeks to create a hierarchy of non-white people by ranking them based on how white they are.
I remember when Matt taught me that term on Twitter, saying pretty much what you did, me thinking it was a nothingburger tweet, yet he got ruthlessly dragged on it on there from his left flank.
'People of color' I thought was a least somewhat cunning, and probably gave them some advantage.
BIPOC was a degeneration into academia-driven jargon nonsense.
Additionally, putting Black and Indigenous outside of, and -before- all the other POC was odd and just seemed to create a kind of hierarchy.
"I don’t say “people of color”. People of color sounds like something you see when you are on mushrooms. Besides, the use of people of color is dishonest. It means precisely the same thing as colored people. If you’re not willing to say “colored people” you shouldn’t be saying “people of color”.
Besides, the whole idea of color is bullshit anyway. What should we call white people? “People of no color”? Isn’t pink a color? In fact, white people aren’t really white at all, they’re different shades of pink, olive and beige. In other words, they’re colored. And black people are rarely black. I see mostly different shades of brown and tan. In fact, some light-skinned black people are lighter than the darkest white people. Look how dark the people in India are. They’re dark brown but they’re still considered white people. What’s going on here? May I see the color chart? “People of color” is an awkward, bullshit , liberal-guilt phrase that obscures meaning rather than enhancing it. Shall we call fat people, “people of size”?"
--George Carlin
"People of color" --- I'm mostly annoyed with the construction "People of X", which just hurts my ears. Just use a damn adjective! Where else is the construction used? I can only think of "People of faith". I realize that "colored" has loaded history, but if the NAACP can use it, I think it can be reclaimed.
For my money “X of color is even worse”. “Students of color”, “reporters of color”, “gamers of color” (yes, Kotaku has actually used that one), they’re all bad.
People of color is the granddaddy of all "people first" language.
I still remember trying to explain to a kid that "well yes, white is a color to, but that's not what they mean..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36v9GSOFMFc&t=2m59s
“People of color” never conferred a real advantage, just an illusion of advantage, which is probably not good if it keeps you from seeing things as they really are.
It is hilarious to hear Rishi Sunak referred to as Britain's first PM "of color" and more so if you hear his accent before seeing his picture.
Of course, when Thatcher said that she lived in a black and brown neighborhood she was referring to "the help."
Uh, Thatcher never said anything about living "in a black and brown neighborhood." FrigidWind is rephrasing Thatcher's famous quote, "You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure."
My comment was entirely facetious.
That's an American stereotype, British race relations are very distinct as the country was essentially all-white until after the war, well after the decline of the domestic service sector
As a “brown” person this drives me nuts. But let’s not overlook the role of liberal white people in that. I always wonder why the brown people I see on TV as “representation” are so much more liberal than my Bangladeshi family and relatives. Then I realized: who decides which brown people get to speak for their race on TV?
Diversity means "people who hold the same views as me, but with a different skin color"
Based on the Warren campaign, the people claiming to speak for races aren’t speaking for very many voters.
It's also the fact that the people on TV personally benefit immensely from those policies. This article in the Atlantic explains it really well: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/supreme-court-harvard-affirmative-action-legacy-admissions-equity/671869/
What's made me saddest in the last decade or thereabouts when trying to discuss this with progressives...there's a strong desire not to give up the "demographic destiny dream", and that's very understandable. But it's been distressing to see cope of the specific variety "anyone who votes R was never progressive/D to begin with". A sort of misapplied internal-racism ideology which simply does not reflect actual election results, and stereotypes entire groups of diverse people. Turns out that democratic processes do not, in fact, inevitably deliver progressive victories - because the electorate isn't inevitably progressive. Feature Not Bug. If a persuaded bird in the hand is worth two mobilized birds in the bush, then that also applies to dis-persuaded ones...losing former voters is twice as bad. I think this is one of the strongest unearned R talking points, the whole your-vote-is-taken-for-granite thing which speaks to a certain kind of temperament. People just like feeling that they're actually listened to.
(It's been especially weird as "_________ people are not a monolith" has become an increasingly common soundbite.)
Progressives like the idea of demographic destiny for the reason Matt identified regarding Black voters: white Democrats can overrule more conservative Black voters on abortion, gay marriage, and other social issues, so long as they promise to protect them from Republican racism.
Of course progressives like this arrangement. Who wouldn’t want a huge bloc of votes from people they don’t have to compromise with? And for the same reason, they really resist the idea they’ll have to compromise with religious Latinos on abortion or with Muslim immigrants about what we teach kids in school about sex or gender.
I don't know if most even realize minorities in their own party are more moderate, when they are basically relying on testimony from members in academia and hollywood, basically tokenizing them. And that testimony can be pretty uncompromising.
I'll never forget a Hispanic actor on Bill Maher explaining why some hispanics vote R. Because "they hate themselves." Makes it pretty easy to unpeople them when you hear that.
Imagine trying to learn about white people from white progressives.
Similarly I wish they would give up on the view that all these young people will keep voting D as they grow up. The hippies grew up and got mortgages and jobs and started voting more conservative. Gen z will do the exact same.
Double-like.
Thank you for reminding us of one of the few very optimistic things about the politics of the moment : racial depolarization. The US is facing very grave challenges to its domestic politics in the short term, but if it meets them successfully this welcome trend means the future may be bright.
