I think this analysis, while good, downplays or skips over a lot of the dynamics that lead up to the 2016 election; two in particular- Hillary did carry a lot of lingering baggage from sexist attitudes towards her from her husband’s presidency, and the Great Awokening was already well underway by 2016 (as you’ve written, 2014 is when it really started to take hold). That being said, I think there’s no denying (or there should be no denying), that it was Hillary Clinton who decided to start injecting wokeism directly into the Democratic Party’s veins. Being pretty woke myself at the time, I was ecstatic to hear her directly refer to systemic racism in a debate. It felt like all the things we’d started discussing among like company during the Obama years but were kind of taboo to bring up in mixed company had been fully “vetted” or something, like we all decided “nope I don’t care if this makes you uncomfortable, I’m going to start telling you The Facts.” Of course, making people uncomfortable is a TERRIBLE way to run for office, and The Facts were more like opinions. But I thought at the time and continue to think that the Sanders folks had and still have no idea how much stronger the backlash to socialism would have been. People on the left still don’t get that the majority of Americans strongly, genuinely oppose it as a concept.
Agree strongly with your last point. Bernie's favorability remained high because the only one attacking him was Hillary; which his hardcore fans probably took as a badge of honor.
Give Fox & Friends a few months to tear down actual nominee Bernie and see what his favorability looks like.
I genuinely felt like Hillary WAS a moderate alternative to Bernie, and that if we thought “but her emails” was bad, just wait til we got to the the oppo on Bernie and his communist buddies. Remember Bill Ayers? Guilt by association is the dumbest but most shockingly effective political move.
"Guilt by association is the dumbest but most shockingly effective political move."
Honestly, I don't think guilt by association is all that bad in itself. But it has been used by a lot of very bad people, so that is a sufficient reason to condemn it.
Guilt by association should have tanked both Trump and Clinton given both’s proximity to Jeffrey Epstien (yes, in Clinton’s case, it was her husband.. but it would be trivial to pin that on Hillary too… look at how Trump trotted out Paula Jones and friends)
The effectiveness of GOP posturing against rioting and communism in 2020 proves your point. And if they had been running against a guy who embraces the massively unpopular socialism label and talks a lot about revolution? I think that would have gone pretty badly
Yeah this was also the start of “it’s not my job to educate you!” line of reasoning. That’s one that still bothers me because, like, it is your job if you want to try and persuade someone. You have to do it from a persuasive angle though and not act frustrated the entire time that you are doing it.
I don’t understand why liberals are celebrating that Josh Hawley video about “people with uteruses” as being a total dunk on right wingers. It’s the same kind of “GeT EdUcAtEd” response that plays right into their hands. Gender issues are complicated and people have a broad range of feelings about them. The left is just ignoring this at the moment and just yelling “transphobic!” At a bunch of people. Josh Hawley is a trash person but he isn’t the audience.
I've been rolling my eyes at how much traction that clip is getting, especially because anyone with two neurons to rub together knows that all those "look at Josh Hawley getting SCHOOLED by this professor!" reactions are literally EXACTLY what Hawley was hoping would happen. He loves the fact that liberals are crowing about how dumb he is for saying things like "men can't have babies" and "people who give birth are women" precisely because 90% of the population is like "ummm, what? Those statements are obviously true." I totally get that there is nuance there and that the professor is absolutely correct on her factual statements. But at the same time, in almost every other realm of public discourse, when we make statements that are true in 95% of situations (things like "people who give birth are women") we don't go around shouting about how that erases or causes physical harm to the other 5% of people for whom it is not true. If I say "Alzheimer's is an issue for elderly people" nobody pops up to shout me down for "erasing" the small number of people who are much younger than 65 who have Alzheimer's- we recognize that the statement is broadly true while knowing that virtually everything has some exceptions to it. Shouting down Hawley and calling him a bigot who is erasing and hurting trans people for relatively benign and innocuous comments is playing right into his hands. You're not going to persuade the vast majority of Americans that we should be more considerate of transgender humans by condemning and internet-mobbing someone who said something that everyone who is not indoctrinated into woke ideology and vocabulary believes to be so obviously true that to say it seems unnecessary.
I feel like people at advocacy organizations with this line is really different from just queer people who are on Twitter.
I thought no one looked good in that segment but she looked high handed and he was obviously callous. I don’t know if that transmits to people who don’t talk to many trans men though.
I'd argue that everyone looked good to their base as I've seen both sides sharing this video as an amazing "own". The professor needs some time outside academia, interacting with smart people with different world views (or she's acting for the cameras). We all know Hawley is close minded and rude, but he came across as the sane, open minded person. Ironically the left is celebrating what your median voter would view as rude hyperbole and ad hominem.
If you're marginally political and don't know Hawley, I'm struggling to see how he looks bad. If you are political it looks like they successfully baited each other into a very typical culture war stand off. They both knew what they were doing and got what they wanted.
I don't know how it felt to see it as someone non-political but I'll take a moment and dunk on the professor as a queer person who actually thinks what she was saying was mostly correct. Hawley's line of argument is just so full of casual cruelty it's insane that anyone thinks this is great.
I feel like I could draw a chain of correlations from men can't have babies to violence and self harm to trans people. It's not crazy to me, even if I think it's a little bit attenuated, but she didn't connect the dots. If men can't have kids leads to trans men aren't really men. If trans men aren't really men they're crazy, or lying. If they're lying or crazy they don't have to be treated like a regular person, and at some margin this will lead to slightly higher levels of violence and self-harm.
Pedantically I also really dislike the dropping of qualifiers to those words are violence when what they actually mean is those words will contribute to an environment which has some greater number of incidences of violence or self harm. . I can follow it and think it's probably true, but it's a multistep bank shot that I'd never use outside of the most safe space, and certainly not on a platform like Senate hearings.
Personally I feel like the both came off as petty and immature, though Hawley picked the fight for sure. But when it comes to reproductive functions, "trans men" are indeed different than "cis men," and for all but the last five minutes of the English language, the word "men" referred to what some now call cis men. It doesn't mean trans men don't exist, it just means that progressive activists don't have the unilateral ability to change the English language and then act insulted when people go "huh??" If trans men want to be considered men full stop no caveats, then they may have to live with the possibility that people will generally assume, sometimes incorrectly, that they aren't able to get pregnant. Personally I think it would be easier to at least reserve a word in the English language for the portion of the population that generally makes eggs and has uteri ("female" is fine) and another word for the portion of the population that makes sperm (how about "male"?), knowing that a very small portion of the population defies either bucket.
So if I'm the professor, my first answer to Hawley would have been "I prefer the term 'female' when delineating between the reproductive functions of the human subpopulations." He probably would have picked a fight over that answer anyway but at least I'd come away looking more reasonable.
Language doesn't solve the core issue. Conservatives can accept the language shift then just use male/female as the core policy and cultural distinction. Trans folk are "othered" by part of culture and outage continues all around. Both camps want to force their preferred classification on the population and it kind of matters because both sex and gender are deeply integrated into the human experience.
Yeah — the arrogance and condescension of the “educate yourself” and “do your research” lines is appalling. Clearly people who have no interest in persuading.
I agree with a lot of this, and was in a similar place in 2016. I'll add though, with regard to opposition to socialism, that in the 2020 primary I remember being very frustrated when John Hickenlooper said in a debate that Democrats should distance ourselves from socialism, and when Rachel Maddow pressed him for what policies specifically he objected to as "socialism" he wouldn't give any specifics, just repeated "all I know is we can't let ourselves be the party of socialism" or something.
Based on my experience of the Obama years, my reaction at the time was that Republicans are going to call us socialists in 100% of possible universes, so running on being unable to be called a socialist was a sucker's game. But the thing is that doesn't mean swing voters will find it equally plausible that Democrats are socialists in all possible universes. At the very least there are lots of immigrants from current and former communist countries who really do have very specific, bad associations with socialism, and you'd think a party that claims to care about immigrants would make it a priority to assuage their fears.
I think that by 2016, Republicans had done for “socialism” what Democrats have now done for “racism”. The typical person hears it and thinks “eh, they say that about everyone.”
I think that's true to a certain extent but I also think the electorate's reaction would be different if a Republican candidate went around saying "I'm a proud racist and we should enact these racist policies." than if it's just Democrats calling them racist.
The better take is "Democrats should distance themselves from the TERM socialism", and leave at that. Medicare for All is good, regardless of whether or not it's socialism.
I totally agree with this, but I would further emphasize that the lingering sexist baggage was in some sense even worse for Clinton than it seems because it's clear that at a high level her campaign incorrectly thought that drawing attention to what a huge scumbag Trump is would be extremely damaging to his campaign.
I really think that prior to Trump's election there was a lot of West Wing-style conviction among Democrats that the American public would fundamentally not tolerate an openly racist, sexist garbage person as the president. Clinton's team clearly thought that the Access Hollywood tape and the associated sexual harassment allegations would be devastating to the Trump campaign, probably in part as a result of all of the right-wing pearl clutching that accompanied Bill Clinton's sex scandal. The mistake was taking all of that as genuine revulsion at sexual misconduct, instead of understanding it as a handy cudgel.
Finally, I also strongly think that Trump's election, and specifically the mechanism that it played in the minds of a lot of Democrats, probably had much more of an effect on the Great Awokening than any particular political messaging. Like I said, a lot of Democrats were operating with the assumption that basically nobody would tolerate a person like Trump, and so when he won it it was deeply shocking that so many of their friends and neighbors *didn't* feel that bald-faced racism and sexism was disqualifying. That mere fact made a lot of people decide that racism, sexism, and other forms of intolerance were much more live problems in American society than they did during the Obama administration, and gave a lot of energy to the Great Awokening.
Real quickly to add to the sexism point of yours, since I'm on vacation and there's already 200 comments before I could even wake up, the history of Hillary Clinton's approval ratings [https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/files/2016/08/Clinton-popularity.jpg] will always remain bonkers to me. Higher when she was in subordinate roles (starting just as First Lady, standing by her husband after Lewinsky, Secretary of State), and lower in leading roles (Hillarycare, Senator, both presidential runs).
Are there any other individuals we can compare that too though? I can see it being pretty plausible that that's true for just about everyone- the joke in sports is that the backup quarterback is always the most popular player on the team. It's easy to be at least fine with someone who isn't actively in charge of things because they're not a direct threat to do anything that you have problems with. First Lady is a figurehad- the Queen of England has had consistently high approval ratings for decades. I'm sure if she started making actual policy choices that would quickly change as people would then decide whether they liked her based on things that she was actually doing that impacted them as opposed to just seeming like a nice lady. HRC was popular as a figurehead, but when she dove directly into promoting a particular policy that folks disagreed with they decided they liked her less- not because of her gender, but because of partisan nonsense and genuine disagreements about policy.
I'd also quibble with labeling the SoS a subordinate role. It's not the President, but it's much more than just a figurehead position is, and having it sitting next to First Lady seems a little bit bizarre. It's undeniably a leadership role IMHO, so the fact that her approval ratings were higher during that portion of her career seems to indicate that people are making decisions less about her gender and more about the kinds of actions she's taking and what her policy stances are. Foreign affairs are not something Americans are too invested in so they're not outraged about specific policy choices she's making, but at the same time I don't think anyone was looking at the Secretary of State leading the fight for American interests abroad and thinking "she's not in a leadership position, which is good because she's a woman."
This is a great point, but by the same token socialism was alway bubbling on the margins and becoming far more popular in those exact same years (remember occupy ws?). However this did not make it inevitably mainstream on the left. It *stayed* on the margins, frankly even on campus discourse. The same thing could have conceivably been the case with wokism (whose theoretical basis, such as it was, was many decades old at that point in any case, and already becoming dated by empirical reality).
The fact that Occupy Wall Street didn’t have the staying power of the Tea Party movement shows that socialism didn’t get *that* much more popular during those years.
Sure but what I’m saying is that it’s a result under a set of circumstances. As Marie notes, wokism felt the same way until 2016. It’s a hypothetical, but imaginable that under different circumstances it would have gone the way of socialism, just like the tea party perhaps might not have emerged without Obama. That’s my argument at any rate.
Right--while some of the 90’s PC wave found purchase (not using certain pejoratives, e.g.), the most outlandish parts (“womyn”) never found institutional purchase, which perhaps could have been the fate of “birthing persons” if the Dems had never bought in.
That's an excellent point! The '90s PC wave was a sort of conversation piece, but never reached any kind of institutional power anywhere, not even in academia. Today's PC wave, by contrast, may arguably have the ideological heritage of the 90s one but in terms of its sociology(?) and institutional capture is more akin to the McCarthy era.
+1 I've pointed this out when people try to suggest the present linguistic games are the same as those of the 1990s and no more consequential -- you generally didn't have government agencies formally adopting 1990s "PC" language into regulations and other official policies other than adding "African-American" as an alternative to "black," and a handful of other examples.
also you didn't have "cancel culture" back then, i.e. people being fired to be made an example of and thus create a culture of fear inhibiting the free exchange of ideas. That was totally foreign to American discourse, at least in liberal "spaces," since at least the 1960s and until 2015 or so.
It is the likely eventual fate of it, but in the meantime the "don't say 'mother'" directive has infected a number of government agencies and liberal stalwarts like the ACLU, which causes the Dems at least some degree of headache.
There was a tumblr that I thought summed up the problem with OWS: "We are the 1% but we stand with the 99%". It was full of the smuggest most annoying rich kids and it represented everything that was wrong with OWS.
OWS's slogans are slogans that should be being shouted by guys that work in an Amazon warehouse, or women working in an elderly care home, or fry cooks at McDonald's. But they were being shouted by grad students. It always felt like a movement not of the actual working class, but of the people who had applied for Wall Street jobs and been turned down.
I kind of agree and actually find it very weird how much it has gone from HRC said it in a speech to the mainstream.
It feels like weirdly cynical at times. It appeals to me because the normative foundations of American life can feel very oppressive to me. But for most of my life I was taught to shut up about it. It's kind of incredible to be able to say in public and not fear total blacklisting that I think most of the underpinnings of American society were built to be oppressive. That's how it should have always been.
I'm a bit confused how it went from hey Hilary said it in a speech to now people feel it's some kind of unstoppable object.
Oh, I’m not claiming it’s Hillary alone. She was part of it but I think you should give the credit to trump. His presidency was extremely norm shattering and took the left soul searching. It also coincided with education polarization. I don’t presume to have a full answer but I suppose in an increasingly post racial (yes) society the woke messaging was more palatable than socialism for the increasingly economically and educationally homogeneous but racially diverse left. It may also have given white liberal elites, feeling surprisingly powerless with the election of trump, a renewed sense of power and agency (isn’t that one of the best - and most toxic - aspects of guilt ?)
This is absolutely a major piece of it. Trump's win was so shocking and discrediting that it validated a lot of radical / left-wing critiques of American society.
Those critiques aren't even wrong, but as a political matter it meant that the normal ways that opposition parties respond to an election loss - by trying to appeal to voter groups you've lost - seem like "giving in" to racism or sexism or authoritarianism.
"Those critiques aren't even wrong, but as a political matter it meant that the normal ways that opposition parties respond to an election loss - by trying to appeal to voter groups you've lost - seem like 'giving in' " - the sad truth of American politics is that this very sentence, out of context, can be said about the GOP in 2020. Both far left and far right have succumbed to conspiracy theories. The right's version is more simplistic and easier to disprove, it's also more ad hoc, but the left's idea is also essentially a conspiracy theory, whose quintessential expression in the 1619 project (in its original, pre-stealth-edit formulation). The major difference, of course, is that left crazies, though influential, haven't actually taken over the Democratic party, while the GOP is entirely the party of Trump.
Embracing "socialism" was so silly. If you policies are popular but not your branding, then change your branding! It's easy! Just call yourself something a New Deal Democrat or something!
I thought that one of the factors in Bernie's appeal in 2015-2016 was that he was left on economic issues, but positioned as fairly moderate (for a Dem) on a lot of the other hot-button social issues.
It certainly made him more appealing to me, personally.
I thought the biggest factor in Bernie’s appeal was that he was not Hillary Clinton. Hillary had high approval ratings before she announced, in fact she was consistently admired as long as she wasn’t running for anything. Once she announced, things started downhill, and whoever persisted in running against her (as Bernie did) was going to benefit from being Not Hillary. A lot of people were against her candidacy based on the “nepotism” charge as well—just as they faulted George W. Bush for entitlement since his dad was former President, they regarded Hillary as trying to inherit Presidency from her husband. I agree with Matt that she probably didn’t help her case much by adopting the “woke” agenda but I don’t think people voted for Bernie in the primaries because Hillary was too far left—they voted for Bernie as the “anybody but Hillary” candidate.
I think an underrated factor that worked against her (in both 2008 and 2016) was George W. Bush becoming president. Not just because of the Iraq War, but because the idea of a *second* dynastic president so soon after the Bush presidency really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
The problem is that there are two entirely different meanings of socialism and most Americans go with the "basically what the Soviet Union did" meaning - which is something that most self-described socialists are just as opposed to as the median American voter is.
The other meaning is roughly something like "an economic system that prioritises well-being for the mass of the population and the poor over profit and income for the richest few". There are a bunch of different such systems, all of which are, in the broadest sense "socialist", each one being a different type of socialism.
That second meaning - which is what socialism means to, say, the French Socialist Party, or the German Social Democrats - is the one that Bernie means by "socialist" but is not what most Americans think it means and it has always seems a particularly silly windmill to tilt at to convince the general public to accept a different meaning of a word.
Quibble: Among my fellow conservatives, I think the "but socialism!!!" that folks like the throw around so much is basically their shorthand for "more taxes and more welfare and other bad govt stuff that I don't like".
There really isn't anything more sophisticated about the general usage.
Why do you think it’s the second? The established meaning used to be “state ownership of the means of production.” But I agree that words do change their meaning — literally — so I need to accept that the ignorant have indeed won and changed the meaning.
I'd say that 'capitalism' is abused almost as badly.
But it's shorthand.
And no one wants to spend dozens of words capturing the nuance when pretty much everyone knows what is meant by context.
We aren't writing specifications here. Precision and accuracy are always nice, but it's futile to demand that in casual (at least non-academic) conversations.
I think it's the second because that's what most people who call themselves socialists mean when they call themselves it.
I don't think it's necessarily historically ignorant though; that's what the people that called themselves socialists mostly meant before 1848. If you go and read the Communist Manifesto or his other early writings from the 1840s and 1850s, Marx spends ages attacking those sorts of socialists and that's why he invented "communist" as a term to mean his sort of socialist.
Non-communist socialists - Marx called them "ethical socialists", we generally say "democratic socialists" or "social democrats" (both are translations of the German Sozialdemokratie) - aren't always opposed to the full-scale state ownership of the means of production, but the vast majority of them are, and have been since at least the 1960s.
In the US, Debs is a bit unclear (he went back and forth on the exact economic form of socialism that he favored), but LaFollette split with the Communists in 1923 and had adopted an economic program for his 1924 run for the Presidency that wasn't just "nationalise everything". Socialists of the non-Communist type mostly supported the New Deal and the huge battles of European socialist parties over an economic program that saw some role for the market, which went right through the 1950s and 1960s just didn't happen in the US because there wasn't a serious socialist party there at the time. But Socialism came to mean something more moderate over here before I was born in the 1970s. Tony Blair - a politician with striking similarities to Bill Clinton - called himself a socialist here. Macron used to be in the Socialist Party until 2016.
I agree with this but also think a lot of it wasn't sexism-it was that a lot of people didn't want another Clinton OR Bush and they thought that they were becoming family dynasties. representing the old guard. You could have argued that Clinton or Bush was borne from the old guard from either the left or the right perspective (e.g. NAFTA, Iraq War, Welfare Reform, Supported her sexist husband, etc). A lot of this isn't her fault but having Clinton or a Bush name was a real anchor coming into that election.
I think rather than "unleash" he should have said acknowledge / embrace"... because all those undercurrents were there... she just raised their salience in the primary and then mistakenly over interpreted that embrace as tje reason she prevailed...
I genuinely find it weird that it makes people uncomfortable. Like systemic racism holds. that people in power constructed systems which created self-perpetuating racist results. And people would rather hear your grandfather was a horrible human being who participated in a system propped up by an awful lot of violence.
There are a few reasons why people may feel uncomfortable with the concept of systemic racism (I'm not defending, just explaining), and one is linguistic.
People have an idea what the word racism means--it's Jim Crow, Nazis, segregationists, the KKK, and Archie Bunker. And now, primarily from academics, the meaning of the word racism has changed to include systemic problems that result in unequal outcomes among the races. So now racism isn't just your uncle who says nasty things at Thanksgiving. "Racism" now includes the fact that you moved to the suburbs to send your kids to the "good" school district, while other people can't afford to live in that district. It includes the fact that your parents raised you in an owner-occupied single-family home, while other people were excluded from the housing market. It includes the fact that you went to a high school that offered AP and IB courses, while others went to schools without them. It includes the fact that your parents paid for your SAT-prep courses, while other people had to wing those tests. And much more.
