Yes, commenting requires being a subscriber. I figured out recently that you can like comments on un-paywalled posts even without being a subscriber though, which explains the likes I sometimes get on really old posts from "someone".
Don't accept it as "cute" or whatever else - its just one more reason to lie, one more facet of "post-truth" to sell to another crowd.
These cynical politics will be the death of us.
How about people that care about our country run on the actual platforms they will attempt to enact if elected? Is that so fucking hard?
I'm not thrilled about woke culture invading everything either. But if we accept that rightwing politicvians are the champions of this culture war BS, all we're doing is handing an issue over to the charlatans that will actually abuse their power to inflict punishments on "woke" scapegoats. Looking at you Trump, DeSantis and Abbott.
But they won't actually fix the dumbass sensitivity training we all must endure, because in a free society, this is not the prerogative of political policy.
Both the right and the left are not only on an extended vacation, but a permanent leave of absence from budget realities. Conservatives won't touch Pentagon waste because military spending is a jobs program for conservative constituencies. Meanwhile, progressives won't admit that funding a European style welfare state requires European style high middle class taxes.
Happy new year. I'd like to read or reread the column you wrote on how the left/democrats have changed. I went to the website and, scrolling for something that I don't know the name of seems like a poor approach. Could you given name/date of that article? Thank you.
It’s interesting how decent Trump was running against Clinton but then… I think the power or something else got to him and he went off the rails kind of with how he responded to Covid. And one of his main weaknesses I think was he made bizarre claims (injecting bleach) that hurt him with college educated suburban voters and also was totally incapable of showing any empathy at all over the issue.
He did bizarrely IIRC go after Kemp for opening things up too early. I don’t know, he seemed to be all over the place. He did do everything that was needed to facilitate fast vaccine development but didn’t really get to benefit from that due to the timing of the announcement IIRC.
Would be fascinating to see the world where Covid doesn’t happen. I think Trump probably wins but who knows.
Isn't the most straight forward answer that Trump doesn't actually believe in anything except what he thinks at the moment is good for himself personally?
"...but wherever the hand of the state is already present — in government workforce trainings, in libraries, in K-12 schools, even in university faculties — Republicans are now looking to clamp down on progressive wrongthink."
The framing here is that conservatives are on the attack, but it certainly feels like the inverse to me.
We're just trying to stop the culturally-progressive left from pushing that crap on people, and especially kids.
If we were trying to inculcate explicitly conservative values via the same means, then you may be justified in framing it that way...but by and large, we are not.
It was precisely designed to please their supporters and sow fear and confusion among progressives. Those who passed the law probably don't care if courts strike it down now, they've already reaped the benefits in turning out their base and cementing their control of the state and many local school boards.
This is something I submitted for the Mailbag a couple weeks ago, but it seems relevant to this post; something that Republicans writ large are now seriously considering is almost literally decimating the federal government's policy making capability and replacing it (if at all), with political hacks.
How bad is it that the ban on Schedule F (technically, the Preventing a Patronage System Act) didn't get included in the NDAA (which is the only realistic chance to pass it)? Not just Trump, but RDS or basically any plausible Republican nominee in 2024 will absolutely use this to destroy the Civil Service to the greatest possible degree, right? And how would Democrats try to fix the results of that?
Also, for those commenters here who like to hate on public employee unions (who I concede have some valid points), are you at all concerned about decimating the policy making capabilities of the USG?
Do you think McConnell et al would ever really let the President fire all these civil servants? They didn't do it under Trump or Bush when they could have.
Do you really think Trump cares a fig for what McConnell thinks, especially now? And while I think McConnell himself wouldn't push for it, I think the policy brains of the GOP, such as they are (Heritage, AEI, etc) would absolutely be pushing for it. Those guys are the ones who figured out that it's (apparently) legally possible, and Trump showed that there's a whole universe of things that you can do (especially once the Supreme Court and much of the federal judiciary is in your pocket) once you don't care what "polite society" (aka old school bipartisan Washington establishment, etc) thinks of you. It doesn't even have to be clearly legal, but just enough to execute and then tie it up in court for years, which is more than enough "pour encourager les autres"; why would anyone competent risk public service when the job security is replaced by a guarantee of political retaliation?