Agreed. Frankly, if one of the "bad" outcomes is that more and more minority voters become Republicans, and as a result, the Republican party starts to worry about not being too racist, lest they alienate their minority bloc(s), so they, you know, start being less racist, this seems.... good for everyone?
It will be interesting to see how well the Republican party is able to "depolarize" racially given that white identity has become such an important part of its worldview and yet so many Latinos (and maybe in the future Asian Americans) are almost begging to join that coalition. Will the latter solve the puzzle by deciding they're white, or will whiteness become a less salient element of Republican thinking (e.g., eliminating all the Confederate imagery)?
I disagree. GOP might be the preferred home of the racist far right but it doesn’t follow that that’s an important constituency, despite the left’s efforts to brand the gop otherwise. Very few gop supporters consciously view themselves as racist and they had no problems supporting non white candidates (Ben Carson as you’d recall was the only one coming close to beating trump in the 2016 primaries). The gop certainly has strong anti democratic and authoritarian tendencies that are cause for serious concern, and it’s getting worse, but these are not racist even if racist dog whistles are used tactically in specific races. Non whites are already a growing percentage of gop voters and representatives at all levels and the trend will be sure to continue. The left wil do very well to stop telling itself ghost stories and face the real monsters that are no less disturbing.
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but Ben Carson didn’t win a single state, so I’m not sure what “came close” could possibly mean here.
I mean, come on. “Only candidate who came close” is pretty clear. To your point, no one came that close to Trump in the end, but in the early stages before everyone had dropped out Carson polled close and no one else.
"Will the latter solve the puzzle by deciding they're white"
That's has been happening for some time. E.g. from 2014: "More Hispanics Declaring Themselves White" [1] There have been other analyses along those lines. Pew has done some interesting surveys along similar lines (e.g. [2]). And FWIW, I'm pretty certain that European-decended Republicans will accept them.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/upshot/more-hispanics-declaring-themselves-white.html
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/24/the-ways-hispanics-describe-their-identity-vary-across-immigrant-generations/
Do Republicans even need to eliminate *all* Confederate imagery to pick up non-black votes? I'm pretty sure most Latino and Asian-American voters don't have that much more negative reactions to the appearance of the Confederate flag than most Anglo voters do.
That's a synecdoche for all the subtle and not so subtle centering of the white cause in America among Republicans. Like in, oh, any random five minutes of Tucker Carlson.
I want to pre-register my opinions about why Abrams is struggling to get the same share of the black vote as in 2018.
There is a fairly bitter divide between black women and low status black men. Marriage rates are low and illegitimacy is high. Many lower status black men are “on” child support for children they rarely see. The system tries to extract a portion of their income that country club Republicans would revolt at. Child support for three children in Georgia is ~45% of one’s income plus health care costs and work related child care costs. A person who makes $2500 a month can easily be on the hook for $1500 in child support. Try working full time and living on a grand a month and see how angry you become.
The system also polices single fathers’ private lives. If they want to exercise visitation, they often have to pee in a cup to prove they don’t smoke pot. The social workers and probation officers staffing this edifice of social control are often black women.
Higher status black men have the same reason to vote Republican as high status white men: lower taxes and fewer regulations. It’s unsurprising that 15-20% of black men will chose Kemp over Abrams. I do expect her to hold strong with black women.
2018 was a strongly Democratic year and 2022 is likely to be a pretty good Republican year. I don't think we have to strain for deep explanations.
How is that different since 2018 though? None of what you're describing are new developments, but you prefaced the comment by saying she wasn't getting the same vote share as in 2018. What happened in the last four years?
Your analysis also seems to ignore other factors that would be hugely important- liberal policies on marijuana laws, policies that would presumably support single mothers (thereby lessening the potential costs of child support), etc. etc. etc. What you point to is likely relevant to the discussion, but its a very narrow subset of issues that applies to a narrow subset of voters (how many voters are paying child support for 3 children while making $2,500 a month? How many of the individuals that you're referring to would be outraged by this and are both registered and actual voters? Etc. etc.). It's an interesting discussion to have, but I'm not sure it really gets over the hurdle necessary to say these issues are dispositive for why the race is somehow different than 2018, or that these issues are actually driving all that much actual voting behavior.
1. COVID happened. The biggest fans of coercive masking and distancing were female. Men were told to do sissy, risk averse things and shamed if they didn’t. Brian Kemp kept us free! That’s why I seriously considered voting for him, though I do plan on voting for Abrams.
2. Black female candidates have broken through in recent years. Harris is the most obvious example. What has she done for working stiffs?
In Henry County, where I practice law, every trial court judge had been a white male up until 2018. We now have three trial court judges who are black females. Clayton and Fulton county have black female district attorneys. In some ways, the system has become harsher on black men than the old lilly white courthouse gang. The proportion of domestic violence cases that are prosecuted as felonies rather than misdemeanors has exploded. The number of black men who go to prison for violence against blank women has exploded. Overall incarceration rates are flat. If black women are are more eager than their white predecessors to lock up black men, it’s perfectly rational for black men to look for other advocates, including but not limited to Brian Kemp.
Those are all different issues than you originally raised. But you’re now claiming black men will vote against black women because they’re upset about being prosecuted for domestic violence? How many men are we talking about being prosecuted? And how many men who aren’t committing domestic violence (which, one would hope and presume, is the overwhelming majority of men) are seeing domestic violence prosecutions go up and saying “we’ve got to put a stop to this!”