Now, I think it's no doubt that the history of systemic racism affects all of those things and more. But people haven't changed the definition of "racism" that they are familiar with (that is individual bigoted attitudes and behaviors). So when you say that they benefit from systemic racism, they think that they're being accused of being racists, a la the KKK and Jim Crow segregationists. And no one likes to be called racist.
A similar thing has happened with the term "white supremacy," which used to mean people who believed that white people should be treated superior to other races, but now has come to mean support of anything that continues the history of systemic racism. So people think you are equating the local gang of skinheads with your opposition to affirmative action.
Now words change meaning, and this is fine. But people should also realize that the whole country doesn't adapt to new word definitions coming from academia overnight.
I can't help but think that the academic/activists that redefined and expanded the definitions of "racism"/"white supremacy" were deliberately trying to take advantage of the weight those terms have in regular society in order to help draw attention to their ideas. If they had been successful in simply watering down those terms and relaxing the social penalties associated with them, I don't think it would be as much of a problem. But instead we've been on a parallel track where most of society use the terms with the narrower definition and and higher social penalty while this smaller group uses the terms with a broader definition and a lower social penalty, and this mismatch has just created confusion and turned any attempt at a larger societal conversation about racism into a dead end.
Agreed. Systemic Inequality strikes me as more accurate given the generally accepted definition of the terms, but it's not as catchy or inflammatory so it doesn't have traction in popular discourse. But academics shouldn't care about traction, so it befuddles me that they went with systemic racism given that we already knew what "systems of racism" look like (apartheid, jim crow, etc.).
I've noticed that these types of academic ideas have tended to come out after moments of racial process, like how Critical Race Theory came about as a response to the end of the Civil Rights movement. It seems to be born about a desire to educate the public about whether we've really "fixed" racism. It's like, "Oh, you silly white people really think we've ended racism? Well let me show how racism is actually structurally embedded in our society" "Oh, so think 'systems of racism' are a thing of the past? Well let tell you that those same system are still present, just invisible". I've read excerpts from the book "The New Jim Crow", which helped kick off the modern race-centric criminal justice movement, and that book was very much framed as a critique of the post-racial optimism of Obama's election.
I agree that there frequently has been a willful naivete among white people regarding the state of race relations in this country (I too once thought that Obama's election meant racism was no longer a problem), but I feel this kind of response from academics is a massive overcorrection, especially now that those ideas have become gospel in social justice circles and many white people are now far too *pessimistic* about the state of race relations.
I feel like worse than that it really allowed a lot of bigotry to slip the bounds back into acceptable discourse and that a lot of the prior ban that say led Trent Lott to resign over comments about voting for Strom Thurmond now seem ridiculous. It showed that a lot of commitment to a lack of racism was merely elite manners.
Well, some of us remember the dangers of racism and white supremacy 1.0 and think the word is there for a reason. It ain’t small pox, it hasn’t disappeared (as multiple murderous hate crimes show) and it can come back in force, so we need the words to talk about it and fight it. Thinking we can forgot about it to talk exclusively about something else IS the height of “white privilege”.
It’s not so much an argument about the theory as an observation about many of the acolytes. That they apparently so easily allowed them to be thus watered down and diluted beyond all recognition suggests they may not have been fully aware of the extent depth and distinctness of the depravity suggested by the original meaning (or worse, that they didn’t care). What this might mean for the reliability of their “allyship” remains to be seen.
Oh I have no doubt a lot of this is a fad that will fade at some point.
As a person who’s always found America operating as normal to be really difficult it’s hard for me to believe that a huge part of the most successful parts of society adopted a fairly uniform view like this.
I mean there's no question that Racism/white supremacy 1.0 still exists. I can tell you when I lived in Baltimore, and my home was broken into, the number 1 question that I would get asked was "Was he black?" Of course I didn't see the person, so I have no way of know, but those comments were some good old fashioned racism/white supremacy 1.0 (prevalent in my left-leaning, mostly Democratic social circle, no less).
I can understand why someone might expect that the perpetrator was black based on the demographics of the city—a large black underclass probably means a large portion of those desperate enough to resort to crime will also be black—but why that would come up other than in a description of the specific perpetrator, for the purpose of finding them, does seem racist. I would think the first question would be “how did they get in?” That’s what I’d want to know.
Ironically, if the were really left-leaning, they might have been asking because they wanted to be more forgiving/understanding of the criminal’s situation if they were a minority. Racism 3.0?
I'm confused on why "Was he black" is equivalent to 1.0 racism? That must be partly because I don't really understand the intent of the question. If the follow up is "we ought to drive Black people out of this neighborhood" then I totally get it. But the intent of that question is pretty open-ended. I haven't lived in Baltimore and I don't know much about it but it's not unreasonable to imagine that ethnicity offender rates vary a lot, depending on the crime and neighborhood, because that's quite often the case.
I work in fraud right now, for example, and the majority of the more extensive and sophisticated rings we've found have been Armenians and / or Russians. If we found a big ring and a coworker asked "Armenians again?" it could be an awkward question and I'd wonder if they had a good reason for such a bluntly "racism-adjacent" question but I wouldn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that they were a racist given the obvious disparity in offender rates.
If you assume that a crime was done by a member of a particular racial/ethnic group based on stereotypes associated with that group, I think that fits the definition of racism.
Oh man I can’t tell you how much I wish they had come up with a new word. It drives my autistic brain crazy when people do this in any context. I was screaming at people about this in 13-14 when it was bubbling up on Facebook and Twitter.
I lost that debate but like still think like the thing being described is bad regardless.
It depends what you mean by this analysis. If you mean that inherited wealth is a thing, few would dispute it, certainly none on the old economic left. But if you tell poor white people, poor perhaps precisely because of their ancestors who were here or who just lately immigrated here, that they have some sort of unique privilege in *today’s* society (and not just as compared to black people but any “person of color” including one who literally arrived in this country yesterday), well that does not follow purely from what you described, it requires many additional assumptions and ideas, and is also rightly considers toxic and offensive.
It seems like a very real failure of imagination on the part of those poor whites to understand that there's someone with all the ways they're oppressed and is black too. It like boggles my mind that something as kind of utopian as intersectional discourse which finds so many avenues of oppression and wants to address them all gets understood as people want to put whites down.
It's like recreating individualism in that it recognizes infinite opportunities and then says we should resolve them all.
Imagination is all well and good, but here is a reality. It’s the height of COVID and life saving vaccines are about to come out, but initially there won’t nearly be enough to meet demand. How do you prioritize? CDC own models show clearly that age should be the way to go, resulting in maximum reduction in death. However at one point they seriously consider prioritizing essential workers nevertheless, because the old are disproportionately white. They acknowledged by the way, that this more “equitable” choice would result in more deaths across *all* racial groups, but were planning to go ahead anyway. Only public backlash stopped them.
Here’s another. It’s no longer as bad, but people are still dying and a new life saving therapeutic came out. Again , how do you prioritize? Health agencies in multiple states made a point system according to which being a “person of color” (read: nonwhite) would give you priority even if young and healthy, over people in known risk groups such as obese or elderly. In most cases public and legal backlash did not stop them and policy was enacted.
In one thing I do agree with the woke: racism kills.
1. Elderly people in long-term care facilities were always part of phase 1a, which is the setting that drove/drives a huge proportion of the increased mortality in older adults
2. The primary motivation for prioritizing essential workers was the idea that a sterilizing vaccine quickly distributed among the in-person essential workforce would help block spread, and subsequently reduce mortality across the entire population. It was not 'old people don't matter because they're white'. With the benefit of hindsight that model was incorrect, but based on early data from the mRNA vaccines there was substantial hope of large scale sterilizing immunity.
3. They weren't 'stopped' by public blowback, the final recommendation still prioritized essential workers in phase 1b, along with adults 75+.
If your argument is 'race should never have been mentioned in these discussions', that's fine, but to argue that a commitment to racial justice was overriding all other considerations is not a fair or honest recounting of the facts.
This is actually way more wild then I expected. It's pretty clear throughout the document that the racial and ethnic identities of who gets vaccinated is treated as an important consideration. See slides 32 & 33 where vaccinating the elderly is giving the highest possible score with respect to Science, Implementation, Maximizing Benefits & Limiting Harms, but then given the lowest possible score in terms of Ethics and Mitigating Inequalities.
It's worth mentioning that slide #31 shows how they arrived at the lowest score for mitigating inequities: on the one hand Seniors have the highest covid incidence, mortality and rate of congregant living. But on the other hand they are less ethnically diverse, which brings the score down to the lowest possible in that category.
It is pretty shocking to find out that the highest medical authorities in the land are explicitly and openly weighting my parents life less than others on the basis of race.
I don't have time to re-litigate this. I'd just note it's very curious that your recounting in this very post presents a picture as if race in fact did *not* play any part in the discussion, yet your own final paragraph suggests otherwise, which doesn't seem to align with your recap. Which is it?
*also, I was working purely from memory. If I got any *facts* wrong, apologies. Since you did us all a favor and went through the data just now, could you please point out exactly which facts if and where I did so?
P.S. Here' Yascha Mounk's reaction to this affair. To those unfamiliar, he is a leftist/liberal political scientist, whose expertise is fighting populist regimes. Not a disease expert but certainly not a right-wing source either.
Yes, people who have good ideas will continue to have bad ideas. There’s nothing about understanding of these ideas that bind you to any granular course of action.
Like these seem like bad ideas to me but like it does not follow that to believe in systemic racism is to believe that equity is in the priority stack not to believe it is the priority stack. Yes some woke people go too far like literally all other ideas ever.
For what it's worth, I think poor white people can and do understand it, you just need to adopt a different framing. "Black people tend to have it harder" means the same thing, but doesn't generate the same amount of hostility.
I think people parse it as implying that people support the existing social order out of racism, or the social order will have to be hugely rethought to end racism, or something like that. (Of course, many people that use the term agree -- "Capitalism is racist, so we need to get rid of capitalism.")
The terminology can work in academia where people accept it, but in politics, you don't get to assume people will adopt formal definitions. I've had better luck with "Black people are more disadvantaged by impersonal forces rather than individual prejudice"
I had naively thought that the privilege discourse would make this palatable - it’s not that you did anything wrong, it’s that people give you privileges they don’t give to other people. But somehow people hear it as you doing something wrong anyway.
I think it has sometimes scanned as “even if you were born in a trailer park, you’ve been given an advantage that you don’t deserve.” And by the way, why haven’t you done more with it?
FWIW, I was literally born in a trailer park in Alabama, and if someone tells me to check my white privilege, I can't guarantee that I won't react violently.
I rationally know that if white privilege is a real thing, then I likely benefitted from it in some what.
But the net 'privilege' from the circumstances of my birth would almost certainly put me pretty deeply into negative territory. At least relative to Americans.
So trying to pull the privilege card would just make me very very irate.
The application of the word "privilege" to all sorts of things that people generally consider *rights* probably doesn't help (e.g., free speech, not being stopped by police without cause, etc.) and I think it very clearly doesn't help that discourse also imputes all sorts of stereotypes to people that clearly aren't true on an individual basis, e.g., anything about purported intergenerational transfers of real property (no one in my family has inherited a house since before WW2 at the latest -- all of my elderly relatives have ended up selling their homes to pay for medical expenses, assisted living facilities, etc.).
Yes, I think that’s important. Rights aren’t “privilege”. No one is supposed to be denied those. White people aren’t enjoying unearned advantage; we need to ensure that basic expectations are met for black people (primarily; BIPOC is a failed attempt at conflating racial experiences that are quite dissimilar).
Part of the problem is that for politics, you want the "original sin" version -- 'you didn't do anything wrong, we just live in a fallen world. Please vote for me.'
On the other hand, for personal stuff, you want the "free will" version -- 'please try to do better next time'. When the wires get crossed, and people take the individual responsibility framing and apply it at a large scale, it all blows up.
Privilege discourse is the most reactionary thing imaginable. The greatest intellectual achievement of the enlightenment movement was to create a framing (discourse) of rights as opposed to duties and privileges. An idea cemented the American and French revolutions all the way to wwii and the un decalarion of human rights. To take us back to privileges framing over a rights framing (and not coincidentally, groups over individuals) is reactionary and regressive to a colossal scale. It’s not just bad politics it’s horrifying philosophy.
I dunno, Enlightenment thinkers loved railing against the undeserved privileges of the nobility and clergy.
To me, the big problem is that the term doesn't do what we want it to do, so it's dumb to cling to it. (Also, "justice" rhetoric isn't nearly as effective as progressives seem to think it is.)
I may be an outlier here, but I would rather you accuse me of being terrible, rather than accuse my ancestors.
Accusing my grandparents of being terrible people when they basically followed the standard template of their society at the time...just makes me angry.
Like of course we're not saying like John Davis you personally lynched Emmit Till but it's kind of a pretty elementary inference from explaining the systems of violence that were in place everywhere and the timeframe and that people alive participated in them.
And like that's the history conservatives want over powerful, rich white people used racism to enshrine social order and conventions that maintained that power and some of those carry over to this day. It seems like the systemic view of racism is a much more humane one than the conventional bad people doing bad things one.
But it also greatly downplays the role of individual agency, "self made man" myth etc. That rubs many people the wrong way even if it does at some level absolve them of responsibility for past injustice.
I'd say that particularly rubs many people the wrong way because simultaneously systemic racism doesn't actually seem in practice to absolve individuals of anything as seen by the outburst of literal iconoclasm in 2020.
Yeah I tend to favor this view, with obvious attenuation the further back in time you go. I mean, surely as a function of selection effects, my ancestors (and those of presumably almost everyone, including e.g. basically everyone of the incredibly numerous descendants of Genghis Khan) are probably among those who were the most ruthlessly effective at engaging in pillage and rapine, because the nicer folks were dead or subject to them. The Hobbesian war of all against all has definitely been a reasonable approximation of many parts of the world throughout history.
I do agree with Belisarius' point that a lot of people just kind of go along to get along because they perceive (rightly) that their individual agency is much more applicable to "be a decent person by the standards of my time" than "be a moral paragon according to as-yet undetermined future standards"--this is why the central insight of the social-identitarian left that changing default norms is so powerful, whether used for good or ill.
That said, the costs of "being moral" are also going to have a huge effect here. I'd say with pretty high confidence that right-thinking people of the future are going to be appalled by the wanton slaughter and mistreatment of animals that we do now [1], possibly (if you run the numbers) more than any other thing humans have ever done throughout all of recorded history. But it's going to be easier for that view to take root as the general consensus once vegetarian meat alternatives are dirt cheap and tasty.
[1] I am not actually a vegetarian but I mostly consider this an example of me behaving immorally rather than a reason that animal welfare concerns are wrong.
Mostly agree but it is interesting how far “authenticity” goes with people. Joe Rogan liked Bernie. Why? I think he thought he was more real than Hillary. It’s hard to say if Bernie could have beat Trump in Ohio or Michigan but he may have had a better chance than what people viewed as a fake Hillary. Calling people deplorable wasn’t smart either. BTW - I voted for Hillary and while I don’t like her that much do think she may have been an effective President.
'Authenticity' is the word that people used, but ultimately I think it came down to a form of risk assessment.
Bernie had been saying the same thing for 40+ years. If nothing he supports is just anathema to you, and you like or tolerate most of the rest, then you know what you are going to get and it might not be so bad.
Hillary and many other Dem politicians seem more...inscrutable? Just plain untrustworthy?
So you might kind of like what they are saying more than Bernie, but if you figure that there is a decent chance that they will 'evolve' on an issue as soon as they are elected *cough Obama cough* and that 'evolution' is something that you oppose....maybe the net risk assessment makes you go for Bernie over Hillary.
My hunch is that Americans oppose any moral framework that stands in opposition to their deeply held beliefs and values, especially when that moral framework is adopted and enforced by people they view as having power over them. So wokeness is the boogeyman of the day because it’s promoted by people with power, whereas socialism is not.
This essay is makes me profoundly sad. Our politics, our discourse, our society would have been much better today if not for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I think Matt's analysis is spot-on, including the part where any other Democrat would have beaten Trump and consigned him to the trash dump of history where he belongs.
We are going to deal with the damage from the 2016 election for years to come.
Agree. In addition, I wish we only had transcripts of Congressional hearings and floor speeches, rather than videos. I think it would open the door for Congress to be much more functional.
Additionally, transparent systems are (I think) even more easy for lobbyists to manipulate, and for our geopolitical adversaries to take advantage of.
I use to hate earmarks, but I think that those forms of legal legislative bribery actually provide some very much needed grease to the gears of governance.
"transparent systems are (I think) even more easy for lobbyists to manipulate"
I find this very unconvincing. Transparent systems make things easier to stop - but lobbyists thrive in state houses where there is often very little transparency.
It may prevent some of the behind-closed-doors corruption, though I'd argue that they seem to be getting away with a lot of stuff just fine with 'transparency'.
And it lets them more easily use the media to put pressure on elected representatives.
What do you mean by revolution? I can think of three meanings: 1. Violent overthrown of govenet to achieve raid la political change (French, Russian , Iranian) 2. Hyperbole for mere social shift (“sexual revolution”) 3. Overthrew of essentially foreign rule (American revolution). As far as no. 1 is concerned I can hardly think of a single case that went well in the short or medium term (and that’s an understatement), and indeed most proved catastrophic even in the long term
Edit: of course Bernie never advocated for such revolution, nor most of his acolytes (at least not seriously). In fact I don’t think america today has much in the way of revolutionaries per se on either side. the biggest danger is authoritarian populism but that’s more democratic backsliding than proper ideologically induced and all out violent and radical revolution.
This is a spot on take of the 2016 primary. Also, James Webb would have won.
We are now still paying for this as Democrats in an ever increasing Woke arms race. We can’t even fight effectively on Roe being overturned because we have to instead focus on off putting to the median voter trans friendly wording like “birthing person” instead of building a broad coalition.
You could almost set a watch to this too with our drop in Hispanic vote and Asian voters. Wokeism made us idiots on education, patriotism, and crime (issues important to them).
How silly of me. Lets make sure we focus the impact of the issue on that 0.2% of the population while alienating the other 99.8%. Brilliant strategic decisions all around.
In a 6-7 year period where democrats have made some astonishingly dumb messaging decisions, I think this will go down as by far the dumbest.
I think one could make a similar claim that it was 2016 Bernie Sanders that unleashed the Mobilization Delusion among progressive activists. Prior to Bernie, no one thought that aggressively tracking to the left was a winning strategy. His supporters did not realize that what made him relatively popular was not his bold, aggressive policy ideas, but that he culturally understood working class white people did not go after them on race. So you get this wing learning the wrong lesson, and instead deciding there’s a “revolution” waiting to be democratically unleashed and if we had a politician who was bold enough, disengaged voters would come out en masse for Democrats. Totally oblivious that an equal (or greater) and opposite number of previously disengaged voters would come out to oppose it or reluctantly switch sides in the general.
Also, there was disappointment with Obama himself on the left wing of the Party. He swept into office with huge crowds, soaring rhetoric, and large majorities. And then ... it turned out to be 8 years of grinding, slogging political stalemate. Felt like the dying gasps of the 90s centrist Democratic style of politician whose main skill was surviving, with no easily articulable, broadly appealing vision of how government and society should work and be organized. Just ad hoc, technocratic tweaks and adjustments in reaction to events. Incremental, elitist and not inspiring. Actually very small-c conservative, and from that perspective, quite defensible. But the Democratic Party is committed to the idea that it's not the conservative party, so couldn't sell itself honestly by describing itself as what it actually was (is?).
I'm not so sure that it was the stalemate that caused the disappointment, but the appointment of Tim Geitner. Meet the new boss, turns out he is the same as the old boss. Again.
I'm not sure most of the electorate could name Tim Geithner, even in 2009, so I have a hard time buying that he could have been a huge source of any dissatisfaction with Democrats.
Yeah I don't know who that is. But still, I could see how a top appointment could be typical of a pattern of appointments that trickled out to the electorate.
Appreciate The Who reference! But am an unrepentant lover of Obama, and I think that Biden's presidency is showing how hard it is to make change in our system and we are really lucky that he moved the ball forward with Obamacare, because at this point we are not even debating that there should be universal access to health care it's just how we get there.
I think the mobilization delusion has been a running theme in in-group discussions for a long time. But the 2016 primary made it actually seem like it was having empirical results.
In the 2000s it was still empirically true that high turnout elections appeared to favor democrats (see 2006/2008). However a large part of that was that democrats were fielding high quality, moderate candidates in all 50 states thanks to netroots-type funding and very good candidate recruitment. I actually think that’s an approach that could still work for dems, it’s the conclusion that People Really Want Socialism that is incorrect.
I think Howard Dean as head of DNC is under-appreciated!
But I think there's a difference between
the thing that used to be true: higher turnout favors Democrats (which is no longer clearly true now that Democrats are the party of college educated voters and Trump has a base of only loosely attached voters)
the thing that never was true and still isn't: running on a farther left platform will tap into a large pool of left-leaning non-voters
I meant the latter thing by "the mobilization delusion", but I see that the term is ambiguous.