Under Bush and prior Republicans, there wasn't such an intense hatred of government, especially combined with a total rejection of norms. Even if the base might have wanted such a thing, the Republicans who would actually staff a presidential administration were mostly "serious professionals" who saw themselves as such, and would never even consider it.
There's another thread on this already, but I want to come at it from a slightly different angle:
> Were these diversity trainings an important issue? No. But they are indisputably within the purview of the executive branch of the federal government.
There's a lot to hate about DEI trainings as currently constituted, but for my money the worst part is that they institutionalize sloppy, fallacious thinking and subject adults to hours of counterproductive, emotionally inflammatory, internally contradictory nonsense like "implicit bias".
My view is that two factors explain 90% of the terrible black/white racial disparities in the US:
- The compounding negative effects of slavery and Jim Crow.
- Ongoing social segregation.
In terms of importance, diversity trainings aren't up there with medical care, homelessness or housing, but DEI is a $7.5 billion dollar industry (on pace to grow to $15.4 billion by 2026), an expensive, insulting distraction that degrades our ability to solve racial disparities in America today. If you agree with any of that, I think it qualifies as important *enough* to be worth addressing.
> wherever the hand of the state is already present — in government workforce trainings, in libraries, in K-12 schools, even in university faculties — Republicans are now looking to clamp down on progressive wrongthink.
Usually "clamp down on wrongthink" would refer to a powerful body stopping people from expressing dissident opinions. This is a grotesque inversion: undoing mandatory government-sponsored indoctrination is nearly the opposite.
Implicit bias is something that can actually be measured. The idea came from real experiments performed on real people, it's not made up or contradictory. Even black people find other black people more intimidating than white people and are more likely to react negatively to them in high stress situations.
It looks like a lot of that research (like a shocking amount of other research in sociology) has been discredited, though. Or at least others have failed to replicate it.
I feel pretty confident that these trainings don't accomplish anything so I don't really care if we abolish them. I just hate listening to the right talk about them as if they are some kind of pernicious mind control. Like telling people to be nice to each other was the worst thing we could have done.
If some people have a reaction like "FU, who are you telling me what to do?" (and there have been reports that some of these training show people may come out with more racial antipathy afterwards. e.g, https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail), then, yeah, probably better to hope that people's mothers raised them right than do asinine DEI trainings.
There's room for improvement but I don't know what it would be that wouldn't do more harm than good. I agree that people have biases, both conscious and unconscious, but the vast majority of people don't hold to them all that closely. They may think "X people are more likely to be Y" but it doesn't take much evidence for them to identify a person from X not being Y.
This is a musguided take that entirely misses the radicalization of the Republican Party.
Positions taken by presidential candidates are only one part of a party’s positions on issues. Zooming out, as external realities and short term political calculations have shifted, so have the mainstream views of both parties on taxes, spending, and foreign policy, and even climate change, in ways that often defy a left-right dichotomy.
But the Republican Party has hurtled to the right — far beyond the chart you’ve reproduced — on racial justice and cultural matters: immigration, CRT, voting rights, and more, even — arguably — guns. On this broad set of issues, todays Republican candidates and office holders aren’t even remotely recognizable from those of the last 1/2 century. They seem willing to abandon the rule of law and democracy itself to reclaim past glory, real or imagined.
> immigration, CRT, voting rights, and more, even — arguably — guns.
It's demonstrably false to say that the Republicans have shifted right on any of these except voting rights, and I'm not really sure that voting rights really fits on a left-right spectrum.
It's hard to have a discussion on "racial justice and cultural matters" as an abstraction, but it appears to me that Republicans have been consistent on these issues the entire thirty-ish years I've been paying attention to politics. For example, they've opposed Affirmative Action since at least the 80s. If anything, it seems to me they've liberalized meaningfully, the chief example being views on same-sex partnerships.
Guns? You might find their positions extreme, but I don't see how you can say they've changed.
Finally, on immigration:
> In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
> The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
And they were all correct. That first quote is particularly on point. It's a basic cognitive dissonance that the left, generally more economically progressive and emphatic on the rule of law than in the recent past have become indifferent-to-supportive of illegal immigration.
I think with immigration it’s more that the parties have sorted. Yes you can find some liberals like Obama saying anti-immigration stuff in the past, but there are also quotes from Reagan and George W. Bush praising immigration and amnesty.
I don’t think Glenn Greenwald is a relevant example here though since Greenwald is a conservative.
