Gun control is an interesting issue because there is inherent tension between it and criminal justice reform. Stop and frisk was specifically an anti-gun measure.
To resolve this tension, it seems like progressives support more gun laws but don't really support enforcing them. Which electorally is probably the worst of both worlds.
I have never found this to be a particularly compelling argument. Like, ok, it is my sense that in many parts of the world like Japan it is only the cops and the professional criminals who have guns and as a result a lot less gun death because they have fewer impulsive domestic killings, accidental shootings, and suicides. I would be a less than ideal but still win in my mind if the hardened criminals of Seattle still had the same number of guns but I didn't have to worry about a hotheaded neighbor shooting someone in a road rage issue, a kid with a gun they stole from their parents shooting someone they perceived as a bully, a toddler shooting themselves by accident, and a teenager committing suicide.
They really try to square the circle by attacking only the gun manufacturers, and hope that the existing guns will go away via voluntary buybacks. Just no serious consideration on what to do with the grand majority of gun owners who don't want to give them up.
Matt's article inspired me to ask gun control supporters how they wanted to enforce their ideal policy. About half were fine with cracking down, and the other half said I was completely missing the point.
I'm not sure if I've ever seen a real poll ask the question on how gun laws should be enforced, do you have something handy? My own effort was anecdotal, unscientific polling.
The key question I think is how people feel about banning handguns specifically. My understanding (though happy to be corrected) is that consistently polls poorly.
IMO no other question really matters when it comes to what we want to understand about popular sentiment on the subject. All the other stuff about red flag laws and 'assault weapons' are kind of a red herring. The most positive way you could spin it from a gun control perspective is to say support is a mile wide but an inch deep. The more realistic way is that people just don't support it beyond some mild tightening on the margins.
I wonder how much of a fuss people would actually have if:
Guns have to be on a register.
The owner of each gun has to register it, so you have to register all transfers.
The registered owner of a gun is legally liable for any damage done with that gun and is required to carry insurance for that (liability is joint with the person using the gun, ie you / your insurance only have to pay if a gun is stolen and used in a crime if the criminal can't afford to pay).
A gun can be marked as lost/stolen on the register and you cease to be liable for it, but you have to pay a fee (you can claim this against your gun insurance), which then goes to a fund used to compensate the victims of crimes committed with stolen guns.
You can lose your right to own a gun if you commit a felony (at which point you have to sell your guns; you can have them stored by a range or by the police for a reasonable period until you sell them so you don't have to have a fire sale at depressed prices).
This would be gun *control* rather than gun *restrictions* - it wouldn't it illegal to own any guns unless you're a felon (in which case it already is), but it would make enforcing those laws a lot easier.
Most of the gun control rules that have been passed in Washington have been relevant to hand guns -- universal background checks, extreme risk protection orders, and gun storage laws have all been aimed primarily on slowing or limiting access to guns in general and apply just as much to hand guns.
I think the answer to how gun laws should be enforced is "reasonably" - pretty much like anything. Somewhere between "the laws shouldn't be meaningless and have no teeth" and "enforcement shouldn't be zealous to the hilt with no other considerations."
It also depends on the laws. If we have one law that is poorly written and any enforcement would lead to absurd outcomes, probably best to repeal or re-write the law. If there's a gap in the law that makes other laws redundant, or there is simply no funding for personnel to adequately enforce the law, also probably best to try to address that.
Yeah I'm an advocate for gun control. Personally I support exploring a pigouvian taxes on ammunition. I'm also intrigued by the idea of requiring liability insurance, but that might run into issues with civil rights law.
The idea that volume of ammunition expended is in anyway related to homicide or crime rates at all is nonsense. Legal shooters use lots of bullets. Murders use a couple of mags at most.
"Should be" is carrying a lot of weight in this comment. How many people who keep guns for actual home protection are disciplined about staying proficient?
If they're like me and should be disciplined about exercising to stay healthy, the question answers itself.
How would you charge a pigouvian tax on ammo, but exempt 'hunting and shooting ranges'.....? You'd have a drone follow the person home and watch what they do with the ammo, then decide to tax them later? Seriously man, stop and think about what you're saying for a minute
Shooting ranges is easy: tax exempt buying ammo from the range that you discharge at the range (ie you can't take out ammo that you have bought there).
And for hunting? an exemption for rimmed rifle ammo (other than .22 LR) and a ban (well, extending the NFA restrictions on full-auto) on semi-automatic rifles using rimmed ammo (other than .22LR) would work pretty well.
Semi-autos/autos with rimmed ammo are rare anyway (they're a bad idea because of rimlock), apart from .22LR - they're mostly historic WWII-era weapons from the UK or Russia, so a ban is more of a pre-emptive move to stop manufacturers designing a rimmed semi-auto in Winchester .303 or 7.62x54mmR. If that ammo was cheap, there would be Moisin-Nagant and Lee-Enfield clones on the market within weeks, and modern designs (ie plastic rather than wood, Picatinny rails for sights, straight rather than curved bolt handles, etc) within months.
People could either buy these rimmed bolt-action hunting rifles (which are weapons you need to practice with and you have to aim because reload times are significant) and get tax-free ammo, or they could buy rimless semi-autos and pay the tax.
I continued to be baffled by the insurance thing... like what exactly is the insurance supposed to be paying out on? Are people suggesting that some insurance company is gonna cover your... I guess civil liability when you murder someone with your gun? That's not how insurance works.
And if we're talking about like... gun accidents, the premium on any one of the 400 million guns around the country would be infinitesimally small, a rounding error, wouldn't impact anything... and I'm pretty sure we already have health insurance for that? Is the idea that my insurance will pay to patch the hole in my ceiling if I have an ND?
It's liability insurance - the damages wouldn't be limited to direct medical expenses. You could collect for pain and suffering, lost income, etc. It would also cover medical expenses beyond the victim's crappy Aetna coverage and for uninsured people. I've got no problem with requiring gun owners to carry insurance.
But in general, you are right that this wouldn't make a dent in gun ownership. It's not like car insurance - premiums are high because the vast majority of cars will be involved in an accident at some point. Most legal guns are used at the range or not at all.
Liability insurance doesn't cover crimes though. The reason this isn't a product that exists is because the number of shootings that are like... accidental shootings of people who don't own the gun in question that might plausibly be covered by insurance is tiny and entirely unrelated to the sort of gun crimes people are concerned with.
If the suggestion was actually that we need to create a civil cause of action against people who have their guns stolen when those guns are used in crimes that would be more defensible, but the whole "make them get insurance" thing totally skips right over the fact that that liability is not a thing that exists, at least under current law. If you could in fact statutorily create such a liability under the constitution is I guess an interesting question, and then maybe it might make sense for insurance to cover such a liability..
As a gun owner, what are your thoughts on those kinds of laws? It always struck me that there are compromise ways to make gun ownership safer on the margins that are pretty unobjectionable (e.g.- make purchasing a gun more like getting a driver's license, with training and testing requirements), and it would seem like holding individuals liable if they negligently store their firearms in a way that allows them to be swiped and circulate in the black market is a sensible measure. What do you think?
Is that really rare? The entire thrust of the progressive argument is that both accidental and intentional deaths from firearms increase more-or-less directly with the number of guns in circulation. So the benefit to gun owners of "feeling safer" by owning a gun is not worth the actual reduction in safety for everyone. But I think even progressives understand that the realms of hunting and target shooting exist largely outside this system of trade-offs, so sometimes take pains to exempt them from their total gun-reduction strategies.
Exactly this. Those who profess to want gun control that doesn't require removing guns from the homes of (currently) law-abiding individuals are tinkering on the margins while pretending that they want to make drastic impacts on gun deaths in this country.
Those who actually acknowledge that making those drastic impacts would require repealing the second amendment are being honest, but have a politically impossible end goal.
I prefer to be honest about it and recognize the futility rather than the annual parade of misleading attempts to "do SOMETHING" on guns when that something will have virtually zero impact on the harm caused by guns. If you're at least honest then maybe you build a generational movement that makes gun abolition feasible by say 2150 or so. But as it stands, nobody is doing anything that will do anything, ever.
Yea, but I do encounter people who seem to genuinely think the "insurance" part has some relationship to reality instead of just being a misidentified tax.
Yes, but it is (in principle) a *differentiated* tax: the people most likely to misuse their guns are those who pay the highest insurance rates for it, whereas most taxes are just per capita or per gun.
A tax on ammunition that is high enough to actually make a difference in the rate of gun crimes (and it would have to be very high -- most people who commit crimes with their guns aren't actually using many bullets) would very likely be subject to a Second Amendment challenge in the same way that special taxes on newsprint and ink have been successfully challenged on First Amendment grounds.
Yes, people can make their own ammunition at home, it's not that hard. I mean, people make their own meth at home, no....? I would suggest Googling & learning a little more on the subject. The reason home ammunition-making isn't more widely practiced is that ammo is easily purchased now. Change that calculus and you'll create a thriving black market for rounds
Back when I was into guns, I did this and it’s actually a very popular hobby. For guns that shoot rare ammunition it can also be a lot cheaper than buying manufactured ammo.
That said, it’s theoretically possible to crack down on this by limiting the sale of smokeless powder and primers, but that wouldn’t stop it.
It is not uncommon at all. The brass is typically reusable many times over, the bullet itself is dirt cheap (and if you have a crucible and mold you can churn them out pretty easily), and the powder is relatively cheap.
FWIW, there has been an 11% federal tax on ammunition since 1919. (It goes to fund conservation.) That’s not cigarette tax level, but it’s also not nothing when combined with state sales tax.
You would either have a system where risk premiums do not reflect market conditions or a system where young Black men pay considerably more for insurance than people from other demographic groups.
"They really try to square the circle by attacking only the gun manufacturers, and hope that the existing guns will go away via voluntary buybacks."
Actually, I think the purpose of going after gun manufacturers with either liability and/or regulations is to reduce the supply of guns manufactured in the first place. Pretty much all "illegally owned" guns (that weren't manufactured via 3D printing which is another issue/problem entirely) were "legally manufactured" guns to begin with, which were purchased and distributed likely through an initially legal chain of purchase and custody to an illegal one. So one very probable means of reducing the supply of illegal guns is to reduce the supply of legally manufactured guns (and ammo, same deal) in the first place.
"Actually, I think the purpose of going after gun manufacturers with either liability and/or regulations is to reduce the supply of guns manufactured in the first place."
If that's actually the strategy, then I wish them lots of luck, b/c they're gonna need it. The US Army needs to buy guns from somewhere. The Army would also much rather the manufacturers be both domestic and not dependent on government largesse.
Making bullets harder to buy would affect people stockpiling ammunition, but the vast majority of shootings involve literally only a handful of shots being fired, so it is highly unlikely to make much of a dent in gun crime unless you're talking about absolutely confiscatory levels of taxes on ammunition sales or something like that, in which case we get into Second Amendment issues.
Increasing the cost of doing something affects things on the margins.
So even if you increase the cost of bullets by a few cents in aggregate you might limit access to lethal means to a marginal bad actor. Its the same way excise taxes work.
I said it was "highly unlikely to make much of a dent in gun crime," not that it would have zero effect. But I suspect that demand for bullets to be used for criminal purposes is highly inelastic -- if you're someone who is already inclined towards a career path where firearms are an important part of your toolbox, paying an extra five cents a bullet adds less than two dollars to the cost of two fully loaded magazines for a semiautomatic pistol. When you further factor in that (i) even career violent criminals likely go weeks or months at a time without actually discharging a gun and (ii) ammo is effectively non-perishable under normal environmental conditions, a small per-bullet tax probably is adding less than $20 to the annual cost of being a criminal.
The point though is that the person "on the margin" here is the person who buys 5000 rounds a year, not the person who uses <50 rounds a year committing crimes
The consistent failure to handle tensions and trade-offs would be funny if it weren't putting the survival of US democracy at risk (and, less dramatically, making it very hard to govern effectively in general)
people keep saying this but I think folks are just radically misunderstanding the concern..
obviously if Trump wins the election, that's democratically legitimate! the fear is not that Trump will win. the fear is that, IF Trump wins, he will do things that will weaken or even destroy democracy. having a guy who has radicalized himself against the concept of free and fair elections become president is pretty bad. in the background, he and his team have been pursuing aggressive purges of people who were insufficiently loyal post-2020 when Trump began questioning the election. McConnell won't be majority leader. The speaker or, God willing, the minority leader, will be someone who will not publicly affirm the legitimacy of the election. he has positioned himself very well to make another run at stealing the 2028 election. and it only takes one successfully rigged election to essentially obliterate the norm of the democratic transfer of power in this country.
we must be clear-eyed about the fact that the GOP is not particularly attached to democracy, and their voters do not care about it either.
I have the cynical thought that “democracy” to Blue people really means “rule by us”. No party that is actively attempting to disenfranchise 1.3 million American voters in one state alone (to name just one thing) is in any position to convince anybody that they are fighting to save democracy. Ultimately, the law is for the people, not the people for the law.
No, "Blue people" really are concerned that if Trump wins again, there will never be another free and fair election in America, at least not for a long time. I have no idea what specific instance you are referring to here (my best guess is you are complaining about New York's new congressional maps? though those are actually astoundingly fair for a state where one party controls state government), but yes, both parties have weakened democratic norms by playing games with district maps and voting restrictions. There's still an enormous difference between this and trying to nullify the result of a legitimately conducted election.
As a card-carrying "blue person", I think people who *very seriously and legitimately* wonder if Trump 2024 means no 2028 election--I think these people are absolutely frank barking mad.
I did not think Trump's 2016 win was a tragedy/crime against democracy. I thought it was a tragedy _of_ democracy, but it was democratically legitimate.
When he lost in 2020 that was democratically legitimate - but ... and here's where I worry about him - he tried really hard to delegitimize it.
If he wins in 2024 that will be legitimate but I will _never_ vote for someone who treats democracy as poorly as he did in 2020. (I'm on the record in these comments as opposing efforts by Democrats to get extreme Republicans to win primaries to be easier to defeat in the general because I think that's iffy, even if technically 'democratic')
Now, when people say - if he wins there will never be another "free and fair election" (or at least not the next few) - I don't think they are envisioning dictator-esque 90% + votes. But elections tend to be close enough that being able to add a 5% weight to the electoral college scale makes it _really_ hard for the other side to win. I don't how likely that is, but even a 10% likelihood is WAY more than I can tolerate.
This is grading Trump on a curve IMO. Even in 2016 he encouraged violence, said he'd reject the result if he lost, did reject the result of the Iowa caucus which he did lose, actively sought and received foreign interference. He may have got even worse over time but he's been awful from the start.
Do you know how many disputed elections there have been in the history of this country? None of what has happened is remotely like 1876 for example. In some states there were assassinations and armed conflict between the parties. Democracy survived then because the people wanted it. Trump can’t end democracy on his own, unless the people don’t want it anymore. I think we do.
Donald Trump is a bad person who believes in wrongheaded ideas. He lies, cheats, and steals, and I believe he would kill if he believed he could get away with it. He is also fat and smelly. I do not respect him as a human being.
No - "democracy" to Blue people (and people on most other parts of the color wheel) means the person who gets the most votes wins. It's Red people who support the insane idea that disproportionate voting power should be granted to rural Americans just because they live in places with more empty acreage. If you want to see actual "democracy" then you need to abandon the Electoral College and apportion Senate seats by population, as God and James Madison intended. But you won't, because seizing and maintaining political power by any means necessary is more important to Red people than is democratic process or democratic principle...which is the main problem we "Blues" have with Trump, in a nutshell.
The Constitution established the electoral college as it is in 1787. How it works is no surprise to anyone at this date. If you personally think it should work differently, you're welcome to make that argument to the American people, to get a constitutional amendment. Meantime, Democrats need to stop whining about it and figure out how to win elections in those states. They used to be very competitive in all the states and in rural areas. Now they're not, largely due to their political incompetence: the PMC's who run the party seem to think it beneath them to try to listen to and appeal to voters in those states. Meanwhile, when Republicans win the electoral college, it's not called "seizing power". It's called being elected fair and square.
You are right. If Donald Trump was the only piece of the puzzle, he alone could not do any meaningful damage to democracy.
But he is not one individual. He is the leader of an enormous political cult that has slavish and absolute devotion to him. This cult has proven, in 2020, that its devotion to Trump is more important than democracy. To them, he is a monarch.
This cult has gained increasing power at state and local government in many states, including critical battleground states like Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. Do you think it is so unreasonable to be concerned that these officials, who have *already demonstrated disrespect for democracy*, may try to undertake efforts to influence the election? Are you not worried about Trump's plan to hollow out the administrative state and replace it with his slavish cult devotees, and what those devotees might be able to do with the vast levers of power at their disposal?
They have already provided us with their blueprint. They will claim fraud. They will throw out votes. They may simply just adopt their own slate of electors with no relationship to the vote counts in the state, claiming that the election is hopelessly compromised.
I am definitely worried about a Trump Presidency and am firmly opposed to Trump.
I do, however, have more faith in American institutions than those who think democracy is ending.
"Do you think it is so unreasonable to be concerned that these officials, who have *already demonstrated disrespect for democracy*, may try to undertake efforts to influence the election?"
Depends on what the "influence" is and what you mean by "disrespect for democracy."
"Are you not worried about Trump's plan to hollow out the administrative state and replace it with his slavish cult devotees, and what those devotees might be able to do with the vast levers of power at their disposal? "
Having been a cog in that administrative state, I think it will be very difficult for Trump to realize that goal.
And this brings up a point I've been trying to hammer for long before Trump, which is the growth in the power of the Executive branch. If it really does have vast levers of power, then maybe we ought to do something about that so the Executive isn't seen as prize or a gateway to controlling the country. But ironically many of the people who are most opposed to Trump are also the people who like a strong Executive and administrative state.
And yes, they've said what they might do - which is foolish of them. But again, a lot of that will be easier said than done.
And I'm not saying this about you specifically, but I see a huge disconnect between words and actions.
In other words, I read a lot of people claiming that we are on the verge of fascism from Trump, but when you drill down it turns out they're not willing to make much, if any, political compromises to stop Trump, and have not done other actions one would expect to see if those fears were genuine. If Trump is such a threat to democracy, then why aren't more people acting like that's the case?
Obviously Trump's election is not the literal end of democracy, any more than was Hitler's being appointed Chancellor. It's what comes afterwards that kills democracy. Maybe it'll turn out Trump was just kidding about it all.
The United States has 230 years of constitutional government behind us. Germany had 12. Trump either will or won’t be a problem but as far as I’m concerned the legal stuff and especially the ridiculous “insurrection” nonsense is something that is happening now, not something we fear might happen in the future.
I wish 2020's attempted coup really was "ridiculous nonsense." But it wasn't. It was hamhanded, sure. But it was deadly serious. Trump absolutely wanted to steal that election. I'm also not sure about your breezy assertion that the age of America's constitutional obviates the risk of a descent into authoritarianism. This seems...unfounded?
Trump behaved badly and would lose my vote over it if he had it in the first place. It is telling that a Federal prosecutor in a hostile administration didn’t see his way to actually charging him with treason or insurrection or sedition. Let’s not puff this up beyond what it is: it is preaching to the choir and shows real fear of the American people. He needs to be beaten decisively at the ballot box.
It's absolutely true that our democracy is more deeply rooted than was democracy in Weimar Germany, and the chances of an equivalent Reichstag fire followed by the Enabling Laws are pretty small.
But there are a lot of very bad things these folks can do short of the Nazi takeover of German democracy.
Some of the "bad things" are only "bad" because Democrats hate them. Getting the Federal bureaucracy and maybe (maybe) even the Justice Department under tighter political control might not be a bad thing, if it prevents him from getting away from "the deep state prevented me from doing the right thing" excuse. If he gets elected, he should govern, and if he does that badly, he should get thrown out and replaced by the other guys. If a majority of voters think he can be a normal president, then let him try.
Well, no. If Trump wins again he will almost certainly do it without getting a majority of the popular vote, so it won't be "democratic" under the normal meaning of that word or the way we use the word to describe every other election to every other office in America and in most of the democratic world. His election would be "legitimate" under the US Constitution, but not "democratic".
My solution: Any person found in possession of a gun is ipso facto presumed to have volunteered for service in the well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, and shall be immediately sent to drill.
I'm not sure why you would make such an obvious strawman that "progressives don't really support enforcing them."
There's lots of support for red flag laws, improving the background check databases, restricting what is legally available for purchase, closing the gun show loopholes, and most importantly not returning illegal firearms that are confiscated in other investigations in the first place. Just look at California's policies and procedures
Gun control doesn't mean increasing police harassment or kicking down doors. There are lots of existing check points in the system that can gradually filter out the guns most efficient at killing people.
Right, I agree with this. The issue isn't wanting to pass gun laws but not enforce them. It's wanting to pass and enforce gun laws only against privileged groups (manufacturers, perpetrators of domestic violence, stereotypical white gun enthusiasts) but not against oppressed groups.
these things can definitely help with preventing mass shootings
but the vast majority of gun violence is perpetrated by people who are already criminals. they are generally not purchasing guns legitimately, they are buying guns on the black market. it needs to be a serious offense to walk around with an illegal gun, because that is how you squeeze this market.
Most gun death is actually committed within a household, in the form of domestic violence, suicide, or accidents, rather than violent crimes or personal defense.
you're really putting your thumb on the scale by including suicides. we know from the experience of many other countries that while firearms may increase the probability of the marginal suicide, there are many other ways to kill yourself
"gun violence" may include suicide in activist-world but everyone else understands it to mean interpersonal violence, i.e. where the subject uses a firearm to kill another person
and when analyzing that category, violent crime is in fact the overwhelming majority of gun deaths. DV and accidents are both relatively small compared to the massive body of incidents of "guy kills another guy because of a dispute or to enable property crime"
There's some weird elision going on there. You accurately pointed out that most gun death is suicide, but then glued on domestic violence (even though more men are murdered by guns than women, and it's not close) and accidents (which are only a few percent of total gun deaths).
I support all of this, but focusing on purchasing restrictions but not enforcing illegal ownership would barely make a dent in crime.
If you want to reduce gun violence, you have to put some focus on the people who are actually committing most of the gun violence. Those people aren't going to be stopped by red flag laws and gun show restrictions. If there are a lot of guns in circulation (and there will be...) they won't be hard to get for people who are willing to break the law.
2 of your 6 ideas (red flag, and not returning) are about ownership. Both deal with the gun, not the person. There are plenty of guns out there - taking someone's gun isn't going stop them if they're generally predisposed to criminality. You have to do something about the person who was caught doing the illegal thing.
I'm not sure your really in dialogue with me or the other commenters. I suspect you know what I'm saying. Someone in a gang who's been in and out of jail 10 times is disposed to criminality. Your grandmother probably isn't.
Please calm down, because you're not helping make your case by promoting extra judicial violence.
It is in fact necessary for cops to return legal firearms confiscated in an investigation.
If more types of firearms are made illegal for sale, or illegal without a license, then they will not be returned to their owner. Just as now, if a firearm doesn't have a serial number.