The socialist/progressive wing of the part did really well in local LA races during the last primary, and turnout was TERRIBLE. I think that's another good point in favor of "marginal voters are more moderate than regular voters."
I think a lot of political people can imagine not voting because they are annoyed at their party and want their party to do thing that they like, but those voters, in practice, tend to vote anyway because they find the other party so objectionable.
What they can't imagine is being the person who really isn't all that interested in politics but will catch up when the really big events happen. I usually explain that with a sport analogy; there are plenty of people who don't follow the NFL, but will watch the Superbowl and will pay some attention in the week or two before the Superbowl so they can pick a side for that game. Lots of people have about the same level of interest in politics. They will pay attention for a couple of weeks before the Presidential election and they might pay attention to the midterms.
Bernie helped but this was a legacy of the Obama campaign - "all that matters is the number of field organizers, don't bother to try to persuade anyone, just wake people up." That was particularly a lesson people were crowing about in 2012 - "permanent Democratic majority just due to demographics." My own takeaway is that Obama's successes were driven by his celebrity/charisma (which is not a bad thing - that's how you win at politics!). Hillary and Trump had their own celebrity/charisma, both mostly violently negative, which essentially fought each other to a draw.
You claim that the national policy mood had swing somewhat to the right. But I venture to guess that there was also a marked shift to the left in elite coastal cities and among elite-educated, urban young adults. So the kind of people working on the Clinton campaign were living in a more left-leaning milieu, and may have mistaken that left-ward shift among coastal young professions for a nation-wide shift.
I can tell you, as someone who had lived in an elite-educated urban, coastal bubble, that I felt that my friends moved did indeed move quite left on policy issues. In 2008, among my Democrat-leaning friends, I feel that single-payer healthcare was considered an extremist idea. People were split on affirmative action and gay marriage (many would take centrist positions like "affirmative action for socioeconomic status" or "civil unions"). Universal child care and free college were not even discussed. People supported increasing the minimum wage to $10, but wouldn't have thought about $15. And white people were by and large not comfortable with (or even unaware of) the concept of privilege. By 2016, in my urban, Democratic-leaning friend group, single-payer healthcare is widely favored, support for affirmative action, gay marriage, and a 15 dollar minimum wage is unquestioned, and people by and large support significant government help with college and child care (albeit maybe not fully funded government programs). And people started to be more careful to acknowledge and articulate their privilege.
This is anecdotal, but I'm guessing that a lot of people noticed this shift among urban well-educated young people and mistook it for a national trend in 2016. When they forget that most of the country are yuppies and hipsters that live in coastal cities.
I've always felt one of the big pulls left in this timeframe was the fact that you had all these Millennials trying to enter the workforce in the Great Recession, and not finding "good" jobs deciding to take non-profit or advocacy jobs that at least helped them feel good. As a 2010 college graduate with a Poli Sci major, I know a lot of people that left college with a degree that wasn't going to get the kind of job they were envisioning in that job market, so they took advocacy jobs that paid shit, but at least gave them a feeling of purpose, and then they moved radically to the left in the next couple of years.
Interesting. What's that friend group like in 2022? My guess would be that of all these things maybe AA is not longer a la mode and its no longer taboo to question it even in elite circles? Heck even NYT has repeatedly published takes critical of it, and polls suggests scotus killing it would be very popular.
Any sense/guess? Also, what’s your basic take on Israeli politics (I think you mentioned living in Tel Aviv in a previous comment so I gather you’ve been there for a few years) ?
Sorry for the late reply...So I don't discuss American politics as frequently or with as many people as I did when I lived in the states. But my sense is that in 2020, my friends were pretty gung-ho for progressive politicians--Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and to a lesser extent Bernie Sanders, and were pretty down on the moderate Joe Biden. But now, I feel like my social circle has moved on a bit from progressive politics, and just wants reasonable moderates...Wrt to Israel politics...yes I'm in Tel Aviv now. There's a lot I can say, but overall it's also highly disfunctional. And although I live in a left-wing bubble of Meretz and Labor supportiers, the left wing is really small here. So it's really a fight between centrist and right-wing parties, with the left-wing parties making a pretty small impact and are no longer major players. Another thing that surprises me about Israeli politics is how central individual personalities are to the politics, and the extent that the politics feels like a chess game, where people have to make moves to stand out more or out-politic their opponents. I never really conceptualized American politics in this way. We're also going through our 5th election cycle in 2 years, so let's see how it goes...
I've had many of the same experiences: graduating college and observing career paths, meeting some really rich people (but maybe not quite as rich as your examples) for the first time and traveling in the developed world.
But my conclusions were almost the exact opposite. I've seen nearly everyone I know with a good head on their shoulders do very well and very minor advantages accrue to people based on pure wealth. Sure, some people had setbacks, but basically anyone with a plan who worked towards that plan ended up ok. And I've also seen many examples of siblings where one messed up and the other did totally fine (drug dealer brother, yoga-studio-owning sister, for example). Or one had a "normal" career and the other excelled (social worker brother, harvard med school professor sister).
The average rich person is not making a 5% annual by sitting on their hands. Bonds, CDs and savings have been earning 1% or less, before taxes for the lsat couple decades. The stock market may have averaged something like 5% recently, but that comes with considerable risk as 2022 shows. A rich debutante sitting on 10 million in Jan would now be down to 7 million 6 months later. That's hardly reliable money and that example is not believable.
If compounding did dominate other incomes we'd still have Vanderbilts and Carnegies and Astors at the top of society and no Gates or Buffets could surpass them.
At the end of the day we're talking about what a "fair" society is. I think everyone agrees that a pure Utopia is impossible. The question is something more like "how much better could it be" or, in the context of politics, will the change the left always wants make a flawed, "unfair" society better or "pretty fair, (although no utopia)" worse.
To me, that half a percent of US household have 10 million in net worth (often tied up in property or a business they run) doesn't seem like cause to be greatly upset. It's not even enough money to ball the bottom out of poverty in any case if you went full Venezuela and forced them to divide the 10M in 100 and give it to everyone else.
If it was a caste of oppressors ruling generation after generation then maybe, but that seems far from the case since there's continually new fortunes being made. Likewise, that there are people who have poor prospects from birth is terrible, but show me a country where that isn't the case? There really aren't very many, and just "turning left" doesn't solve either of these problems. From welfare to neoliberal economics the left has had as much to do with creating these problems as the right.
I haven't had a chance to listen to the book club audio with Leah Boustan yet, but I would think that her finding that second-generation immigrants significantly outperform their parents (and native-born citizens) should restore your faith in the American dream. I'll quote from the NYT piece on the book:
"Second, immigrants tended to settle in parts of the country experiencing strong job growth. That gave them an edge over native-born Americans who were firmly rooted in places with faltering economies. Immigrants are good at doing something difficult: leaving behind relatives, friends and the familiarity of home in search of prosperity. The economists found that native-born Americans who do what immigrants do — move toward opportunity — have children who are just as upwardly mobile as the children of immigrants."
I think it’s also worth pointing out that HRC was the only possible candidate who could be seen as nullifying the fact of Donald Trump’s personal scumminess. Because no matter how many harassment scandals erupted around him — and the man literally started a beauty pageant so that he could barge into the dressing rooms so there was never gonna be a lack — he could simply ask “and who are you still married to, again?”
There was the Epstein shit lurking around both Trump and Bill Clinton as well. Any other candidate could have made hay from Trump's association with Epstein but that was a gift the Dem's threw away by picking Clinton.
"...if Clinton could have put up Iowa-level numbers among white voters across the board, she would have done even better than she actually did."
Your theory: she got less popular over the course of the primaries, because she pivoted left.
My theory: she got less popular over the course of the primaries because the Republicans coalesced around a campaign *to make Clinton less popular*.
You are forgetting that Bannon's whole plan was to drive her likeability numbers into the ground, by using Cambridge Analytics, Facebook, strategic hacks from Russia, etc., in order to make her look sinister, untrustworthy, and deranged.
And it worked! With a little help from Republican operatives in the FBI, Bannon and Manafort and the whole sick crew managed to make her unpopular.
You think people were still worrying about her Iraq war vote? Ancient history.
I do think it's a bit of both. Let's go back to the 2008 primary even... you could argue that Obama won because of Hillary's Iraq vote, and surely that was a big part of it, but I'd argue that an even larger part was that he was NOT HILLARY. And 2016 "moderates" voting for Bernie weren't voting for him as much as they were voting for NOT HILLARY. It was profoundly stupid of the Democratic elite to try to coronate someone with so much baggage. You're right about the right wing rat fucking apparatus, but it was also uniquely set up to bring her down. They'd been planning that for at least 20 years and her negatives were really really high to begin with.
It was stupid but they arguably had no choice. Clinton had a pretty huge, passionate, indigestible fan base in the party, plus the ability to out-fundraise everyone by massive amounts. Under those circumstances it was rational for the elite to think that Clinton's nomination was inevitable in spite of her weaknesses, and thus it was better to avoid a contentious primary that would only make things worse without having any chance to derail the nomination. Unfortunately, they got a contentious primary anyway.
I do also think many were fooled by Clinton's sky-high approval ratings as Secretary of State, which was obviously wrongheaded in hindsight, but is also just a very weird fact that's hard to come up with explanations for. She really was super popular for a while there between 2008 and 2016! This goes back to the comparison I drew above between Clinton and Terry McAuliffe: some politicians are just weird in this way.
I think the main reason she lost to Obama in 08 was because she and her idiot campaign team (Mark Penn!) were just terrible at running a campaign. Read David Plouffe (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6452758-the-audacity-to-win). The Obama campaign was besides themselves with wonder and joy that the Clinton campaign had no idea how to maximize acquisition of delegates (i.e., focus on caucuses especially in states no one was paying attention to) and they just rolled up delegate after delegate until Clinton had no chance.
For some of us, voting for the invasion of Iraq was (and still is) akin to voting against certifying the 2020 election. I cannot over emphasize how frustrating it was to watch the pod people replace the brains of otherwise thoughtful people, one-by-one, until facts no longer mattered and supporting that illegal invasion was the only patriotic thing one could do; and how unpatriotic people like me were for living in reality. The lasting damage and total lack of accountability remain unforgivable.
To me, it was as though Clinton had showed up on January 6th and pumped her fist in support of the insurrectionist mob and then said anyone who opposed the mob was naive and didn't understand the situation at the time. The attacks from the right-wing hate machine were a net positive for her because it meant she really got under their skin.
You're both right. The right wing media machine had been pummeling Hillary since the 90s. BENGHAZI !!!!!!! Add to that the young progressive types hating her for being an establishment shill; and The WWC Bernie bros "just didn't like something about her" (Y would that be?) She never had a chance against anyone BUT Trump.
Thanks, but your examples suggest you think that I am right and Yglesias is wrong. He says she suffered from going left; you say she suffered from being perceived as too right.
I'm saying she was beaten up from both the left and the right. Squishy low info centrists were just going to fixate on Benghazi and emails; activist leftists were going to stay home oR write in Bernie because Iraq & NAFTA.
before the Indiana primary, Trump and his crew were more worried about destroying Cruz than Clinton. Most of the data in Matt’s beautiful regression was pre-rat fucking.
Don’t deny voters their agency. Besides, your theory has the downside of being the one that, for decades, the left tells itself every single time it loses an election, even when the margins are tiny, implying that only a few swing voters had to be won over. I can’t remember which podcaster said this recently, but it’s soooo true: only the left can take the party’s 65-35 advantage in some elections and make it 50-50.
I would find that more persuasive if we weren't talking about democratic primary voters. The fact that republicans were attacking her would, if anything, seem more likely to fuel positive views of her with dems. If we were talking general population approval numbers, I think your point makes a lot of sense. But if we're talking about democratic primary voters (so not just a self identified democrat, but one who is gung-ho enough about the party to actually show up in a primary election to vote for their chosen candidate) I don't really see how that holds much water.
Just by way of example, I don't think anyone reasonably believes that MSNBC bashing Trump in hyperbolic ways for months did anything other than make the core republican voter like him even more.
That would be me. And I am still mad about her voting for the Iraq war.
I think a big part of it is how nasty the lead up to the war was. People who raised reasonable objections were often told that meant they would have supported Hitler or didn’t care if Saddam nuked NYC.
One important caveat here. Trump was and is an extremist on foreign policy. His wish to leave NATO, love for dictators, mysterious relationship with Russia, casual denigration of allies for unclear reasons all point to an extremism on foreign policy that was unusual.
Although this extremism isn’t exactly on the traditional dimension that American politics have been differentiated - Trump wasn’t more pro-war as the right had been seen in recent decades, and he wasn’t more anti-communist. He was (as he is on so many things) off in his own idiosyncratic dimension rather than being a right-wing extremist.
Trump is an isolationist, which is an enduring element in American political thought, but in terms of the party positions, is an extremist position. His policy prescriptions are populist and match closely the America Firsters of the 1920s, for example.
but he's not a consistent isolationist, which is the most frustrating part. It's not like he wants to dismantle the military and keep to ourselves, he wants a giant military that he can throw around the world to satiate his giant ego, while not being interested in having anyone else tell him "no."
This is true, but in the primary Trump savaged Jeb Bush for his brother's war, and Jeb would neither criticize his brother nor justify a war that was unpopular even with Republicans. As for everything else fo-po related, voters don't care about that stuff.
"He kept us safe." Except for 9/11, anthrax, etc. Jeb Bush's position was so bad it exposed how incoherent and incompetent the Republican foreign policy establishment had been under George W. Bush.
Right but not that many people cared that much about that, especially with the pandemic and economic chaos ( why so many voters chose to support Trump in view of his performance in regard to those is another matter). There is also a residue of feelings among many voters that were vaguely sympathetic to Trump’s attitude (America should come first and may be better off isolating itself from the world's problems - hence sympathy to autarky and closed borders, our Allies don’t do enough for their own defense, we have less to fear from the Russians than the Chinese). I’m not saying those feelings were correct but they buffered the grotesqueness of Trump’s positions.
It's only extreme from the point of view of the political parties, it's not very extreme from the point of view of the electorate and I expect it will help him if he runs again.
I honestly don't remember--how much of that was painted in yuuuuge, bold, flashing, very classy and large, gold sharpie letters in early 2016, and how much was merely plausible?
I don't think it was a top-five sort of talking point I deployed with acquaintances who were leery of Clinton, but it definitely would/should have been.
I agree with the general point that 2016 was the year "woke politics" went mainstream, but as someone who worked on the ground for Hillary Clinton throughout that entire cycle (Iowa to the general), I think MY's point is under-calibrated.
I want to echo a lot of what Marie Kennedy has said at the top about HRC responding to a very real and mounting pressure from left-wing organizing. Mid-2015 saw many campaign events where BLM activists took the stage or shouted down candidates (Bernie and HRC) and surrogates to pressure them on racial justice issues. The fact of the matter is that HRC actually engaged with those activists in closed-door meetings and reworked her messaging, while Sanders and his surrogates initially took umbrage and tried to insist that socialist economic reform *really was* racial justice. The Sanders campaign really did come around on this issue, but not for months.
About Iowa, and HRC's usual strength there (in spite of the softness of her support among white men). A victory in Iowa really doesn't say anything about popular support. The caucus system is incredibly arcane and lowercase "c" conservative in that the number of delegates up for grabs at any given caucus site is reflective of turnout from the previous year -- not the number of people who show up on caucus day. What this means in practice is that Iowa rewards incredibly strategic organizing, where moderate candidates and campaigns can maximize their victories in low-turnout areas (where the participant-to-delegate ratio is low) and try fight to a standstill in high-turnout areas (where the participant-to-delegate ration high). Sanders may very well have had more people turn out to caucus for him in 2015, but the delegates were rarely up for grabs in those specific caucus sites for it to make the difference. Nevertheless, Iowa was not seen as a victory in the Hillary campaign -- what should have been a crushing victory led to a lot of hair pulling in HQ and in field offices.
People will also be interested to hear that after Sanders' route in New Hampshire, people in HRC land (on the ground, anyway) truly thought the wheels had come off. Nevada was really the final stand. From my perspective, Clinton really did benefit from the "woke"/academic speak in Nevada because her most valuable surrogates and champions in Nevada were Latino representatives in Congress (Rep. Luis Gutierrez) and young and college-educated first- and second-generation immigrants (DREAMers). This combination was incredibly effective at reaching working-class and non-English-speaking Latino voters.
The evolution of HRC's campaign rhetoric reflected a very necessary and intelligent response to a challenge from the left-flank -- I think MY says this well. It was critical to her victory in Nevada and was necessary to stem the bleeding from the profoundly unfair criticisms leveled against her by activists who charged her as supporting racist policies and single-handedly building the system of mass incarceration.
One final point on the constant harping of DJT as "not extreme." I recognize that MY is repeating this talking point which seems to be very popular among people reacting to #Resistance messaging. But it's important to note that "not being a fiscal hawk" is not the same as "not extreme." Build the Wall, the "Muslim Ban," leveraging the National Guard and federal agencies to crack down on DC protesters, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement and the JCPOA -- those are all extreme, actually. And I would posit that the first three examples were absolutely motivated by nativism, Islamophobia, and racism, and all of those are ideologies. Whether or not DJT could write a discourse outlining his theory of governance is beside the point -- he was and is extreme, but he signaled a willingness to compromise on issues of federal spending and certain aspects of the welfare state.
My experience is that Sanders camp was really bad about conflating "The best way to address racism is approaching as a class issue" vs "Racism is actually a class issue." These are really different!
(I also think that a lot of Dems can struggle with gauging just quite how representative activists from a community are of that particular community, and that is a problem.)
Thanks for this observation -- I absolutely agree with you that there is a big difference. From my perspective, the Sanders Campaign really struggled initially to separate the message from the messenger. Bernie was [edit: is] kind of a crotchety guy and didn't take the event disruptions criticisms of his policy agenda particularly well! Instead, he defended his record as a civil rights protestor which was a little embarrassing, tbh. His team got a lot better at this as time went on, however, and did more to elevate young and Black surrogates. By 2020, Sanders himself had gotten the rhetoric of racial justice completely down.
I invite your thoughts on how Democrats think activists represent communities -- I feel that "establishment" or active party members are fairly good about drawing this distinction, but certainly the terminally online struggle to see a clear difference.
I've run into activists that I think struggled with the distinction -- and for white dudes, it can be really rough to push back when a Black activist with moral authority talk about "we need to show solidarity" or allyship.
I've run into this in a few other cases.
Journalists (especially at smaller outlets) will sometimes do this (either semi-intentionally or otherwise), and will often turn to activists for "he said, she said" talking points, which perpetuates this. You're still seeing "Being tough on asylum seekers could hurt the Democrats with Latino voters" (most writers have learned their lesson about Latinx.)
Academics can get caught in a similar trap. You see this in the debate over Gay Pride and whether or not it's compatible with capitalism (Tim Cook seems to be pretty good at it!). Most Queer Theory professors would say no, and reach for a more abstract conception that I'm not sure is sustainable.
DEI departments are, of course, a menace, and tend to latch on to "woke" terminology without the "dismantling structures of oppression" part. That can act as a big signal booster to the idea that this is more mainstream than it actually is.
The donor base, which tend to be college educated white professionals, also seem to struggle with this. If you think Racial Justice is important and want to support the cause, it can be quite difficult to figure out where to put your dollars!
As a sidenote, I also think there's a lot of collective forgetting about the political climate in 2013-2015, exactly when the invisible primary happened. At the time, Obama's ratings were middling, Biden's favorables surprisingly weak, many Democrats were anticipating a challenging 2016 race (with Rubio or pre-Bridgegate Chris Christie being seen as likely GOP nominees), and Hillary was widely viewed as the strongest potential candidate.
That had a lot to do with her favorables, which had fallen from their SoS heights but remained quite high. Higher than both Obama and Biden and higher than most potential Republican candidates. There was also substantial Clinton nostalgia (and lingering buyers' remorse among Dem elites, i.e. you frequently heard "Hillary would've been stronger / better/ fought harder," etc.).
For all the talk about the DNC or the Obama WH rigging the race, there wasn't some big groundswell for Biden to run, Hillary had extremely dominant poll ratings from rank-and-file Dems, and (as Matt did note), the one figure who could have emerged as a credible challenger earlier in the process would have been Elizabeth Warren.
Now, obviously Hillary's poll numbers wound up being soft. Benghazi and emailgate caused enormous damage, but the impact really didn't become fully apparent until the fall of 2015.
I also would challenge the notion that Trump was uniquely beatable. His demolition of the Republican field illustrated some clear political strengths, and it's likely he did better in a lot of the Rust Belt and among white working class independents than any other plausible GOP nominee. FWIW, I'm fairly sure Hillary would've beaten Ted Cruz solidly. It's harder to track for Rubio - I could see him winning by 3-4 points and a wide EC victory (including CO and VA), but I could also see a tight race where Hillary prevails by narrowly carrying WI, MI, and PA.