This sounds an awful lot like skewed thinking- you’re taking your personal experience and what you see and using it to explain things that seemingly have little (or literally nothing) to do with them.
There is a common thread between my original comment and my reply: the desire of black women to domesticate black men, and (some) black mens’ desire to avoid that. Remember, only about 1 in 15 black men will probably change their votes.
Let’s revisit this when we have exit polls! I do wonder how well they will get at voters motives, but data is always helpful
For sure. I think it's a pretty safe bet that Abrams will get a meaningfully higher % of the black female vote than black male. I'm just not sure the reasons you're giving will be able to explain the difference, or the drop off from 2018-2022 if she ends up with a statistically significant dip in BM votes between the two elections. Motives are tough to tease out, and a lot of the things you're discussing are things that have been issues for quite a while. COVID happened, and that seems to be the only point you've highlighted that actually could describe a meaningful change in voter behavior in the past 4 years.
Is Brian Kemp going to make prosecutors go after fewer domestic violence cases? If not, then why is that relevant exactly?
because if black women are trying to control you but don’t want to sleep with you, you probably wouldn’t like them
Do felons in Georgia get to vote? Or are you saying this is influencing other black men to change their votes?
They get to vote after they finish probation.
I'm not sure if you're taking a position here or just describing, but it seems reasonable to me that child support would take 45% of income for 3 kids. I have fewer than 3 kids, but still spend at least 45% of my income on my family.
(The drug test for visitation is bad, but still, just don't smoke pot like the majority of parents?)
The details here might be extreme: I certainly disagree with the drug testing part, and maybe the precise amount of money here is punitive, I don't know. But in general, I'm pretty on board with vigorous child support laws.
I’m not commenting on whether child support laws are good policy. I’m saying they have the political effect of creating a lot of pissed off, low status men.
Got it, thanks.
I'm very supportive of vigorous child support laws. But also recognize there is a big difference between being a father in the family with lots of say in how the money is spent, is spent with you doing things with your kids, and you get "thank you daddy" when you do something nice for your kids as opposed to someone whose wages are removed from their paycheck like a tax but gets none of those things.
That's fair, I'm quite open to tweaks from the status quo as appropriate. The goal should be maximizing the interest of the child, and it probably differs by each family. I could see that being equally involved parents in some cases, and in others, a clear custodial parent where the non-custodial parent's best primary contribution is financial.
Has something about all that changed since 2018?
If not, it’s hard to see why it would be relevant, and I think you’re just looking to explain why Black men are more conservative than Black women, and less likely to support female candidates than women. But I don’t think there’s likely to be a racially specific explanation for that, since we see it in most (all?) ethnic groups.
I also have some questions about both how real and how large this group is, but I don’t think that’s worth getting into since this doesn’t pass the first order sniff test as a driver of change.
Also worth considering what proportion of the Black male vote you think she’ll get this time if you think that will be the difference maker. She got 88% of Black men in 2018. 85% is only a couple of points off, probably within the margin of error, seems possible. 80% seems low.
I've written this before, but I find it fascinating that a political party dominated by rich, professional class, secular people wants millions of poor, working class, Catholics and Evangelicals to join their party, and assumes that these millions of people will vote for their same professional class, progressive priorities. Seems like the pinnacle of naivite.
Also, the 2008 and 2014 elections horribly scrambled the parties' brains. After 2008 both parties bought the "demographics is destiny" canard and after 2014 both parties bought the "Republicans can only win in low turnout elections" canard. So since then Democrats have been complacent, waiting for their ascension to eternal power, and Republicans have doing everything they can to keep turnout low. In reality 2008 was just a really bad year for incumbents (Republicans) because of the financial crisis and Democrats had an incredible politician that the media and Hollywood collectively orgasmed over, which gave Democrats large coattails. And in 2014, turnout was low, but it was also a really bad Senate map for Democrats. All those senators who were elected in the Obama blowout of 08 had to face re-election under much worse political conditions.
It seems to me that you could take your first paragraph, substitute the word "conservative" for "progressive" and it would apply equally well to the Republican as the Democratic party.
That's true, but Republicans aren't the ones clamoring for mass Hispanic immigration and a mass amnesty of illegal immigrants.
I have not noticed any Democrats "clamoring" for that, either."
I know that most Latinos don't prioritize those two issues as much as many progressives think they do (or should!) but to the extent that Democrats highlight them, is that an actual negative for party support among Latinos?
It's certainly a negative among recent legal immigrants, but I doubt their numbers are large enough to make a major impact overall. The biggest negative impact is just the general vibes that working class, religious people feel from being looked down upon by the professional class and simultaneously being expected to vote for people who publically disapprove of their lifestyle.
The immigration thing is probably the most complicated and it breaks down over intra-Hispanic/Latino divisions. Like, Latino voters of Mexican origin are all usually for amnesty for well-established (10+ years in country) undocumented immigrants because of a perception that these people are Mexican (which, to be fair, they mostly are), but actively oppose liberalizing the asylum regime for new arrivals from Central and South America. (Source: Conversations with my future in-laws, who are of Mexican origin.)
10% true and 90% Fox hype.
This is not to say that 10% is 100% too much.
Do these defecting voters see Republicans as *not* looking down on their ethnic lifestyle or is merely a negative vote?