The issue with stop and frisk - as with many policies - is "what level of intrusion do you allow on innocent people in order to catch some guilty ones?"
Real talk: stop & frisk was accepted because it wasn't like a white guy in a suit was randomly going to have a cop put him up against the wall and grope his crotch for a gun. The innocent people in this system were powerless people, so there wasn't a fuss about how much they disliked the system. Not cool.
You need enforcement mechanisms that can be applied consistently and fairly. That wasn't the NYC stop & frisk system, sorry.
My memory of what the reseach showed was that stop and frisk was ineffective (& countereffective in alienating the communities the police needed to work with them), whereas frisking people with probable cause was effective. "Frisking" itself is not neccessarly bad. We need more nuance here.
yes! probable cause is a great reason to frisk someone, I agree!
even the "you jumped a turnstile so I'd also like to know if you have a gun" is fine by me. But not just grabbing people at random. (Or really, NOT at random, but by profiling.)
See also the unwritten rule of waiting to see if a mass casualty event involving firearms gets coded as a "mass shooting" or "crime" to determine how we respond.
Huh? What is the evidence you are citing to support the proposition that progressives don't want gun restrictions enforced? One of the many issues with stop and frisk is that it was ineffective at "gun control", turning up only about 14 guns for every 10,000 stops. I'm pretty sure a lot of progressives would have supported mag-wanding white tourists in Times Square as a means of finding and removing guns from NYC streets (and I'm not even sure this would have turned up fewer guns per stop than S&F), but Bloomberg obviously wouldn't have done this, so allowed the stop and frisk discourse to congeal in the "racism" bucket rather than in "gun control". The fact that S&F as implemented was objectively bad at gun control made it easier for progressives to see the "structural racism" without any countervailing benefit, but I see no evidence that it lessened progressive zeal for getting guns off the street.
Matt is writing about a different situation here. DC has a weird set up where they have trouble going after people whom they know are committing a crime. NYC, was using a vast drag net on certain neighborhoods and demographic groups. They hassled a lot of innocent people to catch a few criminals, which likely undermined any impact that they had. A key to effective policing is swift and certain justice, not swift and certain harassment.
Progressives support a number of gun control measures. Some seem like they'd be more effective than others. Stop and frisk seemed to be ineffective. When it stopped, by court order, the neighborhoods where it was used saw a similar decline in crime as neighborhoods where it hadn't been used. As for why they raise hackles over this, and not regulating every feature of a gun in some new assault weapons van, they care more about the costs of hassling minorities than taking away the toys of wealthy gun owners
While I have never fired a gun and have no desire to ever do so, wealthy gun owners who like wasting their money on their toys are generally not the ones who use guns to commit violence.
So the question is, is the purpose of gun control to reduce the number of guns, or to reduce the number of shootings? I feel it should be the latter.
Most gun owners are not wealthy. Wealthy people hire other people to carry guns for them. But it is true that legal owners commit a miniscule fraction of violent crime.
That came off as derisive, but I didn't really it mean it that way. Targeting minority neighborhoods with police harassment is just going to piss off progressives more than impeding what is essentially a recreational activity for some. You can say that the latter policy is dumb on a number of levels, and I don't really disagree. I'm not defending either policy, but can you see why one might invite a different response from people? I
There has been an interesting case in Seattle. We had a fatal shooting at my daughter's high school last year. The shooter was a child and he got the gun from a friend who bought it from a friend in a long chain of teenagers that eventually led back to a parent whose kid stole their gun in a city about 15 miles north. That parent had not been in compliance with either the safe storage laws or the obligation to report stolen guns law. There has been widespread pressure from people in Seattle that they want to see this parent prosecuted but the county prosecutor for that county will not charge him since he doesn't see any "bad faith." I has definitely been a flip of who is in favor of prosecuting folks for breaking the law and who isn't. But I don't think it is that inconsistent really. The same people pressing for the prosecution of the parent also don't want to see an unduely harsh jail time for the minor involved and I don't seem them advocating for stopping and frisking teens.
Collaterally, I feel like the extent to which changing progressive attitudes on enacting and enforcing gun control laws over the past decade (particularly when also combined with other criminal justice reform) has played a role in empowering a resurgence of white supremacism is severely underexplored.
Are there any progressives in Congress or a prominent coalition of progressives in state legislatures or major local city governments that still advocate for fully abolishing the police?
My guess is no. And I think it's important to recognize that the progressive movement, while still probably far to your left on police reform , does not believe in the more extreme stances that came out post 2020.
You underestimate my desire for police reform. I want to abolish police unions, abolish qualified immunity, throw police who are guilty of crimes in prison, and blacklist cops who are fired because of abusive conduct.
And yes, most Democratic politicians have not embraced the police abolition movement. But the media, both Fox News and mainstream, don't amplify those politicians. The media amplifies the police abolitionists, making them appear powerful.
Even the reasonable things you want can be problematical if badly implemented. I wonder if people know what qualified immunity is. You're going to say that a DMV clerk can't be sued for screwing up your license renewal, but that a police officer should be exposed to financial ruin every time they arrest someone who can get a lawyer? Especially, if they have no union to back them up? This is a recipe for some very ineffective policing. Like it or not, most of these issues are not policy issues but management issues. You have got to diagnose the problems, and put in place the incentives to get people to do the right things and to not do the wrong things. This is a long job, but it's the only way to improve things.
I'll clarify: I don't believe any government employee should have blanket qualified immunity like they do under current Supreme Court doctrine (Which incorrect anyway. That the Supreme Court hasn't reversed its error is a travesty). If Congress wants to make some small, specific immunity carve-outs for certain classes of government employees or certain actions, fine. But the presumption should be that people have rights, and that if government employees violate those rights they should be liable for damages. People shouldn't have to prove they have rights that can be violated.
Eh. Given how-much Internet rhetoric is in-group signaling, I don't really think it's possible for large-scale movements to successfully pretend anything these days. *Someone* will always want to scream the secrets aloud for those sweet, sweet Twitter hearts.
That's right. I think what actually happens, especially on the west coast, is marginal revenue gets used by politicians for lots of non-profit orgs that have high variance in results for urban quality of life, compared to policing.
Again, I think it's just much more important to look at the actions of the Democrats in Congress/in state legislatures around the country, rather than the sorts of people featured on LibsofTikTok videos.
Might be a loser politically, but much catchier than "I'm a Democrat and I want you to register your ammo and pay an insurance premium that will compensate victims in the event you ammo is stolen and used in the commission of a crime."
Calling something both common sense and brilliant would seem like a contradiction. But it is not. And this piece from Matt is both common sense and brilliant.
I particularly liked: "In Clinton’s account, none of Trump’s supporters are high-income people who want tax cuts. None of them are managers at Sunbelt automobile plants who don’t like Democrats’ pro-union stands. None of them are private school parents who like the idea of school vouchers because they will benefit financially. None of them own a restaurant in a community that has benefitted from fracking and worry that Democratic environmentalism will be bad for their business."
I miss the days when we saw political opposition as being wrong, not evil. I hope they come back, though that will probably only happen once Trump leaves the stage.
Totally agree, though I might speculate Clinton knew what she was doing but it backfired. There ARE Deplorables in the Trump camp! For me, being in the same team with those people is unimaginable, so it motivated me to vote for Clinton vs Trump. I really want those people kept down.
But, I was probably a Clinton voter all along (heck, Jill Stein got more votes than Trump in my part of Brooklyn). Out there in the swing states, they are less offended by the deplorables and more accepting of them in the coalition.
Wasn't there some quote like "What if I want corporate tax cuts, but the only people willing to help me get them are kinda racist?" For ME, you always vote against the racists! Keep them out of power! But America as a whole turns out to have more moral flexibility.
Around 2016, liberals came to see racism as preeminent among all types of evil. A lot of other people didn’t; they continued seeing it as one among many types of evil.
If Hillary Clinton were guilty of everything she’s ever been accused of, including the stray impossible-to-pull-off murder, would you vote for Ted Cruz against her in a head to head matchup? What’s worse, Hillary having gotten away with a few murders and then making it to the White House, or every woman in the country losing access to abortion (among other policy outcomes).
I think there's a broader piece to be written that the obsession with racism (which, to be clear, is very different than opposing racism) hurts Democrats a lot. Basically Democrats and their lefty friends in the commentariat can't see anything that in any way involves a person of color through any other lens than racism, and also are so afraid of accusations of racism that it limits their freedom of action. And those are bad dynamics for a political party and movement that still needs working class white support.
Great comment. A month or 2 ago, there was a CNN reporter on Bill Maher's show. This was just after Norman Lear had passed and so Lear was the topic of conversation. The CNN reporter, a black women, said, and I kid you not, there are more Archie Bunkers in contemporary America than when All in the Family was airing.....an incredible statement....incredibly wrong.
It’s a bad dynamic for people who want to solve the actual problems of non-white people. It’s impossible to engage in real brainstorming and problem solving when you’re so afraid of your own shadow that you can’t say even marginally difficult things.
"Around 2016, liberals came to see racism as preeminent among all types of evil. A lot of other people didn’t; they continued seeing it as one among many types of evil."
I think that statement is correct, but incomplete without noting that around 2016 it also became widely accepted amongst liberals that "racism" has a dramatically broader definition than what it historically meant while a lot of other people kept using it in the "traditional" sense.
The comparison I like to use is Andrew Cuomo. He's a pariah now, and rightfully so, but let's say that somehow he mounts a political comeback (e.g.- imagine he was the only candidate to mount a primary challenge to Biden because his ego convinced him that people were clamoring for his return, and then Biden dies during the primaries and Cuomo now becomes the only viable candidate who can step in) and was the Dem nominee in 2024. Would all these self-righteous "I can't support someone whose morals I disagree with" voters really all stay home or vote 3rd party candidate if they knew that would mean Trump would get re-elected? Of course not.
It's easy to take the high road when it's the road that takes you where you want to go anyways. It's a lot harder when taking the high road means that you end up at a destination that horrifies you.
If all Trump did was sexually assault a bunch of women, well, I'd use it against him because that's politics[1] but I'd understand people who just want tax cuts voting for him. It's really more the corruption and the shady business dealings and the sense Trump views the office of president as a way to benefit himself. I could vote for a rapist, but I don't want to vote for someone who might genuinely sell out the US's interests to another nation.
Someone else pointed out that you really can't discuss the way people feel about these candidates without discussing the balkanized media environments. I had a smart law school buddy who is a conservative media junky who posted earlier this year that the Hunter Biden situation was going to be literally the greatest scandal in American history, dwarfing Watergate. His basis for the claim was clearly a reliance on what I would describe as conspiracy focused conservative writings, but he genuinely believed them.
My personal take is that the "pick-your-own-narrative" nature of media means that we'll never again be able to resolve the deep fissures within the electorate. It's never going to go back to the old "trusted" media source formula, so we will forever be in a situation where huge swaths of the country will view the other side as monstrous because of what they're told by their chosen platforms.
I'm not sure I would say preeminent exactly... But the thing is, if you live life as a modern white liberal professional in a coastal city, working and socializing with college grads, then real "old-timey" racism is something you might never see. It is shocking and backward and unimaginable. It's only something from movies & TV, and only the villains. It's totally 100% taboo.
It's like the SNL skit right after the election with Dave Chappelle & Chris Rock, where the white folks are shocked to discover America might still be racist. OK, outside the liberal bubble, there were apparently a lot of people who knew that, and they didn't find it disqualifying to be on the same team as the racists.
(Also as MY has mentioned before, this does lead to a problem on the Left where people try to define other pet issues as racism to tap into this same energy. That's also bad, but I'd say less bad than actual racism.)
I would have thought that too. But I went to a rally on Saturday that was advertised as being in support of the Ceasefire and protecting Raffa. The folks holding the mic was leading mostly "River to Sea" and "Globalize the Intifada."
There were a lot of folks there who identify as communists or anarchists etc who may not vote Dem or not vote at all. I was offered three different communist newspapers while I was there and there were full on USSR flags in the crowd. But there were also lot of fairly normie looking folks who probably came to support the cease fire (including kids from my kid's Amnesty International Club) who were chanting back everything that was said.
I don't think most of those people really want to wipe Israel off the map or have global terrorism against Jews but they were comfortable with the language in a way that shocked me. (They were also chanting back thing in Arabic that I could fully make out and that there is no way most of them knew what it meant.) The group think was real and I do think that some progressive Dems have bought into ahistorical Manichaean view of this conflict that borders on and sometimes crosses into antisemitism.
I still think antisemitism is a larger problem on the Right - no one was doing hitler salutes. But it worries me a great deal. I also feel a more compelled to say something about the Left leaning stuff and try to push back against it that the Right wing stuff for the same reason that I have historically spoken out more about Israel's human rights violations than Hamas's crimes - I don't think Hamas or Right-wing bigots given two fucks what I think. I think the would both be perfectly happy with me thinking badly of them and might get off on it. I hope that a democratic nation with a public commitment to human rights and my fellow progressives might.
I'm in the NY area, so there's such a substantial Jewish population I think nothing of it... Is it different elsewhere?
Oh, or do you mean the Israel stuff lately? I mean sure, f** Netanyahu obviously. But most of the Jewish people I know have been frustrated with him and Israeli politics for a long time.
Not to get a hostile tangent going, but being opposed to certain Israeli state actions is NOT antisemitism. It amazes me that this conflation has been allowed to get any traction.
I mean, it kinda depends on how much sway the racists are going to have.
The party that's more against immigration is probably the party that's going to get more racist votes. But maybe they want to cut immigration levels to 75% of what the other party wants and 75% of what I want. But they do ten other things I want(I actually support corporate tax cuts even as I'm ok with raising my income taxes).
However, once Trump was actively courting them _that_ starts to be a different story - they're clearly going to have too much power.
Racism is also used as a binary. You are either one of those deplorable racists, or you are an anti-racist crusader fighting the good fight. In reality, almost everyone has some shades of racism and prejudice whether they admit it to themselves or not.
I hear you on this one. When I use the word I'm using it in the late 20th century traditional way. Actual bigots. Charlottesville marchers, for example.
I'm not interested in weakening the word by giving it some abstract broader concept.
"For ME, you always vote against the racists! [...] But America as a whole turns out to have more moral flexibility.." Or perhaps rather than being more "morally flexible" than you just (correctly in my eyes) don't see racism as the unique or even primary moral issue of our time?
I feel like I'm being reasonable, versus some people who say "you have to be racist to vote for Trump." I don't think that's true - I think as you say, all you have to do is give it a lower priority, even if you might still think it is bad.
No. It's not the same. There's a difference between cowing on moral issues to get a couple more bucks in your pocket and seeing the broad range of moral issues and prioritizing different ones over racism.
To say it more clearly, my gripe isn't with you saying voting against the side with more racists is a top priority for you, but I take issue with the idea that someone who, say, will for example never vote for the pro abortion legality candidate is somehow more "morally flexible" (which I don't read as a neutral observation). They may have different moral beliefs and priorities but the issue isn't the "moral flexibility" and I think it's indicative of the problem to suggest it is.
I think the better analogy is you want border security for non racist reasons and yep there's also some people that want border security for racists reasons.
But does that mean you have to give up your policy position and vote for the open borders candidate?
I always thought Clinton's big mistake was saying *half* of Trump voters were deplorables.
The media loves to jump all over things that are stated with false precision and somehow putting a number on a thing transforms what would otherwise be an anodyne statement.
Original: "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
And change it to: "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put many of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
I may be wrong here but I get the feeling that the latter would have been far less impactful.
I agree that this your wrong/evil wish isn't going to happen under Trump. The problem being that *enthusiastic* Trump supporters are, essentially, assholes.
I didn't think this about previous Republican presidents or their followers. I've always prided myself on being a "both sides have good points - it's all rational perception differences and reasonable tradeoffs!" Trump has been a real kick in the pants for people like me.
Yeah— even before Trump, conservatives were, on average, more likely to be bad people than liberals (significantly lower honesty-humility HEXACO factor scores even back in 2010), and it’s gotten worse since then. Even a guy like Richard Hanania, whose issue positions are very right-wing, argues that on average, liberals are more personally moral and try harder to avoid hypocrisy.
There definitely are conservatives who are decent people, but at the population level, they actually are worse.
Liberals identifying morality with HEXACO factor scores rather than things like charitable giving and church attendance is a big part of why the deplorables comment was such a disaster for Clinton.
If you strip out contributions to a church that you currently attend— ie: payment to maintain a service that directly benefits you, which is only “charitable” by technicality— Republicans are actually less charitable.
And again, the liberal idea that giving money to your church "is only 'charitable' by technicality" is a big part of why the deplorables comment was such a disaster for Clinton. For many many Americans politically left center and right committing time and money to their communities and churches is a big part of their identity and having Hillary Clinton (not particularly famous for her morality) dismiss anyone who doesn't completely buy into left wing social orthodoxy as "deplorable" while the vast majority of dem party elites snicker (not nearly as secretly as they seem to think) at churchgoers was incredibly damaging to folks' ability to stomach voting for her.
That's precisely my point though. If anybody in the country actually believed that Clinton (and high profile Democrats broadly) had respect for people who didn't completely buy into Democrat party social orthodoxy of the time (which had just swung way left, as this piece notes), people would have been a lot more willing to buy she was talking about stupid Pepe bros
I'm not saying that HEXACO and generally all the other indicators showing one side of the political spectrum is better than the other are completely worthless, but they remind me a lot of people trying to use science to rationalize racism.
Someone create a metric that says that their preferred group is the worst, and I might find it more credible.
HEXACO is just a personality psychology measurement derived from factor analysis; some other psychologists (who didn’t create the scale) researched its relationship with political values later, and it’s worth noting that they also found positive associations between conservatism and a factor that most people agree is a good trait (conscientiousness).
The critique that you’re raising is more valid when applied to some things like the F-scale for right-wing authoritarianism (a genuinely bad piece of social science.)
I'm pretty firmly in the camp that most of it is pseudoscience. Its still useful at times to provide language to describe and discuss things, but I think its almost entirely correlation graphing that advances minimal understanding of causation.
Would also add— skin color is a basically cosmetic hereditary trait; political ideology is a set of beliefs and preferences about how the state should act. There’s no prima facia reason to think that the former has a relationship with cognitive traits, while it would be really weird if the latter didn’t.
Probably really depends on how you define morality.
Everyone is the hero in their own story. If you oppose abortion you are opposing baby killing. If you are for it you are for women's rights
If you actually want to get a lot of squishy middle voters you say something like Bill Clinton "Safe, Legal & Rare" and stop impugning the morality of your opponents
I think it was trying to get a bunch of Trump supporters to look at the other Trump supporters and say "how the hell did we end up in bed with this lot?", but what it did was get the non-deplorable Trump supporters to think Hillary had attacked them for being deplorables.
I think they were trying to do something reasonable, but they did it in a ham-fisted way and it backfired. The problem is that they didn't realise how easily it could backfire (which is one error) and therefore didn't put nearly enough effort into thinking through how to address that and, indeed, whether to say something like that at all.
But I think they _were_ being strategic about the messaging, they just messed it up.
To a first approximation, all enthusiastic supporters of _any_ politician are assholes. There are certainly exceptions. It was possible to be an enthusiastic supporter of Obama somehow without being an asshole, but apparently impossible to do that for either Clinton. _Enthusiasm_ about politicians is honestly a good part of the problem.
this doesn't seem right - supporting a politician seems fine, as long as you support them because you think they're going to improve the world (and not because you want them to harm your supposed opponents, which is what I think fires up Trump's base)
Supporting a politician is fine-ish, if you mean something like "I support most of her positions and hope she does well at getting elected and implementing them". Visible enthusiasm for a politician is usually somewhat revolting, and makes me downgrade my opinion of the enthusiast greatly. It's does nothing but inflame polarization and substitute for thought.
I do think they think that, and that they're broadly, wrong.
I also think a lot of progressives and conservatives have always thought that the other side was primarily motivated by desire to harm them.
What I'm saying is, I've always thought this was paranoid and juvenile, and have argued against that framework on both sides. Trump has made that argument a lot harder, because I believe his base actually is motivated in large part by hatred.
Maybe I've always been wrong, and it's always been hatred all the way down. Or maybe I'm wrong now, and Trump's base wants what's best for me - a coastal, city guy - they just disagree on how to do it. But I think I'm right! That Trump's following really is more animated by a desire to, let's say, drink liberal tears, than their predecessors in the Republican party.
Well I think you've moved the goal posts quite a bit. There is very possibly a difference between what would "improve the world," which you originally said should be everyone's goal and what would be "best for you - a coastal, city guy." the standard you're now holding trump voters to. I am not denying that the aims of your political opponents may genuinely be at odds with your interests, but that doesn't mean their desire to "harm you" is what "fires them up".
Gun control advocates, for example, tend to have aims at odds with the interests of safe, responsible, law abiding hobbyist gun owners, but I don't think it would be fair to say that what fires them up is a desire to harm you.
Is the Trump crowd acting in a way that is likely to redound to the benefit of asylum seekers? No, of course not. But I think you'd have to be pretty politically insulated to think that their primary motivation is to harm genuine asylum seekers rather than to limit other effects of immigration (which you could very reasonably argue they have done a poor job scaling)
I miss those days too. A lot. To consider people with different views as “only” wrong and not morally bankrupt, though, it’s helpful to actually know, and preferably even like, people who hold those views. Clinton’s “deplorable” framing, and the lingering interpretation of the election results on the left, suggest a level of denial/out-of-touchness that will be really hard to overcome.
I can still recall how strongly people pushed back against me after 2016 for trying to get them to engage with WHY anyone could have voted for Trump. My intent at the time was premised on the fact that the election was incredibly close, so if we could understand where just 1% of the voters were coming from and address their concerns then it could be enough to win elections, but a large number of my friends on the left were entirely dismissive and refused to consider that anyone who voted for Trump could have had a good-faith (if, IMHO, misguided) reason for voting for him. They instead just wanted to lump them all together as deplorables and dismiss as monsters, which I thought (and continue to think) was a) inaccurate, and b) strategically short-sighted.
I agree, and in my experience (I was living in NYC and working in the public sector), most efforts to “understand” Trump voters struck me at the time as incredibly condescending. Silly example but NPR station WNYC started a segment along these lines called “Flyover Country.” That’s when I stopped listening to even the few remaining shows I liked and found that I could live perfectly well with no NPR!
“…it’s helpful to actually know, and preferably even like, people who hold those views”
The part of Clinton’s statement that matters more to me than calling tens of millions of American voters “deplorable” was that she said they were “irredeemable.”
Ugh I had forgotten about that. What kind of person believes that they have the capacity to evaluate the redeemability of those they have (single handedly) found to be unacceptable?
Not to be the both sides guy, but I think her comments were a lot more measured and generous to the other side than say...
"In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream""
I just looked it up again, her comments really aren't that bad for a cherry-picked, "worst thing this politician has ever said" thing. The spirit of this was generosity and empathy to Trump's voters. The only problem here is the word "half", which she admits is "grossly generalistic." If Trump said this it would be among the most mature and generous statements he's ever made about his political opponents.