I just want to say that I agree with everything here and I think it was a really well thought out and well written comment. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
My takeaway from this is that it further confirms how horrible the primaries system is, as it means the parties are forced to produce candidates to extremist activist liking rather than ones appealing to the median voter. This certainly explains Trump, who in no way in hell could have become a leader of any major political party in a pre-primary world, but from what you're saying it also explains Hillary's awokening, that for me is terrible as well (though of course far far less so). I think a comparison with the UK is instructive. The Tory party is surprisingly moderate by US standards, I think because most of their system of elected leader is done within the parliamentary party (the membership only selects from the shortlist of the top 2). In labor by contrast they had a democratizing reform that gave due-paying members nearly all the power, and that temporarily unleashed the putin-supporting antisemitic corbyn for awhile. Thankfully the credible alternative of the Tories allowed the UK voters to crush Labour which in turn gave Labour the political will to course correct in a major way and become a sane party again. In the US, with both parties under the yoke of the primaries, the voters on each side are locked under negative polarization and generally can't hold their own politicians accountable in any way for fear the other will come to power (see e.g. the failed recall of Newsom). This means there is nothing to balance out the incentive to pander to the farthest base.
Your point is well taken that primaries in particular and democratizing reforms in general allow for a greater risk of populist leaders. But this has been the great debate for over two centuries.
This is why I actually quite like the idea of superdelegates as a moderating influence on candidates -- I thought it was a grave mistake for the DNC to reduce the power of elected party members in 2016.
It’s worth noting that relatively closed systems are not immune to populist waves -- your own example overlooks the selection of Boris Johnson, who was the right choice for the Tories and exactly the wrong choice for the UK (and Europe, for that matter).
I would also distinguish democratizing reforms on general elections and in selections of candidates. The two are in fact very different even if similar arguments have been mustered. US currently has the worse of both worlds with backsliding democracy in general elections (gerrymandering) and increased reliance on primaries and small donors . What we would rather need is smoked filled rooms deciding the candidates who then have to face hyper competitive highly democratic elections against viable candidates of the opposite party or parties. This would guarantee the establishment has an interest in fielding candidates palatable to the median voter and usually moderate and sane
Not to quibble, but primary system is a relatively new development and was seen and is objectively a democratizing reform. It’s a tricky situation because in political environments characterized by negative polarization, there’s still no incentive for a group of political insiders to pick a candidate who panders to the median prospective voter.
Why not, if the districts are competitive ? E.g. isn’t it obvious that McConnell would have chosen more moderate gop senate candidates at least in purple states than the ones currently putting gop takeover at risk?
McConnell might have, but there's no scenario in which McConnell has anything but an informal, advisory role in selecting Senate candidates outside of Kentucky. If what you're suggesting are national committees to vet party candidates up and down the ticket, from city council to president, I just don't see that as realistic.
Was he though? Johnson has his faults but he is totally a small d democratic candidate. Also wrong for Europe is debatable seeing his stellar leadership on Ukraine , and finally once his problematic domestic conduct got to much the Tories could oust him precisely because of the sanity of the British system+electorate that made them fear losing to Labour if they don’t clear house.
First of all, I just need to say that my favorite line of political analysis may be this statement “Donald Trump is, as a human being, a total piece of shit.”. Second, although HRC was in ways a flawed candidate, I would not understate the extent that people excused Trump’s moral failings by saying that HRC was just as bad. But many of those “criticisms” really amounted to sexism and general Clinton-hate that was stirred up by Fox et al. over the years when Clinton was the POTUS. Yes, klobuchar would have been better, but some amount of old-white male support for Trump (ie, his base) was dependent on sexist criticisms of HRC.
"...some amount of old-white male support for Trump (ie, his base) was dependent on sexist criticisms of HRC."
My guess about the level of opposition to HRC based on sexism was initially quite high circa 2017. But I had to retrospectively revise it down in light of Biden's showing in 2020. The pairing is not.perfect, but 2020 suggests that trump's support was not.only anti-woman.
The sexism clearly played a role in 2016. But smaller than I initially thought.
I strongly believe everyone should view 2020 as a sui generis election. Logistical changes demanded by the pandemic skewed everything; states with little absentee voting shifted to an effectively all-mail ballot, and voters who normally wouldn't have voted did so because a ballot had been sitting on their kitchen counter for six weeks. And that's without the pandemic itself as a one-off (fingers crossed) issue. We should mostly ignore 2020.
"I strongly believe everyone should view 2020 as a sui generis election.... We should mostly ignore 2020."
I completely agree with this, I just don't think it goes far enough.
My policy is never to learn from history at all. The past isn't coming back, and the future won't be like it. It's just a random sequence of one-off anomalies, and the appearance of repeatable features is just an illusion we keep falling for. Over and over. No one repeats history, they just repeat Santayana.
That's what experience has taught me, in any case.
I’m not saying that’s wrong but it’s a very hard argument to make. Biden’s margin was 5+ million greater than HRC’s. Arguably it should have been greater due to COVID & economic shutdown and some people having gotten their fill of Trump but who can say? Trump was advantaged with the good pre-pandemic economy, the GOP tax bill (his approval increased the most with its passage), the fear of social upheaval related both to the pandemic and the George Floyd protests and the growth in prominence of weird-sounding woke stuff - pronouns, bathrooms, 1619 Project, etc.- that caused Trump to get more votes than in 2016.
I always think it’s worth mentioning that Clinton had an additional handicap: she’d spent almost 40 years in politics while holding just one elected office and briefly at that. So she was the target of conservative attacks for decades while being, essentially, a courtier who could never really take credit for anything she was part of.
What’s wild about Comey is that he managed to gain the spotlight enough during the early Trump years that we all got to find out that he was was… just some dude and not nearly competent enough for the role he chose for himself.
My biggest issue with Hillary Clinton is that she won her place on the national stage through marriage. It would be disgustingly anti-feminist for the first woman to become President to do so by dint of who she slept with.
I’ve heard people respond that Hillary is really smart, and she is, but Yale Law School cranks out 180 really smart grads a year and hardly has a monopoly on really smart resume gods. Most of these people live fairly anonymous lives in greater New York City or the Bay Area, and have no chance of raising tens of millions (and getting a but ton of free media) if they decide to run for U.S. senate. If they decided to dive into politics, they’d probably start with a campaign for state senate or maybe U.S. House.
Hillary’s political instincts are rather mediocre for a national politician, but her dynastic credentials let her cut in line. Nominating unworthy oligarchs is not a great electoral strategy and it didn’t work in 2016. Trump was more cunning.
In fairness, I've heard a number of people over the years say they refuse to vote for dynastic candidates on principle (including Clinton or any Bush).
I started plugging for a constitutional amendment prohibiting any first order relative, whether by blood, law, or marriage, of a former president from being eligible for the office since 1999 on the grounds that it would bar both George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton from the presidency.
Would have been nice to trade that restriction for a loosening of the rules on naturalized citizens - if someone has been a citizen for over 20 years and held elected office already, let the voters choose whether or not they can be president.
I mean, the article is about her and not him? I absolutely think (and I suspect the above commenter would agree) it is a failure when members of the same nuclear family are in the running for the U.S. regardless of gender.
In almost every country, groundbreaking women in politics get there first via their family relationships. See Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, and many others. Margaret Thatcher is an interesting partial exception.
Sanna Marin, PM of Finland, appears to qualify too -- her Wikipedia entry at least doesn't mention either of her biological parents or her stepfather having any involvement in her political career or even being particularly important in any capacity and she famously got married after becoming PM (her husband also doesn't seem to have worked in politics before their marriage either).
I agree Golda Meir qualifies, but I also feel like Israeli politics for the few decades after the country was established are so sui generis that it's not very useful to draw conclusions about.
she managed to become PM of an important country as a woman with obscure origins. there’s also theresa may, who also had middle class origins and never married anyone important.
Jacinda Arden is the PM of New Zealand and her father was a cop.
Yep; the fact that two-thirds of his fellow Union presidents within a five-year window either direction of his term have Wikipedia articles is ... pretty much what I'd expect, actually. That said, as far as his peers go, he does seem like a relative underachiever.
Helle Thorning Schmidt, the first female PM of Denmark was the daughter of a university lecturer. She married a Welsh politician, hardly obvious that helped her political career.
One of the interesting moments that I think faded into history is in 2008 when Obama was winning the primary and Hilary was taking shots ('like Annie Oakley' IIRC) with future deplorables in Indiana. Back then people were saying she had finally found her political legs and who she was in politics, even if she lost. Turns out not so much.
We're a nation we're lawyers are married to lawyers, doctors are married to doctors, fast food workers are married to fast food workers, etc. Why are we shocked two politic-minded people ended up being interested in politics?
Hillary Rodham, an Ivy League graduate would've likely ended up in politics whomever she married. Like, kids of poltiicians - fine, but saying that political offices should be closed off to you, just because of who you married sounds pretty terrible to me.
Literally every Yale law grad could easily raise tens of millions if they decided to run for Senate in a state with a contested election. Otherwise anonymous Ivy Leaguers who run for high office based on being Ivy Leaguers is, like, the most common single politician type and they’re all very well-funded thanks to the normal donor apparatus.
Not in a Senate primary, no, but I don’t think she did either given that it was known she’d win. Donations to her primary campaign were essentially donations to her general campaign.
So, I think this piece is set at the wrong level of analysis. Here is a restatement:
* After 8 yrs of, essentially, McConnell vs Obama, the national policy mood had swung to exasperated and disaffected. 10s of millions of people had been crushed by the 2008 meltdown and had seen nothing in the way of help or even focus on them. Just bitter gridlock.
*Rather than running a candidate with no hope of going toe-to-toe with McConnell, et al, the Dems nominated a Clinton who could give as well as take on a platform of toughness and competence; and, importantly, as a woman and therefore a potentially historic break from the same-old, same old inter-a-party dynamics.
*Republicans, having lost 2X but also having successfully kept Obama and the Dems from leading any effort to rescue the millions of people crushed by the last straws of 2008, nominated someone who also was not the embodiment of the status quo gridlock and inter-dynasty (Bush v Clinton) dynamic that had been playing out endlessly for decades.
*This might have set the stage for an overwhelming Republican victory, but the candidate was Trump. SO many still held their noses and voted for the same-old. It was close.
*The clear lesson for Dems, given how Trump’s presidency was playing out, was to nominate someone who could possibly beat Trump in the face of him having rallied those 10’s of millions of disaffected Americans to a refreshingly new style of politics (or actually anti-politics, which is the essence of authoritarianism) which broke the stagnant, ineffective mold and offered at least a lot of cathartic community gatherings and performance opportunities, if not any real actual improvements in the lot of the common people.
And because Trump became ever-more narcissistic, self-absorbed, and crime-boss-like, there was an opening for the Dems to nominate Joe Biden, who by virtue of a lot of stuff I won’t go into here, was the Dem candidate with the best chance of pulling together a coalition of voters strongly motivated by fears of what a second Trump term might bring.
So that’s my alternative. Wish we could discuss, but at least there it is. Thanks.
"After 8 yrs of, essentially, McConnell vs Obama, the national policy mood had swung to exasperated and disaffected. 10s of millions of people had been crushed by the 2008 meltdown and had seen nothing in the way of help or even focus on them. Just bitter gridlock."
*This wildly misremembers 2008-2010 where Democrats had a massive legislative majority who were then summarily crushed in the 2010 elections because people didn't think that Obama and the Dems led any effort to rescue the millions of people crushed by the last straws of 2008.*
"Rather than running a candidate with no hope of going toe-to-toe with McConnell, et al, the Dems nominated a Clinton who could give as well as take on a platform of toughness and competence; and, importantly, as a woman and therefore a potentially historic break from the same-old, same old inter-a-party dynamics."
*Its hard to believe that anyone could consider nominating Clinton a "historic break from the same-old, same old inter-a-party dynamics." Further, suggesting that only Clinton would have a hope of going toe-to-toe with McConnell is extremely condescending to everyone else in the Democratic party. Also - please stop making McConnell out to be some type of Lex Luther level super genius, he's not.*
>>After 8 yrs of, essentially, McConnell vs Obama<<
The word "essentially" is doing a lot of work here. The Republicans only took the Senate in 2014. The fact that the Republicans filibustered everything in sight was in part a Democratic choice.
I know this isn't the main point of this post, but there is a "So exactly why do we all think Trump is so bad?" debate that probably should happen among all the different Trump-hating factions of American politics. We all don't like the guy, but some hold that Trump is uniquely bad, even among conservatives, because he is anti-democratic and wants to get rid of elections using a cult of personality, why others think he is bad because he's an ur-conservative rich a-hole, and basically just the worst one of the bunch because they always seem to get worse — and these are somewhat mutually-exclusive reasons to agree with one another. This is all confounded by the fact that Trump is actually substantially more moderate than the "normal" conservatives on some policy issues — unless you count "American democracy existing is a good thing" as a policy. This all ends up in the "Trump is uniquely bad beyond just ideology" people getting very annoyed when the "Trump is really bad because really conservative politicians are really bad" people put out "X really conservative politician is actually Worse Than Trump™" pieces (*cough* https://www.vox.com/2016/2/20/11067932/rubio-worse-than-trump *cough*) or support Dem PACs spending millions on covert pro-Trumpist campaign ads (https://www.persuasion.community/p/dear-democrats-stop-boosting-trumpist). Often it plays out as a never-Trump vs. liberal squabble, but, as you later pointed out, there are liberal reasons to find Trump uniquely bad too (https://www.vox.com/2016/3/13/11214140/trump-is-terrifying)!
This debate is confounded by the fact that Trump became a lot worse over time. If he had faded away after losing the 2020 election, there would be a straight face argument that he was no more dishonest than Ryan. (Yes, Trump was a horrible liar, but Ryan’s brand was built on his austerity budgets and the numbers never added up).
Trumps policy outcomes were not uniquely bad, in fact they were decent. The country stayed at peace. The economy improved. More people died of covid under Biden than Trump, notwithstanding the fact that vaccine access improved markedly right around Biden’s inauguration.
But for the pandemic and its dislocations, Trump probably would have won re-election and the disgrace of January 6 never would have happened.
I 100% agree that if Trump’s every rhetorical desire has been satisfied, that would have been awful. However, Trumps outcomes were nothing like his rhetoric. The wall was never built. The deportation force was never meaningfully augmented. The ACA was never repealed.
Presidents are judged more for outcomes than their intentions. Few moderates think biden wants 8-9% inflation, it’s just something he’s stuck with.
Except voters understood that was because of the pandemic and other leaders with similar jobs records (Trudeau, Johnson) were pretty popular in November of 2020.
Right, but you can’t say that good things that happened under Trump are a credit to him due to outcomes mattering (failure of ACA repeal) but the bad stuff (Covid recession) doesn’t count against him because he didn’t create the virus or intend to lose jobs.
Yeah, Covid happening wasn’t Trump’s fault. But the ACA repeal fell short because McCain voted no — if Trump got his way it would’ve gone through and people would’ve lost healthcare!
“The country stayed at peace.” Except for war in Afghanistan, and military actions in Iraq and Syria and Eastern Africa. Trump increased bombing. What are you talking about?
Except all of those conflicts were continuations of conflicts that were already going when Trump entered office and arguably his effort to wind up the Syrian intervention was subverted. I mean, I always thought the "Trump is a non-interventionist" thing from 2016 was a bunch of BS and warned various Trump-curious libertarians away from him on that basis, but I actually have to say I was genuinely amazed that Trump had not started any new wars by the end of his presidency.
Trump's first, second, and third policy instincts were laziness, so in retrospect, maybe we should not have been surprised that he did not start any new wars. Wars sound like work.
The best I can say about Trump is that he was so lazy and indifferent to any type of policy that the country was mostly able to run on autopilot for his four years. On the economy, the Trump years were a straight line extrapolation from Obama's second term, so I guess we have to give him credit for not screwing it up.
He was horrible during COVID, but I'm not sure that had any material effect, other than making COVID a terrible polarizing issue in the country when it didn't need to be.
Oh, and the one time he got deep into the machinery of government, well, we got Jan. 6 and its leadup. I dunno, but calling him a "moderate" on policy with that shining case on his resume is a real "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln" moment.
Well i'm squarely in the camp of democracy first, and everything else is a distraction if the literal peaceful transfer of power is at risk, so yes, Trump is uniquely bad for this reason , he tried to orchestrate a coup against the vote of the American people. That makes him a traitor of the first degree. It really does not matter whether and to what extent the trains ran on time under his presidency, and the only way anyone can be "worse than trump" is if they also pursue a literal conspiracy to destroy liberty in America, but do it more successfully.
People are reupping the ‘decades of right wing propaganda / smears’ line again the in comments here. Reasonable enough. But this is, of course, a reason for the party NOT to coalesce around Hillary. It is often wielded as a defense of her candidacy—as though once the right aimed their smear cannon at anyone else they would have suffered the same fate in short order. We have long campaigns in the US but they aren’t 24 years long.
Which brings me to my one complaint about this article: Matt says Dem insider politicians, donors, staffers ‘got sloppy and forgetful’ and produced an unprecedented lockstep coalition in support of her candidacy. This is inadequate. Something very bad happened there and it wasn’t at all sloppy.
I think this analysis, while good, downplays or skips over a lot of the dynamics that lead up to the 2016 election; two in particular- Hillary did carry a lot of lingering baggage from sexist attitudes towards her from her husband’s presidency, and the Great Awokening was already well underway by 2016 (as you’ve written, 2014 is when it really started to take hold). That being said, I think there’s no denying (or there should be no denying), that it was Hillary Clinton who decided to start injecting wokeism directly into the Democratic Party’s veins. Being pretty woke myself at the time, I was ecstatic to hear her directly refer to systemic racism in a debate. It felt like all the things we’d started discussing among like company during the Obama years but were kind of taboo to bring up in mixed company had been fully “vetted” or something, like we all decided “nope I don’t care if this makes you uncomfortable, I’m going to start telling you The Facts.” Of course, making people uncomfortable is a TERRIBLE way to run for office, and The Facts were more like opinions. But I thought at the time and continue to think that the Sanders folks had and still have no idea how much stronger the backlash to socialism would have been. People on the left still don’t get that the majority of Americans strongly, genuinely oppose it as a concept.
Agree strongly with your last point. Bernie's favorability remained high because the only one attacking him was Hillary; which his hardcore fans probably took as a badge of honor.
Give Fox & Friends a few months to tear down actual nominee Bernie and see what his favorability looks like.
I genuinely felt like Hillary WAS a moderate alternative to Bernie, and that if we thought “but her emails” was bad, just wait til we got to the the oppo on Bernie and his communist buddies. Remember Bill Ayers? Guilt by association is the dumbest but most shockingly effective political move.
"Guilt by association is the dumbest but most shockingly effective political move."
Honestly, I don't think guilt by association is all that bad in itself. But it has been used by a lot of very bad people, so that is a sufficient reason to condemn it.
😉
Guilt by association should have tanked both Trump and Clinton given both’s proximity to Jeffrey Epstien (yes, in Clinton’s case, it was her husband.. but it would be trivial to pin that on Hillary too… look at how Trump trotted out Paula Jones and friends)
And look at how people condemn Justice Thomas with his wife’s conduct.
I think that stretches the idea of guilt by association.
The effectiveness of GOP posturing against rioting and communism in 2020 proves your point. And if they had been running against a guy who embraces the massively unpopular socialism label and talks a lot about revolution? I think that would have gone pretty badly
Yeah this was also the start of “it’s not my job to educate you!” line of reasoning. That’s one that still bothers me because, like, it is your job if you want to try and persuade someone. You have to do it from a persuasive angle though and not act frustrated the entire time that you are doing it.
I don’t understand why liberals are celebrating that Josh Hawley video about “people with uteruses” as being a total dunk on right wingers. It’s the same kind of “GeT EdUcAtEd” response that plays right into their hands. Gender issues are complicated and people have a broad range of feelings about them. The left is just ignoring this at the moment and just yelling “transphobic!” At a bunch of people. Josh Hawley is a trash person but he isn’t the audience.
I've been rolling my eyes at how much traction that clip is getting, especially because anyone with two neurons to rub together knows that all those "look at Josh Hawley getting SCHOOLED by this professor!" reactions are literally EXACTLY what Hawley was hoping would happen. He loves the fact that liberals are crowing about how dumb he is for saying things like "men can't have babies" and "people who give birth are women" precisely because 90% of the population is like "ummm, what? Those statements are obviously true." I totally get that there is nuance there and that the professor is absolutely correct on her factual statements. But at the same time, in almost every other realm of public discourse, when we make statements that are true in 95% of situations (things like "people who give birth are women") we don't go around shouting about how that erases or causes physical harm to the other 5% of people for whom it is not true. If I say "Alzheimer's is an issue for elderly people" nobody pops up to shout me down for "erasing" the small number of people who are much younger than 65 who have Alzheimer's- we recognize that the statement is broadly true while knowing that virtually everything has some exceptions to it. Shouting down Hawley and calling him a bigot who is erasing and hurting trans people for relatively benign and innocuous comments is playing right into his hands. You're not going to persuade the vast majority of Americans that we should be more considerate of transgender humans by condemning and internet-mobbing someone who said something that everyone who is not indoctrinated into woke ideology and vocabulary believes to be so obviously true that to say it seems unnecessary.