More of the former. The Republican Party contains a lot of people with similar lifestyles.
I think you kind of hit the nail on the head that the emerging CW on this front is stuff that was obvious to anyone who has spent a significant amount of quality time (i.e., not interviewing them in a diner or whatever) with Latino folks here in the US.
I am a college-educated Caucasian guy in my late-30s, but the area I've lived since I was about 9 is heavily Latino, and mostly Mexican. It's basically been the entire social life for my siblings and I; most of my childhood was spent hanging out with first and second generation Mexican-Americans and their families, and nothing about that experience would lead a person to automatically assume that these voters are automatic "gimmes" for progressive candidates, and it was always weird to me when people in college acted like that would be the case.
I’m about your age and the 2nd/3rd generation Mexican families I grew up with were very conservative Catholics that, more often than not, really didn’t like recent Mexican immigrants. You could probably get them to vote Democratic for $$$ reason but the second you start talking about abortion or immigration, you’re going to lose them.
My experience is that there is kind of a divide between first generation folks and their kids. Most of my friends parents are pretty fine with immigration, but are very hardline on crime and especially abortion, for sure. My second-generation friends are, in my experience, kind of personally squeamish on the idea of abortion, but think it should be legal.
As an example, a 17-year-old young lady I know was pregnant with her second child. She comes from a family where having children while in high school is, unfortunately, kind of the norm. The idea of having an abortion was not something discussed openly in polite company (read: folks her parent's age/generation) but the idea was definitely whispered around amongst her brothers and sisters as a viable option, and all of these folks were raised extremely Catholic.
The biggest political divide is not skin color, it’s whether your ancestors came here voluntarily or in chains. Any voluntary immigrant would, tautologically, rather be subject to American institutions than those of their native land. If you thought the US were irredeemably anti-Latino, you would be very reluctant to come here.
Conversely, the black institutions that evolved during segregation incorporate a racialized world view. Black elites, be they politicians, lawyers, or ministers, draw their status from being near the top of a racialized hierarchy. This system won’t last forever. There are now quite a few black college grads who haven’t made it into the black elite and have the education and strength of mind to question how well their professional betters are serving the black community.
There's also, of course, an increasing population of voluntary black immigrants from the West Indies and Africa, whom data suggests so far have a largely similar experience to other immigrants. Those populations are still small enough (and often recent enough immigrants to not be citizens) to not have too much political effect, but I suspect that over the next 50 to 100 years that's going to start complicating the the black political narrative.
I have had a number of West African clients, there’s a significant community of them in southern metro Atlanta. One does not get from West Africa to the US in the 21st century by being average. They are classic strivers and usually very intelligent. Also pretty socially conservative. I doubt they will be a solid D voting block.
Many of them are Mormon: a greater proportion than the preexistent population, in fact.
The last sentence of your comment made me think of Coleman Hughes. And there are many others.
When was the last time you read a whole article about Hispanics that didn’t use Latinx?
Refreshing.
Ruben Gallego is doing everyone a favor by explicitly telling people to reject such usage.
Obviously Republicans bear the moral blame for the growing Republican contempt for representative democracy, but I think a lot of it is driven by fear that the "emerging Democratic majority"; the flip side of Democratic complacency. If Republicans understand that Hispanic votes are up for grabs and demographics does not equal destiny, it may help cool some of the right's distaste for representative government. (here's hoping!)
It also strikes me as odd when Democrats criticize whatever they think "replacement theory" is. I'm sure there are awful versions of it out there, but the Tucker Carlson version sounds almost exactly like "emerging Democratic majority" but with a negative, instead of a positive spin. Although the Tucker version might be called more xenophobic, it's also less racist since it seems to be more about immigrants than ethnicity like the Dem theory.
This was always a stupid and dangerous line of political argument. You can’t argue, “the immigrants will all vote D,” and then expect Rs to favor immigration. You’ve just said it’s against their political self-interest!
C'mon man, this is such an "well acktually" kind of criticism. The substance of the argument doesn't require that a native born GOP voter dies every time an immigrant naturalizes or has a child. It just means that the new population gradually replaces the old population, over time.
As an example, there used to be a bunch of Dutch settlers in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley, but over time they were replaced by incoming waves of immigrants and other colonial populations with higher birthrates. Now there are very few people with any Dutch ancestry in the area. Colloquially, they've been replaced. It's very pedantic to disagree on the grounds you're using.
"But Abrams has the misfortunate of needing to run against a pretty strong opponent. . . "
It was not misfortune; it was a choice. Abrams could have run for Senate in 2020 (and many begged her to do so) but refused and instead chose to run against a fairly strong Republican incumbent for governor in a year where history screamed that Democrats would be at a disadvantage. So she will lose and will deservedly become a footnote in Democratic politics. She could have been a contender but refused to do so.
I like her; she's very smart; and from most accounts has done a great job with voter registration and mobilization. But the bottom line in politics is winning elections and there, for whatever reason, she dropped the ball.
my half baked theory is that the talk about the "coalition of the ascendent" w.r.t. hispanic immigration and obama made immigration reform impossible for decades
You are correct. You can’t tell everyone that immigrants will vote Dem and then scratch your head at GOP opposition to immigration. Why would they support something that’s against their political self-interest? Same thing applies to Puerto Rican and DC statehood. There are strong principled arguments why statehood is appropriate. But if Dems are going to explicitly make the case that it will politically benefit them, they can’t blame Republicans for objecting.