***
"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
At least let's just say that some politicians are "evil" for holding positions X,Y Z and leave the voters out of it. I'm not saying that many voters do not share the "evil" positions, but if you want to persuade one, it's better to criticize the politician, not the voter.
And no, Trump is the perfect target for "politician bad, voters good" message.
The hidden force on that isn't the Groups, but polarization, and that is much harder to deal with.
E.g., all the stories of people who no longer date people who disagree with their politics, have fights with their relatives on Thanksgiving, etc. It's normie liberals and normie conservatives who now see the voters on the other side as evil, and politicians or pundits who say they aren't isn't going to change that.
"all the stories of people who no longer date people who disagree with their politics, have fights with their relatives on Thanksgiving"
Obligatory reminder that when NORC polled about this back in 2018, most people said they never actually fought about politics on Thanksgiving.
To be fair, all the stories about cross-party dating acceptability post-date the poll, so it's possible we've gotten more argumentative to match. But I think the Thanksgiving stuff is a myth in the way that dating-one's-politics is not.
I 100% have friend who stopped spending holidays with their family post-Trump. Mostly because so many of their relatives now felt free to say racist things and wouldn't stop. I don't know how common it is but it happens.
I also have always been a dating one's politics gal myself. I consider my politics to be a pretty good map to my values and don't want to date someone who doesn't share them. I have had guys argue me on that. That I can't say that I won't date someone who disagrees with me on political issues. BS. I think more women have historically done this then men.
I don’t want to come down too hard on either you or Matt’s piece but I think it’s probably worth noting that most of these examples (with the possible partial exception of private school parents) are people who are signficantly higher in an employment hierarchy than a larger (potentially much larger) number of employees or subordinates. Their importance genuinely is outsized both due to contributions and media prominence, general authority, and higher propensity to vote, but at the same time you can’t win an election with only managers high income earners any more than it makes sense to fight a war only with commissioned officers and no enlisted personnel.
Well, yeah, the deplorables and the economically dissafected were already covered, so I think the missing segment would by definition be better off. The bigger point is that the Democrats have sort of caricatured Trump voters in a way that doesn't lend itself to persuading many of them to vote differently.
I genuinely don't know how to balance this with the basic primal fear t hat Trumpy politics activates. Like I'm not even that worried about say passing a law that does something but that we'll return to the conditions of some people are beneath the protection of law, or only have them under certain conditions.
Like I remember not loving Hilary, and thinking she was too left on economics and watching the 2016 convention and being struck with a kind of fear I can't really remember anything else like it in politics. Even when like politicians were more likely to pass laws to hurt people like me they didn't seem as willing to personally assault people like me. Like I wouldn't have felt personally threatened by a President Romney, or McCain and even Bush for all his use of gayness as a wedge I didn't feel like it was going to unleash anger and hatred the way that Trump did.
Are you kidding me he's like the avatar of a violent mob attacking non-conformity. Like he could have the queerest positions possible and the normalization of this style would be a threat to any minority group protected mostly by elite consensus.
Like Bush era the government might pass some laws against gay marriage but social norms towards interpersonal kindness seems better than better laws and worse people.
Folks who are marginalized and are potential targets for violence tend to have their radar up for trouble. Their intuition is worth listening too. I don't know many Queer people who didn't fear the way Trump was changing our culture.
I genuinely don’t know what you want. Trump’s personality was a disaster taking a more of being that was driven out of polite discourse for decades and bringing it back.
The lack of bipartisan suppression of these type of people is a greater threat than almost any law you could draft aside from astonishingly cruel ones. It was far worse than any of the stuff Karl Rove was doing.
Like it went from these people
are a few knuckledraggers who no one would ever hear from again to a constant barrage of state and local laws trying to make sure weirds aren’t safe.
Whether or not he "displayed any anti-gay tendencies" narrowly construed, he was certainly willing to encourage physically assaulting political opponents in a way major party candidates have not. He led chants of "lock her up". He told attendies at rallies, "hey, punch that gy, I'll pay your bail", etc.
A colleague outside my office was watching Trump's inauguration. I'm pretty sure she wasn't a Trump fan, but she was someone who kept up on current events.
I excused myself and went out to get a sandwich. On my return, Trump was orating, or whatever you call that thing he does. Weird and often kinda effeminate hand gestures. And standing there in his Brioni suit and overcoat. Overcompensating long red tie. The weird hair.
"Would it have killed him," I asked my colleague, "to button his suit jacket for this one occasion?"
I don't know about politically, but Trump has sexually assaulted at least Jean Carroll, has refused to pay/ screwed over contractors/tradespeople who worked with him.
On any ethical scale I care to use, he's acted evilly in his personal/business life.
Strange, because you alone seem to be introducing the word evil, and I do long remember that sort of discourse about voters who support pro-choice policies.
Your interpretation still seems to be driving to an unfounded point.
"I do long remember that sort of discourse about voters who support pro-choice policies."
Yes, but was it mainstream? …among Democrats?
(I'm not trying to play "no true Scotsman" here. But it's possible to (1) recognize that a particular action is bad, (2) recognize some people will do it anyways, (3) observe other people doing it, and yet (4) still (ahem) deplore when it becomes common among your (para)social group.)
Man talk to some people with kids in private school about vouchers if u want to hear a full throated embrace of a policy. I’m always like really this whole thing is about your philosophy on the structure of education and nothing to do with u would pay less tuition?
I think it won't be that anyone comes back after he leaves. Also- for myself - trying to imagine that I would vote for the common sense part of republican economic interests, but as part of the deal had to vote for someone whose entrance onto the political scene was based on a racist conspiracy theory. Economic interests, but without the racism? No, that's not possible. They're a package, (an evil package), and I couldn't compartmentalize in that instance.
We are in the era of post material politics. It’s the same income effect that is causing people to take out mortgages for $100k trucks with short beds.
It all depends on what you're trying to explain. If the question is "why did Republicans receive slightly but only slightly more votes in 2016" then "they moderated on entitlements but nominated an unappealing candidate" is a good explanation.
But people are fundamentally trying to explain something different, which is "why did anyone at all vote for Donald Trump, given his manifest unfitness". And there you need different kinds of explanations, like "people wanted to burn the system down" or "people didn't care about his explicit racism because they didn't like the Waters of the US rule".
"Many people in Toronto have been shaking their heads this past year and saying to themselves 'What have we done to deserve this?' And looking at Ford’s stubbornly high popular approval ratings, many have also been wondering – as my wife put it – 'What the fuck is wrong with people in this city?'"
He pointed out that Ford was an example of a demagogue, identified by Plato and Aristotle as a serious problem for democracy.
"Just to establish that there is nothing special or unprecedented about Ford, consider this 1838 profile of 'the demagogue,' taken from James Fenimore Cooper’s essay on the subject. Cooper described demagogues as possessing four qualities:
"(1) They fashion themselves as a man or woman of the common people, as opposed to the elites;
"(2) their politics depends on a powerful, visceral connection with the people that dramatically transcends ordinary political popularity;
"(3) they manipulate this connection, and the raging popularity it affords, for their own benefit and ambition; and
"(4) they threaten or outright break established rules of conduct, institutions and even the law."
Sounds familiar, right?
Heath points out that as voters, we're accustomed to political parties filtering out demagogues and other unsuitable candidates. In Ford's case, there were no political parties in Toronto municipal politics to do this. In Trump's case, the Republican Party was too weak to stop him - the "hollow parties" argument.
"So the people who wind up getting put forward to the electorate, by political parties, do not have all that much in common with ordinary citizens. They are more like contestants on Jeopardy – the product of a huge pre-screening process, which goes on behind the scenes. We tend to take it for granted, though. As a result, much of the electorate has become accustomed to exercising the vote irresponsibly. They look at the ballot and assume that all the major candidates are more-or-less capable of doing the job, and that the differences between them are minor ones of political ideology."
> As a result, much of the electorate has become accustomed to exercising the vote irresponsibly. They look at the ballot and assume that all the major candidates are more-or-less capable of doing the job
This is a really good point. Voters are slowly morphing from citizens to pageant judges, mentally insulated from the eventually existential consequences of poor choices.
Much of that Joseph Heath piece is excellent. However, "In any case, it is worth observing that political parties are poised to become much more powerful as time goes by" has not aged well.
(I don't know much about Canadian politics, but the mechanism he suggests for increased party dominance applies equally well to America, where parties certainly have not become more powerful.)
I think there's a pretty wide gap between Canadian and American politics. In Canadian politics we have strong party discipline. It's highly unusual for an elected official to vote differently from the rest of their party.
I'm trying to think of evidence of Canadian parties becoming weaker rather than stronger over the last 10-20 years; nothing really comes to mind. After Andrew Scheer narrowly defeated Maxime Bernier for the leadership of the federal Conservative Party, Bernier left to start his own People's Party, and it hasn't gone anywhere. Perhaps the implosion of the small federal Green Party, where a relatively new Green leader (Annamie Paul) was unable to maintain party unity, would be an example.
"Trump has assembled the most extensive small-donor list ever created by a GOP presidential candidate. It’s a significant source of his power. Previous occupants of the Oval Office used the bully pulpit for policy and fundraised on the side. But Trump has merged the two, creating a fundraising pulpit. The ceaseless marketing pleas to aid the president against his evil opponents keeps his voters invested, literally. It enables the campaign to test messages and plan for turnout. Trump’s hold over his army of conservative retirees also permits him to control the GOP to an extent previous presidents only dreamed of. If those further down the food chain want to eat, they must follow Trump’s lead. It behooves Republican officeholders to fall in line. It’s not lost on anyone in the campaign world that Trump can monetize his donor list at will."
In the Canadian political world, you get similar fundraising emails, but they're all run through the parties. There's independent non-partisan regulators that enforce restrictions on how they can be used, like Elections Canada at the federal level, so it's difficult to see how a politician could exploit this kind of list as a source of power independently of the party.
Trump is the personification of the stereotype of a successful business man. He was a reality TV superstar back when TV still mattered and reality TV was half the content. Considering many people are marginally engaged and often not that smart, I reject that Trump was broadly seen as unfit. He was viewed by low information voters as extremely fit for the role.
If you were engaged, you saw Trump as unfit for office. But if you were one of the many low information voters that Trump brought to the GOP, you saw the celebrity businessman everyone kept saying they wanted to run the country like a business.
And he did. Guess what? Turns out the New York real estate business is hideously corrupt and vaguely incompetent. Who knew.
“Don’t care” is wrong, “explicitly like”! The populist anti-immigrant shift is so glaringly obvious globally that the only sensible explanation is “it’s authentically popular, at least among a big minority”
If conservatives don't want liberals conflating this, they should jettson MAGA, because those loons very definitely ARE anti immigrant in general (not just anti "illegal" immigrant). They explicitly want deep cuts to immigration quotas.
I always wonder what the ratio is within this group of people that are satisfied with current legal immigration versus people who want it to be stricter.
Perhaps dumb question: why is ejecting Stanford stats PhDs from the country after graduation a good policy if and only if the rate of asylum claims is above a certain level?
>>why is ejecting Stanford stats PhDs from the country after graduation a good policy if and only<<
Don't be ridiculous. Everybody knows the the poorer our country is, the better able we are to address our problems (including illegal immigration). Plus, China has only benign intentions toward America, so who gives a fuck whether or not we're attempting to maximize our technological expertise?
I feel like if we really adhered to clamping down, it would require really going after businesses who employ illegal immigrants. That might make for good politics in the short term, but then people would get shock therapy on rising prices due to scarce labor among a populace already scarred by inflation. I can also see pro-business Republicans being gunshy on that despite the pressure to be hardasses on immigration.
It sucks that people struggle to understand tradeoffs.
There is no way to determine whether an asylum claim is spurious without considering the evidence. Until the evidence has been considered, that person is a legal immigrant into the country they are applying for asylum in.
If you want to change that, then you want to amend the international treaties. Lots of countries want to change something about how the asylum system works - it's massively popular to say that people fleeing from Syria shouldn't have the right to live in any country of their choosing (but they do under treaties that have been incorporated into domestic law in virtually all countries).
Instead of saying "these people don't have these rights", I don't understand why no politician has ever said "look, that's the law, we should change it: loads of countries agree with us on this, we can do this".
Asylum seekers are, by international treaty, legal immigrants. Any human being has the right, under international treaty (which is "the supreme law", to quote the Constitution of the United States), to turn up to any signatory country, to be allowed to enter, and to have their claim for refugee status to be speedily determined.
Lots of people in lots of countries are not happy with this legal immigration.
"and to have their claim for refugee status to be speedily determined. Lots of people in lots of countries are not happy with this legal immigration."
Well, here in 'murica, I think a lot of people are unhappy with the fact that this "speedy determination" is being denied to those legal immigrants, and not the immigration itself per se.
Trump’s comments that Judge Curiel couldn’t be fair to him because “he’s Mexican” suggest that he wasn’t strictly observing this illegal/legal distinction. Stephen Miller isn’t a big one for that distinction either.
I would categorize myself as being center-right on immigration in that I want a physical border wall, more border control, faster processes and a quota/an upper limit on all types of immigrants decided on by the voters. But I would never vote for a person like Trump in a million light years, even if I'd agree with him on most issues (which I don't). He's a terrible person on every level, and also a traitor and a grave threat to democracy and the country.
There is probably a nontrivial population of voters who do not view him as manifestly unfit because they are some combination of uninformed and informed only by right-wing media that rigorously adheres to a narrative that, actually, it is Democrats who are manifestly unfit.
Setting aside the cultists, who are, well, cultists, if you only see Trump through the sanitized frame of the Wall Street Journal or the alternate reality of Fox News, he was actually a really good president who accomplished a lot, but who left office with unfinished business after losing re-election under sketchy circumstances.
I also am not sure "democracy" is the great issue some elites think it is. For many normies, democracy just means their vote for President is counted and all the norms we learn about in civics class or from the political media are esoteric and unimportant.
i don't think 'normies' care about democracy at all, like including the vote-counting part
people care about *liberal freedoms*, e.g. free speech, freedom of religion, etc. but it is possible for these things to coexist with a hybrid regime or even an outright autocracy, and indeed i am sure that in the hypothetical case of democratic backsliding in the U.S. such freedoms will be respected, at least at first
With all the wailing about the fact that Clinton got more votes than Trump and other nonsense like ‘’a voter in Wyoming has more power than a voter in California,’ I think it’s the “elites” who need to repeat civics class.
Also, in the Fox News Cinematic Universe, it is Democrats who are a threat to democracy. Just look at how they are weaponizing the justice department to bring politically motivated charges against Trump because Joe Biden has dementia so this is the only way they can un-democratically install CRT-loving, ultra-woke, probably-not-even-a-real-US-citizen Kamala Harris in office so they can torch the Constitution, confiscate all of our guns, force white people to have abortions and flood the country with the illegal immigrants that helped them rig the 2020 election. WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
Bingo. You can’t talk about anything last 10 years worldwide without talking about bifurcation of media. If you watch Fox for 2 hours on a random Wednesday, it is just a completely different universe.
Because people are partisan and will vote for their candidate. On the margin, Trump’s unfitness lost him some votes, but people generally will vote for their team.
In 2016? Combination of moderating on medicare/social security, willing to bash the Iraq War, anti-immigrant demagoguery and the dominance politics of attacking and humiliating the other candidates (I hate Trump, but I still chuckle at "Little Marco").
All of this didn't even get him a majority of the Republican primary vote! But you don't have to outrun the bear, just the other guy.
I had the thought this morning after consuming the front page headlines screaming about people being trampled to death in Gaza that a lot of what happened before and during the Trump admin was obscured by his antics. Like, there was a *ton* of news that just didn't get reported because the headlines were always about the chaos and drama of the Trump campaign and later white house. Because Biden's campaign and white house are run completely opposite to that, we barely get any reporting about them and so other news has to fill the void.
I really think this is why Trump supporters are so misinformed about what went on during the Trump years: they blocked out any *bad* news about him, and since that's really all the news there *was*, they just didn't consume nonpartisan news.
My take is that Trump was/is “fun” for a lot of voters. Also a bully/strongman that would “stand up” against the “elites” on “their” behalf. I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said “Trump 2020: Make Liberals Cry Again” that really ticked me off at the time but in retrospect captured the entire zeitgeist.
"Why did anyone vote for Donald Trump, given his manifest unfitness?" because partisanship is the overwhelming driver of voting behavior, not supposed "objective" analysis of things like "fitness". This is one of the strongest findings there is in political science and backed up by almost a century worth of data and analysis.
Yes; Matt's take here is probably my least favorite of all his takes. I just see no evidence among voters I know that they have ideologies, or even opinions, on most issues. The few who do often can't tell which candidate supports the view they hold. Trump's "moderation" on Social Security may have swayed a slim slice of voters, and made the difference on Election Day, but only because the vote itself was so close that 50K votes could make the difference. When it's that close, anything - VP candidate, a hairstyle, a head cold - can be the difference between win and loss. Issues don't matter very much in elections; tone and repetition do.
To MYs point I wonder how many voters saw the Dems push hard to the left and were worried about that. Similar to now really, had Biden had more leeway and or just chosen to tack more to the center (or perhaps more accurately engaged in less performative theater to appease left causes) it would swing legitimate independents back.
Similarly supporting pro Trump primary candidates might not be wise.
For reason listed in the posts above I find Trump unfit to be president (but to be honest I came to that conclusion when the talk about grabbing females private parts came out), but other people seems to disagree with me. This includes family members who I know are decent human beings doing what they think is best. Giving those folks a more centered choice would probably help.
I think the dems left wanted to use Trumps obvious unfitness to push left and thought that would work. It’s looking like that strategy was bad 2016 and is still at least dangerous in 2024.
There's a funny issue here, that while most politically engaged Democrats will agree that Trump is "manifestly unfit for office", but they won't agree on _why_. Especially in 2016, if you asked 20 Democrats to write down why Trump was unfit for office, 10 would give reasons that applied equally to any other Republican, 5 would claim Trump was openly racist (never true for a definition that doesn't apply to all Republicans), and 5 would gesture in various ways to his personality and their visceral reaction to him. Maybe there's a little bit more consensus post-Jan 6th, but there is no consensus.
And if the question is, "why would anyone vote for Trump, when my friends and I would never imagine it (for what are assumed to be common reasons)?" that's a question that Democrats ought to have been asking of themselves and their bubbles, not Trump voters.
"why did anyone at all vote for Donald Trump, given his manifest unfitness"
I didn't vote for Trump in 2016, but did vote for him in 2020. Plus most of my family did as well (and plan to vote for him in 2024) so I believe I can answer this question.
1. The belief that Hillary Clinton was also manifestly unfit as well (I agree with that). She is corrupt, and her unsecure server was a HUGE problem.
2. Disagreed with the vast majority of Democrat police positions. Abortions, guns, immigration policies, lack of school choice, over regulation, blatant race baiting, hostility to Christians and/or traditional values etc etc
Jesus Christ, how can you still believe this? BTW the "unsecure" part is only vaguely accurate. Through the telephone game you have come to believe this, but it's based on second-hand reports that her IT guy hadn't installed the latest security patches. There is no evidence the server was ever compromised.
But more to the point, all the emails were released *anyway*, with what, like a dozen being deemed classified? So your feelings here are based on a) unfounded supposition and b) ex post facto reasoning that has already been debunked. You're basically going "yeah so there was nothing harmful on that server, sure, but what if there *was*???". Stating that as a reason for not liking Clinton is insane, and so I don't believe you.
An important factor that’s missing here— Trump’s personal qualities and rhetoric were so repulsive to a certain kind of voter (basically, educated professionals who are also generally interpersonally nice and prosocial) that they perceived him as very extreme and had a hard time assigning significance to his (actually very important) moderation relative to GOP consensus on entitlements and same-sex marriage. To those people, Trump’s victory strongly read as the GOP going crazy and getting rewarded for it, and it both a: led to a need for special explanations of the Trump phenomenon and b: affectively polarized a lot of them into going much further left than they were before.
My dad grew up in a Republican family and was a genuine swing voter for most of his adult life. His favorite politician for most of my youth was our congressional district’s nice guy moderate Republican representative. But Trump just appalled him— and he decided never to vote for Republicans in a federal race again, and gradually drifted left to the point where he was collecting signatures for Mayor Pete in 2020. He wasn’t and isn’t any sort of far-left extremist, but he perceived Clinton as being much more reasonable and moderate than Trump was in 2016.
Clearly a reflection of my media diet - but I thought it was generally accepted Trump was perceived as the more moderate candidate by voters in 2016 and that along with thermostatic shifts against the Democrats were the main drivers of his win. Clinton was busy telling Virginian coal miners to “learn to code” and talking about intersectionality, while trump was promising to bring back manufacturing jobs.
Biden is running functionally unopposed. Biden’s margin in Michigan is likely to be narrow. That 15% is more than enough to make a difference in November.
That 15% will only matter if Trump tries to cozy up to the Muslims in Dearborn (at least enough to keep them away from Biden) -- but then again, I wouldn't put it past Trump to turn against the Jews. (I'm sure Jared could get the Saudis to buy him a ranch somewhere on the West Bank, if he hasn't already set up such a refuge on his own.)
I can see some Muslims sitting home because of Gaza. I think memories of the Muslim ban and the moving of the US embassy in Israel will keep most any of them from voting for Trump ever. Most Jews I know consider Trump to be pro-Israel but antisemetic (with an exception for his son-in-law). Antisemetism is more of a conspiracy theory than a mere social prejudice. It is possible, like Trump, to think that Jews are smart and good with money and therefore useful but also think that they sneaky, unAmerican, and involved in some sort of shady conspiracy to run the media and non-profits for their own agenda. But he clearly hates Muslims more.
Three memories (however accurate) from 2015-2016 stand out for me. One, how utterly bizarre, petty and childish the primaries were (especially the Republican primary). Two, how often I heard Trump talking about sensible and moderate things like ending the carried interest loophole, but read articles in the NYT about how he was a lying scumbag who cheated on his wife with porn stars and refused to release his tax returns. And three, a dry, boring interview with Clinton in which she demonstrated a jaw-dropping grasp of the nuances and details of an astonishingly wide range of policies, but read articles in the NYT about how she was probably a criminal because she used a private email server and that calling Trump supporters a basket of deplorable was the worst thing a politician had ever done. (The only thing I remember about Bernie was how it sounds funny when he says "millionaires and billionaires".)
Which fact about Trump turned out to be more important: that he opposed the carried interest loophole or that he's a huge scumbag? The first one turned out to be not a fact at all, so it's hard to fault the media's emphasis here.
This is a really rosy picture of Trump in 2016 that makes him sound like a nice centrist figure... He also said that Mexicans are rapists, waterboarding is great and that John McCain is not a war hero because he got caught.
He did not say “Mexicans are rapists” nor did he say that white supremacists are “good people” Read the whole quotes. I don’t like the man but fair is fair. His actual defects are bad enough.