I've never understood the belief that republicans have moved right- any politician from the 1990s or even 2008 Obama would be considered far right today. The country has moved to the left and the parties have moved left with it.
I think a better meme picture would depict how we went from a left/center/right line to a four-square with one axis being cultural (conservative/liberal) and the other being world view (globalist/nationalist). “Center” doesn’t really exist anymore because of cable news and social media. Trump just took Republican Party over to the conservative/nationalist square. Clinton took the Democrats over to the liberal/globalist square, abandoning the white working class who were conservative but supported the Democrats because of ties to organized labor. Those left in the other two squares have been marginalized and forced to pick sides they don’t fully support each election. Their candidates can’t make it through primaries. I think eventually we will end up back on a line, but it will be nationalist/center/globalist, once we sort out the culture issues. That will take a while. In the meantime, we are in this four-square mess with a two-party system.
I’ll say I think you’re “yada yada yada”ing over GWB initiative to privatize social security. It’s literally the first thing he tried to do after re-election. My point is, destroying social security, Medicare and Medicaid has actually been a more consistent through line in GOP thought than is laid out in this post.
McCain and Trump are exceptions that prove the rule. McCain because he was a “Maverick”. And given what we saw with the Tories in U.K. post 2009, it seems really likely if McCain had won in 2008, there would have been enormous pressure to persue an “expansionary austerity” agenda. And in Trump’s case, he was a former Democrat who was free wheeling in his speeches and rallies (to say the least) and through out lines about protecting Medicare and health care as some half remembered amalgamation of what he saw on Fox and what he used to believe. And what happened? GOP came within one vote of overturning ACA.
My point on all this is I think we really underestimate the possibility that RDS has as a major part of his platform massive entitlement cuts. Seems very likely there will be some sort of recession in 2023. And as you’ve pointed, borrowing to cover tax revenue shortfalls is going to be a lot less feasible. There is going to be a ton of rhetoric on the right about “if Americans are tightening belts, then big government should do so as well”. If RDS is going to distinguish himself vis a vis Trump, besides covid vaccines, this seems to be prime territory.
"conservative attacks on woke schooling are just a mask for the “real agenda” of vouchers and privatization, I think the logic of this campaign militates in the other direction"
Had similar thoughts that it would eventually bloom into privatization attempts, thought that aligned w Youngkin's goals and well as you mentioned you'd expect the budget eventually. Or are you just saying those things are in tension and there isn't some charter push across the board?
The actual problem is that the left right political spectrum is useless. If we're talking about left-right in purely economic terms, both parties are way left of where they were in 08, but the meme is mostly about identitarian culture war stuff where it is largely accurate to say the Dem conventional wisdom has gone off the rails.
The reality is that the events of the post cold war era have driven us to a place where the center of gravity in politics favors totalitarian, populist grievance of all varieties over more coherent ideological concerns. We've shifted along an entirely distinct axis in ways that scramble the parties of the post new deal equilibrium.
Isn’t the point of this post that Republicans are not in fact more left on economics, and that they have largely abandoned Trump’s more moderate economic positions?
In some ways like slashing entitlements yes, but there is still a part of the GOP that digs Trump's version of populist economics that ignores budget deficits to avoid hard choices and still cut taxes. That wing is much stronger than it used to be. Those people still want to cut entitlements, but unlike previous Republicans it's not really about balancing the budget.
I don't think that's really true, but I don't have hard evidence in front of me. But I believe that in previous eras (Reagan for instance) tax cuts were always paired with budget cuts. Bush Sr even raised taxes rather than run a budget deficit. There have always been true believers in having a balanced budget on the Right, it's a modern change to have so many people willing to cut taxes without cutting spending. But I think that still demonstrates that Republicans of today prioritize cutting taxes over cutting entitlements.
I mean the Rs have never exactly been deeply ideologically committed to free market economics, but to the extent that the nationalists/populists remain elevated they are absolutely significantly less committed than ever.
It seems to me that the Republican party as a group now is less committed to populist-left economic issues now and much more focused on cutting entitlements and taxes on rich people.
The compass is good to the extent people engage with politics on an ideological level. Problem is, right now we're in a moment where tribal populism trump's ideology. People are mostly engaging with politics on the level of tribal affiliation that the compass doesn't really reflect.