I think you are right, but only because Republicans bought the "demographics is destiny" canard too, which is quite astounding if you think about it. Most Republicans believe that Democrats' only goal in immigration reform is to gain millions of new, loyal voters. And let's be honest, this is the actual goal of many Democrats. So why would Republicans sign their political death warrant?
Now that more Latinos are moving into the Republican column, should we see a change in the Republican position? (And, heck, maybe in the Democratic position as well?)
My fantasy is a 50/50 Latino vote split leads to both parties agreeing to let the illegals living in the shadows come out have a decent and legalized life.
Well if Latinos were to become become split 50/50 then Democrats would need to pickup a bunch of votes from other groups to remain competitive at the national level.
I hope it changes the Republican positions, because that would be better for our politics, but I am doubtful.
I don't think we'll see any change on the illegal immigration side of things, because conservatives are almost inherently going to oppose that from a sovereignty/control perspective.
But hopefully it mellows the hostility to legal immigration some.
This piece gets in another way at something I have been thinking about since listening to Bad Takes yesterday. I tend to find Matt's argument about the need for candidates to distinguish themselves, move to the center, go for persuasion, etc. compelling. I tend to think he's right.
But you can't talk about the Obama years without reminding yourself that we DID have a group of Dems who prominently tried to tack to the center and distinguish themselves from the party, particularly on the highest profile issue of all: health care. And they uniformly got wiped out in the next election.
You can find a lot of versions of that story. Testor was a great candidate who really overperformed by tacking to the center. He lost. Seems likely that the same thing will happen in Ohio this year. As Matt often points out, Donald Trump moderated the GOP's positions on stuff like social spending in 2016. But Trump barely won in a squeaker against the most unpopular candidate in history, and then lost his next election. There are races that go the other way, but the overall story leads me to wonder if this is just the classic case where the road to winning is actually pretty narrow, and politics is difficult, and the moderation strategy is really not as good as advertised. Situationally useful, but just that.
Like I said, I'm not sure; I tend to find Matt's analysis compelling. But I remember feeling like the clear takeaway from several of the big fights in the Obama years was that the moderates in the Democratic both made the legislative politics ugly (drawn out fights, no public option, etc.), had nothing to show for it at the end, and might even--through the ugliness--have contributed to the public backlash and GOP gains. A lot of folks walked away with a "hang together or hang separately" analysis.
If/when Tim Ryan loses, it won’t be because he tacked center. It will be because too many Ohioans have turned against the entire party. I saw this feature on WaPo the other day where they interviewed people at NFL games about who they’re voting for, a guy said he voted for Biden but was now voting Vance even though he doesn’t really like him, actually likes Ryan a lot, but just doesn’t trust the Dems to hold power in Congress.
My takeaway from the "ask the voters" pieces is that most people have really weird reasons when choosing who to vote for, and it's something that smart and politically knowledgeable people really struggle with understanding.
These "ask the voters" pieces are actually worse than you think. Yes you are correct that one problem with these pieces is that voters often have very idiosyncratic reasons why they vote the way they do which are often not applicable to the electorate at large. But there are bigger problems.
One is selection bias. What I mean is that in many cases the reporter has likely spoken to a number of voters and chosen to include the most interesting" one. What I mean is, the "I voted for Biden, but now I'm voting for J.D. Vance" voter is way way more likely to be put into an article than "I'm voting for J.D. Vance because I'm a Republican and I usually vote Republican" even though the latter is the much much more typical voter.
But the second issue is much worse. Reporters making it seems like they are talking to some random regular person they stopped on the street, when in fact the person in question is often an activist, head of political organization or in some cases connected to the GOP or Democratic Party. Selena Zito is probably the most famous and egregious of these cases (see https://www.huffpost.com/entry/columnist-salena-zito-trump-swing-voters_n_5b8581afe4b0162f471cf3ac), but I have to tell you, she's far from the only one who does stuff like this. I'm telling you, go read an article and look up some the names of "random" voters that reporters talk to and you'll discover how often they aren't so random. There's a reason NYtimespitchbot has as running gag on twitter "I was a lifelong Democrat, but then Joe Biden said...".
I'm reminded of the time the NYT published a piece interviewing a bunch of supposedly random suburban Atlanta voters of which one was actually the President of the Atlanta Young Republicans and would go on to run for Congress as a Republican this year:
https://twitter.com/charlesbethea/status/1319028097187020812?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Very good points to add.
Someday someone will (or maybe already has, and I'm just not aware of it) analyze voter choices through Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory, because I'm genuinely more and more convinced that it explains a lot about voter behavior and especially less educated voters' behavior.
I"m not familiar with this concept, and I'm going to try to read up on it, but in the meantime, some expounding could be helpful too.
Jaynes' theory was that humans before the late Bronze Age were not "conscious" in the way modern humans are. They were obviously *sapient*, but they lacked what might be better described as "narrative consciousness" or "conscious interiority" -- they did not have the same ability to consciously play out, theorize, self-interrogate, etc. that we take for granted.