Well, I looked up the full quotes because they were edited in the press, which as you may recall was openly biased at that time. Accuracy is important. As we have seen it is hard to reach his mistrustful voters even with accurate stuff. Thus, I continue to differ with you in my opinion. However I am sure that holding the view you hold is comforting to you, in assurance of your own righteousness. In this you have a lot of company in the Democratic Party which may well lose in November because of it. Stop getting your panties in a twist about the man’s crudity, and start thinking about how to beat him at the ballot box.
I work for a Democratic polling firm. I’m doing my part. What are you doing to help Biden besides grousing about how poor Donald Trump is being slandered?
> Well, I looked up the full quotes because they were edited in the press, which as you may recall was openly biased at that time
Holy shit, are you really doing that thing lying Trumpers do where you argue he said "their" instead of "they're" and then pretending that it makes any difference in the interpretation.
Trump said, very directly, that the people Mexico was "sending" were, with few exceptions, criminals and rapists. You are a liar, full stop, if you are claiming anything different.
That's right, that's exactly what he said. What he didn't say is "Mexicans are rapists." Those are two different things. The first is crude and nasty (and inaccurate), the second is directly racist.
This is a bit of a weird post to me. I don’t actually disagree agree per se., but I’m sorry it’s just way to pat and what’s weird is that this take is sort of contradicted by a post Matt had a few months ago. Let me explain.
You can’t explain 2016 without talking about media coverage and you can’t talk about media coverage without acknowledging important part of why coverage was the way it was in 2016; the vast majority of political press and press in general clearly thought there was no chance Trump could win. It explains so much about “her emails” coverage, particular questions that Clinton got in interviews and just tenor of coverage in general. If I’m not mistaken polls showed by Election Day the electorate thought Trump and Hilary were equally corrupt which is insane but clearly only possible because of media coverage.
Where it comes back around to a Matt post is he sort of acknowledged this when he had his post that media is going to put their thumbs on the scale for Trump due to financial incentives. I pushed back a bit at the time but acknowledged that Matt may have based his take on actual conversations with reporters and editors and lo and behold he noted on Twitter a very revealing connection he had with a New York Times editor about 2016 coverage. My point is you don’t write a post like that without implicitly acknowledging the role media played. And I actually think Matt turned out to be right; hence the over the top coverage of Biden’s age and hence insane NYTimes headlines where Biden’s bigger victory in Michigan is a worry for Biden and Trump’s narrow victory is a show of his strength*. So to not even bring it up in this post is kind of a why I said this is a weird post at the top.
* this is the headline that finally pushed me to say that maybe it isn’t media, but editors who very much want Trump to win to increase the number of readers and viewers. Which also speaks to a blind spot about reporters and whether too many at the Times are too liberal (or at other outlets). As Murdoch realized years ago, your headlines and story placement are much more important than the actual articles. Sort of doesn’t matter if the body of an article has a leftist slant if the headline doesn’t have that same slant.
Dirty little secret; NYT still has tremendous second order power. Whether people directly read the New York Times or not, they read other newspapers, watch other news programs or read other Facebook posts that are directly influenced by what the Times puts out.
The biggest influence on the media is the Associated Press and other wire services, 1000 times more influential than the Times because they produce the copy and background run in thousands of outlets, and liberal press critics NEVER talk about wire services.
Sorry, the NYT narrative is BS. Liberals are just obsessed with the Times because liberals read it.
"Blinks rapidly" wut? You're telling me AP "just the facts" news has more impact than Times or Fox for that matter? This is nuts. AP does not determine news placement, headlines, which stories get emphasized and which ones don't. They provide the nuts and bolts of stories.
This is like arguing the makers of televisions sets and movie theater chains have more impact on culture than the actual shows and movies Hollywood puts out.
Yep I am. Literally 60% or more of voters never read a NYT story during the entire election year. But everyone who reads any newspaper, follows any Facebook news feed, or watches any TV news sees wire service content.
It's shocking how many people on the Left know absolutely nothing about the media business they constantly criticize. The NYT is an elite thing that has nothing to do with Rust Belt swing voters.
And its amazing to me that people can't realize that NYT has a reach well beyond it's actual readership and actual subscriptions given it's impact on what gets into other news stories.
Ever seen the actual viewership numbers for Fox News? The actual numbers for their primetime lineup is at most 5 million people. And usually less 3 million. And yet if you were to argue that Fox has no impact on general discourse, politics and news cycle because only a few million people a night watch any one show you would be correctly admonished for being willfully naïve.
The article is about whether "fake" news was a deciding factor in the election. But keep reading as the article gets into a deep dive about specifically New York Times coverage.
538 is saying it knows what caused this one fluctuation when there were 30 fluctuations in the polls in 2016 and it can't explain the other 29.
Tracking polls are BS. Voters aren't changing their minds back and forth and in any event there's no basis to conclude RUST BELT SWING VOTERS were who shifted in any poll even if there was a shift.
Yes I'm quite aware of this. I'm very aware that lots of fluctuations in polls are non-response bias. In fact I've been noting this recently noting this in polling with the specific data that the people Trump is most overperforming with compared to 2020 are the groups also most likely to say they aren't paying attention to the election right now. I'm also aware that when in the past candidates got post nomination bounces it was likely due to supporters being fired up and more likely to answer the phone for a week. If you're argument that in general polls can fluctuate for all sorts of reasons that don't actually reflect voting preference but randomness than yes of course I know that.
You know who taught me that? Nate Silver, the person who wrote this article stating the Comey letter likely swayed the election. In other words someone who has some standing to note whether a swing in polls is randomness or reflects some actual shift; whether it was swaying opinion or convincing a soft supporter to stay home.
If you're argument is that lots of different factors can impact an election over the course of a year, yeah no duh. There's a reason there is going to be lots of focus on inflation, unemployment and inflation and GDP growth over the next 6 months in large part because many people understand these factors are historically pretty impactful on elections.
Here's the equivalent of you're arguing. If I say, 49ers would have very likely would have won the Super Bowl if they had converted a 3rd and 4 late 4th quarter in Chiefs territory and you come back and say "no that didn't matter. There were all sorts of plays that happened before that if they had gone differently would have changed the outcome". I mean sure strictly speaking true for literally any game, but that's basically argument for saying no single play ever makes the difference for the outcome of any game which is just manifestly untrue.
Fair...to a point. But I think there is a very key difference between "Clintons are shady maybe corrupt" and "Clinton is as corrupt as Trump". The foundation for the latter to take hold in public consciousness isn't possible without Whitewater, Bill's "indiscretions" shall we say, and the general unseemliness of the Clinton Foundation.
But that last one is I think worth dwelling on. Whatever unseemliness there was with the Clinton Foundation, it just pales in comparison to anything uncovered by David Farenthold in regards to the Trump Foundation which as far as I can tell just pure and simple a completely fraudulent organization. Like there is no comparison between the two despite what "Clinton Cash" and Steve Bannon may tell you. Which is where media role is important. In order for there to people out there beyond just hardcore GOP voters who believe Trump and Clinton are equally corrupt requires a real assist from media organizations.
I mean, I totally agree with you that Donald Trump is much more corrupt than Hillary Clinton. But I don't think 80%+ of voters can tell you what the Clinton Foundation is, much less remember the term "Whitewater." They just have the vibe that they know Hillary is corrupt, and they know Trump is corrupt, and so they treat the question like "do you approve of these two candidates" rather than "have you measured their corruption and is one more corrupt on balance."
Twice as many primary voters in Michigan voted for Nikki Haley than voted for "uncommitted." Trump had a much weaker showing than Biden. Trump has underperformed the polls in all primaries so far.
So the super condensed version of what I think happened is this: Between Iraq, the financial crisis, the national debt, and the failure of immigration reform, the establishment political parties so thoroughly discredited themselves they essentially collapsed. Then there was a choice... Would the realignment be about basically Tea Party vs Occupy, Ron Paul vs Bernie or would it be Trump vs Hillary, Nikole Hanna Jones vs Chris Rufo.
Obviously we got the worse timeline where the second realignment won out and people are voting on their identitarian tribalist affiliations and policy only matters to the extent of which "side" is "winning". And now it's all been turbocharged by covid/inflation, scarcity/zero sum economic thinking.
Trump-cult Republicans would rather watch hysterical lib tears on MSNBC and Twitter because Trump says something crazy than own the libs in real life through policy victories.
Very, very true, IMO! I've attributed this to the combination of how vulnerable much of the more vocal left is to trolling these days combined with many right-wingers having gotten so used to losing on policy issues for the last few decades that making liberals cry is the only thing they can think of plausibly succeeding.
The Right has gotten plenty of policy victories over the past 30 years. TANF reform. Low taxes (Democrats are not attempting to raise the corporate income tax back to its previous level, they are not raising income taxes on people making less than 400k, and are not raising marginal rates above 40%). Repealed the individual mandate for health insurance. Vastly expanded school choice. Got Democrats to agree to an enforcement-only immigration bill (before stupidly tanking it). End of Roe v. Wade. Much less onerous gun laws. Much greater deference for religious liberty in the judiciary. Trump killed TPP and got Mexico, Canada, and Senate Democrats to agree to a revised NAFTA. Everyone loves to focus only on the negatives though.
(1) Several of these things happened literally in only the last five to six years. That's why I said, "having gotten so used to losing on policy issues for the last *few decades* . . . ." "Trump-cult Republicans [preferring to watch] hysterical lib tears on MSNBC and Twitter" predates those wins and what we're observing now represents a sort of learned helplessness.
(2) Some of those aren't things that I don't think most "Trump-cult Republicans" even care about (e.g., corporate tax rates) and thus don't think of as wins.
Hillary Clinton was an oxymoron: a driven, careerist woman who owed her place on the national stage to marrying the right man and stomaching his infidelities. There are thousands of women with her academic credentials yet only a handful whose parties cleared the field in their senate race.
Sleeping your way to the top (whether with one man or several) is often effective, but rarely makes you popular. It threatens both women who are unwilling to do it and men who are unable to. Harris’ affair with the speaker of the California Assembly when he was twice her age has a similar dynamic. It’s just gross and voters don’t like it. The refusal of the mainstream media to even talk about it is a huge blind spot.
Getting married before your spouse is a famous politician is not sleeping your way to the top. I’m no fan of Hillary, but this is a totally unfair and frankly sexist claim. She wasn’t some talentless hack.
It’s IS fair and accurate IMO to say that she rode on Bills coat tails in the same way that family members often do - see for example the Bush family.
But you see the Bush family members don’t have two X chromosomes so the same disparaging and dismissive narratives don’t apply. The fact this misogynistic bigotry is being tolerated on here is glaring.
The fact that you would call me a bigot or a misogynist for saying truthful things about female politicians speaks poorly of your ability to engage in civil discourse.
The subject “ misogynistic bigotry “ references to the specious accusations you have made about two women who have or currently hold positions power.
The subject is not the speaker. You are equating a rebuke of repeated repetitions of a misogynistic trope as a personal attack. This misdirection is an action called lying. This action of lying is then used to support a false claim of “uncivil” behavior.
All in defense of an assertion that Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris owe their political positions due to sleeping with men.
These are both commenters who have been around for a while and are aware of your general misogyny, so they are likely interpreting your comment through that lens as well.
Absolutely. She’s a better politician than a lot of people want to admit, and the evidence for that is how much she improved as a NY senator. Just look at her vote totals in her reelection vs her initial election. Also note how many counties she swung towards her- she got a lot more votes and not just by running up the score in deep blue NYC and suburbs- she significantly improved upstate as well.
Getting married before your spouse is a famous politician is not intentionally sleeping your way to the top. Staying with him through multiple affairs and then running for senate with his backing is.
People stay married to unfaithful spouses for all kinds of reasons. It would be wrong to assume that we can read Clinton's mind, or understand the dynamics of their long marriage well enough to conclude that the reason she didn't dump him was purely about political advantage.
Edited to add: And Clinton's political career is effectively over at this point. If she was keeping Bill around for political expediency, there is no reason to continue that charade now, yet they are still married.
Like, I accept that it matters a lot to you, for whatever reason, but I think you are confusing the strength of your own feelings for strength of analysis.
Hillary Clinton was extremely popular for a long time, this analysis makes literally no sense
She became unpopular because she became a totemic representation of the most easily-hateable elements of the Democratic coalition: scoldy hyper-educated elites who look down on everyone
They didn't. There was an election, and Bernie lost.
^
"How do you explain Clinton's high unfavorability ratings?"
I came of age as a politics nerd during the Clinton administration, and as I have mentioned many times on this forum, I grew up in an evangelical Christian community in the upper middle class burbs of Houston--my dad is a minister. So I was actually there when the whole Clinton mythology was born. I could have waxed eloquent for you on all the terrible things about the Clintons; I was extremely proud to vote for W to "restore dignity" to the White House and scrub away the residual Clinton slime <editor's note: hahahahahaha...a lot changed for me in the ensuing decades>.
^
And one thing I can tell you is that you actually have it exactly backwards: for many anti-Clintonians, HRC's marriage to Bill was the one sympathetic thing about her. My mother-in-law--a Trump voter who believes Hillary is an awful human--dithered about whether she would pull the lever for him at the last minute in part because of that stunt he pulled at the debates where he brought along Bill's old victims.
^
In the end, however, she did vote for Trump. And she did that because she knew that Hillary was a socialist who would enforce socialized medicine on older Americans, sending them to death panels that would cut off their care after the government seized all their assets through taxation to give money to undeserving poor people to fund their abortions.
^
Bernie lost for a reason, and it's the same reason that he would have lost to Trump.
>How do you explain Clinton’s high unfavorability ratings? Why did people like Bernie more?<
She codes as "limousine liberal" — especially after she moved to NY to run for the Senate. She made enemies on the left because of foreign policy. She had long been vilified by the right because they hated her husband. A bunch of reasons. I don't think the fact that her husband was unfaithful had much effect either way. If anything it made her a more sympathetic person.
Millions of voters idiotically want a "common touch" in their political leaders. Hillary Clinton mostly lacks that. So does Nancy Pelosi. It's unfair. But politics ain't fair. Normies (again, with maximum inanity) want a president they can imagine having a bear with. I think for similar reasons Gavin Newsom's national aspirations aren't going anywhere.
EDIT: Sanders is the exact opposite of "limousine liberal coded." With his shock of uncombed hair, rumpled suits and think Brooklyn twang, he exudes authenticity. Voters like that. Again, I think voters are wrong not to be coldly calculating policy wonks (like SB readers) when they vote. But I didn't invent human nature.
How do you explain her very high favorability ratings as SoS? Why did people like her so much while she was doing that job if they hate her so much for having slept her way into it (in your telling)?
She was just doing a job as a subordinate. The top person takes all the heat.
Really, that's it. I bet Joe Biden had higher ratings as Obama's veep than he does now. When you become the top dog whatever flaws you have get magnified.
That's a perfectly valid explanation, but an entirely different one than "people hate her because they perceive her as having slept her way to the top", which is why I was asking David how he can account for those facts that seem to run counter to his narrative. If people hate you for who you are then the things you're currently doing shouldn't really impact how much they like you.
I don't think any gettable voter dislikes Hillary because she did the nasty with Bill Clinton.
But I do think the fact that she obviously couldn't have had the political career she had without Bill, and she screwed up a lot and wasn't as good at politics as Bill was, probably blunted her feminist message somewhat. And that probably contributed to her unpopularity on the margins, when she was going for the ultimate brass ring in politics.
1. If she were the nominee, that story would get much more play. It’s a huge negative that isn’t built into her polling, a strong reason she should not be the nominee.
2. Harris does give off the vibe of someone who would have a career advancing affair. She is very ambitious, quite attractive and not quite as smart. She also flip flops more wildly than most politicians.
Yes. He's saying "we must have courage to do the difficult things which will let us succeed." It's catchy and bold. It's good oration! You remember it! You know what he meant!
Even with affirmative action, she only went to UC Hastings for law school. I doubt her LSATS were much over 162. She’s free to release them if it would prove me wrong.
I have long appreciated David Abbott for speaking all of his mind, even when I vehemently disagreed, but it seems to have taken a different tone in the last few months.
There’s a difference between a dude who gets into Harvard law through affirmative action (and might not have needed it if he’s smoked less pot his first two years in college) and someone who could only get into UC Hastings even with affirmative action.
Also, Obama’s temperament is simply exemplary. The mix of discipline and empathy is so rare.
Here in the Bay Area, we know all about the Kamel with the Brown hump. Just wait until Trump gets going on that!
(Lest anyone call me misogynist, I think Nikki Haley could demolish Biden [if she could somehow get the nomination] -- though she's way too far-right on economics for me.)
If only Clinton had been a senator or a major member of a cabinet, like Secretary of State, then people may have seen her as qualified as a television game show host that ran a privately run family business.
I know a lot of people in the Democratic Party believe she would have gotten ahead anyway by her obvious merit, but really, she actually screwed up a lot (health care, billing records, Libya) and always seemed to fall up and not down, because she had the brand name last name (which gets back to who she married).
You shouldn't make this your all encompassing theory of Hillary, but I bet a lot of the voters who DIDN’T like her could see this while Dems who were in love with her and saw all opposition to her as sexist missed it.
Sounds like a comment from someone younger than me who thinks things were always the way they are now. When my generation came up, women were still pretty much ignored across the board in business, politics, science, academia etc (talk about "systemic!"). There was some kind of deep denial or even fear among men when it came to recognizing intelligence and skill in female persons. Standing on the shoulders of a spouse was one of the few ways a woman could be successful in politics.
Hillary Clinton was fully qualified to be President, both in terms of intelligence and experience (including her experience as First Lady.) Unfortunately she couldn't resist appealing to natural human tendencies to demonize our opponents, and thus deploringly contributed to the self-righteous trend of dismissing our "better angels." (Those so-called Christian nationalists aren't the only group that rejects the true message of the Gospels.)
Note - not labeling anyone here, although perhaps making assumptions about perspective.
Why does Michelle Obama have such high favorability in that case?
A more accurate reading is that when a First Lady has credentials beyond fashion model, people give them credit for doing a difficult job and are open to seeing them use a set of transferable skills in a different context.
Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton were a power couple. Both have been very effective networkers and political operatives. The idea that HRC’s political career and success is primarily due to her relationship with her husband dismisses her qualities and successes.
And this misogynistic narrative/accusation only applies to one half the population.
"The idea that HRC’s political career and success is primarily due to her relationship with her husband dismisses her qualities and successes."
What successes?
She didn't succeed very much and screwed up a lot (her idiocy on Iraq cost her the presidency), and the last job she held that wasn't derivative of Bill's success was at the Rose Law Firm.
Had she not married Bill she would have ended up head of the Children's Defense Fund or something- not nothing but not a presidential candidate by far.
You could argue that her election to Senate in New York was bolstered by Bill Clinton's popularity. But she took that opportunity to become one of the most respected people in the Senate and eventually a leading candidate for the party nomination 8 years later. I don't think that was all on Bill's coattails.
>You could argue that her election to Senate in New York was bolstered by Bill Clinton's popularity<
That election was no gimme for HRC. Rick Lazio was a popular, skilled, moderate Republican from Long Island—the kind of Republicans New Yorkers used to elect to statewide office with regularity. Indeed, IIRC he was ahead in the polls for much of that race: New Yorkers can suss out carpetbagging and don't always award it. She ran a strong campaign and ultimately prevailed. But it wasn't a foregone conclusion in early 2000.
This is probably a controversial opinion, but I don't think she actually did anything important in the Senate (other than support the Iraq War which was terrible). I think what happened is that because she was already seen as a potential presidential candidate and had all of Bill's party connections and favor-owers behind her, she was guaranteed to get favorable coverage and be showered with "striking out on her own narratives".
Matt talks in his OP about how The Groups shape narratives. Well a lot of Groups, especially feminist groups within the Dem coalition, saw Hillary as the first women president and went to work immediately portraying her as the star as the Senate to raise her profile even further and try to ensure she became a presidential candidate. So of course she was respected-- it's like what Arthur Miller said about JP Morgan: with his pockets on he was very respected. Well, the Clintons had a lot of power in the Democratic Party (BTW an underrated story right now is how much power the Obamas still wield in the Party) and they were making sure that people knew they had to respect and promote Hillary if they wanted to be the beneficiaries of that power.
Yeah, not a bad take. I'm still very confident that Hillary earned her rep as a well-prepared and highly intelligent Senator. But you're right, her legislative record isn't remarkable. And the Clinton machine was there for her.
She was also a terrible Secretary of State, largely responsible along with Madeline Albright for the country's terrible relations with Russia today. Her condescending treatment of Vladimir Putin whenever they met, along with her advocating the expansion of NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia got exactly the result George Kennan predicted. Her dig at at Putin in her speech last September at the State Department just emphasized how unqualified she was ro be the country's top diplomat, and without the Clinton connection and Obama's desire to keep her in the tent, she never would have got it.
We need to bring back James Madison to talk about this. (And then right after, of course ask him how our form of government has fared over more than two centuries.)
"And then right after, of course ask him how our form of government has fared over more than two centuries."
I do wonder how long the Founders expected our peculiar form of government to last. Rome stayed a republic for about twice as long, and Venice twice that, although of course both lacked universal suffrage for most or all of it. Here's hoping we can outdo both!
There are plenty of women who have risen to power, even in the US, that didn't require marrying some up and coming mover. Discounting Hillary Clinton riding Bill's coat tails is ahistorical.
Michelle Obama didn't spearhead health care reform the way Hillary Clinton did, as if she had been elected or appointed to a position of power in her husband's administration.
I still remember Hillary presuming to go to Congress to negotiate with them and feeling like my head was going to explode. i was 15 or 16 and I knew nepotism when I saw it.
First Ladies are actually popular because they are fashion models who get Vogue covers and basically are a repository for positive coverage, plus they have the brand names of their husbands.
A lot of Democrats saw Hillary as the first woman President so they missed this, but actually the entire notion of a "First Lady" who decorates the White House and runs the social calendar is terribly anti-feminist and a big reason First Ladies are popular is because a lot of people still buy into vestiges of 1950's morality.
Nobody, least of all Michelle Obama, pretends that she has any real influence that isn't directly related to her being the spouse of Barack Obama. People are 100% okay with people sleeping their way to the position of First Lady and doing First Lady-like things. They look askanse when this is used to catapult them into elected or meritocratic positions.
The propensity of men on this thread to describe being married to someone as "sleeping their way to the top" or "sleeping their way to the position of First Lady" is pretty shocking.
yeah i feel like i'm taking crazy pills. 'sleeping your way to the top' is an accusation you level at someone who has an affair with their boss for a promotion, not a marriage...
But do VOTERS see it that way? And more theoretically, isn't marriage a social construction, and often transactional? E.g., why do you think Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis?
Marriage is also much more complicated than sex, which is why ultimately I agree it isn't helpful to say anyone slept their way to the top by marrying. But that doesn't mean voters didn't see some contradiction between Hillary's stated feminism and her actual route to power.
The actual way voters perceive this issue is entirely different from the "slept her way to the top" framing. There is a cynical view related to her staying with Bill after the scandals that implies she STAYED with him for calculated reasons (which, to be clear, is a fucking bullshit attitude. Judging a marriage and what happens between two people who, by all accounts of anyone who knows them, love and loved one another is absurd), but that's very different from "she's where she is because she fucked Bill Clinton".