I feel like people at advocacy organizations with this line is really different from just queer people who are on Twitter.
I thought no one looked good in that segment but she looked high handed and he was obviously callous. I don’t know if that transmits to people who don’t talk to many trans men though.
I'd argue that everyone looked good to their base as I've seen both sides sharing this video as an amazing "own". The professor needs some time outside academia, interacting with smart people with different world views (or she's acting for the cameras). We all know Hawley is close minded and rude, but he came across as the sane, open minded person. Ironically the left is celebrating what your median voter would view as rude hyperbole and ad hominem.
If you're marginally political and don't know Hawley, I'm struggling to see how he looks bad. If you are political it looks like they successfully baited each other into a very typical culture war stand off. They both knew what they were doing and got what they wanted.
I don't know how it felt to see it as someone non-political but I'll take a moment and dunk on the professor as a queer person who actually thinks what she was saying was mostly correct. Hawley's line of argument is just so full of casual cruelty it's insane that anyone thinks this is great.
I feel like I could draw a chain of correlations from men can't have babies to violence and self harm to trans people. It's not crazy to me, even if I think it's a little bit attenuated, but she didn't connect the dots. If men can't have kids leads to trans men aren't really men. If trans men aren't really men they're crazy, or lying. If they're lying or crazy they don't have to be treated like a regular person, and at some margin this will lead to slightly higher levels of violence and self-harm.
Pedantically I also really dislike the dropping of qualifiers to those words are violence when what they actually mean is those words will contribute to an environment which has some greater number of incidences of violence or self harm. . I can follow it and think it's probably true, but it's a multistep bank shot that I'd never use outside of the most safe space, and certainly not on a platform like Senate hearings.
Personally I feel like the both came off as petty and immature, though Hawley picked the fight for sure. But when it comes to reproductive functions, "trans men" are indeed different than "cis men," and for all but the last five minutes of the English language, the word "men" referred to what some now call cis men. It doesn't mean trans men don't exist, it just means that progressive activists don't have the unilateral ability to change the English language and then act insulted when people go "huh??" If trans men want to be considered men full stop no caveats, then they may have to live with the possibility that people will generally assume, sometimes incorrectly, that they aren't able to get pregnant. Personally I think it would be easier to at least reserve a word in the English language for the portion of the population that generally makes eggs and has uteri ("female" is fine) and another word for the portion of the population that makes sperm (how about "male"?), knowing that a very small portion of the population defies either bucket.
So if I'm the professor, my first answer to Hawley would have been "I prefer the term 'female' when delineating between the reproductive functions of the human subpopulations." He probably would have picked a fight over that answer anyway but at least I'd come away looking more reasonable.
Language doesn't solve the core issue. Conservatives can accept the language shift then just use male/female as the core policy and cultural distinction. Trans folk are "othered" by part of culture and outage continues all around. Both camps want to force their preferred classification on the population and it kind of matters because both sex and gender are deeply integrated into the human experience.
Yeah — the arrogance and condescension of the “educate yourself” and “do your research” lines is appalling. Clearly people who have no interest in persuading.
I've been mostly taking that incident as an example of Right Wing language policing more than anything.
(Also, an example of how progressives need to get better at code-shifting.)
I agree with a lot of this, and was in a similar place in 2016. I'll add though, with regard to opposition to socialism, that in the 2020 primary I remember being very frustrated when John Hickenlooper said in a debate that Democrats should distance ourselves from socialism, and when Rachel Maddow pressed him for what policies specifically he objected to as "socialism" he wouldn't give any specifics, just repeated "all I know is we can't let ourselves be the party of socialism" or something.
Based on my experience of the Obama years, my reaction at the time was that Republicans are going to call us socialists in 100% of possible universes, so running on being unable to be called a socialist was a sucker's game. But the thing is that doesn't mean swing voters will find it equally plausible that Democrats are socialists in all possible universes. At the very least there are lots of immigrants from current and former communist countries who really do have very specific, bad associations with socialism, and you'd think a party that claims to care about immigrants would make it a priority to assuage their fears.
I think that by 2016, Republicans had done for “socialism” what Democrats have now done for “racism”. The typical person hears it and thinks “eh, they say that about everyone.”
I think that's true to a certain extent but I also think the electorate's reaction would be different if a Republican candidate went around saying "I'm a proud racist and we should enact these racist policies." than if it's just Democrats calling them racist.
Yes but also it actually helped the non-socialist Dems to have Bernie around as a foil. Now they can point and say, "HE is a socialist, and I am not."
The better take is "Democrats should distance themselves from the TERM socialism", and leave at that. Medicare for All is good, regardless of whether or not it's socialism.
I totally agree with this, but I would further emphasize that the lingering sexist baggage was in some sense even worse for Clinton than it seems because it's clear that at a high level her campaign incorrectly thought that drawing attention to what a huge scumbag Trump is would be extremely damaging to his campaign.
I really think that prior to Trump's election there was a lot of West Wing-style conviction among Democrats that the American public would fundamentally not tolerate an openly racist, sexist garbage person as the president. Clinton's team clearly thought that the Access Hollywood tape and the associated sexual harassment allegations would be devastating to the Trump campaign, probably in part as a result of all of the right-wing pearl clutching that accompanied Bill Clinton's sex scandal. The mistake was taking all of that as genuine revulsion at sexual misconduct, instead of understanding it as a handy cudgel.
Finally, I also strongly think that Trump's election, and specifically the mechanism that it played in the minds of a lot of Democrats, probably had much more of an effect on the Great Awokening than any particular political messaging. Like I said, a lot of Democrats were operating with the assumption that basically nobody would tolerate a person like Trump, and so when he won it it was deeply shocking that so many of their friends and neighbors *didn't* feel that bald-faced racism and sexism was disqualifying. That mere fact made a lot of people decide that racism, sexism, and other forms of intolerance were much more live problems in American society than they did during the Obama administration, and gave a lot of energy to the Great Awokening.
Real quickly to add to the sexism point of yours, since I'm on vacation and there's already 200 comments before I could even wake up, the history of Hillary Clinton's approval ratings [https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/files/2016/08/Clinton-popularity.jpg] will always remain bonkers to me. Higher when she was in subordinate roles (starting just as First Lady, standing by her husband after Lewinsky, Secretary of State), and lower in leading roles (Hillarycare, Senator, both presidential runs).
It makes sense if you believe that Hillary Clinton is very competent, but you don't trust her to have your best interests at heart.
Very competent but acting at the direction of someone you do trust = good
A very competent person that you don't trust or think that wishes you ill = very bad
And FWIW, as a conservative-ish southern white guy, I suspect that she is at best ambivalent towards my well-being.
At best.
And I wouldn't completely rule out actual malevolence and ill will towards me and mine.
She’s been married to one for decades!
He's a fellow traveller democrat.
Genuinely curious, why? She seems to like Bill Clinton and he's at least demographically similar
David Shor pointed out that Benghazi did lasting damage to her approval ratings, unfortunately.
Which is kind of insane.
I'm on the other team, but I couldn't understand what the big deal was there.
On the other team as in you voted for trump?
I sat out that election. But I typically vote for conservatives.
I find it encouraging that we seem to agree on so much despite the fact that I by contrast am deep in q3 of the political compass.
Are there any other individuals we can compare that too though? I can see it being pretty plausible that that's true for just about everyone- the joke in sports is that the backup quarterback is always the most popular player on the team. It's easy to be at least fine with someone who isn't actively in charge of things because they're not a direct threat to do anything that you have problems with. First Lady is a figurehad- the Queen of England has had consistently high approval ratings for decades. I'm sure if she started making actual policy choices that would quickly change as people would then decide whether they liked her based on things that she was actually doing that impacted them as opposed to just seeming like a nice lady. HRC was popular as a figurehead, but when she dove directly into promoting a particular policy that folks disagreed with they decided they liked her less- not because of her gender, but because of partisan nonsense and genuine disagreements about policy.
I'd also quibble with labeling the SoS a subordinate role. It's not the President, but it's much more than just a figurehead position is, and having it sitting next to First Lady seems a little bit bizarre. It's undeniably a leadership role IMHO, so the fact that her approval ratings were higher during that portion of her career seems to indicate that people are making decisions less about her gender and more about the kinds of actions she's taking and what her policy stances are. Foreign affairs are not something Americans are too invested in so they're not outraged about specific policy choices she's making, but at the same time I don't think anyone was looking at the Secretary of State leading the fight for American interests abroad and thinking "she's not in a leadership position, which is good because she's a woman."
This is a great point, but by the same token socialism was alway bubbling on the margins and becoming far more popular in those exact same years (remember occupy ws?). However this did not make it inevitably mainstream on the left. It *stayed* on the margins, frankly even on campus discourse. The same thing could have conceivably been the case with wokism (whose theoretical basis, such as it was, was many decades old at that point in any case, and already becoming dated by empirical reality).
The fact that Occupy Wall Street didn’t have the staying power of the Tea Party movement shows that socialism didn’t get *that* much more popular during those years.
Sure but what I’m saying is that it’s a result under a set of circumstances. As Marie notes, wokism felt the same way until 2016. It’s a hypothetical, but imaginable that under different circumstances it would have gone the way of socialism, just like the tea party perhaps might not have emerged without Obama. That’s my argument at any rate.
Right--while some of the 90’s PC wave found purchase (not using certain pejoratives, e.g.), the most outlandish parts (“womyn”) never found institutional purchase, which perhaps could have been the fate of “birthing persons” if the Dems had never bought in.
That's an excellent point! The '90s PC wave was a sort of conversation piece, but never reached any kind of institutional power anywhere, not even in academia. Today's PC wave, by contrast, may arguably have the ideological heritage of the 90s one but in terms of its sociology(?) and institutional capture is more akin to the McCarthy era.
+1 I've pointed this out when people try to suggest the present linguistic games are the same as those of the 1990s and no more consequential -- you generally didn't have government agencies formally adopting 1990s "PC" language into regulations and other official policies other than adding "African-American" as an alternative to "black," and a handful of other examples.
also you didn't have "cancel culture" back then, i.e. people being fired to be made an example of and thus create a culture of fear inhibiting the free exchange of ideas. That was totally foreign to American discourse, at least in liberal "spaces," since at least the 1960s and until 2015 or so.
It is the likely eventual fate of it, but in the meantime the "don't say 'mother'" directive has infected a number of government agencies and liberal stalwarts like the ACLU, which causes the Dems at least some degree of headache.
I think that's the point: where are the left-wing think tanks doing that?
My simple rule for explaining why Republicans are often better at winning than Democrats is "compare the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street."
I do think we do drum circles *much* better than conservatives, so there's that.
"Remember the war against Franco – that's the kind where each of us belongs. Though he may have won all the battles, we had all the good songs."
So you're saying that we need a new mass mobilization initiative centering around drum circles ? ;)
OWS wouldn’t have gone anywhere even if they had stayed on-message. Their message was fringe and their approach angry and hateful.
There was a tumblr that I thought summed up the problem with OWS: "We are the 1% but we stand with the 99%". It was full of the smuggest most annoying rich kids and it represented everything that was wrong with OWS.
OWS's slogans are slogans that should be being shouted by guys that work in an Amazon warehouse, or women working in an elderly care home, or fry cooks at McDonald's. But they were being shouted by grad students. It always felt like a movement not of the actual working class, but of the people who had applied for Wall Street jobs and been turned down.
Wow, I googled and it's still up: https://westandwiththe99percent.tumblr.com/
I kind of agree and actually find it very weird how much it has gone from HRC said it in a speech to the mainstream.
It feels like weirdly cynical at times. It appeals to me because the normative foundations of American life can feel very oppressive to me. But for most of my life I was taught to shut up about it. It's kind of incredible to be able to say in public and not fear total blacklisting that I think most of the underpinnings of American society were built to be oppressive. That's how it should have always been.
I'm a bit confused how it went from hey Hilary said it in a speech to now people feel it's some kind of unstoppable object.
Oh, I’m not claiming it’s Hillary alone. She was part of it but I think you should give the credit to trump. His presidency was extremely norm shattering and took the left soul searching. It also coincided with education polarization. I don’t presume to have a full answer but I suppose in an increasingly post racial (yes) society the woke messaging was more palatable than socialism for the increasingly economically and educationally homogeneous but racially diverse left. It may also have given white liberal elites, feeling surprisingly powerless with the election of trump, a renewed sense of power and agency (isn’t that one of the best - and most toxic - aspects of guilt ?)
This is absolutely a major piece of it. Trump's win was so shocking and discrediting that it validated a lot of radical / left-wing critiques of American society.
Those critiques aren't even wrong, but as a political matter it meant that the normal ways that opposition parties respond to an election loss - by trying to appeal to voter groups you've lost - seem like "giving in" to racism or sexism or authoritarianism.
"Those critiques aren't even wrong, but as a political matter it meant that the normal ways that opposition parties respond to an election loss - by trying to appeal to voter groups you've lost - seem like 'giving in' " - the sad truth of American politics is that this very sentence, out of context, can be said about the GOP in 2020. Both far left and far right have succumbed to conspiracy theories. The right's version is more simplistic and easier to disprove, it's also more ad hoc, but the left's idea is also essentially a conspiracy theory, whose quintessential expression in the 1619 project (in its original, pre-stealth-edit formulation). The major difference, of course, is that left crazies, though influential, haven't actually taken over the Democratic party, while the GOP is entirely the party of Trump.
Embracing "socialism" was so silly. If you policies are popular but not your branding, then change your branding! It's easy! Just call yourself something a New Deal Democrat or something!
I thought that one of the factors in Bernie's appeal in 2015-2016 was that he was left on economic issues, but positioned as fairly moderate (for a Dem) on a lot of the other hot-button social issues.
It certainly made him more appealing to me, personally.
I thought the biggest factor in Bernie’s appeal was that he was not Hillary Clinton. Hillary had high approval ratings before she announced, in fact she was consistently admired as long as she wasn’t running for anything. Once she announced, things started downhill, and whoever persisted in running against her (as Bernie did) was going to benefit from being Not Hillary. A lot of people were against her candidacy based on the “nepotism” charge as well—just as they faulted George W. Bush for entitlement since his dad was former President, they regarded Hillary as trying to inherit Presidency from her husband. I agree with Matt that she probably didn’t help her case much by adopting the “woke” agenda but I don’t think people voted for Bernie in the primaries because Hillary was too far left—they voted for Bernie as the “anybody but Hillary” candidate.
I think an underrated factor that worked against her (in both 2008 and 2016) was George W. Bush becoming president. Not just because of the Iraq War, but because the idea of a *second* dynastic president so soon after the Bush presidency really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
The problem is that there are two entirely different meanings of socialism and most Americans go with the "basically what the Soviet Union did" meaning - which is something that most self-described socialists are just as opposed to as the median American voter is.
The other meaning is roughly something like "an economic system that prioritises well-being for the mass of the population and the poor over profit and income for the richest few". There are a bunch of different such systems, all of which are, in the broadest sense "socialist", each one being a different type of socialism.
That second meaning - which is what socialism means to, say, the French Socialist Party, or the German Social Democrats - is the one that Bernie means by "socialist" but is not what most Americans think it means and it has always seems a particularly silly windmill to tilt at to convince the general public to accept a different meaning of a word.
Quibble: Among my fellow conservatives, I think the "but socialism!!!" that folks like the throw around so much is basically their shorthand for "more taxes and more welfare and other bad govt stuff that I don't like".
There really isn't anything more sophisticated about the general usage.
Fair.
Why do you think it’s the second? The established meaning used to be “state ownership of the means of production.” But I agree that words do change their meaning — literally — so I need to accept that the ignorant have indeed won and changed the meaning.
I'd say that 'capitalism' is abused almost as badly.
But it's shorthand.
And no one wants to spend dozens of words capturing the nuance when pretty much everyone knows what is meant by context.
We aren't writing specifications here. Precision and accuracy are always nice, but it's futile to demand that in casual (at least non-academic) conversations.
I think it's the second because that's what most people who call themselves socialists mean when they call themselves it.
I don't think it's necessarily historically ignorant though; that's what the people that called themselves socialists mostly meant before 1848. If you go and read the Communist Manifesto or his other early writings from the 1840s and 1850s, Marx spends ages attacking those sorts of socialists and that's why he invented "communist" as a term to mean his sort of socialist.
Non-communist socialists - Marx called them "ethical socialists", we generally say "democratic socialists" or "social democrats" (both are translations of the German Sozialdemokratie) - aren't always opposed to the full-scale state ownership of the means of production, but the vast majority of them are, and have been since at least the 1960s.
In the US, Debs is a bit unclear (he went back and forth on the exact economic form of socialism that he favored), but LaFollette split with the Communists in 1923 and had adopted an economic program for his 1924 run for the Presidency that wasn't just "nationalise everything". Socialists of the non-Communist type mostly supported the New Deal and the huge battles of European socialist parties over an economic program that saw some role for the market, which went right through the 1950s and 1960s just didn't happen in the US because there wasn't a serious socialist party there at the time. But Socialism came to mean something more moderate over here before I was born in the 1970s. Tony Blair - a politician with striking similarities to Bill Clinton - called himself a socialist here. Macron used to be in the Socialist Party until 2016.
I agree with this but also think a lot of it wasn't sexism-it was that a lot of people didn't want another Clinton OR Bush and they thought that they were becoming family dynasties. representing the old guard. You could have argued that Clinton or Bush was borne from the old guard from either the left or the right perspective (e.g. NAFTA, Iraq War, Welfare Reform, Supported her sexist husband, etc). A lot of this isn't her fault but having Clinton or a Bush name was a real anchor coming into that election.
I think rather than "unleash" he should have said acknowledge / embrace"... because all those undercurrents were there... she just raised their salience in the primary and then mistakenly over interpreted that embrace as tje reason she prevailed...
I genuinely find it weird that it makes people uncomfortable. Like systemic racism holds. that people in power constructed systems which created self-perpetuating racist results. And people would rather hear your grandfather was a horrible human being who participated in a system propped up by an awful lot of violence.
There are a few reasons why people may feel uncomfortable with the concept of systemic racism (I'm not defending, just explaining), and one is linguistic.
People have an idea what the word racism means--it's Jim Crow, Nazis, segregationists, the KKK, and Archie Bunker. And now, primarily from academics, the meaning of the word racism has changed to include systemic problems that result in unequal outcomes among the races. So now racism isn't just your uncle who says nasty things at Thanksgiving. "Racism" now includes the fact that you moved to the suburbs to send your kids to the "good" school district, while other people can't afford to live in that district. It includes the fact that your parents raised you in an owner-occupied single-family home, while other people were excluded from the housing market. It includes the fact that you went to a high school that offered AP and IB courses, while others went to schools without them. It includes the fact that your parents paid for your SAT-prep courses, while other people had to wing those tests. And much more.
Now, I think it's no doubt that the history of systemic racism affects all of those things and more. But people haven't changed the definition of "racism" that they are familiar with (that is individual bigoted attitudes and behaviors). So when you say that they benefit from systemic racism, they think that they're being accused of being racists, a la the KKK and Jim Crow segregationists. And no one likes to be called racist.
A similar thing has happened with the term "white supremacy," which used to mean people who believed that white people should be treated superior to other races, but now has come to mean support of anything that continues the history of systemic racism. So people think you are equating the local gang of skinheads with your opposition to affirmative action.
Now words change meaning, and this is fine. But people should also realize that the whole country doesn't adapt to new word definitions coming from academia overnight.
I can't help but think that the academic/activists that redefined and expanded the definitions of "racism"/"white supremacy" were deliberately trying to take advantage of the weight those terms have in regular society in order to help draw attention to their ideas. If they had been successful in simply watering down those terms and relaxing the social penalties associated with them, I don't think it would be as much of a problem. But instead we've been on a parallel track where most of society use the terms with the narrower definition and and higher social penalty while this smaller group uses the terms with a broader definition and a lower social penalty, and this mismatch has just created confusion and turned any attempt at a larger societal conversation about racism into a dead end.
Agreed. Systemic Inequality strikes me as more accurate given the generally accepted definition of the terms, but it's not as catchy or inflammatory so it doesn't have traction in popular discourse. But academics shouldn't care about traction, so it befuddles me that they went with systemic racism given that we already knew what "systems of racism" look like (apartheid, jim crow, etc.).
I've noticed that these types of academic ideas have tended to come out after moments of racial process, like how Critical Race Theory came about as a response to the end of the Civil Rights movement. It seems to be born about a desire to educate the public about whether we've really "fixed" racism. It's like, "Oh, you silly white people really think we've ended racism? Well let me show how racism is actually structurally embedded in our society" "Oh, so think 'systems of racism' are a thing of the past? Well let tell you that those same system are still present, just invisible". I've read excerpts from the book "The New Jim Crow", which helped kick off the modern race-centric criminal justice movement, and that book was very much framed as a critique of the post-racial optimism of Obama's election.