But don’t the tribes have ideologies ? Compass doesn’t measure *why* you have certain views but does track the views themselves. Aren’t dem and gop voters views father than ever , at least on some issues ?
Their tribal preferences have diverged while their preferred institutional structures have grown more aligned. There's been increasing ideological consensus around empowering a government capable of imposing broad, totalitarian cultural preferences and stamping out dissent. The fight is over which tribe ends up aiming the weapon they're working together to build.
The good vs evil axis of modern politics isn't the trads vs the libertines or whatever. It's the pluralists vs the totalitarians. The people who want the government to be a tool of productivity vs the people weaponizing it.
That’s too pessimistic imo. I still think most dem voters are small d democratic. It’s just that the authoritarian left (“totalitarian” seem imprecise and hyperbolic) has gained too much power in certain institutions (parts of media, academia, certainly museums, non profits), though there are sign for cautious optimism on that front too. Situation with gop is more worrying as too many of the actual political elites are authoritarian or at least happy to go along with that.
The problem is in the trajectories. As the left racked up wins on civil rights and such, big parts of the traditional right were relatively happy to embrace a live and let live community based cultural/legal pluralism. At some point though the left's cultural project and general proclivity for "positive rights" and such, became so all encompassing the balance in the GOP flipped to where we're now in this arms race where neither side has a commitment to restraining the power of the government to reward friends and punish enemies..
The combination of this topic with not being paywalled has brought out considerable nut-bagery in the coments section.
I thought you had to be a subscriber to comment even on the free posts
Could be, dunno. There's a lot more nut-bagery here than there normslly would be, or than there as on the original post.
Yes, commenting requires being a subscriber. I figured out recently that you can like comments on un-paywalled posts even without being a subscriber though, which explains the likes I sometimes get on really old posts from "someone".
The italics font you're using is really poor. It looks like the font size is considerably smaller than the rest of the text.
It would help to say more about how Rufo is really a charlatan.
Don't accept it as "cute" or whatever else - its just one more reason to lie, one more facet of "post-truth" to sell to another crowd.
These cynical politics will be the death of us.
How about people that care about our country run on the actual platforms they will attempt to enact if elected? Is that so fucking hard?
I'm not thrilled about woke culture invading everything either. But if we accept that rightwing politicvians are the champions of this culture war BS, all we're doing is handing an issue over to the charlatans that will actually abuse their power to inflict punishments on "woke" scapegoats. Looking at you Trump, DeSantis and Abbott.
But they won't actually fix the dumbass sensitivity training we all must endure, because in a free society, this is not the prerogative of political policy.
Both the right and the left are not only on an extended vacation, but a permanent leave of absence from budget realities. Conservatives won't touch Pentagon waste because military spending is a jobs program for conservative constituencies. Meanwhile, progressives won't admit that funding a European style welfare state requires European style high middle class taxes.
Happy new year. I'd like to read or reread the column you wrote on how the left/democrats have changed. I went to the website and, scrolling for something that I don't know the name of seems like a poor approach. Could you given name/date of that article? Thank you.
“Trump thought Ryan’s ideas were unpopular.”
It’s interesting how decent Trump was running against Clinton but then… I think the power or something else got to him and he went off the rails kind of with how he responded to Covid. And one of his main weaknesses I think was he made bizarre claims (injecting bleach) that hurt him with college educated suburban voters and also was totally incapable of showing any empathy at all over the issue.
He did bizarrely IIRC go after Kemp for opening things up too early. I don’t know, he seemed to be all over the place. He did do everything that was needed to facilitate fast vaccine development but didn’t really get to benefit from that due to the timing of the announcement IIRC.
Would be fascinating to see the world where Covid doesn’t happen. I think Trump probably wins but who knows.
"I think the power or something else got to him"
Isn't the most straight forward answer that Trump doesn't actually believe in anything except what he thinks at the moment is good for himself personally?
What Musk's meme misses is that his own head gets exponentially larger on each successive line.
"...but wherever the hand of the state is already present — in government workforce trainings, in libraries, in K-12 schools, even in university faculties — Republicans are now looking to clamp down on progressive wrongthink."
The framing here is that conservatives are on the attack, but it certainly feels like the inverse to me.
We're just trying to stop the culturally-progressive left from pushing that crap on people, and especially kids.
If we were trying to inculcate explicitly conservative values via the same means, then you may be justified in framing it that way...but by and large, we are not.