It’s not even like Hillary married the scion of a political family. She married a penniless man from Arkansas with a broken family and zero political connections. She took her Yale JD and moved to fucking Fayetteville for that man. Sorry, nobody does that for the career boost. She loved him.
The thing that's been really shocking are the folks that are sticking with these claims despite being called out. I could almost understand the attacks if they were rhetorical shorthands in service of some other point. David's original comment is pretty rough in my opinion, but I think he's mostly critiquing HRC as a candidate, which is more inbounds than intentionally accusing her of fucking a man for political gain. But some of the guys on here are insisting that not only is that what she did but it's also what most Americans believe and disliked her for. These claims are pretty horrifying IMHO.
That's how you view all the marriages amongst your friends and family (and your own if married)? People who are just sleeping together? And doing so in order to achieve some monetary or career goals?
It's a common euphemism for relationship-based nepotism that I'm honestly shocked anybody would bother to take offense to. Someone may marry a business magnate for love, but if that someone then starts finding their way onto the boards of companies that magnate owns, it's perfectly common if not very polite to say that they slept their way to that position.
I actually disagree with this. I do think being First Lady contradicts feminist messaging, but there's no doubt marrying a politician has always been an entree into politics and that's probably even more true now due to Americans' obsession with celebrities.
Michelle Obama has never sought office. Hillary was actually quite popular when she was secretary of state. If Michelle ran for President, her numbers would sag.
There is more than one variable. Appearing to be ambitious is bad. Being self made is good. However, having high name recognition is also good. Being from a political family pushes in both directions. I’m pretty confident that: (1) people from political families are more likely to hold office than the median American (p<0.0001) and (2) other things constant, the median politician who is closely related to a prominent politician has less political acumen than average. For similar reasons, I think the median Harvard student shows dad contributed 8 or 9 figures to Harvard has a lower IQ than the median college student.
Massachusetts is going through this cycle except with a lesbian relationship. Plenty of people have taken the rage bait but I think most people are chill about it.
I see this corrective account of yours as directionally right but overstated. A lot of non-Donald voters (liberals and Democrats, but also moderates and independents) just assume that everyone shares their utility functions and prioritizes values and tradeoffs the same way they do. They wish away ideology and conclude that different votes are due to ignorance or confusion brought on by misinformation. This naive view blinds people to the big risk of being uncompromising (which is that you end up demanding your side take a position that’s farther from the median voter than the other side and your side loses).
But I believe there was a more reasonable and sophisticated view of the 2016 election that didn’t ignore ideology. On this view the important aspects of Donald that were orthogonal to his location in the liberal–conservative ideological dimension were so bad that the typical ideological tradeoffs you’d expect in a campaign with a normal candidate didn’t apply. That is, Donald was so obviously unfit for office that many typical Republican voters would never vote for him. As a result you could essentially “load up” on liberal positions more than you normally could against a normal Republican opponent and still win.
That he said and did enough things to attract the wild enthusiasm of White supremacists made this calculus more plausible. “Surely,” Democrats thought, “our reasonable and responsible Republican friends—with whom we disagree about a lot of things, but ultimately share a commitment to longstanding American values of pluralism and democracy—will not vote for this guy.” But they did. So this view was wrong.
"That is, Donald was so obviously unfit for office that many typical Republican voters would never vote for him. As a result you could essentially “load up” on liberal positions more than you normally could against a normal Republican opponent and still win."
I think this happened, and then a lot of moderate and center right folks who probably wouldn't have voted for Trump got spooked by Democrats "showing their true colors" and displaying everyone their wishlist.
Also absolute turnout says nothing about persuasion - in a country where only 60% of people vote, you could easily subtract 5M votes from the D category, add 5M votes to the R category, and not have persuaded a single person.
To be clear I think persuasion is a better strategy than base mobilization and do believe there are a lot of persuadable voters! But it’s undoubtedly true Trump brought out 2012 non-voters, while a lot of 2012 Obama voters stayed home.
Yes, GOP turnout stayed flat in raw numbers from 2012 to 2016, but the third-party vote share skyrocketed, with the largest part of it almost certainly coming from Republican voters going to Libertarian. (LP raw vote count more than tripled between 2012 and 2016 and Gary Johnson was the LP presidential candidate both times, so we've obviously got an excellent experimental control for candidate name recognition and quality!) That would imply Trump motivated probably at least a few hundred thousand non-2012 voters to come out to vote for him.
The thing being, it's a two-party system, so if you "load up" on liberal positions because you "know" your Republican "friends" won't dare vote for this white supremacist asshole, you're basically smirking in their faces and giving them the finger while daring them to vote for the white supremacist asshole. You haven't actually made it harder for them to vote Trump (ie: by deregistering them from voter rolls or some other dirty trick), just given them more reason to stop you by shooting your hostage.
I basically agree with this. That said, I think the big surprise was the fact that the evangelical voters seemed to have such a flexible view of morality, when it came to choosing a candidate. We simply didn’t believe they were so willing to sell their souls for a Supreme Court justice.
Reminds me of the time I realized that a priest of the True Faith was baldly lying to my face. I thought myself a man of the world but this venal act was deeply upsetting.
Democrats had 8 years to neutralize the threat of Trump by moderating on immigration but they assumed that if someone is against illegal immigration or asylum spamming, it must be because they’re racists.
For me probably one of the most annoying things about post-2016 Dem politics is the assertion from the Sanders wing of this latent untapped support for their brand among the electorate. In all this time their style of candidates has yet to win in an election redder than R+0 yet there are still those that are convinced a Sanders style candidate could somehow sweep a place like WV.
The main lesson people in that camp have reached, AFAICT, is that the mistake was not moving far enough left. They sincerely believe there is a vast reserve army of non-voters who are just craving nationalization of major industries, etc.
The dishwasher efficiency rules are so bad they are actually self defeating. They led to increased water use as people disappointed by dishwasher performance swapped to more hand washing, which is much less efficient overall.
EDIT: Please disregard! I was wrong! (Maybe.) See Tyler G's comment and my response below.
My unpopular view -- household water usage is fine. In most cases, it's a closed loop system where treated water is used, made dirty, then sent back to be cleaned again. I want my high-flow shower heads back.
I think the bigger issue with the dishwasher regulations is the same issue with plastic bag bans; the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Even if the dishwasher regs and plastic bag bans did what they were suppose to*, the benefits are so small compared to the scale of the problem it's just not worth it. It's virtue signaling and perfect fodder for Fox or other right leaning outfits to tell viewers that environmentalism is about about elites trying to annoy you and tell you how to live your lives rather than it being about a real existential threat to the world. And so you've now lessened the chances of reaching swing voters or moderates on things that make up the IRA (a bill that may actually have very real and impactful long term positive effects) who may actually agree with you climate but associate environmentalists with people who've made their lives that much more annoying for no real reason.
* And will you look at that. Possible evidence plastic bag bans have actually backfired. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/25/new-jersey-plastic-bag-ban-study/72354533007/. I've noted to you before I have very profound disagreements and issues with libertarianism as an overall philosophy and guide for making policy generally. But I have a lot of time for libertarianism as a critique of particular regulations and particular cases of government overreach. This is a very good example of where I'm coming from on the latter.
I'm very confused as to how plastic bag bans starting becoming a *climate-change* issue. I've only heard them defended on Great Pacific Garbage Patch grounds.
There's a reason why I'm adding water rights owners to The List. They have it good in shifting the narrative of blame onto households and making them feel guilty, while they continue to rent seek on their rights at well below what the market price would be.
It's really mind-boggling to look at water usage in pretty much any western state. Domestic use (which even includes things like watering lawns) tends to be around 12% of water use.
And every time anyone proposes any sort of YIMBYism here in Colorado, a bunch of people start screeching about how we'll run out of water if more people live in Denver or Boulder.
And the Denver metro is on the other side of the continental divide, despite the shared name they're at least out of the Colorado River watershed clusterfuck.
“ Today, the "C-BT" serves over 33 cities and towns in northeastern Colorado, including Fort Collins, Greeley, Loveland, Estes Park, Boulder, and Sterling, encompassed by 7 counties, providing a secondary source of water for around 1 million people and an irrigated area of 640,000 acres (2,500 km²).”
I've seen this comment a few times, but is it true? I feel like dishwashers now (including the one I got last year) are waaaaay better than they were 30 years ago, which is my point of reference. I've had two mid-price-point dishwashers purchased in the last 5 years and don't ever have to pre-rinse or rewash my dishes.
“The tighter rules didn't lead to energy savings for customers. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers estimated that they actually increased water consumption by 63 billion gallons, as households would have to run their dishwashers multiple cycles, or pre-rinse their dishes by hand, in order to get dishes actually clean.”
But on further research, that Reason article appears to be disastrously wrong in several ways.
The rules it is talking about were never put into practice. They are the same proposed rules, referenced in the article from The Hill linked by Matt here, that ended up being abandoned in January 2017, when DOE decided to stick with the existing 2012 rules and not do any further tightening. The study from AHAM that the article references with that “63 billion gallons” number was not about rules actually in existence, it was an estimate of the impact of the proposed rules! And if you follow the citations on that 63 billion, you eventually get to this footnote, from the original AHAM comment on DOE’s NOPR:
“24 It is not clear why the water consumption increases. The NIA is sufficiently opaque that Shorey Consulting has not been able to trace through the reasons behind the changes in water consumption in a reasonable amount of time.”
But looking at the factors they are playing with in the model, there doesn’t seem to be any plausible way that it could be about changes in hand-washing behavior. So essentially everything in that quote from Reason is wrong and baseless.
It does seem to be the case that dishwasher use frequency, in houses with a dishwasher, is declining over time. This could be because cycle times are increasing, or other performance impacts from efficiency regulation, which make people hand wash more often. However, household sizes also decline over time, and people eat at home less frequently, which could just reduce demand for dishwashing in general.
I’d also like to take a moment to recognize the thankless work of being a Proctor and Gamble chemist optimizing the formula of Cascade detergent and saving the environment in the least sexy way possible.
The one article I could find providing evidence to support the argument said that they took existing dishwashers and modified them to use the lower amount and they were definitely worse. I can believe that!
They’re back to being good, and it’s really nice being able to run a load with the six dishes we used for dinner that night and use less water that handwashing.
I think there’s an adjustment period after new regulations are introduced when corporate R&D hasn’t caught up yet, but products should get better in time.
I’m not sure I agree. My original comment was not well founded, and in any case, you can review DOE’s justifications in the Federal Register entry for the 2012 rule, here:
There is extensive argument about tradeoffs, cost-benefit analysis, etc. They do seem to be doing their best.
However, I do still feel that we should abolish the Energy Conservation Program for Consumer Products, because even to the extent that these guys are doing a good job within their mandate, their mandate isn’t actually useful/helpful anymore. This isn’t the 1970s, energy is plentiful and it is only going to get more so moving forward, and it’s time to get out of scarcity mindset. Ditto for water conservation for residential users.
Depends on your priorities I guess. But if I literally doubled my residential electricity use I would be responsible for about 1 extra metric ton of CO2 per year, given the current US average of 368g of CO2 equivalents per KWh. That’s just not a big fraction of my annual emissions.
I mean, in the 70s, we lowered speed limits and everything and that was understandable, desperate times call for desperate measures. But eventually things got better and we gave up on the speed limits. The crisis is past. We don’t need to have the federal government micromanaging everyone’s home appliances anymore, it’s just silly.
The shadow price of the CO2 emitted by the production of the energy would go into a proper cost benefit analysis. Indeed, there would be no other for regulating appliance design.
I always thought if Obama could have kept his 2010 tone, the GOP would have been all but dead and buried as a national party.. Maybe not quite as buried as Dems were in the 1980s but a clear regional minority party.
I think the leftward lurch by Dems on race going back to Trayvon Martin has been disastrous for them. Its hurt them especially with non college voters and also made it easier for Republicans to mobilize against despite have no policy agenda at all besides tax cuts. It's not even clear all the emphasis on diversity or lectures on systemic racism are helping with black voters who in 2016 regressed to historic mean in terms or vote share. Polls even show GOP in 2024 doing not so badly with non college younger black men.
I think the leftward lurch on race is a big part also of the Democrats fecklessness on immigration. You can almost imagine the absurd rhetoric: Can't enforce immigration laws for fear of disparate impact on vulnerable communities of color. To treat phony asylum claimants differently than US citizens is nothing but white supremacy.
The leftward lurch on race is also behind Democrat reluctance to crack down on this nationwide shoplifting craze. What are laws on theft anyway but expressions of systems of oppression?
I'm exaggerating a little but not that much!
With the GOP at peak crazy, Dems are poised to lose in 2024. Great job!
I think this is probably under-selling the role of the "groups" in creating the MOAR left wing everywhere all the time interpretation of 2016. They not only have influence shaping the media interpretation, but Dem politicians still rely on them to "represent" the opinion of groups they put in the title of their organization, even if none of them actually have any real members anymore. And the revolving door is more with the groups and campaign staff than traditional lobbying groups.
Plus they have all log rolled each other so the Climate Groups and the ACLU and the Hispanic groups all have the same opinion every issue and place the same importance on every issue.
Have never thought of it that way … but your point about the “revolving door” of staffers moving between The Groups and Dem Hill offices being more of the norm relative to traditional lobbyists is incredibly true.
I’m sure this is a rosy view of “traditional lobbying,” but it’s a line of work where results matter or you lose clients. The Groups just have to make noise. Those different contexts almost certainly are influencing the party at the staff level. More lobbyists on Dem staffs?
The number of crazies is multiplying the closer we get to November. The Slow Boring version of what happens to those of us in swing states regarding advertisements, robocalls, emails and text messages.
I generally respect you as an honest commenter, so I'm saying this in good faith: this is an unhealthy and conspiratorial mindset. It encourages you to see people who you find disagreeable as non people, instead of actual people who have their own opinions which you might have to contend with.
I have work to do, so I can't fully address this now, but I will stress that I'm very willing to believe that the vast majority of commenters here are actual people who have their own opinions even if I disagree with them strongly. I am, however, highly suspicious of people who show up to comment on a blog or similar website where registration or (especially) a paid subscription is required, but who (1) don't seem to fit the "vibe" of the site and (2) don't engage with the content of the site, but instead create drama with other commenters, especially when in the process (3) they write patently ridiculous thingsthat sound like something a foreigner would think an American of a particular political bent would say, but which they would not. (E.g., an actual American conservative would almost certainly not write that Thomas Jefferson "was the first person to argue that one person was as good as another in this world. This has been very inspirational to many, many people since then.")
"an actual American conservative would almost certainly not write that Thomas Jefferson 'was the first…then.'"
I just Ctrl-F'ed for "was the first", and your quote is the only hit. Was this edited out of somebody's post? Is the problem that I've minimized some comments and not clicked "Load More"? Or was this on some other site?
FWIW, Rock_M also pointed out he's a democrat, and an apparently very frustrated one at that. That seems pretty typical for this site, albeit maybe a little more upset than most of us.
I'm also generally not one to believe this kind of thing, but people who show up to *this* comments section to go "I voted Trump in 2020 and I'm doing it again in 2024"....I dunno man. What possible value could you be getting out of reading Matt?
People have posted comments here before, suggesting that they read Hanania or The Dispatch just to keep an eye on "what the other side is doing". It doesn't seem to implausible that either Republican faction might hate-read us too.
This has been a weird one, I don't know how Matt's writing caused it but there's been a grab bag of multiple lengthy grievances all over the place today that skyrocketed the comment quantity. More revealed exposure of what really riles up Slow Borers, for better or worse.
It certainly doesn't help that we've had the sudden appearance of "Rock_M." I don't think he's Spiky, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's a paid disruptor.
"I don't think he's Spiky, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's a paid disruptor."
I hope he doesn't get banned for today, though. His comments have been the best sort of discomfiting: each time I dig into them, the details I'm most concerned about are correct, even if I don't think he ought draw the conclusions he does from them.
Ah, I didn't read the comments! I scrolled and read like ten of them (I find the ways Americans view guns very interesting), and then gave up. That's why I'm waiting for Matt H. to tell us about the numbers.
I might have done the same if I didn't get up early today. I put in a few replies, didn't have anything I wanted to say on a top level comment...and then it just really took off after I got to work for a bit.
I don't know if we'll break a record, but I can feel the whole page getting queasy because of the sheer number of comments. It took me three tries to get this reply to work.
Matt’s a little more open minded than Hillary and allows that there might be a third kind of Republican: “Everyone is either a really bad racist or else is being crushed by the man and in need of help. Nobody falls into what I think is the classic conservative posture of just, like, a person who is doing okay and is kinda selfish ”
THAT’s what I am! Just a little bit selfish. No possibility that we know that the more government redistributes our earnings the less productive we will choose to be? No chance we realize that the more we’re taxed, and the more they give away, the more people will choose to live off our largesse? No chance that we know that eventually the government will get so big that it is the citizen who will fear the government, instead of the other way around?
The unearned arrogance of the left is at least entertaining, lol.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether Matt is more arrogant than the average smart political commentator, and I'm happy to pay for his takes. What is interesting though, as Matt knows, is that income polarization is extremely low in US politics. So where in the Bush years the dealership/grocery/etc owner voted GOP, and the workers voted Dem unless they were pretty evangelical, it's like becoming more urban-rural where rural owners and workers vote GOP, urban owners and workers vote Dem. This is an exaggeration ofc, but it's more accurate than Matt's emphasis on owners (as part of his aspiration to bring back mid-century class polarization.)
Gun control is an interesting issue because there is inherent tension between it and criminal justice reform. Stop and frisk was specifically an anti-gun measure.
To resolve this tension, it seems like progressives support more gun laws but don't really support enforcing them. Which electorally is probably the worst of both worlds.
Essentially it responds to that old saw that says when guns are outlawed only criminals will have guns with an enthusiastic 'Exactly!'
I have never found this to be a particularly compelling argument. Like, ok, it is my sense that in many parts of the world like Japan it is only the cops and the professional criminals who have guns and as a result a lot less gun death because they have fewer impulsive domestic killings, accidental shootings, and suicides. I would be a less than ideal but still win in my mind if the hardened criminals of Seattle still had the same number of guns but I didn't have to worry about a hotheaded neighbor shooting someone in a road rage issue, a kid with a gun they stole from their parents shooting someone they perceived as a bully, a toddler shooting themselves by accident, and a teenager committing suicide.
They really try to square the circle by attacking only the gun manufacturers, and hope that the existing guns will go away via voluntary buybacks. Just no serious consideration on what to do with the grand majority of gun owners who don't want to give them up.
Matt's article inspired me to ask gun control supporters how they wanted to enforce their ideal policy. About half were fine with cracking down, and the other half said I was completely missing the point.
I feel like public polling generally bears out your findings. Good job finding a representative sample.
I'm not sure if I've ever seen a real poll ask the question on how gun laws should be enforced, do you have something handy? My own effort was anecdotal, unscientific polling.
I'm thinking about polls that test generic and widely popular gun control legislation. Gun owners are generally in support, albeit by a slim margin.
The key question I think is how people feel about banning handguns specifically. My understanding (though happy to be corrected) is that consistently polls poorly.
IMO no other question really matters when it comes to what we want to understand about popular sentiment on the subject. All the other stuff about red flag laws and 'assault weapons' are kind of a red herring. The most positive way you could spin it from a gun control perspective is to say support is a mile wide but an inch deep. The more realistic way is that people just don't support it beyond some mild tightening on the margins.
Obviously in terms of overall homocide rates, handguns are the issue. But that doesn't make other reasonable gun control policies red herrings.
I wonder how much of a fuss people would actually have if:
Guns have to be on a register.
The owner of each gun has to register it, so you have to register all transfers.
The registered owner of a gun is legally liable for any damage done with that gun and is required to carry insurance for that (liability is joint with the person using the gun, ie you / your insurance only have to pay if a gun is stolen and used in a crime if the criminal can't afford to pay).
A gun can be marked as lost/stolen on the register and you cease to be liable for it, but you have to pay a fee (you can claim this against your gun insurance), which then goes to a fund used to compensate the victims of crimes committed with stolen guns.
You can lose your right to own a gun if you commit a felony (at which point you have to sell your guns; you can have them stored by a range or by the police for a reasonable period until you sell them so you don't have to have a fire sale at depressed prices).
This would be gun *control* rather than gun *restrictions* - it wouldn't it illegal to own any guns unless you're a felon (in which case it already is), but it would make enforcing those laws a lot easier.
Most of the gun control rules that have been passed in Washington have been relevant to hand guns -- universal background checks, extreme risk protection orders, and gun storage laws have all been aimed primarily on slowing or limiting access to guns in general and apply just as much to hand guns.
I think the answer to how gun laws should be enforced is "reasonably" - pretty much like anything. Somewhere between "the laws shouldn't be meaningless and have no teeth" and "enforcement shouldn't be zealous to the hilt with no other considerations."
It also depends on the laws. If we have one law that is poorly written and any enforcement would lead to absurd outcomes, probably best to repeal or re-write the law. If there's a gap in the law that makes other laws redundant, or there is simply no funding for personnel to adequately enforce the law, also probably best to try to address that.
Yeah I'm an advocate for gun control. Personally I support exploring a pigouvian taxes on ammunition. I'm also intrigued by the idea of requiring liability insurance, but that might run into issues with civil rights law.
The idea that volume of ammunition expended is in anyway related to homicide or crime rates at all is nonsense. Legal shooters use lots of bullets. Murders use a couple of mags at most.
A gun that's used for home protection is, in most cases, never used at all.
I'm cool with making exceptions for things like hunting and for shooting ranges.
A gun for home protection should be used monthly, if not weekly, and the owner should be expending at least a hundred rounds per range session.
Gun control advocates are so ignorant about the thing they care about, it's always startling.
Meh. Quarterly is fine.
"Should be" is carrying a lot of weight in this comment. How many people who keep guns for actual home protection are disciplined about staying proficient?
If they're like me and should be disciplined about exercising to stay healthy, the question answers itself.
But Allan just said he's fine with making exceptions for ammo used at shooting ranges.
If you're practicing with your gun, I assume you'd do it at a shooting range, right? Where else would you do it? Your backyard?
How would you charge a pigouvian tax on ammo, but exempt 'hunting and shooting ranges'.....? You'd have a drone follow the person home and watch what they do with the ammo, then decide to tax them later? Seriously man, stop and think about what you're saying for a minute
You don’t hunt with a pistol and generally you don’t try to murder someone with a rifle.
Shooting ranges is easy: tax exempt buying ammo from the range that you discharge at the range (ie you can't take out ammo that you have bought there).
And for hunting? an exemption for rimmed rifle ammo (other than .22 LR) and a ban (well, extending the NFA restrictions on full-auto) on semi-automatic rifles using rimmed ammo (other than .22LR) would work pretty well.