I agree that there frequently has been a willful naivete among white people regarding the state of race relations in this country (I too once thought that Obama's election meant racism was no longer a problem), but I feel this kind of response from academics is a massive overcorrection, especially now that those ideas have become gospel in social justice circles and many white people are now far too *pessimistic* about the state of race relations.
I feel like worse than that it really allowed a lot of bigotry to slip the bounds back into acceptable discourse and that a lot of the prior ban that say led Trent Lott to resign over comments about voting for Strom Thurmond now seem ridiculous. It showed that a lot of commitment to a lack of racism was merely elite manners.
Well, some of us remember the dangers of racism and white supremacy 1.0 and think the word is there for a reason. It ain’t small pox, it hasn’t disappeared (as multiple murderous hate crimes show) and it can come back in force, so we need the words to talk about it and fight it. Thinking we can forgot about it to talk exclusively about something else IS the height of “white privilege”.
Actually agree one hundred percent but it seems both pedantic and quixotic to argue about it at this point.
It’s not so much an argument about the theory as an observation about many of the acolytes. That they apparently so easily allowed them to be thus watered down and diluted beyond all recognition suggests they may not have been fully aware of the extent depth and distinctness of the depravity suggested by the original meaning (or worse, that they didn’t care). What this might mean for the reliability of their “allyship” remains to be seen.
Oh I have no doubt a lot of this is a fad that will fade at some point.
As a person who’s always found America operating as normal to be really difficult it’s hard for me to believe that a huge part of the most successful parts of society adopted a fairly uniform view like this.
I mean there's no question that Racism/white supremacy 1.0 still exists. I can tell you when I lived in Baltimore, and my home was broken into, the number 1 question that I would get asked was "Was he black?" Of course I didn't see the person, so I have no way of know, but those comments were some good old fashioned racism/white supremacy 1.0 (prevalent in my left-leaning, mostly Democratic social circle, no less).
I can understand why someone might expect that the perpetrator was black based on the demographics of the city—a large black underclass probably means a large portion of those desperate enough to resort to crime will also be black—but why that would come up other than in a description of the specific perpetrator, for the purpose of finding them, does seem racist. I would think the first question would be “how did they get in?” That’s what I’d want to know.
Ironically, if the were really left-leaning, they might have been asking because they wanted to be more forgiving/understanding of the criminal’s situation if they were a minority. Racism 3.0?
I'm confused on why "Was he black" is equivalent to 1.0 racism? That must be partly because I don't really understand the intent of the question. If the follow up is "we ought to drive Black people out of this neighborhood" then I totally get it. But the intent of that question is pretty open-ended. I haven't lived in Baltimore and I don't know much about it but it's not unreasonable to imagine that ethnicity offender rates vary a lot, depending on the crime and neighborhood, because that's quite often the case.
I work in fraud right now, for example, and the majority of the more extensive and sophisticated rings we've found have been Armenians and / or Russians. If we found a big ring and a coworker asked "Armenians again?" it could be an awkward question and I'd wonder if they had a good reason for such a bluntly "racism-adjacent" question but I wouldn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that they were a racist given the obvious disparity in offender rates.
If you assume that a crime was done by a member of a particular racial/ethnic group based on stereotypes associated with that group, I think that fits the definition of racism.
Oh man I can’t tell you how much I wish they had come up with a new word. It drives my autistic brain crazy when people do this in any context. I was screaming at people about this in 13-14 when it was bubbling up on Facebook and Twitter.
I lost that debate but like still think like the thing being described is bad regardless.
It depends what you mean by this analysis. If you mean that inherited wealth is a thing, few would dispute it, certainly none on the old economic left. But if you tell poor white people, poor perhaps precisely because of their ancestors who were here or who just lately immigrated here, that they have some sort of unique privilege in *today’s* society (and not just as compared to black people but any “person of color” including one who literally arrived in this country yesterday), well that does not follow purely from what you described, it requires many additional assumptions and ideas, and is also rightly considers toxic and offensive.
It seems like a very real failure of imagination on the part of those poor whites to understand that there's someone with all the ways they're oppressed and is black too. It like boggles my mind that something as kind of utopian as intersectional discourse which finds so many avenues of oppression and wants to address them all gets understood as people want to put whites down.
It's like recreating individualism in that it recognizes infinite opportunities and then says we should resolve them all.
Imagination is all well and good, but here is a reality. It’s the height of COVID and life saving vaccines are about to come out, but initially there won’t nearly be enough to meet demand. How do you prioritize? CDC own models show clearly that age should be the way to go, resulting in maximum reduction in death. However at one point they seriously consider prioritizing essential workers nevertheless, because the old are disproportionately white. They acknowledged by the way, that this more “equitable” choice would result in more deaths across *all* racial groups, but were planning to go ahead anyway. Only public backlash stopped them.
Here’s another. It’s no longer as bad, but people are still dying and a new life saving therapeutic came out. Again , how do you prioritize? Health agencies in multiple states made a point system according to which being a “person of color” (read: nonwhite) would give you priority even if young and healthy, over people in known risk groups such as obese or elderly. In most cases public and legal backlash did not stop them and policy was enacted.
In one thing I do agree with the woke: racism kills.
For the benefit of people who might take this recounting at face value:
Here's the slide deck in question: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2020-11/COVID-04-Dooling.pdf
And an accompanying article from Newsweek (hopefully a sufficiently neutral source) which recaps some of the drama at the time (https://www.newsweek.com/nate-silver-criticism-covid-vaccine-report-interpretation-1556198)
Finally, here's the updated interim recommendations from ACIP: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm695152e2.htm
Couple of things to help flesh out context:
1. Elderly people in long-term care facilities were always part of phase 1a, which is the setting that drove/drives a huge proportion of the increased mortality in older adults
2. The primary motivation for prioritizing essential workers was the idea that a sterilizing vaccine quickly distributed among the in-person essential workforce would help block spread, and subsequently reduce mortality across the entire population. It was not 'old people don't matter because they're white'. With the benefit of hindsight that model was incorrect, but based on early data from the mRNA vaccines there was substantial hope of large scale sterilizing immunity.
3. They weren't 'stopped' by public blowback, the final recommendation still prioritized essential workers in phase 1b, along with adults 75+.
If your argument is 'race should never have been mentioned in these discussions', that's fine, but to argue that a commitment to racial justice was overriding all other considerations is not a fair or honest recounting of the facts.
This is actually way more wild then I expected. It's pretty clear throughout the document that the racial and ethnic identities of who gets vaccinated is treated as an important consideration. See slides 32 & 33 where vaccinating the elderly is giving the highest possible score with respect to Science, Implementation, Maximizing Benefits & Limiting Harms, but then given the lowest possible score in terms of Ethics and Mitigating Inequalities.
It's worth mentioning that slide #31 shows how they arrived at the lowest score for mitigating inequities: on the one hand Seniors have the highest covid incidence, mortality and rate of congregant living. But on the other hand they are less ethnically diverse, which brings the score down to the lowest possible in that category.
It is pretty shocking to find out that the highest medical authorities in the land are explicitly and openly weighting my parents life less than others on the basis of race.
I don't have time to re-litigate this. I'd just note it's very curious that your recounting in this very post presents a picture as if race in fact did *not* play any part in the discussion, yet your own final paragraph suggests otherwise, which doesn't seem to align with your recap. Which is it?
*also, I was working purely from memory. If I got any *facts* wrong, apologies. Since you did us all a favor and went through the data just now, could you please point out exactly which facts if and where I did so?
P.S. Here' Yascha Mounk's reaction to this affair. To those unfamiliar, he is a leftist/liberal political scientist, whose expertise is fighting populist regimes. Not a disease expert but certainly not a right-wing source either.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-im-losing-trust-in-the-institutions
Yes, people who have good ideas will continue to have bad ideas. There’s nothing about understanding of these ideas that bind you to any granular course of action.
Like these seem like bad ideas to me but like it does not follow that to believe in systemic racism is to believe that equity is in the priority stack not to believe it is the priority stack. Yes some woke people go too far like literally all other ideas ever.
For what it's worth, I think poor white people can and do understand it, you just need to adopt a different framing. "Black people tend to have it harder" means the same thing, but doesn't generate the same amount of hostility.
I think people parse it as implying that people support the existing social order out of racism, or the social order will have to be hugely rethought to end racism, or something like that. (Of course, many people that use the term agree -- "Capitalism is racist, so we need to get rid of capitalism.")
The terminology can work in academia where people accept it, but in politics, you don't get to assume people will adopt formal definitions. I've had better luck with "Black people are more disadvantaged by impersonal forces rather than individual prejudice"
I think “white privilege” is maybe the dumbest, least productive, most divisive way to talk about it. Unfortunately, that’s what we went with.
It's a lab leak from lefty academia. We weren't able to quarantine it in time.
All this time I’ve heard people swearing that a pangolin started it. Or maybe a puffin. I forget, exactly.
I had naively thought that the privilege discourse would make this palatable - it’s not that you did anything wrong, it’s that people give you privileges they don’t give to other people. But somehow people hear it as you doing something wrong anyway.
I think it has sometimes scanned as “even if you were born in a trailer park, you’ve been given an advantage that you don’t deserve.” And by the way, why haven’t you done more with it?
FWIW, I was literally born in a trailer park in Alabama, and if someone tells me to check my white privilege, I can't guarantee that I won't react violently.
I rationally know that if white privilege is a real thing, then I likely benefitted from it in some what.
But the net 'privilege' from the circumstances of my birth would almost certainly put me pretty deeply into negative territory. At least relative to Americans.
So trying to pull the privilege card would just make me very very irate.
The application of the word "privilege" to all sorts of things that people generally consider *rights* probably doesn't help (e.g., free speech, not being stopped by police without cause, etc.) and I think it very clearly doesn't help that discourse also imputes all sorts of stereotypes to people that clearly aren't true on an individual basis, e.g., anything about purported intergenerational transfers of real property (no one in my family has inherited a house since before WW2 at the latest -- all of my elderly relatives have ended up selling their homes to pay for medical expenses, assisted living facilities, etc.).
Yes, I think that’s important. Rights aren’t “privilege”. No one is supposed to be denied those. White people aren’t enjoying unearned advantage; we need to ensure that basic expectations are met for black people (primarily; BIPOC is a failed attempt at conflating racial experiences that are quite dissimilar).
Part of the problem is that for politics, you want the "original sin" version -- 'you didn't do anything wrong, we just live in a fallen world. Please vote for me.'
On the other hand, for personal stuff, you want the "free will" version -- 'please try to do better next time'. When the wires get crossed, and people take the individual responsibility framing and apply it at a large scale, it all blows up.
Privilege discourse is the most reactionary thing imaginable. The greatest intellectual achievement of the enlightenment movement was to create a framing (discourse) of rights as opposed to duties and privileges. An idea cemented the American and French revolutions all the way to wwii and the un decalarion of human rights. To take us back to privileges framing over a rights framing (and not coincidentally, groups over individuals) is reactionary and regressive to a colossal scale. It’s not just bad politics it’s horrifying philosophy.
I dunno, Enlightenment thinkers loved railing against the undeserved privileges of the nobility and clergy.
To me, the big problem is that the term doesn't do what we want it to do, so it's dumb to cling to it. (Also, "justice" rhetoric isn't nearly as effective as progressives seem to think it is.)
Disagree. I think there's merit in this way of discussing it. Whether it's appropriate for politics/politicians is another question.
I may be an outlier here, but I would rather you accuse me of being terrible, rather than accuse my ancestors.
Accusing my grandparents of being terrible people when they basically followed the standard template of their society at the time...just makes me angry.
Like of course we're not saying like John Davis you personally lynched Emmit Till but it's kind of a pretty elementary inference from explaining the systems of violence that were in place everywhere and the timeframe and that people alive participated in them.
And like that's the history conservatives want over powerful, rich white people used racism to enshrine social order and conventions that maintained that power and some of those carry over to this day. It seems like the systemic view of racism is a much more humane one than the conventional bad people doing bad things one.
This an unidimensional, conspiracy-theory tinged view of history, totally failing the first job of any historical model: accounting for change.
But it also greatly downplays the role of individual agency, "self made man" myth etc. That rubs many people the wrong way even if it does at some level absolve them of responsibility for past injustice.
I'd say that particularly rubs many people the wrong way because simultaneously systemic racism doesn't actually seem in practice to absolve individuals of anything as seen by the outburst of literal iconoclasm in 2020.
Yeah I tend to favor this view, with obvious attenuation the further back in time you go. I mean, surely as a function of selection effects, my ancestors (and those of presumably almost everyone, including e.g. basically everyone of the incredibly numerous descendants of Genghis Khan) are probably among those who were the most ruthlessly effective at engaging in pillage and rapine, because the nicer folks were dead or subject to them. The Hobbesian war of all against all has definitely been a reasonable approximation of many parts of the world throughout history.
I do agree with Belisarius' point that a lot of people just kind of go along to get along because they perceive (rightly) that their individual agency is much more applicable to "be a decent person by the standards of my time" than "be a moral paragon according to as-yet undetermined future standards"--this is why the central insight of the social-identitarian left that changing default norms is so powerful, whether used for good or ill.
That said, the costs of "being moral" are also going to have a huge effect here. I'd say with pretty high confidence that right-thinking people of the future are going to be appalled by the wanton slaughter and mistreatment of animals that we do now [1], possibly (if you run the numbers) more than any other thing humans have ever done throughout all of recorded history. But it's going to be easier for that view to take root as the general consensus once vegetarian meat alternatives are dirt cheap and tasty.
[1] I am not actually a vegetarian but I mostly consider this an example of me behaving immorally rather than a reason that animal welfare concerns are wrong.
Then they’re discussing history. That’s interesting, perhaps, but has little to no bearing on anything happening today.
"history . . . has little to no bearing on anything happening today"???
For example, there is no more redlining, so no one is being prevented from buying in any particular neighborhood because of race.
Is it a question of preferring that or is it a question of disputing the "self-perpetuating racist results" part?
Mostly agree but it is interesting how far “authenticity” goes with people. Joe Rogan liked Bernie. Why? I think he thought he was more real than Hillary. It’s hard to say if Bernie could have beat Trump in Ohio or Michigan but he may have had a better chance than what people viewed as a fake Hillary. Calling people deplorable wasn’t smart either. BTW - I voted for Hillary and while I don’t like her that much do think she may have been an effective President.
'Authenticity' is the word that people used, but ultimately I think it came down to a form of risk assessment.
Bernie had been saying the same thing for 40+ years. If nothing he supports is just anathema to you, and you like or tolerate most of the rest, then you know what you are going to get and it might not be so bad.
Hillary and many other Dem politicians seem more...inscrutable? Just plain untrustworthy?
So you might kind of like what they are saying more than Bernie, but if you figure that there is a decent chance that they will 'evolve' on an issue as soon as they are elected *cough Obama cough* and that 'evolution' is something that you oppose....maybe the net risk assessment makes you go for Bernie over Hillary.
As the polls showed, Americans oppose democratic socialism considerably less than they oppose wokeness.
My hunch is that Americans oppose any moral framework that stands in opposition to their deeply held beliefs and values, especially when that moral framework is adopted and enforced by people they view as having power over them. So wokeness is the boogeyman of the day because it’s promoted by people with power, whereas socialism is not.
For an opposite example, see Christianity as viewed by LGBTs, Muslims, non-believers, etc.
Depends on what you think “socialism” means. Some people say it just means “Very liberal.”
Does anybody know where Matt wrote about the Great Awakening in 2014? Can't find it in a search.
Written in 2019 but states upfront that it took off in 2014: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020
Thanks much.
This essay is makes me profoundly sad. Our politics, our discourse, our society would have been much better today if not for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I think Matt's analysis is spot-on, including the part where any other Democrat would have beaten Trump and consigned him to the trash dump of history where he belongs.
We are going to deal with the damage from the 2016 election for years to come.
It's basically an eternity away, but the early indications that 2024 may be a Biden Trump rematch is far far worse.
Our political party system is consistently putting forth candidates for both sides that most Americans routinely consider a net negative.
It's absurd, but no one has a realistic path out of this dysfunction.
We need a return to Smokey back rooms. There is a theory that more democracy and more transparency is better. It’s not always the case.
Agree. In addition, I wish we only had transcripts of Congressional hearings and floor speeches, rather than videos. I think it would open the door for Congress to be much more functional.
I'd love to just pass a rule saying that no clip of anything from Congress can be less than, say, fifteen minutes long.
Obviously that's not compatible with the First Amendment, but I think it would be great for discourse.
I think turning off the cameras and going audio only like the Supreme Court would be enough to fix it.
Additionally, transparent systems are (I think) even more easy for lobbyists to manipulate, and for our geopolitical adversaries to take advantage of.
I use to hate earmarks, but I think that those forms of legal legislative bribery actually provide some very much needed grease to the gears of governance.
"transparent systems are (I think) even more easy for lobbyists to manipulate"
I find this very unconvincing. Transparent systems make things easier to stop - but lobbyists thrive in state houses where there is often very little transparency.
It may prevent some of the behind-closed-doors corruption, though I'd argue that they seem to be getting away with a lot of stuff just fine with 'transparency'.
And it lets them more easily use the media to put pressure on elected representatives.
The really scary thing is that sometimes I even think that while sober...
God I wish!!!
What do you mean by revolution? I can think of three meanings: 1. Violent overthrown of govenet to achieve raid la political change (French, Russian , Iranian) 2. Hyperbole for mere social shift (“sexual revolution”) 3. Overthrew of essentially foreign rule (American revolution). As far as no. 1 is concerned I can hardly think of a single case that went well in the short or medium term (and that’s an understatement), and indeed most proved catastrophic even in the long term
Edit: of course Bernie never advocated for such revolution, nor most of his acolytes (at least not seriously). In fact I don’t think america today has much in the way of revolutionaries per se on either side. the biggest danger is authoritarian populism but that’s more democratic backsliding than proper ideologically induced and all out violent and radical revolution.
This is a spot on take of the 2016 primary. Also, James Webb would have won.
We are now still paying for this as Democrats in an ever increasing Woke arms race. We can’t even fight effectively on Roe being overturned because we have to instead focus on off putting to the median voter trans friendly wording like “birthing person” instead of building a broad coalition.
You could almost set a watch to this too with our drop in Hispanic vote and Asian voters. Wokeism made us idiots on education, patriotism, and crime (issues important to them).
I remain astounded that progressives seem intent on insisting that abortion is not a women's rights issue. It's absolutely mind boggling.
You are not “centering marginalized communities of trans women of color” when you say this.
How silly of me. Lets make sure we focus the impact of the issue on that 0.2% of the population while alienating the other 99.8%. Brilliant strategic decisions all around.
In a 6-7 year period where democrats have made some astonishingly dumb messaging decisions, I think this will go down as by far the dumbest.
A separate observation from my other comment.
I think one could make a similar claim that it was 2016 Bernie Sanders that unleashed the Mobilization Delusion among progressive activists. Prior to Bernie, no one thought that aggressively tracking to the left was a winning strategy. His supporters did not realize that what made him relatively popular was not his bold, aggressive policy ideas, but that he culturally understood working class white people did not go after them on race. So you get this wing learning the wrong lesson, and instead deciding there’s a “revolution” waiting to be democratically unleashed and if we had a politician who was bold enough, disengaged voters would come out en masse for Democrats. Totally oblivious that an equal (or greater) and opposite number of previously disengaged voters would come out to oppose it or reluctantly switch sides in the general.
Also, there was disappointment with Obama himself on the left wing of the Party. He swept into office with huge crowds, soaring rhetoric, and large majorities. And then ... it turned out to be 8 years of grinding, slogging political stalemate. Felt like the dying gasps of the 90s centrist Democratic style of politician whose main skill was surviving, with no easily articulable, broadly appealing vision of how government and society should work and be organized. Just ad hoc, technocratic tweaks and adjustments in reaction to events. Incremental, elitist and not inspiring. Actually very small-c conservative, and from that perspective, quite defensible. But the Democratic Party is committed to the idea that it's not the conservative party, so couldn't sell itself honestly by describing itself as what it actually was (is?).
I'm not so sure that it was the stalemate that caused the disappointment, but the appointment of Tim Geitner. Meet the new boss, turns out he is the same as the old boss. Again.
I'm not sure most of the electorate could name Tim Geithner, even in 2009, so I have a hard time buying that he could have been a huge source of any dissatisfaction with Democrats.
Yeah I don't know who that is. But still, I could see how a top appointment could be typical of a pattern of appointments that trickled out to the electorate.
Appreciate The Who reference! But am an unrepentant lover of Obama, and I think that Biden's presidency is showing how hard it is to make change in our system and we are really lucky that he moved the ball forward with Obamacare, because at this point we are not even debating that there should be universal access to health care it's just how we get there.
I think the mobilization delusion has been a running theme in in-group discussions for a long time. But the 2016 primary made it actually seem like it was having empirical results.
In the 2000s it was still empirically true that high turnout elections appeared to favor democrats (see 2006/2008). However a large part of that was that democrats were fielding high quality, moderate candidates in all 50 states thanks to netroots-type funding and very good candidate recruitment. I actually think that’s an approach that could still work for dems, it’s the conclusion that People Really Want Socialism that is incorrect.