Jaynes attributed this to lack of integration between the right and left hemispheres of the brain and believed that humans of this era perceived their own thoughts generated in the so-called "silent" right brain ("silent" in that even though the structure of the human brain is symmetrical, language functions are overwhelmingly concentrated in the left brain) as external voices, visions, etc. Effectively, when ancient people (and for that matter people living in Neolithic societies quite recently) talked about the gods, ancestors, spirits, etc. speaking to them, they weren't being figurative -- they were 100% correct in that they were "hearing" *something*, but the something was their own right hemispheric thoughts.
Jaynes described the foregoing as the "bicameral mind." He then further hypothesized that the Bronze Age "collapse" of the 12th Century BC was the result of the bicameral mind breaking down in civilizations of the Mediterranean and Middle East due to a combination of increased population and the influence of increased literacy. Then over the next several centuries human consciousness was reordered into the "unicameral consciousness" form that dominates today.
Jaynes' interest in this theory was not primarily political (his main testable hypothesis is actually about various psychiatric disorders, especially schizophrenia, being the product of incomplete integration of left/right consciousness). However, there's facially a strong *historical* political implication in it: the bicameral mind explains the ancient "god-kings" and a bunch of other Neolithic and Bronze Age socio-political phenomena that faded post-Bronze Age collapse (e.g., deliberate human sacrifice).
Where some people take this, and what I was alluding to in my comment, is that the bicameral mind is not as long-dead as one might suppose. Jaynes himself viewed it as mostly disappearing by the late Axial Age outside of people who were identifiable as mentally ill. But what if it has persisted, albeit in a reduced way, among a large part of humanity -- people operating on a day-to-day basis largely deferring to this "unconscious" right-hemispheric guidance that they don't really interrogate? The modern political implications of this is that some, possibly electorally significant, part of the population approaches politics in the way an ancient Sumerian would have had they suddenly been asked to decide who should rule their city-state: they would focus on the most immediate question of material conditions without consideration of whether there were longer-term implications because, in the absence of narrative consciousness, they wouldn't be able to understand the "big picture."
Matt actually in the last few months, presumably inadvertently, touched on this concept when he joked in a tweet about Biden's approval going up in response to falling gas prices using language that sounded like he was speaking about a Mesopotamian god-king (something like "Dark Brandon hath delivered a bounteous harvest of regular unleaded and it was good," or something like that). But I genuinely think there's something there that's worth exploring and trying to understand. For further context, I actually started to think about this before ever reading Jaynes' writings based on a couple of years post-college that I spent working in an office where I and the manager were the only people with bachelor degrees and most of the other staff were high school grads -- any sort of discussion about current events was absolutely horrifying in terms of the sheer lack of understanding about politics and economics and made clear to me that for probably a lot of people the President is functionally a semi-divine figure with near omnipotent power over the economy, legislation, social ills, etc.
So where were these “bicameral mind” folks 50 years ago? Or 30 years ago? The main thing that’s changed is communication technology. We have the same minds but are confronted with suddenly hearing from so many more outside sources—unless the idea is that psychosis is becoming normalized because people get to share their crazy thoughts online? Responding to rising and falling prices (or employment/unemployment) is nothing new, there is a wealth of historical data showing how US elections track economic indicators. The only way this “bicameral mind” thing seems relevant is if it has to do with the rise of paranoia, for example the notion that politicians are not merely dishonest (as always) but actively conspiring to our lives miserable in service of some powerful cabal.
I doubt many scholars take Jaynes' theory seriously these days but if they do, given the huge advances in paleo-genetic research, it would be interesting to find out if there's any DNA-based evidence for Jaynes' claim.
I completely understand where this guy is coming from. As someone who votes pretty uniformly Democratic, it really takes a truly incompetent and genuinely awful candidate to get me to look at the Republican. The status of who chairs congressional committees, or can veto legislation, and or who can simply bring legislation to the floor is really too important to me. The only real exceptions are local elections, where most problems lack clear ideological framing and are limited in scope, and state level executive positions like attorneys general or secretaries of state, where I can trust the party won't have much influence over them. It would be nice if we had some sort of party-slate system like the German Bundestag does to get around this, but that's obviously never happening.
This is depressing to me, because it essentially means that the only vote that most people care about is the first vote - who should be majority leader/speaker. This is entirely true in the house since they have consolidated almost complete control in the speakers hands and absolutely nothing happens without her doing it. Then we wonder why candidate quality has dropped...
My friends and family in Ohio think the party turned against them. Didn’t the party leader call them deplorable a while back?
I would argue the PPACA (Obamacare) was only moderate when compared to other, more progressive policies. Relative to the status quo ante, it was a very progressive change. It fundamentally altered the way health care (~17% of the economy at the time) was paid for and delivered. It changed a system that had been resisting change for decades. Could it have gone further? Of course. But it was a big deal. Take the W!
some might even say "A big f***ing deal", right? :)
It also doesn't fit the bill of centrist IMHO because most people have insurance coverage through their job, Medicare, or Tricare, and did not perceive a need (or get a noticeable result) from the legislation.
A fun counterfactual - maybe Matt could take a swing some day - would be if Congress had just passed a simple Medicaid expansion bill. I mean, don't we acknowledge that was the bulk of the heavy lifting (re increased coverage) from the ACA in the end?
People tend to be down on the exchanges (not Matt though!) for not leading to a revolution in American healthcare, but there were so many things in the ACA, beyond Medicaid expansion that Americans rightly value: keeping kids on family plans until 26, community ratings (can't be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions), 80% minimum payout rate, and who knows maybe even someday electronic health records.