I'd say it was a poorly designed law intended to do the latter.
It was precisely designed to please their supporters and sow fear and confusion among progressives. Those who passed the law probably don't care if courts strike it down now, they've already reaped the benefits in turning out their base and cementing their control of the state and many local school boards.
What evidence is there to the contrary?
Given it's apparent half-cocked nature, poor design seems like the simpler explanation.
And it meshes well with the general disorganization/lack of professionalism among Republicans recently.
This is something I submitted for the Mailbag a couple weeks ago, but it seems relevant to this post; something that Republicans writ large are now seriously considering is almost literally decimating the federal government's policy making capability and replacing it (if at all), with political hacks.
How bad is it that the ban on Schedule F (technically, the Preventing a Patronage System Act) didn't get included in the NDAA (which is the only realistic chance to pass it)? Not just Trump, but RDS or basically any plausible Republican nominee in 2024 will absolutely use this to destroy the Civil Service to the greatest possible degree, right? And how would Democrats try to fix the results of that?
Also, for those commenters here who like to hate on public employee unions (who I concede have some valid points), are you at all concerned about decimating the policy making capabilities of the USG?
https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/12/lawmakers-left-anti-schedule-f-legislation-out-compromise-defense-policy-bill/380575/
Do you think McConnell et al would ever really let the President fire all these civil servants? They didn't do it under Trump or Bush when they could have.
Do you really think Trump cares a fig for what McConnell thinks, especially now? And while I think McConnell himself wouldn't push for it, I think the policy brains of the GOP, such as they are (Heritage, AEI, etc) would absolutely be pushing for it. Those guys are the ones who figured out that it's (apparently) legally possible, and Trump showed that there's a whole universe of things that you can do (especially once the Supreme Court and much of the federal judiciary is in your pocket) once you don't care what "polite society" (aka old school bipartisan Washington establishment, etc) thinks of you. It doesn't even have to be clearly legal, but just enough to execute and then tie it up in court for years, which is more than enough "pour encourager les autres"; why would anyone competent risk public service when the job security is replaced by a guarantee of political retaliation?
Under Bush and prior Republicans, there wasn't such an intense hatred of government, especially combined with a total rejection of norms. Even if the base might have wanted such a thing, the Republicans who would actually staff a presidential administration were mostly "serious professionals" who saw themselves as such, and would never even consider it.
There's another thread on this already, but I want to come at it from a slightly different angle:
> Were these diversity trainings an important issue? No. But they are indisputably within the purview of the executive branch of the federal government.
There's a lot to hate about DEI trainings as currently constituted, but for my money the worst part is that they institutionalize sloppy, fallacious thinking and subject adults to hours of counterproductive, emotionally inflammatory, internally contradictory nonsense like "implicit bias".
My view is that two factors explain 90% of the terrible black/white racial disparities in the US:
- The compounding negative effects of slavery and Jim Crow.
- Ongoing social segregation.
In terms of importance, diversity trainings aren't up there with medical care, homelessness or housing, but DEI is a $7.5 billion dollar industry (on pace to grow to $15.4 billion by 2026), an expensive, insulting distraction that degrades our ability to solve racial disparities in America today. If you agree with any of that, I think it qualifies as important *enough* to be worth addressing.
> wherever the hand of the state is already present — in government workforce trainings, in libraries, in K-12 schools, even in university faculties — Republicans are now looking to clamp down on progressive wrongthink.
Usually "clamp down on wrongthink" would refer to a powerful body stopping people from expressing dissident opinions. This is a grotesque inversion: undoing mandatory government-sponsored indoctrination is nearly the opposite.
Implicit bias is something that can actually be measured. The idea came from real experiments performed on real people, it's not made up or contradictory. Even black people find other black people more intimidating than white people and are more likely to react negatively to them in high stress situations.
Doesn’t replicate.
It looks like a lot of that research (like a shocking amount of other research in sociology) has been discredited, though. Or at least others have failed to replicate it.
Yeah, Jesse Singal has looked a lot at the IAT and similar tests: https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html
I feel pretty confident that these trainings don't accomplish anything so I don't really care if we abolish them. I just hate listening to the right talk about them as if they are some kind of pernicious mind control. Like telling people to be nice to each other was the worst thing we could have done.