I think Howard Dean as head of DNC is under-appreciated!
But I think there's a difference between
the thing that used to be true: higher turnout favors Democrats (which is no longer clearly true now that Democrats are the party of college educated voters and Trump has a base of only loosely attached voters)
the thing that never was true and still isn't: running on a farther left platform will tap into a large pool of left-leaning non-voters
I meant the latter thing by "the mobilization delusion", but I see that the term is ambiguous.
The socialist/progressive wing of the part did really well in local LA races during the last primary, and turnout was TERRIBLE. I think that's another good point in favor of "marginal voters are more moderate than regular voters."
I think that second one is absolutely true.
I think a lot of political people can imagine not voting because they are annoyed at their party and want their party to do thing that they like, but those voters, in practice, tend to vote anyway because they find the other party so objectionable.
What they can't imagine is being the person who really isn't all that interested in politics but will catch up when the really big events happen. I usually explain that with a sport analogy; there are plenty of people who don't follow the NFL, but will watch the Superbowl and will pay some attention in the week or two before the Superbowl so they can pick a side for that game. Lots of people have about the same level of interest in politics. They will pay attention for a couple of weeks before the Presidential election and they might pay attention to the midterms.
I don't see Democrats running candidates like Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman anytime soon.
Bernie helped but this was a legacy of the Obama campaign - "all that matters is the number of field organizers, don't bother to try to persuade anyone, just wake people up." That was particularly a lesson people were crowing about in 2012 - "permanent Democratic majority just due to demographics." My own takeaway is that Obama's successes were driven by his celebrity/charisma (which is not a bad thing - that's how you win at politics!). Hillary and Trump had their own celebrity/charisma, both mostly violently negative, which essentially fought each other to a draw.
And they are still pushing some version of it for the 2024 mid terms....
It kind of worked for McGovern in 1972 though one could certainly argue that that was a blip.
(Also, it obviously didn't work for him in the general.)
You claim that the national policy mood had swing somewhat to the right. But I venture to guess that there was also a marked shift to the left in elite coastal cities and among elite-educated, urban young adults. So the kind of people working on the Clinton campaign were living in a more left-leaning milieu, and may have mistaken that left-ward shift among coastal young professions for a nation-wide shift.
I can tell you, as someone who had lived in an elite-educated urban, coastal bubble, that I felt that my friends moved did indeed move quite left on policy issues. In 2008, among my Democrat-leaning friends, I feel that single-payer healthcare was considered an extremist idea. People were split on affirmative action and gay marriage (many would take centrist positions like "affirmative action for socioeconomic status" or "civil unions"). Universal child care and free college were not even discussed. People supported increasing the minimum wage to $10, but wouldn't have thought about $15. And white people were by and large not comfortable with (or even unaware of) the concept of privilege. By 2016, in my urban, Democratic-leaning friend group, single-payer healthcare is widely favored, support for affirmative action, gay marriage, and a 15 dollar minimum wage is unquestioned, and people by and large support significant government help with college and child care (albeit maybe not fully funded government programs). And people started to be more careful to acknowledge and articulate their privilege.
This is anecdotal, but I'm guessing that a lot of people noticed this shift among urban well-educated young people and mistook it for a national trend in 2016. When they forget that most of the country are yuppies and hipsters that live in coastal cities.
I've always felt one of the big pulls left in this timeframe was the fact that you had all these Millennials trying to enter the workforce in the Great Recession, and not finding "good" jobs deciding to take non-profit or advocacy jobs that at least helped them feel good. As a 2010 college graduate with a Poli Sci major, I know a lot of people that left college with a degree that wasn't going to get the kind of job they were envisioning in that job market, so they took advocacy jobs that paid shit, but at least gave them a feeling of purpose, and then they moved radically to the left in the next couple of years.
I mean, that's kind of the thesis of this old MY take: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-median-voter-is-a-50-something
Interesting. What's that friend group like in 2022? My guess would be that of all these things maybe AA is not longer a la mode and its no longer taboo to question it even in elite circles? Heck even NYT has repeatedly published takes critical of it, and polls suggests scotus killing it would be very popular.
I have lived out of the country since 2019
Any sense/guess? Also, what’s your basic take on Israeli politics (I think you mentioned living in Tel Aviv in a previous comment so I gather you’ve been there for a few years) ?
Sorry for the late reply...So I don't discuss American politics as frequently or with as many people as I did when I lived in the states. But my sense is that in 2020, my friends were pretty gung-ho for progressive politicians--Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and to a lesser extent Bernie Sanders, and were pretty down on the moderate Joe Biden. But now, I feel like my social circle has moved on a bit from progressive politics, and just wants reasonable moderates...Wrt to Israel politics...yes I'm in Tel Aviv now. There's a lot I can say, but overall it's also highly disfunctional. And although I live in a left-wing bubble of Meretz and Labor supportiers, the left wing is really small here. So it's really a fight between centrist and right-wing parties, with the left-wing parties making a pretty small impact and are no longer major players. Another thing that surprises me about Israeli politics is how central individual personalities are to the politics, and the extent that the politics feels like a chess game, where people have to make moves to stand out more or out-politic their opponents. I never really conceptualized American politics in this way. We're also going through our 5th election cycle in 2 years, so let's see how it goes...
I've had many of the same experiences: graduating college and observing career paths, meeting some really rich people (but maybe not quite as rich as your examples) for the first time and traveling in the developed world.
But my conclusions were almost the exact opposite. I've seen nearly everyone I know with a good head on their shoulders do very well and very minor advantages accrue to people based on pure wealth. Sure, some people had setbacks, but basically anyone with a plan who worked towards that plan ended up ok. And I've also seen many examples of siblings where one messed up and the other did totally fine (drug dealer brother, yoga-studio-owning sister, for example). Or one had a "normal" career and the other excelled (social worker brother, harvard med school professor sister).
The average rich person is not making a 5% annual by sitting on their hands. Bonds, CDs and savings have been earning 1% or less, before taxes for the lsat couple decades. The stock market may have averaged something like 5% recently, but that comes with considerable risk as 2022 shows. A rich debutante sitting on 10 million in Jan would now be down to 7 million 6 months later. That's hardly reliable money and that example is not believable.
If compounding did dominate other incomes we'd still have Vanderbilts and Carnegies and Astors at the top of society and no Gates or Buffets could surpass them.
At the end of the day we're talking about what a "fair" society is. I think everyone agrees that a pure Utopia is impossible. The question is something more like "how much better could it be" or, in the context of politics, will the change the left always wants make a flawed, "unfair" society better or "pretty fair, (although no utopia)" worse.
To me, that half a percent of US household have 10 million in net worth (often tied up in property or a business they run) doesn't seem like cause to be greatly upset. It's not even enough money to ball the bottom out of poverty in any case if you went full Venezuela and forced them to divide the 10M in 100 and give it to everyone else.
If it was a caste of oppressors ruling generation after generation then maybe, but that seems far from the case since there's continually new fortunes being made. Likewise, that there are people who have poor prospects from birth is terrible, but show me a country where that isn't the case? There really aren't very many, and just "turning left" doesn't solve either of these problems. From welfare to neoliberal economics the left has had as much to do with creating these problems as the right.
I haven't had a chance to listen to the book club audio with Leah Boustan yet, but I would think that her finding that second-generation immigrants significantly outperform their parents (and native-born citizens) should restore your faith in the American dream. I'll quote from the NYT piece on the book:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/11/opinion/immigrants-success-america.html
"Second, immigrants tended to settle in parts of the country experiencing strong job growth. That gave them an edge over native-born Americans who were firmly rooted in places with faltering economies. Immigrants are good at doing something difficult: leaving behind relatives, friends and the familiarity of home in search of prosperity. The economists found that native-born Americans who do what immigrants do — move toward opportunity — have children who are just as upwardly mobile as the children of immigrants."
So in your case the leftward pull was more economic-focused, than identity/race or social issue focused.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that HRC was the only possible candidate who could be seen as nullifying the fact of Donald Trump’s personal scumminess. Because no matter how many harassment scandals erupted around him — and the man literally started a beauty pageant so that he could barge into the dressing rooms so there was never gonna be a lack — he could simply ask “and who are you still married to, again?”
I've often heard the hypothesis that each of them was the only one who could have possibly lost to the other.
There was the Epstein shit lurking around both Trump and Bill Clinton as well. Any other candidate could have made hay from Trump's association with Epstein but that was a gift the Dem's threw away by picking Clinton.
"...if Clinton could have put up Iowa-level numbers among white voters across the board, she would have done even better than she actually did."
Your theory: she got less popular over the course of the primaries, because she pivoted left.
My theory: she got less popular over the course of the primaries because the Republicans coalesced around a campaign *to make Clinton less popular*.
You are forgetting that Bannon's whole plan was to drive her likeability numbers into the ground, by using Cambridge Analytics, Facebook, strategic hacks from Russia, etc., in order to make her look sinister, untrustworthy, and deranged.
And it worked! With a little help from Republican operatives in the FBI, Bannon and Manafort and the whole sick crew managed to make her unpopular.
You think people were still worrying about her Iraq war vote? Ancient history.
Don't deny rat-fuckers their agency, man.
I do think it's a bit of both. Let's go back to the 2008 primary even... you could argue that Obama won because of Hillary's Iraq vote, and surely that was a big part of it, but I'd argue that an even larger part was that he was NOT HILLARY. And 2016 "moderates" voting for Bernie weren't voting for him as much as they were voting for NOT HILLARY. It was profoundly stupid of the Democratic elite to try to coronate someone with so much baggage. You're right about the right wing rat fucking apparatus, but it was also uniquely set up to bring her down. They'd been planning that for at least 20 years and her negatives were really really high to begin with.
It was stupid but they arguably had no choice. Clinton had a pretty huge, passionate, indigestible fan base in the party, plus the ability to out-fundraise everyone by massive amounts. Under those circumstances it was rational for the elite to think that Clinton's nomination was inevitable in spite of her weaknesses, and thus it was better to avoid a contentious primary that would only make things worse without having any chance to derail the nomination. Unfortunately, they got a contentious primary anyway.
I do also think many were fooled by Clinton's sky-high approval ratings as Secretary of State, which was obviously wrongheaded in hindsight, but is also just a very weird fact that's hard to come up with explanations for. She really was super popular for a while there between 2008 and 2016! This goes back to the comparison I drew above between Clinton and Terry McAuliffe: some politicians are just weird in this way.
I think the main reason she lost to Obama in 08 was because she and her idiot campaign team (Mark Penn!) were just terrible at running a campaign. Read David Plouffe (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6452758-the-audacity-to-win). The Obama campaign was besides themselves with wonder and joy that the Clinton campaign had no idea how to maximize acquisition of delegates (i.e., focus on caucuses especially in states no one was paying attention to) and they just rolled up delegate after delegate until Clinton had no chance.
She was just a terrible, terrible politician.
For some of us, voting for the invasion of Iraq was (and still is) akin to voting against certifying the 2020 election. I cannot over emphasize how frustrating it was to watch the pod people replace the brains of otherwise thoughtful people, one-by-one, until facts no longer mattered and supporting that illegal invasion was the only patriotic thing one could do; and how unpatriotic people like me were for living in reality. The lasting damage and total lack of accountability remain unforgivable.
To me, it was as though Clinton had showed up on January 6th and pumped her fist in support of the insurrectionist mob and then said anyone who opposed the mob was naive and didn't understand the situation at the time. The attacks from the right-wing hate machine were a net positive for her because it meant she really got under their skin.
You're both right. The right wing media machine had been pummeling Hillary since the 90s. BENGHAZI !!!!!!! Add to that the young progressive types hating her for being an establishment shill; and The WWC Bernie bros "just didn't like something about her" (Y would that be?) She never had a chance against anyone BUT Trump.
Thanks, but your examples suggest you think that I am right and Yglesias is wrong. He says she suffered from going left; you say she suffered from being perceived as too right.
I'm saying she was beaten up from both the left and the right. Squishy low info centrists were just going to fixate on Benghazi and emails; activist leftists were going to stay home oR write in Bernie because Iraq & NAFTA.
Fair.
before the Indiana primary, Trump and his crew were more worried about destroying Cruz than Clinton. Most of the data in Matt’s beautiful regression was pre-rat fucking.
I mean, the anti-Clinton campaign has been ongoing since ~1992.
Don’t deny voters their agency. Besides, your theory has the downside of being the one that, for decades, the left tells itself every single time it loses an election, even when the margins are tiny, implying that only a few swing voters had to be won over. I can’t remember which podcaster said this recently, but it’s soooo true: only the left can take the party’s 65-35 advantage in some elections and make it 50-50.
"Don’t deny voters their agency."
Don't worry, I don't deny anyone their agency, except the people in Langley.
("Agency? What Agency....?")
I would find that more persuasive if we weren't talking about democratic primary voters. The fact that republicans were attacking her would, if anything, seem more likely to fuel positive views of her with dems. If we were talking general population approval numbers, I think your point makes a lot of sense. But if we're talking about democratic primary voters (so not just a self identified democrat, but one who is gung-ho enough about the party to actually show up in a primary election to vote for their chosen candidate) I don't really see how that holds much water.
Just by way of example, I don't think anyone reasonably believes that MSNBC bashing Trump in hyperbolic ways for months did anything other than make the core republican voter like him even more.
I think for people whose first presidential vote was in Bush v Gore, Clinton’s Iraq war vote is still the most salient political thing about her.
That would be me. And I am still mad about her voting for the Iraq war.
I think a big part of it is how nasty the lead up to the war was. People who raised reasonable objections were often told that meant they would have supported Hitler or didn’t care if Saddam nuked NYC.
Same here.
One important caveat here. Trump was and is an extremist on foreign policy. His wish to leave NATO, love for dictators, mysterious relationship with Russia, casual denigration of allies for unclear reasons all point to an extremism on foreign policy that was unusual.
Although this extremism isn’t exactly on the traditional dimension that American politics have been differentiated - Trump wasn’t more pro-war as the right had been seen in recent decades, and he wasn’t more anti-communist. He was (as he is on so many things) off in his own idiosyncratic dimension rather than being a right-wing extremist.
Trump is an isolationist, which is an enduring element in American political thought, but in terms of the party positions, is an extremist position. His policy prescriptions are populist and match closely the America Firsters of the 1920s, for example.
but he's not a consistent isolationist, which is the most frustrating part. It's not like he wants to dismantle the military and keep to ourselves, he wants a giant military that he can throw around the world to satiate his giant ego, while not being interested in having anyone else tell him "no."
This is true, but in the primary Trump savaged Jeb Bush for his brother's war, and Jeb would neither criticize his brother nor justify a war that was unpopular even with Republicans. As for everything else fo-po related, voters don't care about that stuff.
"He kept us safe." Except for 9/11, anthrax, etc. Jeb Bush's position was so bad it exposed how incoherent and incompetent the Republican foreign policy establishment had been under George W. Bush.
Right but not that many people cared that much about that, especially with the pandemic and economic chaos ( why so many voters chose to support Trump in view of his performance in regard to those is another matter). There is also a residue of feelings among many voters that were vaguely sympathetic to Trump’s attitude (America should come first and may be better off isolating itself from the world's problems - hence sympathy to autarky and closed borders, our Allies don’t do enough for their own defense, we have less to fear from the Russians than the Chinese). I’m not saying those feelings were correct but they buffered the grotesqueness of Trump’s positions.
Isolationism is a real political current in American politics and always has been. But in the current context, it's extremist, just like socialism is.
It's only extreme from the point of view of the political parties, it's not very extreme from the point of view of the electorate and I expect it will help him if he runs again.
I honestly don't remember--how much of that was painted in yuuuuge, bold, flashing, very classy and large, gold sharpie letters in early 2016, and how much was merely plausible?
I don't think it was a top-five sort of talking point I deployed with acquaintances who were leery of Clinton, but it definitely would/should have been.
It was there, just unreported. Like many things in the 2016 campaign.
I agree with the general point that 2016 was the year "woke politics" went mainstream, but as someone who worked on the ground for Hillary Clinton throughout that entire cycle (Iowa to the general), I think MY's point is under-calibrated.
I want to echo a lot of what Marie Kennedy has said at the top about HRC responding to a very real and mounting pressure from left-wing organizing. Mid-2015 saw many campaign events where BLM activists took the stage or shouted down candidates (Bernie and HRC) and surrogates to pressure them on racial justice issues. The fact of the matter is that HRC actually engaged with those activists in closed-door meetings and reworked her messaging, while Sanders and his surrogates initially took umbrage and tried to insist that socialist economic reform *really was* racial justice. The Sanders campaign really did come around on this issue, but not for months.
About Iowa, and HRC's usual strength there (in spite of the softness of her support among white men). A victory in Iowa really doesn't say anything about popular support. The caucus system is incredibly arcane and lowercase "c" conservative in that the number of delegates up for grabs at any given caucus site is reflective of turnout from the previous year -- not the number of people who show up on caucus day. What this means in practice is that Iowa rewards incredibly strategic organizing, where moderate candidates and campaigns can maximize their victories in low-turnout areas (where the participant-to-delegate ratio is low) and try fight to a standstill in high-turnout areas (where the participant-to-delegate ration high). Sanders may very well have had more people turn out to caucus for him in 2015, but the delegates were rarely up for grabs in those specific caucus sites for it to make the difference. Nevertheless, Iowa was not seen as a victory in the Hillary campaign -- what should have been a crushing victory led to a lot of hair pulling in HQ and in field offices.
People will also be interested to hear that after Sanders' route in New Hampshire, people in HRC land (on the ground, anyway) truly thought the wheels had come off. Nevada was really the final stand. From my perspective, Clinton really did benefit from the "woke"/academic speak in Nevada because her most valuable surrogates and champions in Nevada were Latino representatives in Congress (Rep. Luis Gutierrez) and young and college-educated first- and second-generation immigrants (DREAMers). This combination was incredibly effective at reaching working-class and non-English-speaking Latino voters.
The evolution of HRC's campaign rhetoric reflected a very necessary and intelligent response to a challenge from the left-flank -- I think MY says this well. It was critical to her victory in Nevada and was necessary to stem the bleeding from the profoundly unfair criticisms leveled against her by activists who charged her as supporting racist policies and single-handedly building the system of mass incarceration.
One final point on the constant harping of DJT as "not extreme." I recognize that MY is repeating this talking point which seems to be very popular among people reacting to #Resistance messaging. But it's important to note that "not being a fiscal hawk" is not the same as "not extreme." Build the Wall, the "Muslim Ban," leveraging the National Guard and federal agencies to crack down on DC protesters, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement and the JCPOA -- those are all extreme, actually. And I would posit that the first three examples were absolutely motivated by nativism, Islamophobia, and racism, and all of those are ideologies. Whether or not DJT could write a discourse outlining his theory of governance is beside the point -- he was and is extreme, but he signaled a willingness to compromise on issues of federal spending and certain aspects of the welfare state.
Quick notes, from a fairly HRC-positive person.
"socialist economic reform *really was* racial justice"
My experience is that Sanders camp was really bad about conflating "The best way to address racism is approaching as a class issue" vs "Racism is actually a class issue." These are really different!
(I also think that a lot of Dems can struggle with gauging just quite how representative activists from a community are of that particular community, and that is a problem.)
Thanks for this observation -- I absolutely agree with you that there is a big difference. From my perspective, the Sanders Campaign really struggled initially to separate the message from the messenger. Bernie was [edit: is] kind of a crotchety guy and didn't take the event disruptions criticisms of his policy agenda particularly well! Instead, he defended his record as a civil rights protestor which was a little embarrassing, tbh. His team got a lot better at this as time went on, however, and did more to elevate young and Black surrogates. By 2020, Sanders himself had gotten the rhetoric of racial justice completely down.
I invite your thoughts on how Democrats think activists represent communities -- I feel that "establishment" or active party members are fairly good about drawing this distinction, but certainly the terminally online struggle to see a clear difference.
I've run into activists that I think struggled with the distinction -- and for white dudes, it can be really rough to push back when a Black activist with moral authority talk about "we need to show solidarity" or allyship.
I've run into this in a few other cases.
Journalists (especially at smaller outlets) will sometimes do this (either semi-intentionally or otherwise), and will often turn to activists for "he said, she said" talking points, which perpetuates this. You're still seeing "Being tough on asylum seekers could hurt the Democrats with Latino voters" (most writers have learned their lesson about Latinx.)
Academics can get caught in a similar trap. You see this in the debate over Gay Pride and whether or not it's compatible with capitalism (Tim Cook seems to be pretty good at it!). Most Queer Theory professors would say no, and reach for a more abstract conception that I'm not sure is sustainable.
DEI departments are, of course, a menace, and tend to latch on to "woke" terminology without the "dismantling structures of oppression" part. That can act as a big signal booster to the idea that this is more mainstream than it actually is.
The donor base, which tend to be college educated white professionals, also seem to struggle with this. If you think Racial Justice is important and want to support the cause, it can be quite difficult to figure out where to put your dollars!
What does Gay Pride have to do with capitalism?