I'm very glad the Democrats didn't just pass a Medicaid expansion bill.
But the insurance industry needed the promise of an increased customer base to agree to reform. And just because most middle class people were insured (a great many of them retired or disabled on Medicare) didn’t mean there wasn’t a need for reform—employer-based insurance was getting more expensive and less complete all the time. A large reason why Medicaid expansion was such a large part was that we were in a prolonged recession and a lot of working people fell below the poverty line. Medicaid expansion that covered non-poor people whose medical needs precluded private insurance would have been impossibly expensive.
I'm not saying PPACA was a loss; I think it's a bill that did a lot of good things and also did not work out as envisioned, which is itself pretty interesting.
But I'm saying that the evidence on the ground for Matt's thesis about how Dems could win more seems to me to be at least a little thin, or maybe that there is also other evidence out there that it appears to me might weigh against his claims. Like I said, I'm of two minds about this. Partly that's because I'm a GOP -> Dem voter over my lifetime with a basket of positions that in some ways is pretty moderate / normie. So of course I find Matt's logic compelling.
But when I think about it a lot, I can't help but notice that I feel like a lot of evidence might pull the other way. Not for sure, but it looks like less of a slam dunk the more I think about my own political experiences and the political moves and outcomes I have seen over my own voting life. And the fact that so many people yearn for "moderates" or "centrists" when you talk to them also raises a red flag for me, in the sense that people often claim they want one thing that is seen as socially desirable, but their behavior does not actually reflect that belief. I'm probably jaundiced in this partly because of being a minister's son. But people's stated preferences are not always a great guide to their behavior.
The members with the toughest districts are going to tend to have sharper messages than members who have safe seats. And yet it’s going to be the tough district members that lose most often. Does this mean their messages were actually bad?
Edit: and I should add the bill was always no public option etc etc etc, just as fair to say progs made it a drawn out fight and gained nothing in the end. It was played out for left leaning audiences as ‘oh these few mods are stopping x y z’ while in actuality the moderate plan had been agreed upon long before.
I absolutely agree that the drawn out nature of the internal Democratic fight was a big political own goal. Similar with the Build Back Better negotiations, where they could have taken Manchin's July 2021 deal and been better off.
here’s where corruption charges from the left and discussion of political messaging from moderates combines to obscure the truth that folks like Baucus, Manchin, etc have real views (or their close community does) and as pivotal members are just going to fight for something close to their vision no matter what because it’s theirs and they have the power.
Who is "Testor"? All I can think of is Jon Tester from Montana, who is still the Senate to this day.
Argh! You're right. This is why I shouldn't write stuff on the way out the door at 7 am. Who am I thinking of? Moderate Dem ran a good campaign, outperformed the partisan lean, but still lost in the last election?
Steve Bullock. Montana's partisan lean is like +20, per 538, and Bullock, who had won the governorship twice, lost by ten points. Which means he ran a great campaign! He really did better than you would expect! And he lost.
OTOH, Tester's continued presence (sorry, Jon!) could be your evidence the other way. (Another obvious one from the same election might be Susan Collins.) As I said at the top, I'm not really strongly committed either way on this analysis. My inclination is to think Matt is right, but I feel like there's some pretty solid evidence that goes the other way, which makes me wonder if it is more situational and messy.
"Testor was a great candidate who really overperformed by tacking to the center. He lost."
The reports of (still!) Senator Jon Tester's demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Guilty as charged. See my response to City of Trees.
I think a lot of this was that the centrists tended to pick the wrong fights? They focused on stuff like the War on Terror or the size of the deficit, which aren't really part of "normie" centrism.
It's sort of like Sinema defending the carried interest thing.
Yeah, I don't know what is behind the tendency of "centrist" Democrats in Congress to have pro-corporate and pro-austerity views, but I think that has done a lot to discredit centrism among rank-and-file Democratic voters. I've often heard progressives refer to centrist Democrats as "corporate Democrats", and use that as a rhetorical bludgeon against centrism in general. If you're a "normie" liberal who wants to think of yourself as progressive, would you want to be associated with that? I think this helps explain the party's drift to the left over the past decade.
The centrists sho got wiped out lost because they were in R leaning states and districts. Tester would have lost by more if he had been a normal Democrat
I think the politics is hard piece is true, but these kinds of tidal wipeouts that occurred after passage of the ACA are just part of our system. It's easy to forget that leading to passage the Democrats had a 60 vote majority in the Senate until the last moment when Ted Kennedy died, plus a significant majority in the house which of course included a lot of marginal and toss up districts that were highly vulnerable. But a mere 6 years before that at the height of the war on terrorism all of the punditocracy was about the permanent Republican majority being established. That of course gave way to a Democratic trifecta in 2008.
This comment actually does remind me that while I think Matt is right to say that too many Democrats bought into the coalition of the ascendant theory and are probably leaning too far left and losing some winnable seats, I do want to defend the Progressive side of the Democratic party here by taking our minds back to 2008-2009. The fact that there were many more centrist Democrats in 2009 does NOT mean these same Democrats were actually following a "popularist" strategy. A lot of their centrism really was stuff like deregulation and being probably too friendly to business interests. That centrism also manifested itself into stuff like helping the make the Stimulus smaller than it should have been just so you could get approval of Fred Hiatt and David Brooks. Or Joe Liberman nuking the "public option" just to show he was centrist and "independent" (and just a big F U to Obama to be frank).