Semi-autos/autos with rimmed ammo are rare anyway (they're a bad idea because of rimlock), apart from .22LR - they're mostly historic WWII-era weapons from the UK or Russia, so a ban is more of a pre-emptive move to stop manufacturers designing a rimmed semi-auto in Winchester .303 or 7.62x54mmR. If that ammo was cheap, there would be Moisin-Nagant and Lee-Enfield clones on the market within weeks, and modern designs (ie plastic rather than wood, Picatinny rails for sights, straight rather than curved bolt handles, etc) within months.
People could either buy these rimmed bolt-action hunting rifles (which are weapons you need to practice with and you have to aim because reload times are significant) and get tax-free ammo, or they could buy rimless semi-autos and pay the tax.
I continued to be baffled by the insurance thing... like what exactly is the insurance supposed to be paying out on? Are people suggesting that some insurance company is gonna cover your... I guess civil liability when you murder someone with your gun? That's not how insurance works.
And if we're talking about like... gun accidents, the premium on any one of the 400 million guns around the country would be infinitesimally small, a rounding error, wouldn't impact anything... and I'm pretty sure we already have health insurance for that? Is the idea that my insurance will pay to patch the hole in my ceiling if I have an ND?
How is this supposed to have a policy impact?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNZFdZnYR44
It's liability insurance - the damages wouldn't be limited to direct medical expenses. You could collect for pain and suffering, lost income, etc. It would also cover medical expenses beyond the victim's crappy Aetna coverage and for uninsured people. I've got no problem with requiring gun owners to carry insurance.
But in general, you are right that this wouldn't make a dent in gun ownership. It's not like car insurance - premiums are high because the vast majority of cars will be involved in an accident at some point. Most legal guns are used at the range or not at all.
Liability insurance doesn't cover crimes though. The reason this isn't a product that exists is because the number of shootings that are like... accidental shootings of people who don't own the gun in question that might plausibly be covered by insurance is tiny and entirely unrelated to the sort of gun crimes people are concerned with.
I think it would cover negligently letting your kid get hold of your gun, which isn’t necessarily criminal.
If the suggestion was actually that we need to create a civil cause of action against people who have their guns stolen when those guns are used in crimes that would be more defensible, but the whole "make them get insurance" thing totally skips right over the fact that that liability is not a thing that exists, at least under current law. If you could in fact statutorily create such a liability under the constitution is I guess an interesting question, and then maybe it might make sense for insurance to cover such a liability..
As a gun owner, what are your thoughts on those kinds of laws? It always struck me that there are compromise ways to make gun ownership safer on the margins that are pretty unobjectionable (e.g.- make purchasing a gun more like getting a driver's license, with training and testing requirements), and it would seem like holding individuals liable if they negligently store their firearms in a way that allows them to be swiped and circulate in the black market is a sensible measure. What do you think?
Is that really rare? The entire thrust of the progressive argument is that both accidental and intentional deaths from firearms increase more-or-less directly with the number of guns in circulation. So the benefit to gun owners of "feeling safer" by owning a gun is not worth the actual reduction in safety for everyone. But I think even progressives understand that the realms of hunting and target shooting exist largely outside this system of trade-offs, so sometimes take pains to exempt them from their total gun-reduction strategies.
"accidental and intentional deaths from firearms increase more-or-less directly with the number of guns in circulation"
That is exactly backwards. There has been a decrease in violent crime since the 90s, while the number of guns has increased.
Exactly this. Those who profess to want gun control that doesn't require removing guns from the homes of (currently) law-abiding individuals are tinkering on the margins while pretending that they want to make drastic impacts on gun deaths in this country.
Those who actually acknowledge that making those drastic impacts would require repealing the second amendment are being honest, but have a politically impossible end goal.
I prefer to be honest about it and recognize the futility rather than the annual parade of misleading attempts to "do SOMETHING" on guns when that something will have virtually zero impact on the harm caused by guns. If you're at least honest then maybe you build a generational movement that makes gun abolition feasible by say 2150 or so. But as it stands, nobody is doing anything that will do anything, ever.
If we're going to have a generational movement, why not have a movement to persuade young men not to kill each other?
Yea, but I do encounter people who seem to genuinely think the "insurance" part has some relationship to reality instead of just being a misidentified tax.
Yes, but it is (in principle) a *differentiated* tax: the people most likely to misuse their guns are those who pay the highest insurance rates for it, whereas most taxes are just per capita or per gun.
A tax on ammunition that is high enough to actually make a difference in the rate of gun crimes (and it would have to be very high -- most people who commit crimes with their guns aren't actually using many bullets) would very likely be subject to a Second Amendment challenge in the same way that special taxes on newsprint and ink have been successfully challenged on First Amendment grounds.
You know there's already a lot of ammunition out in circulation right?
And it's incredibly simple for people to manufacture their own at home.
This would like just create a thriving, unenforcable black market.
I'm impressed if people are able to effectively make their own bullets at home
Yes, people can make their own ammunition at home, it's not that hard. I mean, people make their own meth at home, no....? I would suggest Googling & learning a little more on the subject. The reason home ammunition-making isn't more widely practiced is that ammo is easily purchased now. Change that calculus and you'll create a thriving black market for rounds
Back when I was into guns, I did this and it’s actually a very popular hobby. For guns that shoot rare ammunition it can also be a lot cheaper than buying manufactured ammo.
That said, it’s theoretically possible to crack down on this by limiting the sale of smokeless powder and primers, but that wouldn’t stop it.
It is not uncommon at all. The brass is typically reusable many times over, the bullet itself is dirt cheap (and if you have a crucible and mold you can churn them out pretty easily), and the powder is relatively cheap.
Shotgun cartridges can be made with a stack of dimes if you're motivated.
You might want to research this, because restricting trade of the literal bullet slug would also be quite a challenge.
Bullets are easy. So are the brass cartridges. Powder is hard, primers are really hard and dangerous.
FWIW, there has been an 11% federal tax on ammunition since 1919. (It goes to fund conservation.) That’s not cigarette tax level, but it’s also not nothing when combined with state sales tax.
What do you think the issues with civil rights law are?
You would either have a system where risk premiums do not reflect market conditions or a system where young Black men pay considerably more for insurance than people from other demographic groups.
And that’s a problem because??? Young black men are committing a grossly disproportionate amount of the gun crime, no?
it may not stand up in court if there is a disparate impact
"They really try to square the circle by attacking only the gun manufacturers, and hope that the existing guns will go away via voluntary buybacks."
Actually, I think the purpose of going after gun manufacturers with either liability and/or regulations is to reduce the supply of guns manufactured in the first place. Pretty much all "illegally owned" guns (that weren't manufactured via 3D printing which is another issue/problem entirely) were "legally manufactured" guns to begin with, which were purchased and distributed likely through an initially legal chain of purchase and custody to an illegal one. So one very probable means of reducing the supply of illegal guns is to reduce the supply of legally manufactured guns (and ammo, same deal) in the first place.
"Actually, I think the purpose of going after gun manufacturers with either liability and/or regulations is to reduce the supply of guns manufactured in the first place."
If that's actually the strategy, then I wish them lots of luck, b/c they're gonna need it. The US Army needs to buy guns from somewhere. The Army would also much rather the manufacturers be both domestic and not dependent on government largesse.
Make bullets harder to buy. That is one avenue.
Making bullets harder to buy would affect people stockpiling ammunition, but the vast majority of shootings involve literally only a handful of shots being fired, so it is highly unlikely to make much of a dent in gun crime unless you're talking about absolutely confiscatory levels of taxes on ammunition sales or something like that, in which case we get into Second Amendment issues.
Increasing the cost of doing something affects things on the margins.
So even if you increase the cost of bullets by a few cents in aggregate you might limit access to lethal means to a marginal bad actor. Its the same way excise taxes work.
I said it was "highly unlikely to make much of a dent in gun crime," not that it would have zero effect. But I suspect that demand for bullets to be used for criminal purposes is highly inelastic -- if you're someone who is already inclined towards a career path where firearms are an important part of your toolbox, paying an extra five cents a bullet adds less than two dollars to the cost of two fully loaded magazines for a semiautomatic pistol. When you further factor in that (i) even career violent criminals likely go weeks or months at a time without actually discharging a gun and (ii) ammo is effectively non-perishable under normal environmental conditions, a small per-bullet tax probably is adding less than $20 to the annual cost of being a criminal.
The point though is that the person "on the margin" here is the person who buys 5000 rounds a year, not the person who uses <50 rounds a year committing crimes
The consistent failure to handle tensions and trade-offs would be funny if it weren't putting the survival of US democracy at risk (and, less dramatically, making it very hard to govern effectively in general)
At a certain point, we have to accept that if Trump gets reelected by a decent margin that is not the end of democracy, that *is* democracy.
people keep saying this but I think folks are just radically misunderstanding the concern..
obviously if Trump wins the election, that's democratically legitimate! the fear is not that Trump will win. the fear is that, IF Trump wins, he will do things that will weaken or even destroy democracy. having a guy who has radicalized himself against the concept of free and fair elections become president is pretty bad. in the background, he and his team have been pursuing aggressive purges of people who were insufficiently loyal post-2020 when Trump began questioning the election. McConnell won't be majority leader. The speaker or, God willing, the minority leader, will be someone who will not publicly affirm the legitimacy of the election. he has positioned himself very well to make another run at stealing the 2028 election. and it only takes one successfully rigged election to essentially obliterate the norm of the democratic transfer of power in this country.
we must be clear-eyed about the fact that the GOP is not particularly attached to democracy, and their voters do not care about it either.
I have the cynical thought that “democracy” to Blue people really means “rule by us”. No party that is actively attempting to disenfranchise 1.3 million American voters in one state alone (to name just one thing) is in any position to convince anybody that they are fighting to save democracy. Ultimately, the law is for the people, not the people for the law.
No, "Blue people" really are concerned that if Trump wins again, there will never be another free and fair election in America, at least not for a long time. I have no idea what specific instance you are referring to here (my best guess is you are complaining about New York's new congressional maps? though those are actually astoundingly fair for a state where one party controls state government), but yes, both parties have weakened democratic norms by playing games with district maps and voting restrictions. There's still an enormous difference between this and trying to nullify the result of a legitimately conducted election.
As a card-carrying "blue person", I think people who *very seriously and legitimately* wonder if Trump 2024 means no 2028 election--I think these people are absolutely frank barking mad.
I did not think Trump's 2016 win was a tragedy/crime against democracy. I thought it was a tragedy _of_ democracy, but it was democratically legitimate.
When he lost in 2020 that was democratically legitimate - but ... and here's where I worry about him - he tried really hard to delegitimize it.
If he wins in 2024 that will be legitimate but I will _never_ vote for someone who treats democracy as poorly as he did in 2020. (I'm on the record in these comments as opposing efforts by Democrats to get extreme Republicans to win primaries to be easier to defeat in the general because I think that's iffy, even if technically 'democratic')
Now, when people say - if he wins there will never be another "free and fair election" (or at least not the next few) - I don't think they are envisioning dictator-esque 90% + votes. But elections tend to be close enough that being able to add a 5% weight to the electoral college scale makes it _really_ hard for the other side to win. I don't how likely that is, but even a 10% likelihood is WAY more than I can tolerate.
This is grading Trump on a curve IMO. Even in 2016 he encouraged violence, said he'd reject the result if he lost, did reject the result of the Iowa caucus which he did lose, actively sought and received foreign interference. He may have got even worse over time but he's been awful from the start.
Do you know how many disputed elections there have been in the history of this country? None of what has happened is remotely like 1876 for example. In some states there were assassinations and armed conflict between the parties. Democracy survived then because the people wanted it. Trump can’t end democracy on his own, unless the people don’t want it anymore. I think we do.
Donald Trump is a bad person who believes in wrongheaded ideas. He lies, cheats, and steals, and I believe he would kill if he believed he could get away with it. He is also fat and smelly. I do not respect him as a human being.
No - "democracy" to Blue people (and people on most other parts of the color wheel) means the person who gets the most votes wins. It's Red people who support the insane idea that disproportionate voting power should be granted to rural Americans just because they live in places with more empty acreage. If you want to see actual "democracy" then you need to abandon the Electoral College and apportion Senate seats by population, as God and James Madison intended. But you won't, because seizing and maintaining political power by any means necessary is more important to Red people than is democratic process or democratic principle...which is the main problem we "Blues" have with Trump, in a nutshell.
The Constitution established the electoral college as it is in 1787. How it works is no surprise to anyone at this date. If you personally think it should work differently, you're welcome to make that argument to the American people, to get a constitutional amendment. Meantime, Democrats need to stop whining about it and figure out how to win elections in those states. They used to be very competitive in all the states and in rural areas. Now they're not, largely due to their political incompetence: the PMC's who run the party seem to think it beneath them to try to listen to and appeal to voters in those states. Meanwhile, when Republicans win the electoral college, it's not called "seizing power". It's called being elected fair and square.
Where is this 1.3MM voters disenfranchisement happening?
Colorado. Trump received 1.3 million votes there in 2020.
Fortunately we are electing a President and not a Monarch.
You are right. If Donald Trump was the only piece of the puzzle, he alone could not do any meaningful damage to democracy.
But he is not one individual. He is the leader of an enormous political cult that has slavish and absolute devotion to him. This cult has proven, in 2020, that its devotion to Trump is more important than democracy. To them, he is a monarch.
This cult has gained increasing power at state and local government in many states, including critical battleground states like Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. Do you think it is so unreasonable to be concerned that these officials, who have *already demonstrated disrespect for democracy*, may try to undertake efforts to influence the election? Are you not worried about Trump's plan to hollow out the administrative state and replace it with his slavish cult devotees, and what those devotees might be able to do with the vast levers of power at their disposal?
They have already provided us with their blueprint. They will claim fraud. They will throw out votes. They may simply just adopt their own slate of electors with no relationship to the vote counts in the state, claiming that the election is hopelessly compromised.
I am definitely worried about a Trump Presidency and am firmly opposed to Trump.
I do, however, have more faith in American institutions than those who think democracy is ending.
"Do you think it is so unreasonable to be concerned that these officials, who have *already demonstrated disrespect for democracy*, may try to undertake efforts to influence the election?"
Depends on what the "influence" is and what you mean by "disrespect for democracy."
"Are you not worried about Trump's plan to hollow out the administrative state and replace it with his slavish cult devotees, and what those devotees might be able to do with the vast levers of power at their disposal? "
Having been a cog in that administrative state, I think it will be very difficult for Trump to realize that goal.
And this brings up a point I've been trying to hammer for long before Trump, which is the growth in the power of the Executive branch. If it really does have vast levers of power, then maybe we ought to do something about that so the Executive isn't seen as prize or a gateway to controlling the country. But ironically many of the people who are most opposed to Trump are also the people who like a strong Executive and administrative state.
And yes, they've said what they might do - which is foolish of them. But again, a lot of that will be easier said than done.
And I'm not saying this about you specifically, but I see a huge disconnect between words and actions.
In other words, I read a lot of people claiming that we are on the verge of fascism from Trump, but when you drill down it turns out they're not willing to make much, if any, political compromises to stop Trump, and have not done other actions one would expect to see if those fears were genuine. If Trump is such a threat to democracy, then why aren't more people acting like that's the case?
Agreed I’m concerned that if trump wins he will try to insert a censorship unit into Homeland Security and jail his opponent.
Obviously Trump's election is not the literal end of democracy, any more than was Hitler's being appointed Chancellor. It's what comes afterwards that kills democracy. Maybe it'll turn out Trump was just kidding about it all.
Maybe!
The United States has 230 years of constitutional government behind us. Germany had 12. Trump either will or won’t be a problem but as far as I’m concerned the legal stuff and especially the ridiculous “insurrection” nonsense is something that is happening now, not something we fear might happen in the future.
I wish 2020's attempted coup really was "ridiculous nonsense." But it wasn't. It was hamhanded, sure. But it was deadly serious. Trump absolutely wanted to steal that election. I'm also not sure about your breezy assertion that the age of America's constitutional obviates the risk of a descent into authoritarianism. This seems...unfounded?
Trump behaved badly and would lose my vote over it if he had it in the first place. It is telling that a Federal prosecutor in a hostile administration didn’t see his way to actually charging him with treason or insurrection or sedition. Let’s not puff this up beyond what it is: it is preaching to the choir and shows real fear of the American people. He needs to be beaten decisively at the ballot box.
It's absolutely true that our democracy is more deeply rooted than was democracy in Weimar Germany, and the chances of an equivalent Reichstag fire followed by the Enabling Laws are pretty small.
But there are a lot of very bad things these folks can do short of the Nazi takeover of German democracy.
Some of the "bad things" are only "bad" because Democrats hate them. Getting the Federal bureaucracy and maybe (maybe) even the Justice Department under tighter political control might not be a bad thing, if it prevents him from getting away from "the deep state prevented me from doing the right thing" excuse. If he gets elected, he should govern, and if he does that badly, he should get thrown out and replaced by the other guys. If a majority of voters think he can be a normal president, then let him try.
1) never a democracy.
2) a lot of the time not even a republic
2) many civil wars
Well, no. If Trump wins again he will almost certainly do it without getting a majority of the popular vote, so it won't be "democratic" under the normal meaning of that word or the way we use the word to describe every other election to every other office in America and in most of the democratic world. His election would be "legitimate" under the US Constitution, but not "democratic".
At a certain point, we have to accept that if Saddam Hussein gets reelected by a decent margin that is not the end of democracy, that *is* democracy.
Nonsensical. Saddam Hussein was a dictator. Trump is not Saddam Hussein.
“I want to be a dictator on day one”
Like that guy in Argentina? It would probably be awful, but it would be exciting.
Who's doing a good job of this?
I wish we were better, but the whole world is having trouble right now.
My solution: Any person found in possession of a gun is ipso facto presumed to have volunteered for service in the well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, and shall be immediately sent to drill.
Exactly. McDonald v. Chicago was wrongly decided.
I'm not sure why you would make such an obvious strawman that "progressives don't really support enforcing them."
There's lots of support for red flag laws, improving the background check databases, restricting what is legally available for purchase, closing the gun show loopholes, and most importantly not returning illegal firearms that are confiscated in other investigations in the first place. Just look at California's policies and procedures
Gun control doesn't mean increasing police harassment or kicking down doors. There are lots of existing check points in the system that can gradually filter out the guns most efficient at killing people.
Right, I agree with this. The issue isn't wanting to pass gun laws but not enforce them. It's wanting to pass and enforce gun laws only against privileged groups (manufacturers, perpetrators of domestic violence, stereotypical white gun enthusiasts) but not against oppressed groups.
these things can definitely help with preventing mass shootings
but the vast majority of gun violence is perpetrated by people who are already criminals. they are generally not purchasing guns legitimately, they are buying guns on the black market. it needs to be a serious offense to walk around with an illegal gun, because that is how you squeeze this market.
can you provide any statistics for this?
Most gun death is actually committed within a household, in the form of domestic violence, suicide, or accidents, rather than violent crimes or personal defense.
you're really putting your thumb on the scale by including suicides. we know from the experience of many other countries that while firearms may increase the probability of the marginal suicide, there are many other ways to kill yourself
you said gun violence.
"gun violence" may include suicide in activist-world but everyone else understands it to mean interpersonal violence, i.e. where the subject uses a firearm to kill another person
and when analyzing that category, violent crime is in fact the overwhelming majority of gun deaths. DV and accidents are both relatively small compared to the massive body of incidents of "guy kills another guy because of a dispute or to enable property crime"
Is ODing on drugs drug violence? Or is sitting in your car and letting it run I your garage car violence? Or is hanging yourslef, rope violence?
It’s only guns that use this definition and it’s clearly an attempt to raise the stakes.
There's some weird elision going on there. You accurately pointed out that most gun death is suicide, but then glued on domestic violence (even though more men are murdered by guns than women, and it's not close) and accidents (which are only a few percent of total gun deaths).
"elision" lol what even is this accusation?
I'm making a point that most gun violence is within the house, not stochastic crime.
I support all of this, but focusing on purchasing restrictions but not enforcing illegal ownership would barely make a dent in crime.
If you want to reduce gun violence, you have to put some focus on the people who are actually committing most of the gun violence. Those people aren't going to be stopped by red flag laws and gun show restrictions. If there are a lot of guns in circulation (and there will be...) they won't be hard to get for people who are willing to break the law.
I specifically said several ways to enforce illegal ownership.
2 of your 6 ideas (red flag, and not returning) are about ownership. Both deal with the gun, not the person. There are plenty of guns out there - taking someone's gun isn't going stop them if they're generally predisposed to criminality. You have to do something about the person who was caught doing the illegal thing.
"generally predisposed to criminality"
what does this even mean?
More likely to commit crime
(e.g. my 18 year old male cousin who did badly in school is more predisposed to criminality than my 90 year old grandmother)
I'm not sure your really in dialogue with me or the other commenters. I suspect you know what I'm saying. Someone in a gang who's been in and out of jail 10 times is disposed to criminality. Your grandmother probably isn't.
Please calm down, because you're not helping make your case by promoting extra judicial violence.
It is in fact necessary for cops to return legal firearms confiscated in an investigation.
If more types of firearms are made illegal for sale, or illegal without a license, then they will not be returned to their owner. Just as now, if a firearm doesn't have a serial number.
The issue with stop and frisk - as with many policies - is "what level of intrusion do you allow on innocent people in order to catch some guilty ones?"
Real talk: stop & frisk was accepted because it wasn't like a white guy in a suit was randomly going to have a cop put him up against the wall and grope his crotch for a gun. The innocent people in this system were powerless people, so there wasn't a fuss about how much they disliked the system. Not cool.
You need enforcement mechanisms that can be applied consistently and fairly. That wasn't the NYC stop & frisk system, sorry.
My memory of what the reseach showed was that stop and frisk was ineffective (& countereffective in alienating the communities the police needed to work with them), whereas frisking people with probable cause was effective. "Frisking" itself is not neccessarly bad. We need more nuance here.
yes! probable cause is a great reason to frisk someone, I agree!
even the "you jumped a turnstile so I'd also like to know if you have a gun" is fine by me. But not just grabbing people at random. (Or really, NOT at random, but by profiling.)
"It wasn't like a white guy in a suit...so there wasn't a fuss about how much they disliked the system. Not cool."
See also: how the NRA hesitated to defend Philando Castile.
“…it wasn't like a white guy in a suit was randomly going to have a cop put him up against the wall and grope his crotch for a gun”
Suit privilege is real.
See also the unwritten rule of waiting to see if a mass casualty event involving firearms gets coded as a "mass shooting" or "crime" to determine how we respond.
Huh? What is the evidence you are citing to support the proposition that progressives don't want gun restrictions enforced? One of the many issues with stop and frisk is that it was ineffective at "gun control", turning up only about 14 guns for every 10,000 stops. I'm pretty sure a lot of progressives would have supported mag-wanding white tourists in Times Square as a means of finding and removing guns from NYC streets (and I'm not even sure this would have turned up fewer guns per stop than S&F), but Bloomberg obviously wouldn't have done this, so allowed the stop and frisk discourse to congeal in the "racism" bucket rather than in "gun control". The fact that S&F as implemented was objectively bad at gun control made it easier for progressives to see the "structural racism" without any countervailing benefit, but I see no evidence that it lessened progressive zeal for getting guns off the street.