If some people have a reaction like "FU, who are you telling me what to do?" (and there have been reports that some of these training show people may come out with more racial antipathy afterwards. e.g, https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail), then, yeah, probably better to hope that people's mothers raised them right than do asinine DEI trainings.
There's room for improvement but I don't know what it would be that wouldn't do more harm than good. I agree that people have biases, both conscious and unconscious, but the vast majority of people don't hold to them all that closely. They may think "X people are more likely to be Y" but it doesn't take much evidence for them to identify a person from X not being Y.
This is a musguided take that entirely misses the radicalization of the Republican Party.
Positions taken by presidential candidates are only one part of a party’s positions on issues. Zooming out, as external realities and short term political calculations have shifted, so have the mainstream views of both parties on taxes, spending, and foreign policy, and even climate change, in ways that often defy a left-right dichotomy.
But the Republican Party has hurtled to the right — far beyond the chart you’ve reproduced — on racial justice and cultural matters: immigration, CRT, voting rights, and more, even — arguably — guns. On this broad set of issues, todays Republican candidates and office holders aren’t even remotely recognizable from those of the last 1/2 century. They seem willing to abandon the rule of law and democracy itself to reclaim past glory, real or imagined.
> immigration, CRT, voting rights, and more, even — arguably — guns.
It's demonstrably false to say that the Republicans have shifted right on any of these except voting rights, and I'm not really sure that voting rights really fits on a left-right spectrum.
It's hard to have a discussion on "racial justice and cultural matters" as an abstraction, but it appears to me that Republicans have been consistent on these issues the entire thirty-ish years I've been paying attention to politics. For example, they've opposed Affirmative Action since at least the 80s. If anything, it seems to me they've liberalized meaningfully, the chief example being views on same-sex partnerships.
Guns? You might find their positions extreme, but I don't see how you can say they've changed.
Finally, on immigration:
> In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
> The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
(From the 2017 Atlantic article "How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration", https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-democrats-immigration-mistake/528678/)
And they were all correct. That first quote is particularly on point. It's a basic cognitive dissonance that the left, generally more economically progressive and emphatic on the rule of law than in the recent past have become indifferent-to-supportive of illegal immigration.
I think with immigration it’s more that the parties have sorted. Yes you can find some liberals like Obama saying anti-immigration stuff in the past, but there are also quotes from Reagan and George W. Bush praising immigration and amnesty.
I don’t think Glenn Greenwald is a relevant example here though since Greenwald is a conservative.
I've never understood the belief that republicans have moved right- any politician from the 1990s or even 2008 Obama would be considered far right today. The country has moved to the left and the parties have moved left with it.
On guns, as an example, the right moved from hardening schools to allowing teachers to carry guns to requiring teachers to carry guns.
I agree that requiring teachers to carry guns would be moving rightward - are there serious proposals to that effect?
I think a better meme picture would depict how we went from a left/center/right line to a four-square with one axis being cultural (conservative/liberal) and the other being world view (globalist/nationalist). “Center” doesn’t really exist anymore because of cable news and social media. Trump just took Republican Party over to the conservative/nationalist square. Clinton took the Democrats over to the liberal/globalist square, abandoning the white working class who were conservative but supported the Democrats because of ties to organized labor. Those left in the other two squares have been marginalized and forced to pick sides they don’t fully support each election. Their candidates can’t make it through primaries. I think eventually we will end up back on a line, but it will be nationalist/center/globalist, once we sort out the culture issues. That will take a while. In the meantime, we are in this four-square mess with a two-party system.
I’ll say I think you’re “yada yada yada”ing over GWB initiative to privatize social security. It’s literally the first thing he tried to do after re-election. My point is, destroying social security, Medicare and Medicaid has actually been a more consistent through line in GOP thought than is laid out in this post.
McCain and Trump are exceptions that prove the rule. McCain because he was a “Maverick”. And given what we saw with the Tories in U.K. post 2009, it seems really likely if McCain had won in 2008, there would have been enormous pressure to persue an “expansionary austerity” agenda. And in Trump’s case, he was a former Democrat who was free wheeling in his speeches and rallies (to say the least) and through out lines about protecting Medicare and health care as some half remembered amalgamation of what he saw on Fox and what he used to believe. And what happened? GOP came within one vote of overturning ACA.