If there is one part the Progessive side did get right (and I think Matt would be included in this is) it's that those Centrists Democrats would have been much better off voting for more stimulus and more measures to help the economy; a better economy would have done more to lessen losses in 2010 than anything else.
"Voting for more measures to help PEOPLE COPING WITH with the economy" such as reforming unemployment insurance to a) tie it to lost income and b) make eligibility depend on the state of the economy, not some arbitrary date on the calendar. Grants in aid to States and cities should have been tied to indicators of need like the decline in tax revenues.
I suspect Matt might be the first to tell you that the biggest reason for the 2010 midterm wipeout is A) unemployment was close to 10%, B) the usual reason that the "out" party gains in midterms c) the 2008 election was so overwhelming for Democrats that they were defending a large number of marginal seats in what were ultimately pretty red districts or states (Obama won Indiana for example (?!?)). People cite ACA or Democrats not doing "enough", but whatever damage ACA did to Democrats electoral prospects was dwarfed by the three reasons above.
But, like in this year's election, it's so much more fun to discuss Democrats' "missteps" or "bad messaging" than to try to say something interesting day after day about what is basically just a structural issue: midterms are typically bad for the incumbent party.
Just to add it's critical to remember those big Democratic majorities were themselves in place, largely as a rebuke to Republicans on the situation in Iraq and the then in progress financial catastrophe.
I think this is something that Matt has talked about several times, including his podcast with Ezra Klein recently. In 2008, Democrats were elected with a large majority as a significant rebuke to Republicans, but used that to pass some MAJOR changes which then led to massive blow-back on them. Biden has done less (with much smaller majorities), but had Progressives been able to do everything they wanted in the last two years, Democrats would probably get wiped out here.
A major difference between the two parties is that when Democrats grab a temporary majority they accomplish (imo) amazing things -- ACA, IRA, etc -- and those then get embedded in our system. When the Republicans grab a temporary majority, they pass tenuous tax cuts for rich people and corporations and do lots of lib trolling investigations but pretty much nothing else.
Even if we lose Congress this year, I'll be very happy about so many things Biden and the Democrats got passed in their two years.
One could also see the 2010 wipeout as coming from the Democrats failing to do much that addressed the immediate need of people, i.e. something to get people back in work and getting an income (and staying in their homes). The stock market recovered pretty miraculously, the labor market not so much. Health Care reform was mainly objectionable for not being the main thing people most people needed.
I hate to say it, but Republicans found a villain in 2010, and Democrats didn’t. People wanted someone held accountable for 2008. If Obama had done a little going after “fat cats” I think it would’ve made a difference.
Bailing out those responsible, then they give themselves bonuses? Didn’t sit well.
THAT was Bernanke's fault, just like the inflation anchor is Powell's fault.
Democrats have to accept that what they do or do not do will have no influence of macroeconomic aggregates. Obama should have been praising Bernanke for QE and (hint, hint) suggesting that there could have been lot more of it. He could have very publicly defended the Fed from the idiots denouncing the Fed for "debasing the currency." And Biden should have been "expressing total confidence" that the FED would make sure that inflation WAS temporary. ARA should have been designed and more importantly SOLD as relief to people suffering from the COVID recession. Differences of opinion about who should get the relief and how much were inevitable; how nyc "stimulus" the economy needed were not.
And why was it the "moderates" who made the ACA fight ugly? Is it Machin's fault that we don't have a Child Tax Credit with a work requirement?
Back when I was a communist and hung out with lots of radicals there was this view that anti-Black racism was distinctive and unique and much worse than racism against other groups in that Black culture was seen a thing to be wiped out and destroyed and 'good' Black people were the ones who were basically not culturally Black. I think that probably left the lefty conversation as generic anti-racist politics started its rise. I did not like this view at the time, but I have come around to it. Black voters have supported Democrats for so long not because of specific policy issues that benefit Black voters, nor because Black voters think Democrats aren't racist (many Black dems think white dems ARE racist), but because the Democrats have been allies of Black self-empowerment and institutional development. This relies on the variety of Black institutions you mention, which are now sadly weakening. The Democrats and Black institutions had a mutually beneficial relationship where the unique character of Black civil society was preserved and assimilation was *not* the objective. Anti-black racism required this strategy, because mainstream institutions could not be trusted.
When Dems tried to set up parallel political institutions to cater to Hispanic voters they just recreated white institutions that are built around the narrow values of affluent college-educated whites and handed a bunch of power to young Hispanic people who are the most similar to young white people. You could critique this and say well, they should have made more Catholic institutions or etc. But the reality is, the goal for Hispanic voters is (mostly, obviously this isn't monolithic) to gain representation and power within the white-dominated mainstream civil society, not to construct a parallel one, because they don't really need a parallel one.
Great summary. If you go to little Texas towns, you will find roughly the same cultural markers in mostly Hispanic ones as you do with most white ones - lots full of deer blinds, gun shops, churches (though different denominations, to be sure) and really conspicuous references to law enforcement. I've been rolling my eyes somewhat at predictions of a blue Texas and I wish more people would truly explore the state. If you go to an HEB in, say, Lockhart you will find a mix of black, brown and white people and not as much cultural diversity among them than you might expect.
Everyone in Dallas says the Hispanic following the Cowboys is what is making Jerry Jones rich.