Matt wrote about this.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-most-gun-arrests-in-dc-dont-lead
Matt is writing about a different situation here. DC has a weird set up where they have trouble going after people whom they know are committing a crime. NYC, was using a vast drag net on certain neighborhoods and demographic groups. They hassled a lot of innocent people to catch a few criminals, which likely undermined any impact that they had. A key to effective policing is swift and certain justice, not swift and certain harassment.
Progressives support a number of gun control measures. Some seem like they'd be more effective than others. Stop and frisk seemed to be ineffective. When it stopped, by court order, the neighborhoods where it was used saw a similar decline in crime as neighborhoods where it hadn't been used. As for why they raise hackles over this, and not regulating every feature of a gun in some new assault weapons van, they care more about the costs of hassling minorities than taking away the toys of wealthy gun owners
While I have never fired a gun and have no desire to ever do so, wealthy gun owners who like wasting their money on their toys are generally not the ones who use guns to commit violence.
So the question is, is the purpose of gun control to reduce the number of guns, or to reduce the number of shootings? I feel it should be the latter.
Or, even more uncharitably, is it to punish people of the bad/evil other tribe who enjoy responsible firearm ownership.
Because I've definitely run into those people.
Most gun owners are not wealthy. Wealthy people hire other people to carry guns for them. But it is true that legal owners commit a miniscule fraction of violent crime.
That came off as derisive, but I didn't really it mean it that way. Targeting minority neighborhoods with police harassment is just going to piss off progressives more than impeding what is essentially a recreational activity for some. You can say that the latter policy is dumb on a number of levels, and I don't really disagree. I'm not defending either policy, but can you see why one might invite a different response from people? I
There has been an interesting case in Seattle. We had a fatal shooting at my daughter's high school last year. The shooter was a child and he got the gun from a friend who bought it from a friend in a long chain of teenagers that eventually led back to a parent whose kid stole their gun in a city about 15 miles north. That parent had not been in compliance with either the safe storage laws or the obligation to report stolen guns law. There has been widespread pressure from people in Seattle that they want to see this parent prosecuted but the county prosecutor for that county will not charge him since he doesn't see any "bad faith." I has definitely been a flip of who is in favor of prosecuting folks for breaking the law and who isn't. But I don't think it is that inconsistent really. The same people pressing for the prosecution of the parent also don't want to see an unduely harsh jail time for the minor involved and I don't seem them advocating for stopping and frisking teens.
So would be a nationwide system for tracking guns used in crime all he way back to the manufacturer to see if there are any interediction points.
Collaterally, I feel like the extent to which changing progressive attitudes on enacting and enforcing gun control laws over the past decade (particularly when also combined with other criminal justice reform) has played a role in empowering a resurgence of white supremacism is severely underexplored.
Also police abolition. Progressives split between people who believe that is crazy and people who support this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html
Are there any progressives in Congress or a prominent coalition of progressives in state legislatures or major local city governments that still advocate for fully abolishing the police?
My guess is no. And I think it's important to recognize that the progressive movement, while still probably far to your left on police reform , does not believe in the more extreme stances that came out post 2020.
You underestimate my desire for police reform. I want to abolish police unions, abolish qualified immunity, throw police who are guilty of crimes in prison, and blacklist cops who are fired because of abusive conduct.
And yes, most Democratic politicians have not embraced the police abolition movement. But the media, both Fox News and mainstream, don't amplify those politicians. The media amplifies the police abolitionists, making them appear powerful.
Interesting. Thanks for clarifying!
Even the reasonable things you want can be problematical if badly implemented. I wonder if people know what qualified immunity is. You're going to say that a DMV clerk can't be sued for screwing up your license renewal, but that a police officer should be exposed to financial ruin every time they arrest someone who can get a lawyer? Especially, if they have no union to back them up? This is a recipe for some very ineffective policing. Like it or not, most of these issues are not policy issues but management issues. You have got to diagnose the problems, and put in place the incentives to get people to do the right things and to not do the wrong things. This is a long job, but it's the only way to improve things.
I'll clarify: I don't believe any government employee should have blanket qualified immunity like they do under current Supreme Court doctrine (Which incorrect anyway. That the Supreme Court hasn't reversed its error is a travesty). If Congress wants to make some small, specific immunity carve-outs for certain classes of government employees or certain actions, fine. But the presumption should be that people have rights, and that if government employees violate those rights they should be liable for damages. People shouldn't have to prove they have rights that can be violated.
*pretends* not to believe, now that they realize how politically toxic their (terrible) 2020-era stances are.
Eh. Given how-much Internet rhetoric is in-group signaling, I don't really think it's possible for large-scale movements to successfully pretend anything these days. *Someone* will always want to scream the secrets aloud for those sweet, sweet Twitter hearts.
That's right. I think what actually happens, especially on the west coast, is marginal revenue gets used by politicians for lots of non-profit orgs that have high variance in results for urban quality of life, compared to policing.
Again, I think it's just much more important to look at the actions of the Democrats in Congress/in state legislatures around the country, rather than the sorts of people featured on LibsofTikTok videos.
Hey, you are back! We got worried as it looked like your Substack account got nuked earlier this week.
Welcome back!
Well, I hope things are better and it’s good to have you back!
I'm a Democrat, and I want to take away your guns.
Might be a loser politically, but much catchier than "I'm a Democrat and I want you to register your ammo and pay an insurance premium that will compensate victims in the event you ammo is stolen and used in the commission of a crime."
How about, "I'm a Democrat, and I'll make sure we catch the person who broke into your car/house,"?
Because it seems like nobody believes that. If theft was successfully prosecuted, stolen weapons would be reduced.
Calling something both common sense and brilliant would seem like a contradiction. But it is not. And this piece from Matt is both common sense and brilliant.
I particularly liked: "In Clinton’s account, none of Trump’s supporters are high-income people who want tax cuts. None of them are managers at Sunbelt automobile plants who don’t like Democrats’ pro-union stands. None of them are private school parents who like the idea of school vouchers because they will benefit financially. None of them own a restaurant in a community that has benefitted from fracking and worry that Democratic environmentalism will be bad for their business."
I miss the days when we saw political opposition as being wrong, not evil. I hope they come back, though that will probably only happen once Trump leaves the stage.
Totally agree, though I might speculate Clinton knew what she was doing but it backfired. There ARE Deplorables in the Trump camp! For me, being in the same team with those people is unimaginable, so it motivated me to vote for Clinton vs Trump. I really want those people kept down.
But, I was probably a Clinton voter all along (heck, Jill Stein got more votes than Trump in my part of Brooklyn). Out there in the swing states, they are less offended by the deplorables and more accepting of them in the coalition.
Wasn't there some quote like "What if I want corporate tax cuts, but the only people willing to help me get them are kinda racist?" For ME, you always vote against the racists! Keep them out of power! But America as a whole turns out to have more moral flexibility.
Around 2016, liberals came to see racism as preeminent among all types of evil. A lot of other people didn’t; they continued seeing it as one among many types of evil.
If Hillary Clinton were guilty of everything she’s ever been accused of, including the stray impossible-to-pull-off murder, would you vote for Ted Cruz against her in a head to head matchup? What’s worse, Hillary having gotten away with a few murders and then making it to the White House, or every woman in the country losing access to abortion (among other policy outcomes).
I think there's a broader piece to be written that the obsession with racism (which, to be clear, is very different than opposing racism) hurts Democrats a lot. Basically Democrats and their lefty friends in the commentariat can't see anything that in any way involves a person of color through any other lens than racism, and also are so afraid of accusations of racism that it limits their freedom of action. And those are bad dynamics for a political party and movement that still needs working class white support.
Great comment. A month or 2 ago, there was a CNN reporter on Bill Maher's show. This was just after Norman Lear had passed and so Lear was the topic of conversation. The CNN reporter, a black women, said, and I kid you not, there are more Archie Bunkers in contemporary America than when All in the Family was airing.....an incredible statement....incredibly wrong.
It’s a bad dynamic for people who want to solve the actual problems of non-white people. It’s impossible to engage in real brainstorming and problem solving when you’re so afraid of your own shadow that you can’t say even marginally difficult things.
Matt *has* written that piece: https://www.slowboring.com/p/english-kalla. (See also https://www.slowboring.com/p/race-blind-policies-racial-equity, in which old intern Marc said much the same thing.)
"Around 2016, liberals came to see racism as preeminent among all types of evil. A lot of other people didn’t; they continued seeing it as one among many types of evil."
I think that statement is correct, but incomplete without noting that around 2016 it also became widely accepted amongst liberals that "racism" has a dramatically broader definition than what it historically meant while a lot of other people kept using it in the "traditional" sense.
Yep, most conservatives believe that liberals too often use racism as code for "opposes a policy I like"
The comparison I like to use is Andrew Cuomo. He's a pariah now, and rightfully so, but let's say that somehow he mounts a political comeback (e.g.- imagine he was the only candidate to mount a primary challenge to Biden because his ego convinced him that people were clamoring for his return, and then Biden dies during the primaries and Cuomo now becomes the only viable candidate who can step in) and was the Dem nominee in 2024. Would all these self-righteous "I can't support someone whose morals I disagree with" voters really all stay home or vote 3rd party candidate if they knew that would mean Trump would get re-elected? Of course not.
It's easy to take the high road when it's the road that takes you where you want to go anyways. It's a lot harder when taking the high road means that you end up at a destination that horrifies you.
If all Trump did was sexually assault a bunch of women, well, I'd use it against him because that's politics[1] but I'd understand people who just want tax cuts voting for him. It's really more the corruption and the shady business dealings and the sense Trump views the office of president as a way to benefit himself. I could vote for a rapist, but I don't want to vote for someone who might genuinely sell out the US's interests to another nation.
[1] Waves at Brett Kavanaugh.
"It's really more the corruption and the shady business dealings"
I can tell that the vast majority of Trump voters feel the exact same way about Biden
Someone else pointed out that you really can't discuss the way people feel about these candidates without discussing the balkanized media environments. I had a smart law school buddy who is a conservative media junky who posted earlier this year that the Hunter Biden situation was going to be literally the greatest scandal in American history, dwarfing Watergate. His basis for the claim was clearly a reliance on what I would describe as conspiracy focused conservative writings, but he genuinely believed them.
My personal take is that the "pick-your-own-narrative" nature of media means that we'll never again be able to resolve the deep fissures within the electorate. It's never going to go back to the old "trusted" media source formula, so we will forever be in a situation where huge swaths of the country will view the other side as monstrous because of what they're told by their chosen platforms.
I'm not sure I would say preeminent exactly... But the thing is, if you live life as a modern white liberal professional in a coastal city, working and socializing with college grads, then real "old-timey" racism is something you might never see. It is shocking and backward and unimaginable. It's only something from movies & TV, and only the villains. It's totally 100% taboo.
It's like the SNL skit right after the election with Dave Chappelle & Chris Rock, where the white folks are shocked to discover America might still be racist. OK, outside the liberal bubble, there were apparently a lot of people who knew that, and they didn't find it disqualifying to be on the same team as the racists.
(Also as MY has mentioned before, this does lead to a problem on the Left where people try to define other pet issues as racism to tap into this same energy. That's also bad, but I'd say less bad than actual racism.)
Ok but there are deplorable in the left camp too, that’s kind of the definition of having a big tent!
eh, there's no real racist energy in the Democratic party these days, at least not at the national level. There definitely used to be, true!
Many Jewish people would probably disagree with your statement.
I don't think any of the pro-palestine protestors that espoused anti-Jewish rhetoric would necessarily identify with the Democratic Party.
The demographic groups exhibiting the most antisemitism are conservative nonwhites, many of whom are partisan Democrats!
I don’t think they’re hanging out in the GOP.
I would have thought that too. But I went to a rally on Saturday that was advertised as being in support of the Ceasefire and protecting Raffa. The folks holding the mic was leading mostly "River to Sea" and "Globalize the Intifada."
There were a lot of folks there who identify as communists or anarchists etc who may not vote Dem or not vote at all. I was offered three different communist newspapers while I was there and there were full on USSR flags in the crowd. But there were also lot of fairly normie looking folks who probably came to support the cease fire (including kids from my kid's Amnesty International Club) who were chanting back everything that was said.
I don't think most of those people really want to wipe Israel off the map or have global terrorism against Jews but they were comfortable with the language in a way that shocked me. (They were also chanting back thing in Arabic that I could fully make out and that there is no way most of them knew what it meant.) The group think was real and I do think that some progressive Dems have bought into ahistorical Manichaean view of this conflict that borders on and sometimes crosses into antisemitism.
I still think antisemitism is a larger problem on the Right - no one was doing hitler salutes. But it worries me a great deal. I also feel a more compelled to say something about the Left leaning stuff and try to push back against it that the Right wing stuff for the same reason that I have historically spoken out more about Israel's human rights violations than Hamas's crimes - I don't think Hamas or Right-wing bigots given two fucks what I think. I think the would both be perfectly happy with me thinking badly of them and might get off on it. I hope that a democratic nation with a public commitment to human rights and my fellow progressives might.
I'm in the NY area, so there's such a substantial Jewish population I think nothing of it... Is it different elsewhere?
Oh, or do you mean the Israel stuff lately? I mean sure, f** Netanyahu obviously. But most of the Jewish people I know have been frustrated with him and Israeli politics for a long time.
Not to get a hostile tangent going, but being opposed to certain Israeli state actions is NOT antisemitism. It amazes me that this conflation has been allowed to get any traction.
Perhaps you were unaware: Netanyahu isn’t running the war, or really anything else in Israel.
I mean, it kinda depends on how much sway the racists are going to have.
The party that's more against immigration is probably the party that's going to get more racist votes. But maybe they want to cut immigration levels to 75% of what the other party wants and 75% of what I want. But they do ten other things I want(I actually support corporate tax cuts even as I'm ok with raising my income taxes).
However, once Trump was actively courting them _that_ starts to be a different story - they're clearly going to have too much power.
right, and I felt any form of legitimizing them was giving them too much power.
Anyone with any power should say "racists are bad and gross", to help ensure the future has fewer racists.
The problem is that the definition of "racist" has changed quite dramatically over the years, and doesn't have an agreed-upon definition anymore.
Racism is also used as a binary. You are either one of those deplorable racists, or you are an anti-racist crusader fighting the good fight. In reality, almost everyone has some shades of racism and prejudice whether they admit it to themselves or not.
I hear you on this one. When I use the word I'm using it in the late 20th century traditional way. Actual bigots. Charlottesville marchers, for example.
I'm not interested in weakening the word by giving it some abstract broader concept.
It never really did. People who were pro-segregation would deny being racist and insist they were in favour of separate but equal.
(to be clear: for the definition to be agreed, racists have to say "I am a racist")
"For ME, you always vote against the racists! [...] But America as a whole turns out to have more moral flexibility.." Or perhaps rather than being more "morally flexible" than you just (correctly in my eyes) don't see racism as the unique or even primary moral issue of our time?
Isn't that the same as moral flexibility?
I feel like I'm being reasonable, versus some people who say "you have to be racist to vote for Trump." I don't think that's true - I think as you say, all you have to do is give it a lower priority, even if you might still think it is bad.
No. It's not the same. There's a difference between cowing on moral issues to get a couple more bucks in your pocket and seeing the broad range of moral issues and prioritizing different ones over racism.
I dunno, not to dwell on this thread, but I agree it doesn't have to be about "bucks in your pocket."
Maybe you hated abortion, hated racism less, voted for Trump, and you stand by your decision because it worked out for you when Dobbs came down.
That shows moral flexibility around racism. Like if you aren't full zero tolerance, you are showing some flexibility, by definition.
To say it more clearly, my gripe isn't with you saying voting against the side with more racists is a top priority for you, but I take issue with the idea that someone who, say, will for example never vote for the pro abortion legality candidate is somehow more "morally flexible" (which I don't read as a neutral observation). They may have different moral beliefs and priorities but the issue isn't the "moral flexibility" and I think it's indicative of the problem to suggest it is.
I mean is your claim you would never vote for anyone who has any moral disagreements with you whatsoever?
I think the better analogy is you want border security for non racist reasons and yep there's also some people that want border security for racists reasons.
But does that mean you have to give up your policy position and vote for the open borders candidate?
Quite clearly the answer is no
I always thought Clinton's big mistake was saying *half* of Trump voters were deplorables.
The media loves to jump all over things that are stated with false precision and somehow putting a number on a thing transforms what would otherwise be an anodyne statement.
Original: "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
And change it to: "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put many of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
I may be wrong here but I get the feeling that the latter would have been far less impactful.
It also harkened back amazingly to Romney’s 47% comments
I agree that this your wrong/evil wish isn't going to happen under Trump. The problem being that *enthusiastic* Trump supporters are, essentially, assholes.
I didn't think this about previous Republican presidents or their followers. I've always prided myself on being a "both sides have good points - it's all rational perception differences and reasonable tradeoffs!" Trump has been a real kick in the pants for people like me.
Yeah— even before Trump, conservatives were, on average, more likely to be bad people than liberals (significantly lower honesty-humility HEXACO factor scores even back in 2010), and it’s gotten worse since then. Even a guy like Richard Hanania, whose issue positions are very right-wing, argues that on average, liberals are more personally moral and try harder to avoid hypocrisy.
There definitely are conservatives who are decent people, but at the population level, they actually are worse.
Liberals identifying morality with HEXACO factor scores rather than things like charitable giving and church attendance is a big part of why the deplorables comment was such a disaster for Clinton.
If you strip out contributions to a church that you currently attend— ie: payment to maintain a service that directly benefits you, which is only “charitable” by technicality— Republicans are actually less charitable.
And again, the liberal idea that giving money to your church "is only 'charitable' by technicality" is a big part of why the deplorables comment was such a disaster for Clinton. For many many Americans politically left center and right committing time and money to their communities and churches is a big part of their identity and having Hillary Clinton (not particularly famous for her morality) dismiss anyone who doesn't completely buy into left wing social orthodoxy as "deplorable" while the vast majority of dem party elites snicker (not nearly as secretly as they seem to think) at churchgoers was incredibly damaging to folks' ability to stomach voting for her.
> And again, the liberal idea that giving money to your church "is only 'charitable' by technicality"
How is it not? You aren't actually defending your argument here, you're just contradicting.
The enthusiastic Trump supporters she was talking about are not big church attenders or charity givers. They’re young men with frog avatars.
That's precisely my point though. If anybody in the country actually believed that Clinton (and high profile Democrats broadly) had respect for people who didn't completely buy into Democrat party social orthodoxy of the time (which had just swung way left, as this piece notes), people would have been a lot more willing to buy she was talking about stupid Pepe bros
Democratic, please
I'm not saying that HEXACO and generally all the other indicators showing one side of the political spectrum is better than the other are completely worthless, but they remind me a lot of people trying to use science to rationalize racism.
Someone create a metric that says that their preferred group is the worst, and I might find it more credible.
HEXACO is just a personality psychology measurement derived from factor analysis; some other psychologists (who didn’t create the scale) researched its relationship with political values later, and it’s worth noting that they also found positive associations between conservatism and a factor that most people agree is a good trait (conscientiousness).
The critique that you’re raising is more valid when applied to some things like the F-scale for right-wing authoritarianism (a genuinely bad piece of social science.)
I'm pretty firmly in the camp that most of it is pseudoscience. Its still useful at times to provide language to describe and discuss things, but I think its almost entirely correlation graphing that advances minimal understanding of causation.
Would also add— skin color is a basically cosmetic hereditary trait; political ideology is a set of beliefs and preferences about how the state should act. There’s no prima facia reason to think that the former has a relationship with cognitive traits, while it would be really weird if the latter didn’t.
Probably really depends on how you define morality.
Everyone is the hero in their own story. If you oppose abortion you are opposing baby killing. If you are for it you are for women's rights
If you actually want to get a lot of squishy middle voters you say something like Bill Clinton "Safe, Legal & Rare" and stop impugning the morality of your opponents
I agree that politicians should be strategic/tactical about their messaging and that the “basket of deplorables” comment was an unforced error.
I think it was trying to get a bunch of Trump supporters to look at the other Trump supporters and say "how the hell did we end up in bed with this lot?", but what it did was get the non-deplorable Trump supporters to think Hillary had attacked them for being deplorables.
I think they were trying to do something reasonable, but they did it in a ham-fisted way and it backfired. The problem is that they didn't realise how easily it could backfire (which is one error) and therefore didn't put nearly enough effort into thinking through how to address that and, indeed, whether to say something like that at all.
But I think they _were_ being strategic about the messaging, they just messed it up.
Definitely possible. It was just… really bad communication for an electoral politician.
To a first approximation, all enthusiastic supporters of _any_ politician are assholes. There are certainly exceptions. It was possible to be an enthusiastic supporter of Obama somehow without being an asshole, but apparently impossible to do that for either Clinton. _Enthusiasm_ about politicians is honestly a good part of the problem.
this doesn't seem right - supporting a politician seems fine, as long as you support them because you think they're going to improve the world (and not because you want them to harm your supposed opponents, which is what I think fires up Trump's base)
Supporting a politician is fine-ish, if you mean something like "I support most of her positions and hope she does well at getting elected and implementing them". Visible enthusiasm for a politician is usually somewhat revolting, and makes me downgrade my opinion of the enthusiast greatly. It's does nothing but inflame polarization and substitute for thought.
Do you not think Trump's base thinks you support his opponents because you want to harm them?
The only reason they *might* is because Trump tells them they do. Said opponents don't say that.
I do think they think that, and that they're broadly, wrong.
I also think a lot of progressives and conservatives have always thought that the other side was primarily motivated by desire to harm them.
What I'm saying is, I've always thought this was paranoid and juvenile, and have argued against that framework on both sides. Trump has made that argument a lot harder, because I believe his base actually is motivated in large part by hatred.
Maybe I've always been wrong, and it's always been hatred all the way down. Or maybe I'm wrong now, and Trump's base wants what's best for me - a coastal, city guy - they just disagree on how to do it. But I think I'm right! That Trump's following really is more animated by a desire to, let's say, drink liberal tears, than their predecessors in the Republican party.
Well I think you've moved the goal posts quite a bit. There is very possibly a difference between what would "improve the world," which you originally said should be everyone's goal and what would be "best for you - a coastal, city guy." the standard you're now holding trump voters to. I am not denying that the aims of your political opponents may genuinely be at odds with your interests, but that doesn't mean their desire to "harm you" is what "fires them up".
Gun control advocates, for example, tend to have aims at odds with the interests of safe, responsible, law abiding hobbyist gun owners, but I don't think it would be fair to say that what fires them up is a desire to harm you.
Is the Trump crowd acting in a way that is likely to redound to the benefit of asylum seekers? No, of course not. But I think you'd have to be pretty politically insulated to think that their primary motivation is to harm genuine asylum seekers rather than to limit other effects of immigration (which you could very reasonably argue they have done a poor job scaling)
I miss those days too. A lot. To consider people with different views as “only” wrong and not morally bankrupt, though, it’s helpful to actually know, and preferably even like, people who hold those views. Clinton’s “deplorable” framing, and the lingering interpretation of the election results on the left, suggest a level of denial/out-of-touchness that will be really hard to overcome.