Disclaimer -- I'm a straight dude, so YMMV. It has to do with some of the different ways people define the community and what its ideals should be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_capitalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_Liberation_March
Seems like it would take some serious study for an outsider to understand. Not your fault, thanks for the links!
Yeah, I agree with all this.
As a sidenote, I also think there's a lot of collective forgetting about the political climate in 2013-2015, exactly when the invisible primary happened. At the time, Obama's ratings were middling, Biden's favorables surprisingly weak, many Democrats were anticipating a challenging 2016 race (with Rubio or pre-Bridgegate Chris Christie being seen as likely GOP nominees), and Hillary was widely viewed as the strongest potential candidate.
That had a lot to do with her favorables, which had fallen from their SoS heights but remained quite high. Higher than both Obama and Biden and higher than most potential Republican candidates. There was also substantial Clinton nostalgia (and lingering buyers' remorse among Dem elites, i.e. you frequently heard "Hillary would've been stronger / better/ fought harder," etc.).
For all the talk about the DNC or the Obama WH rigging the race, there wasn't some big groundswell for Biden to run, Hillary had extremely dominant poll ratings from rank-and-file Dems, and (as Matt did note), the one figure who could have emerged as a credible challenger earlier in the process would have been Elizabeth Warren.
Now, obviously Hillary's poll numbers wound up being soft. Benghazi and emailgate caused enormous damage, but the impact really didn't become fully apparent until the fall of 2015.
I also would challenge the notion that Trump was uniquely beatable. His demolition of the Republican field illustrated some clear political strengths, and it's likely he did better in a lot of the Rust Belt and among white working class independents than any other plausible GOP nominee. FWIW, I'm fairly sure Hillary would've beaten Ted Cruz solidly. It's harder to track for Rubio - I could see him winning by 3-4 points and a wide EC victory (including CO and VA), but I could also see a tight race where Hillary prevails by narrowly carrying WI, MI, and PA.
I just want to say that I agree with everything here and I think it was a really well thought out and well written comment. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
My takeaway from this is that it further confirms how horrible the primaries system is, as it means the parties are forced to produce candidates to extremist activist liking rather than ones appealing to the median voter. This certainly explains Trump, who in no way in hell could have become a leader of any major political party in a pre-primary world, but from what you're saying it also explains Hillary's awokening, that for me is terrible as well (though of course far far less so). I think a comparison with the UK is instructive. The Tory party is surprisingly moderate by US standards, I think because most of their system of elected leader is done within the parliamentary party (the membership only selects from the shortlist of the top 2). In labor by contrast they had a democratizing reform that gave due-paying members nearly all the power, and that temporarily unleashed the putin-supporting antisemitic corbyn for awhile. Thankfully the credible alternative of the Tories allowed the UK voters to crush Labour which in turn gave Labour the political will to course correct in a major way and become a sane party again. In the US, with both parties under the yoke of the primaries, the voters on each side are locked under negative polarization and generally can't hold their own politicians accountable in any way for fear the other will come to power (see e.g. the failed recall of Newsom). This means there is nothing to balance out the incentive to pander to the farthest base.
Your point is well taken that primaries in particular and democratizing reforms in general allow for a greater risk of populist leaders. But this has been the great debate for over two centuries.
This is why I actually quite like the idea of superdelegates as a moderating influence on candidates -- I thought it was a grave mistake for the DNC to reduce the power of elected party members in 2016.
It’s worth noting that relatively closed systems are not immune to populist waves -- your own example overlooks the selection of Boris Johnson, who was the right choice for the Tories and exactly the wrong choice for the UK (and Europe, for that matter).
I would also distinguish democratizing reforms on general elections and in selections of candidates. The two are in fact very different even if similar arguments have been mustered. US currently has the worse of both worlds with backsliding democracy in general elections (gerrymandering) and increased reliance on primaries and small donors . What we would rather need is smoked filled rooms deciding the candidates who then have to face hyper competitive highly democratic elections against viable candidates of the opposite party or parties. This would guarantee the establishment has an interest in fielding candidates palatable to the median voter and usually moderate and sane
Not to quibble, but primary system is a relatively new development and was seen and is objectively a democratizing reform. It’s a tricky situation because in political environments characterized by negative polarization, there’s still no incentive for a group of political insiders to pick a candidate who panders to the median prospective voter.
Why not, if the districts are competitive ? E.g. isn’t it obvious that McConnell would have chosen more moderate gop senate candidates at least in purple states than the ones currently putting gop takeover at risk?
McConnell might have, but there's no scenario in which McConnell has anything but an informal, advisory role in selecting Senate candidates outside of Kentucky. If what you're suggesting are national committees to vet party candidates up and down the ticket, from city council to president, I just don't see that as realistic.
Was he though? Johnson has his faults but he is totally a small d democratic candidate. Also wrong for Europe is debatable seeing his stellar leadership on Ukraine , and finally once his problematic domestic conduct got to much the Tories could oust him precisely because of the sanity of the British system+electorate that made them fear losing to Labour if they don’t clear house.
First of all, I just need to say that my favorite line of political analysis may be this statement “Donald Trump is, as a human being, a total piece of shit.”. Second, although HRC was in ways a flawed candidate, I would not understate the extent that people excused Trump’s moral failings by saying that HRC was just as bad. But many of those “criticisms” really amounted to sexism and general Clinton-hate that was stirred up by Fox et al. over the years when Clinton was the POTUS. Yes, klobuchar would have been better, but some amount of old-white male support for Trump (ie, his base) was dependent on sexist criticisms of HRC.
"...some amount of old-white male support for Trump (ie, his base) was dependent on sexist criticisms of HRC."
My guess about the level of opposition to HRC based on sexism was initially quite high circa 2017. But I had to retrospectively revise it down in light of Biden's showing in 2020. The pairing is not.perfect, but 2020 suggests that trump's support was not.only anti-woman.
The sexism clearly played a role in 2016. But smaller than I initially thought.
I strongly believe everyone should view 2020 as a sui generis election. Logistical changes demanded by the pandemic skewed everything; states with little absentee voting shifted to an effectively all-mail ballot, and voters who normally wouldn't have voted did so because a ballot had been sitting on their kitchen counter for six weeks. And that's without the pandemic itself as a one-off (fingers crossed) issue. We should mostly ignore 2020.
"I strongly believe everyone should view 2020 as a sui generis election.... We should mostly ignore 2020."
I completely agree with this, I just don't think it goes far enough.
My policy is never to learn from history at all. The past isn't coming back, and the future won't be like it. It's just a random sequence of one-off anomalies, and the appearance of repeatable features is just an illusion we keep falling for. Over and over. No one repeats history, they just repeat Santayana.
That's what experience has taught me, in any case.
I love the final sentence.
I’m not saying that’s wrong but it’s a very hard argument to make. Biden’s margin was 5+ million greater than HRC’s. Arguably it should have been greater due to COVID & economic shutdown and some people having gotten their fill of Trump but who can say? Trump was advantaged with the good pre-pandemic economy, the GOP tax bill (his approval increased the most with its passage), the fear of social upheaval related both to the pandemic and the George Floyd protests and the growth in prominence of weird-sounding woke stuff - pronouns, bathrooms, 1619 Project, etc.- that caused Trump to get more votes than in 2016.
Yeah, it's really hard to disaggregate the factors.
As I post upthread, my impression is that the relevant sexism was with the media moreso than the electorate.
really hard to seperate dem underperformance from Defund the Police.
One of the worst slogans in political history, and the median voter thinks its totally unhinged.
Serious question: what if you are wrong about that What if the opposition had almost nothing to do with sexism? What then?
I always think it’s worth mentioning that Clinton had an additional handicap: she’d spent almost 40 years in politics while holding just one elected office and briefly at that. So she was the target of conservative attacks for decades while being, essentially, a courtier who could never really take credit for anything she was part of.
The weird thing is absent one narcissistic personality disorder type in the FBI we wouldn’t be having this conversation: James “The EGO” Comey.
What’s wild about Comey is that he managed to gain the spotlight enough during the early Trump years that we all got to find out that he was was… just some dude and not nearly competent enough for the role he chose for himself.
My biggest issue with Hillary Clinton is that she won her place on the national stage through marriage. It would be disgustingly anti-feminist for the first woman to become President to do so by dint of who she slept with.
I’ve heard people respond that Hillary is really smart, and she is, but Yale Law School cranks out 180 really smart grads a year and hardly has a monopoly on really smart resume gods. Most of these people live fairly anonymous lives in greater New York City or the Bay Area, and have no chance of raising tens of millions (and getting a but ton of free media) if they decide to run for U.S. senate. If they decided to dive into politics, they’d probably start with a campaign for state senate or maybe U.S. House.
Hillary’s political instincts are rather mediocre for a national politician, but her dynastic credentials let her cut in line. Nominating unworthy oligarchs is not a great electoral strategy and it didn’t work in 2016. Trump was more cunning.
What's anti-feminist is blaming Hillary for using family name recognition, but not blaming any man for doing the same (like W. Bush)
In fairness, I've heard a number of people over the years say they refuse to vote for dynastic candidates on principle (including Clinton or any Bush).
I started plugging for a constitutional amendment prohibiting any first order relative, whether by blood, law, or marriage, of a former president from being eligible for the office since 1999 on the grounds that it would bar both George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton from the presidency.
Would have been nice to trade that restriction for a loosening of the rules on naturalized citizens - if someone has been a citizen for over 20 years and held elected office already, let the voters choose whether or not they can be president.
Sure that's fine, but that's not what David Abbott said.
I mean, the article is about her and not him? I absolutely think (and I suspect the above commenter would agree) it is a failure when members of the same nuclear family are in the running for the U.S. regardless of gender.
In almost every country, groundbreaking women in politics get there first via their family relationships. See Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, and many others. Margaret Thatcher is an interesting partial exception.
Why partial for Thatcher? Because of her dad?
I think we can also add Merkel and President Tsai of Taiwan to the list of probably self-made female politicians.
Sanna Marin, PM of Finland, appears to qualify too -- her Wikipedia entry at least doesn't mention either of her biological parents or her stepfather having any involvement in her political career or even being particularly important in any capacity and she famously got married after becoming PM (her husband also doesn't seem to have worked in politics before their marriage either).
I think so, yes. Golda Meir, as well.
I agree Golda Meir qualifies, but I also feel like Israeli politics for the few decades after the country was established are so sui generis that it's not very useful to draw conclusions about.
How so?
I think you’ll find that this isn’t special and family relationships play an outsized role in politics, business, everything.
Nepotism is a thing, that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Nepotism is being hired by a relative. Being hired by the voters is entirely different.
Not to mention Kim Campbell in Canada
Jenny Shipley, the first female PM of NZ worked as a teacher and married a farmer.
she managed to become PM of an important country as a woman with obscure origins. there’s also theresa may, who also had middle class origins and never married anyone important.
Jacinda Arden is the PM of New Zealand and her father was a cop.
Theresa May is married to a man who was President of the Oxford Union, that's not unimportant in British politics, believe me.
Yep; the fact that two-thirds of his fellow Union presidents within a five-year window either direction of his term have Wikipedia articles is ... pretty much what I'd expect, actually. That said, as far as his peers go, he does seem like a relative underachiever.
Helle Thorning Schmidt, the first female PM of Denmark was the daughter of a university lecturer. She married a Welsh politician, hardly obvious that helped her political career.
One of the interesting moments that I think faded into history is in 2008 when Obama was winning the primary and Hilary was taking shots ('like Annie Oakley' IIRC) with future deplorables in Indiana. Back then people were saying she had finally found her political legs and who she was in politics, even if she lost. Turns out not so much.
the things that make powerful, career focused women feel good are distinctly different from the things that please swing voters
We're a nation we're lawyers are married to lawyers, doctors are married to doctors, fast food workers are married to fast food workers, etc. Why are we shocked two politic-minded people ended up being interested in politics?
Hillary Rodham, an Ivy League graduate would've likely ended up in politics whomever she married. Like, kids of poltiicians - fine, but saying that political offices should be closed off to you, just because of who you married sounds pretty terrible to me.
Literally every Yale law grad could easily raise tens of millions if they decided to run for Senate in a state with a contested election. Otherwise anonymous Ivy Leaguers who run for high office based on being Ivy Leaguers is, like, the most common single politician type and they’re all very well-funded thanks to the normal donor apparatus.
not in the primary
Who is JD Vance again?
A bestselling memoirist who received a lot of media attention in 2016/17? Not exactly anonymous
Not in a Senate primary, no, but I don’t think she did either given that it was known she’d win. Donations to her primary campaign were essentially donations to her general campaign.
So, I think this piece is set at the wrong level of analysis. Here is a restatement:
* After 8 yrs of, essentially, McConnell vs Obama, the national policy mood had swung to exasperated and disaffected. 10s of millions of people had been crushed by the 2008 meltdown and had seen nothing in the way of help or even focus on them. Just bitter gridlock.
*Rather than running a candidate with no hope of going toe-to-toe with McConnell, et al, the Dems nominated a Clinton who could give as well as take on a platform of toughness and competence; and, importantly, as a woman and therefore a potentially historic break from the same-old, same old inter-a-party dynamics.
*Republicans, having lost 2X but also having successfully kept Obama and the Dems from leading any effort to rescue the millions of people crushed by the last straws of 2008, nominated someone who also was not the embodiment of the status quo gridlock and inter-dynasty (Bush v Clinton) dynamic that had been playing out endlessly for decades.
*This might have set the stage for an overwhelming Republican victory, but the candidate was Trump. SO many still held their noses and voted for the same-old. It was close.
*The clear lesson for Dems, given how Trump’s presidency was playing out, was to nominate someone who could possibly beat Trump in the face of him having rallied those 10’s of millions of disaffected Americans to a refreshingly new style of politics (or actually anti-politics, which is the essence of authoritarianism) which broke the stagnant, ineffective mold and offered at least a lot of cathartic community gatherings and performance opportunities, if not any real actual improvements in the lot of the common people.
And because Trump became ever-more narcissistic, self-absorbed, and crime-boss-like, there was an opening for the Dems to nominate Joe Biden, who by virtue of a lot of stuff I won’t go into here, was the Dem candidate with the best chance of pulling together a coalition of voters strongly motivated by fears of what a second Trump term might bring.
So that’s my alternative. Wish we could discuss, but at least there it is. Thanks.
"After 8 yrs of, essentially, McConnell vs Obama, the national policy mood had swung to exasperated and disaffected. 10s of millions of people had been crushed by the 2008 meltdown and had seen nothing in the way of help or even focus on them. Just bitter gridlock."
*This wildly misremembers 2008-2010 where Democrats had a massive legislative majority who were then summarily crushed in the 2010 elections because people didn't think that Obama and the Dems led any effort to rescue the millions of people crushed by the last straws of 2008.*
"Rather than running a candidate with no hope of going toe-to-toe with McConnell, et al, the Dems nominated a Clinton who could give as well as take on a platform of toughness and competence; and, importantly, as a woman and therefore a potentially historic break from the same-old, same old inter-a-party dynamics."
*Its hard to believe that anyone could consider nominating Clinton a "historic break from the same-old, same old inter-a-party dynamics." Further, suggesting that only Clinton would have a hope of going toe-to-toe with McConnell is extremely condescending to everyone else in the Democratic party. Also - please stop making McConnell out to be some type of Lex Luther level super genius, he's not.*
>>After 8 yrs of, essentially, McConnell vs Obama<<
The word "essentially" is doing a lot of work here. The Republicans only took the Senate in 2014. The fact that the Republicans filibustered everything in sight was in part a Democratic choice.
I think this is a solid take.
I know this isn't the main point of this post, but there is a "So exactly why do we all think Trump is so bad?" debate that probably should happen among all the different Trump-hating factions of American politics. We all don't like the guy, but some hold that Trump is uniquely bad, even among conservatives, because he is anti-democratic and wants to get rid of elections using a cult of personality, why others think he is bad because he's an ur-conservative rich a-hole, and basically just the worst one of the bunch because they always seem to get worse — and these are somewhat mutually-exclusive reasons to agree with one another. This is all confounded by the fact that Trump is actually substantially more moderate than the "normal" conservatives on some policy issues — unless you count "American democracy existing is a good thing" as a policy. This all ends up in the "Trump is uniquely bad beyond just ideology" people getting very annoyed when the "Trump is really bad because really conservative politicians are really bad" people put out "X really conservative politician is actually Worse Than Trump™" pieces (*cough* https://www.vox.com/2016/2/20/11067932/rubio-worse-than-trump *cough*) or support Dem PACs spending millions on covert pro-Trumpist campaign ads (https://www.persuasion.community/p/dear-democrats-stop-boosting-trumpist). Often it plays out as a never-Trump vs. liberal squabble, but, as you later pointed out, there are liberal reasons to find Trump uniquely bad too (https://www.vox.com/2016/3/13/11214140/trump-is-terrifying)!
This debate is confounded by the fact that Trump became a lot worse over time. If he had faded away after losing the 2020 election, there would be a straight face argument that he was no more dishonest than Ryan. (Yes, Trump was a horrible liar, but Ryan’s brand was built on his austerity budgets and the numbers never added up).
Trumps policy outcomes were not uniquely bad, in fact they were decent. The country stayed at peace. The economy improved. More people died of covid under Biden than Trump, notwithstanding the fact that vaccine access improved markedly right around Biden’s inauguration.
But for the pandemic and its dislocations, Trump probably would have won re-election and the disgrace of January 6 never would have happened.
I don't think trying to take healthcare away from millions of people so you can cut taxes for the rich is "decent," but your mileage may vary.
I 100% agree that if Trump’s every rhetorical desire has been satisfied, that would have been awful. However, Trumps outcomes were nothing like his rhetoric. The wall was never built. The deportation force was never meaningfully augmented. The ACA was never repealed.
Presidents are judged more for outcomes than their intentions. Few moderates think biden wants 8-9% inflation, it’s just something he’s stuck with.
By the logic of outcomes > intentions the Trump presidency was a huge failure — he ended his term with the worst jobs record since Hoover!
Except voters understood that was because of the pandemic and other leaders with similar jobs records (Trudeau, Johnson) were pretty popular in November of 2020.
Right, but you can’t say that good things that happened under Trump are a credit to him due to outcomes mattering (failure of ACA repeal) but the bad stuff (Covid recession) doesn’t count against him because he didn’t create the virus or intend to lose jobs.
Yeah, Covid happening wasn’t Trump’s fault. But the ACA repeal fell short because McCain voted no — if Trump got his way it would’ve gone through and people would’ve lost healthcare!
Whether or not it’s “decent”, it’s exactly what every Republican candidate for the presidency since 2008 has proposed.
Would just like to point out that Trump not fading away after losing is exactly what he said he'd do, if given the chance — in 2016: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/22/us/politics/donald-trump-election-results.html
The man committed many counts of obstruction of justice AND extortion while in office. Outcomes schmoutcomes.
“The country stayed at peace.” Except for war in Afghanistan, and military actions in Iraq and Syria and Eastern Africa. Trump increased bombing. What are you talking about?
Except all of those conflicts were continuations of conflicts that were already going when Trump entered office and arguably his effort to wind up the Syrian intervention was subverted. I mean, I always thought the "Trump is a non-interventionist" thing from 2016 was a bunch of BS and warned various Trump-curious libertarians away from him on that basis, but I actually have to say I was genuinely amazed that Trump had not started any new wars by the end of his presidency.
Trump's first, second, and third policy instincts were laziness, so in retrospect, maybe we should not have been surprised that he did not start any new wars. Wars sound like work.
The best I can say about Trump is that he was so lazy and indifferent to any type of policy that the country was mostly able to run on autopilot for his four years. On the economy, the Trump years were a straight line extrapolation from Obama's second term, so I guess we have to give him credit for not screwing it up.
He was horrible during COVID, but I'm not sure that had any material effect, other than making COVID a terrible polarizing issue in the country when it didn't need to be.
Oh, and the one time he got deep into the machinery of government, well, we got Jan. 6 and its leadup. I dunno, but calling him a "moderate" on policy with that shining case on his resume is a real "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln" moment.
Well i'm squarely in the camp of democracy first, and everything else is a distraction if the literal peaceful transfer of power is at risk, so yes, Trump is uniquely bad for this reason , he tried to orchestrate a coup against the vote of the American people. That makes him a traitor of the first degree. It really does not matter whether and to what extent the trains ran on time under his presidency, and the only way anyone can be "worse than trump" is if they also pursue a literal conspiracy to destroy liberty in America, but do it more successfully.
People are reupping the ‘decades of right wing propaganda / smears’ line again the in comments here. Reasonable enough. But this is, of course, a reason for the party NOT to coalesce around Hillary. It is often wielded as a defense of her candidacy—as though once the right aimed their smear cannon at anyone else they would have suffered the same fate in short order. We have long campaigns in the US but they aren’t 24 years long.
Which brings me to my one complaint about this article: Matt says Dem insider politicians, donors, staffers ‘got sloppy and forgetful’ and produced an unprecedented lockstep coalition in support of her candidacy. This is inadequate. Something very bad happened there and it wasn’t at all sloppy.