My point on all this is I think we really underestimate the possibility that RDS has as a major part of his platform massive entitlement cuts. Seems very likely there will be some sort of recession in 2023. And as you’ve pointed, borrowing to cover tax revenue shortfalls is going to be a lot less feasible. There is going to be a ton of rhetoric on the right about “if Americans are tightening belts, then big government should do so as well”. If RDS is going to distinguish himself vis a vis Trump, besides covid vaccines, this seems to be prime territory.
"conservative attacks on woke schooling are just a mask for the “real agenda” of vouchers and privatization, I think the logic of this campaign militates in the other direction"
Had similar thoughts that it would eventually bloom into privatization attempts, thought that aligned w Youngkin's goals and well as you mentioned you'd expect the budget eventually. Or are you just saying those things are in tension and there isn't some charter push across the board?
The actual problem is that the left right political spectrum is useless. If we're talking about left-right in purely economic terms, both parties are way left of where they were in 08, but the meme is mostly about identitarian culture war stuff where it is largely accurate to say the Dem conventional wisdom has gone off the rails.
The reality is that the events of the post cold war era have driven us to a place where the center of gravity in politics favors totalitarian, populist grievance of all varieties over more coherent ideological concerns. We've shifted along an entirely distinct axis in ways that scramble the parties of the post new deal equilibrium.
Isn’t the point of this post that Republicans are not in fact more left on economics, and that they have largely abandoned Trump’s more moderate economic positions?
In some ways like slashing entitlements yes, but there is still a part of the GOP that digs Trump's version of populist economics that ignores budget deficits to avoid hard choices and still cut taxes. That wing is much stronger than it used to be. Those people still want to cut entitlements, but unlike previous Republicans it's not really about balancing the budget.
In my view, balancing the budget was mostly an excuse to cut entitlements. Balancing the budget talk never got in the way of cutting taxes.
I don't think that's really true, but I don't have hard evidence in front of me. But I believe that in previous eras (Reagan for instance) tax cuts were always paired with budget cuts. Bush Sr even raised taxes rather than run a budget deficit. There have always been true believers in having a balanced budget on the Right, it's a modern change to have so many people willing to cut taxes without cutting spending. But I think that still demonstrates that Republicans of today prioritize cutting taxes over cutting entitlements.
I'd recommend reading The Big Con by Jonathan Chait on this. He talks extensively about how unserious the Republicans are on balanced budgets.
I mean the Rs have never exactly been deeply ideologically committed to free market economics, but to the extent that the nationalists/populists remain elevated they are absolutely significantly less committed than ever.
It seems to me that the Republican party as a group now is less committed to populist-left economic issues now and much more focused on cutting entitlements and taxes on rich people.
I wouldn’t say useless, I’d say insufficient.
You do make me wonder though whether we still consider the political compass useful? I’d say yes but I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts .
The compass is good to the extent people engage with politics on an ideological level. Problem is, right now we're in a moment where tribal populism trump's ideology. People are mostly engaging with politics on the level of tribal affiliation that the compass doesn't really reflect.
But don’t the tribes have ideologies ? Compass doesn’t measure *why* you have certain views but does track the views themselves. Aren’t dem and gop voters views father than ever , at least on some issues ?
Their tribal preferences have diverged while their preferred institutional structures have grown more aligned. There's been increasing ideological consensus around empowering a government capable of imposing broad, totalitarian cultural preferences and stamping out dissent. The fight is over which tribe ends up aiming the weapon they're working together to build.
The good vs evil axis of modern politics isn't the trads vs the libertines or whatever. It's the pluralists vs the totalitarians. The people who want the government to be a tool of productivity vs the people weaponizing it.
That’s too pessimistic imo. I still think most dem voters are small d democratic. It’s just that the authoritarian left (“totalitarian” seem imprecise and hyperbolic) has gained too much power in certain institutions (parts of media, academia, certainly museums, non profits), though there are sign for cautious optimism on that front too. Situation with gop is more worrying as too many of the actual political elites are authoritarian or at least happy to go along with that.
The problem is in the trajectories. As the left racked up wins on civil rights and such, big parts of the traditional right were relatively happy to embrace a live and let live community based cultural/legal pluralism. At some point though the left's cultural project and general proclivity for "positive rights" and such, became so all encompassing the balance in the GOP flipped to where we're now in this arms race where neither side has a commitment to restraining the power of the government to reward friends and punish enemies..