I can still recall how strongly people pushed back against me after 2016 for trying to get them to engage with WHY anyone could have voted for Trump. My intent at the time was premised on the fact that the election was incredibly close, so if we could understand where just 1% of the voters were coming from and address their concerns then it could be enough to win elections, but a large number of my friends on the left were entirely dismissive and refused to consider that anyone who voted for Trump could have had a good-faith (if, IMHO, misguided) reason for voting for him. They instead just wanted to lump them all together as deplorables and dismiss as monsters, which I thought (and continue to think) was a) inaccurate, and b) strategically short-sighted.
I agree, and in my experience (I was living in NYC and working in the public sector), most efforts to “understand” Trump voters struck me at the time as incredibly condescending. Silly example but NPR station WNYC started a segment along these lines called “Flyover Country.” That’s when I stopped listening to even the few remaining shows I liked and found that I could live perfectly well with no NPR!
“…it’s helpful to actually know, and preferably even like, people who hold those views”
The part of Clinton’s statement that matters more to me than calling tens of millions of American voters “deplorable” was that she said they were “irredeemable.”
Ugh I had forgotten about that. What kind of person believes that they have the capacity to evaluate the redeemability of those they have (single handedly) found to be unacceptable?
You couldn’t make this stuff up….
Not to be the both sides guy, but I think her comments were a lot more measured and generous to the other side than say...
"In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream""
I just looked it up again, her comments really aren't that bad for a cherry-picked, "worst thing this politician has ever said" thing. The spirit of this was generosity and empathy to Trump's voters. The only problem here is the word "half", which she admits is "grossly generalistic." If Trump said this it would be among the most mature and generous statements he's ever made about his political opponents.
***
"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
"grossly generalistic"
No, it's absurd.
At least let's just say that some politicians are "evil" for holding positions X,Y Z and leave the voters out of it. I'm not saying that many voters do not share the "evil" positions, but if you want to persuade one, it's better to criticize the politician, not the voter.
And no, Trump is the perfect target for "politician bad, voters good" message.
The hidden force on that isn't the Groups, but polarization, and that is much harder to deal with.
E.g., all the stories of people who no longer date people who disagree with their politics, have fights with their relatives on Thanksgiving, etc. It's normie liberals and normie conservatives who now see the voters on the other side as evil, and politicians or pundits who say they aren't isn't going to change that.
"all the stories of people who no longer date people who disagree with their politics, have fights with their relatives on Thanksgiving"
Obligatory reminder that when NORC polled about this back in 2018, most people said they never actually fought about politics on Thanksgiving.
To be fair, all the stories about cross-party dating acceptability post-date the poll, so it's possible we've gotten more argumentative to match. But I think the Thanksgiving stuff is a myth in the way that dating-one's-politics is not.
I 100% have friend who stopped spending holidays with their family post-Trump. Mostly because so many of their relatives now felt free to say racist things and wouldn't stop. I don't know how common it is but it happens.
I also have always been a dating one's politics gal myself. I consider my politics to be a pretty good map to my values and don't want to date someone who doesn't share them. I have had guys argue me on that. That I can't say that I won't date someone who disagrees with me on political issues. BS. I think more women have historically done this then men.
I don’t want to come down too hard on either you or Matt’s piece but I think it’s probably worth noting that most of these examples (with the possible partial exception of private school parents) are people who are signficantly higher in an employment hierarchy than a larger (potentially much larger) number of employees or subordinates. Their importance genuinely is outsized both due to contributions and media prominence, general authority, and higher propensity to vote, but at the same time you can’t win an election with only managers high income earners any more than it makes sense to fight a war only with commissioned officers and no enlisted personnel.
Well, yeah, the deplorables and the economically dissafected were already covered, so I think the missing segment would by definition be better off. The bigger point is that the Democrats have sort of caricatured Trump voters in a way that doesn't lend itself to persuading many of them to vote differently.
"Deplorable, and proud of it!" should have been foreseeable after the 1990s had "Charter member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy".
I genuinely don't know how to balance this with the basic primal fear t hat Trumpy politics activates. Like I'm not even that worried about say passing a law that does something but that we'll return to the conditions of some people are beneath the protection of law, or only have them under certain conditions.
Like I remember not loving Hilary, and thinking she was too left on economics and watching the 2016 convention and being struck with a kind of fear I can't really remember anything else like it in politics. Even when like politicians were more likely to pass laws to hurt people like me they didn't seem as willing to personally assault people like me. Like I wouldn't have felt personally threatened by a President Romney, or McCain and even Bush for all his use of gayness as a wedge I didn't feel like it was going to unleash anger and hatred the way that Trump did.
Did Trump ever display any anti-gay tendencies?
Are you kidding me he's like the avatar of a violent mob attacking non-conformity. Like he could have the queerest positions possible and the normalization of this style would be a threat to any minority group protected mostly by elite consensus.
Like Bush era the government might pass some laws against gay marriage but social norms towards interpersonal kindness seems better than better laws and worse people.
So no examples, then?
I don't think a "basic primal fear" is going to be particularly dependent on evidentiary anecdotes.
Folks who are marginalized and are potential targets for violence tend to have their radar up for trouble. Their intuition is worth listening too. I don't know many Queer people who didn't fear the way Trump was changing our culture.
Or, perhaps, particularly true.
I genuinely don’t know what you want. Trump’s personality was a disaster taking a more of being that was driven out of polite discourse for decades and bringing it back.
The lack of bipartisan suppression of these type of people is a greater threat than almost any law you could draft aside from astonishingly cruel ones. It was far worse than any of the stuff Karl Rove was doing.
Like it went from these people
are a few knuckledraggers who no one would ever hear from again to a constant barrage of state and local laws trying to make sure weirds aren’t safe.
Whether or not he "displayed any anti-gay tendencies" narrowly construed, he was certainly willing to encourage physically assaulting political opponents in a way major party candidates have not. He led chants of "lock her up". He told attendies at rallies, "hey, punch that gy, I'll pay your bail", etc.
Sure, he’s, at best, a boor, but from what I’ve heard he doesn’t seem to be a homophobic boor.
If you count Transpeople in the LGBTQ Queer community he was bad on policy. But style matters too.
A colleague outside my office was watching Trump's inauguration. I'm pretty sure she wasn't a Trump fan, but she was someone who kept up on current events.
I excused myself and went out to get a sandwich. On my return, Trump was orating, or whatever you call that thing he does. Weird and often kinda effeminate hand gestures. And standing there in his Brioni suit and overcoat. Overcompensating long red tie. The weird hair.
"Would it have killed him," I asked my colleague, "to button his suit jacket for this one occasion?"
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3e247a5c42b4a39cfc1829172553d4c9e31e19aa/0_119_3136_1882/master/3136.jpg?width=1200&height=900&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&s=3460ac7d17326a4b6492a6beb4039bd6
Is Trump's spite and greed merely a perception problem about subjective morality, or an actual source of suffering, destruction, and evil?
Do you recall the time before Trump when there was a lot of people claiming both Obama and Bush were evil or the devil incarnate?
I think you're making a fairly unfounded rhetorical point, and I'm not sure why.
I don't know about politically, but Trump has sexually assaulted at least Jean Carroll, has refused to pay/ screwed over contractors/tradespeople who worked with him.
On any ethical scale I care to use, he's acted evilly in his personal/business life.
I have no issues with describing Trump as evil. My comment, and my interpretation of Matt's quoted section, is more about the opposition's voters.
Strange, because you alone seem to be introducing the word evil, and I do long remember that sort of discourse about voters who support pro-choice policies.
Your interpretation still seems to be driving to an unfounded point.
"I do long remember that sort of discourse about voters who support pro-choice policies."
Yes, but was it mainstream? …among Democrats?
(I'm not trying to play "no true Scotsman" here. But it's possible to (1) recognize that a particular action is bad, (2) recognize some people will do it anyways, (3) observe other people doing it, and yet (4) still (ahem) deplore when it becomes common among your (para)social group.)
Man talk to some people with kids in private school about vouchers if u want to hear a full throated embrace of a policy. I’m always like really this whole thing is about your philosophy on the structure of education and nothing to do with u would pay less tuition?
I agree.
I think it won't be that anyone comes back after he leaves. Also- for myself - trying to imagine that I would vote for the common sense part of republican economic interests, but as part of the deal had to vote for someone whose entrance onto the political scene was based on a racist conspiracy theory. Economic interests, but without the racism? No, that's not possible. They're a package, (an evil package), and I couldn't compartmentalize in that instance.
Villifying the other team's voters is fairly new for mainstream Democrats, but it has a history that goes back before Trump for conservatives.
We are in the era of post material politics. It’s the same income effect that is causing people to take out mortgages for $100k trucks with short beds.
It all depends on what you're trying to explain. If the question is "why did Republicans receive slightly but only slightly more votes in 2016" then "they moderated on entitlements but nominated an unappealing candidate" is a good explanation.
But people are fundamentally trying to explain something different, which is "why did anyone at all vote for Donald Trump, given his manifest unfitness". And there you need different kinds of explanations, like "people wanted to burn the system down" or "people didn't care about his explicit racism because they didn't like the Waters of the US rule".
"why did anyone at all vote for Donald Trump, given his manifest unfitness"
Excellent point. Back in 2014, Joseph Heath (who now has a Substack!) asked and answered a similar question about Rob Ford, the crack-smoking mayor of Toronto. https://induecourse.utoronto.ca/thoughts-on-rob-ford-vol-3/
"Many people in Toronto have been shaking their heads this past year and saying to themselves 'What have we done to deserve this?' And looking at Ford’s stubbornly high popular approval ratings, many have also been wondering – as my wife put it – 'What the fuck is wrong with people in this city?'"
He pointed out that Ford was an example of a demagogue, identified by Plato and Aristotle as a serious problem for democracy.
"Just to establish that there is nothing special or unprecedented about Ford, consider this 1838 profile of 'the demagogue,' taken from James Fenimore Cooper’s essay on the subject. Cooper described demagogues as possessing four qualities:
"(1) They fashion themselves as a man or woman of the common people, as opposed to the elites;
"(2) their politics depends on a powerful, visceral connection with the people that dramatically transcends ordinary political popularity;
"(3) they manipulate this connection, and the raging popularity it affords, for their own benefit and ambition; and
"(4) they threaten or outright break established rules of conduct, institutions and even the law."
Sounds familiar, right?
Heath points out that as voters, we're accustomed to political parties filtering out demagogues and other unsuitable candidates. In Ford's case, there were no political parties in Toronto municipal politics to do this. In Trump's case, the Republican Party was too weak to stop him - the "hollow parties" argument.
"So the people who wind up getting put forward to the electorate, by political parties, do not have all that much in common with ordinary citizens. They are more like contestants on Jeopardy – the product of a huge pre-screening process, which goes on behind the scenes. We tend to take it for granted, though. As a result, much of the electorate has become accustomed to exercising the vote irresponsibly. They look at the ballot and assume that all the major candidates are more-or-less capable of doing the job, and that the differences between them are minor ones of political ideology."
> As a result, much of the electorate has become accustomed to exercising the vote irresponsibly. They look at the ballot and assume that all the major candidates are more-or-less capable of doing the job
This is a really good point. Voters are slowly morphing from citizens to pageant judges, mentally insulated from the eventually existential consequences of poor choices.
"Voters are slowly morphing from citizens to pageant judges, mentally insulated from the eventually existential consequences of poor choices."
On the bright side, enough poor choices and we won't be insulated anymore!
…
Wait. Is that a bright side?
I think many people make their voting choices with far less thought and analysis than they apply when buying a sweater.
Much of that Joseph Heath piece is excellent. However, "In any case, it is worth observing that political parties are poised to become much more powerful as time goes by" has not aged well.
(I don't know much about Canadian politics, but the mechanism he suggests for increased party dominance applies equally well to America, where parties certainly have not become more powerful.)
I think there's a pretty wide gap between Canadian and American politics. In Canadian politics we have strong party discipline. It's highly unusual for an elected official to vote differently from the rest of their party.
I'm trying to think of evidence of Canadian parties becoming weaker rather than stronger over the last 10-20 years; nothing really comes to mind. After Andrew Scheer narrowly defeated Maxime Bernier for the leadership of the federal Conservative Party, Bernier left to start his own People's Party, and it hasn't gone anywhere. Perhaps the implosion of the small federal Green Party, where a relatively new Green leader (Annamie Paul) was unable to maintain party unity, would be an example.
On the US side, I'm very interested in reading the new "Hollow Parties" book. Jake Bernstein comments on the importance of email fundraising: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/04/23/republican-fundraising-pulpit/
"Trump has assembled the most extensive small-donor list ever created by a GOP presidential candidate. It’s a significant source of his power. Previous occupants of the Oval Office used the bully pulpit for policy and fundraised on the side. But Trump has merged the two, creating a fundraising pulpit. The ceaseless marketing pleas to aid the president against his evil opponents keeps his voters invested, literally. It enables the campaign to test messages and plan for turnout. Trump’s hold over his army of conservative retirees also permits him to control the GOP to an extent previous presidents only dreamed of. If those further down the food chain want to eat, they must follow Trump’s lead. It behooves Republican officeholders to fall in line. It’s not lost on anyone in the campaign world that Trump can monetize his donor list at will."
In the Canadian political world, you get similar fundraising emails, but they're all run through the parties. There's independent non-partisan regulators that enforce restrictions on how they can be used, like Elections Canada at the federal level, so it's difficult to see how a politician could exploit this kind of list as a source of power independently of the party.
I shouldn’t have laughed at this but I did. Relatedly welcome back.
Trump is the personification of the stereotype of a successful business man. He was a reality TV superstar back when TV still mattered and reality TV was half the content. Considering many people are marginally engaged and often not that smart, I reject that Trump was broadly seen as unfit. He was viewed by low information voters as extremely fit for the role.
This is the correct take.
If you were engaged, you saw Trump as unfit for office. But if you were one of the many low information voters that Trump brought to the GOP, you saw the celebrity businessman everyone kept saying they wanted to run the country like a business.
And he did. Guess what? Turns out the New York real estate business is hideously corrupt and vaguely incompetent. Who knew.
“Don’t care” is wrong, “explicitly like”! The populist anti-immigrant shift is so glaringly obvious globally that the only sensible explanation is “it’s authentically popular, at least among a big minority”
Anti-illegal =/= anti-immigrant.
It does for some people, but not all. Or even most.
And when y'all constantly try to conflate these things, it drives the persuadable people away.
If conservatives don't want liberals conflating this, they should jettson MAGA, because those loons very definitely ARE anti immigrant in general (not just anti "illegal" immigrant). They explicitly want deep cuts to immigration quotas.
I always wonder what the ratio is within this group of people that are satisfied with current legal immigration versus people who want it to be stricter.
I would hope "expand it dramatically" would be the largest category in the One Billion Americans comment section!
I'd hope so too! But most people who complain about illegal immigration don't strike me as those wanting to expand it dramatically.
If we clamped down hard on illegal immigration and spurious asylum claim, I'd personally be fine with doubling the legal immigration limit.
If we allow it to continue as it has been, I'd rather reduce legal immigration rate.
The net allowable immigration level should be set by Congress and adhered to.
Perhaps dumb question: why is ejecting Stanford stats PhDs from the country after graduation a good policy if and only if the rate of asylum claims is above a certain level?
>>why is ejecting Stanford stats PhDs from the country after graduation a good policy if and only<<
Don't be ridiculous. Everybody knows the the poorer our country is, the better able we are to address our problems (including illegal immigration). Plus, China has only benign intentions toward America, so who gives a fuck whether or not we're attempting to maximize our technological expertise?
Because we should have control over the immigration rate.
It would obviously be preferable that we kick out or limit the influx of would-be asylees instead.
I feel like if we really adhered to clamping down, it would require really going after businesses who employ illegal immigrants. That might make for good politics in the short term, but then people would get shock therapy on rising prices due to scarce labor among a populace already scarred by inflation. I can also see pro-business Republicans being gunshy on that despite the pressure to be hardasses on immigration.
It sucks that people struggle to understand tradeoffs.
Even worse, they'll just point to E-Verify, when it is easily circumvented by stolen IDs that are rarely investigated.
(And if they were investigated, they'd be accused of racial profiling)
It's one of the ways that the business side of the GOP basically screws over the rest of the GOP.
There is no way to determine whether an asylum claim is spurious without considering the evidence. Until the evidence has been considered, that person is a legal immigrant into the country they are applying for asylum in.
If you want to change that, then you want to amend the international treaties. Lots of countries want to change something about how the asylum system works - it's massively popular to say that people fleeing from Syria shouldn't have the right to live in any country of their choosing (but they do under treaties that have been incorporated into domestic law in virtually all countries).
Instead of saying "these people don't have these rights", I don't understand why no politician has ever said "look, that's the law, we should change it: loads of countries agree with us on this, we can do this".
That would be ideal.
However, alternatively, we can just do what we want, and to hell with the international treaties.
Asylum seekers are, by international treaty, legal immigrants. Any human being has the right, under international treaty (which is "the supreme law", to quote the Constitution of the United States), to turn up to any signatory country, to be allowed to enter, and to have their claim for refugee status to be speedily determined.
Lots of people in lots of countries are not happy with this legal immigration.
"and to have their claim for refugee status to be speedily determined. Lots of people in lots of countries are not happy with this legal immigration."
Well, here in 'murica, I think a lot of people are unhappy with the fact that this "speedy determination" is being denied to those legal immigrants, and not the immigration itself per se.
“y'all constantly try to conflate these things”
remember “they’re sending rapists”?
In regards to illegals, yes.
Trump’s comments that Judge Curiel couldn’t be fair to him because “he’s Mexican” suggest that he wasn’t strictly observing this illegal/legal distinction. Stephen Miller isn’t a big one for that distinction either.
I would categorize myself as being center-right on immigration in that I want a physical border wall, more border control, faster processes and a quota/an upper limit on all types of immigrants decided on by the voters. But I would never vote for a person like Trump in a million light years, even if I'd agree with him on most issues (which I don't). He's a terrible person on every level, and also a traitor and a grave threat to democracy and the country.
The point being that it's still weird imo that anyone would vote for Trump, "given his manifest unfitness" (to put it mildly)
There is probably a nontrivial population of voters who do not view him as manifestly unfit because they are some combination of uninformed and informed only by right-wing media that rigorously adheres to a narrative that, actually, it is Democrats who are manifestly unfit.
Setting aside the cultists, who are, well, cultists, if you only see Trump through the sanitized frame of the Wall Street Journal or the alternate reality of Fox News, he was actually a really good president who accomplished a lot, but who left office with unfinished business after losing re-election under sketchy circumstances.
I also am not sure "democracy" is the great issue some elites think it is. For many normies, democracy just means their vote for President is counted and all the norms we learn about in civics class or from the political media are esoteric and unimportant.
i don't think 'normies' care about democracy at all, like including the vote-counting part
people care about *liberal freedoms*, e.g. free speech, freedom of religion, etc. but it is possible for these things to coexist with a hybrid regime or even an outright autocracy, and indeed i am sure that in the hypothetical case of democratic backsliding in the U.S. such freedoms will be respected, at least at first
“all the norms we learn about in civics class”
With all the wailing about the fact that Clinton got more votes than Trump and other nonsense like ‘’a voter in Wyoming has more power than a voter in California,’ I think it’s the “elites” who need to repeat civics class.
Also, in the Fox News Cinematic Universe, it is Democrats who are a threat to democracy. Just look at how they are weaponizing the justice department to bring politically motivated charges against Trump because Joe Biden has dementia so this is the only way they can un-democratically install CRT-loving, ultra-woke, probably-not-even-a-real-US-citizen Kamala Harris in office so they can torch the Constitution, confiscate all of our guns, force white people to have abortions and flood the country with the illegal immigrants that helped them rig the 2020 election. WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
Bingo. You can’t talk about anything last 10 years worldwide without talking about bifurcation of media. If you watch Fox for 2 hours on a random Wednesday, it is just a completely different universe.
I’d say there would have to be something pretty big going on for so many people to do that, wouldn’t you?
"People didn't care about his explicit racism" -- tied to immigration policy?
Latinos are as "brown" as Italians. Try calling them "Latinxes" if you really want to see them roll their eyes.
Because people are partisan and will vote for their candidate. On the margin, Trump’s unfitness lost him some votes, but people generally will vote for their team.
That doesn’t get us there—why did they vote to nominate him?
In 2016? Combination of moderating on medicare/social security, willing to bash the Iraq War, anti-immigrant demagoguery and the dominance politics of attacking and humiliating the other candidates (I hate Trump, but I still chuckle at "Little Marco").
All of this didn't even get him a majority of the Republican primary vote! But you don't have to outrun the bear, just the other guy.
I agree, I just think it goes along with what OP was saying: a lot of Trump's appeal was *due* to him being an awful person!
I had the thought this morning after consuming the front page headlines screaming about people being trampled to death in Gaza that a lot of what happened before and during the Trump admin was obscured by his antics. Like, there was a *ton* of news that just didn't get reported because the headlines were always about the chaos and drama of the Trump campaign and later white house. Because Biden's campaign and white house are run completely opposite to that, we barely get any reporting about them and so other news has to fill the void.
I really think this is why Trump supporters are so misinformed about what went on during the Trump years: they blocked out any *bad* news about him, and since that's really all the news there *was*, they just didn't consume nonpartisan news.
My take is that Trump was/is “fun” for a lot of voters. Also a bully/strongman that would “stand up” against the “elites” on “their” behalf. I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said “Trump 2020: Make Liberals Cry Again” that really ticked me off at the time but in retrospect captured the entire zeitgeist.
"Why did anyone vote for Donald Trump, given his manifest unfitness?" because partisanship is the overwhelming driver of voting behavior, not supposed "objective" analysis of things like "fitness". This is one of the strongest findings there is in political science and backed up by almost a century worth of data and analysis.
But why did they nominate him?
Yes; Matt's take here is probably my least favorite of all his takes. I just see no evidence among voters I know that they have ideologies, or even opinions, on most issues. The few who do often can't tell which candidate supports the view they hold. Trump's "moderation" on Social Security may have swayed a slim slice of voters, and made the difference on Election Day, but only because the vote itself was so close that 50K votes could make the difference. When it's that close, anything - VP candidate, a hairstyle, a head cold - can be the difference between win and loss. Issues don't matter very much in elections; tone and repetition do.
To MYs point I wonder how many voters saw the Dems push hard to the left and were worried about that. Similar to now really, had Biden had more leeway and or just chosen to tack more to the center (or perhaps more accurately engaged in less performative theater to appease left causes) it would swing legitimate independents back.
Similarly supporting pro Trump primary candidates might not be wise.
For reason listed in the posts above I find Trump unfit to be president (but to be honest I came to that conclusion when the talk about grabbing females private parts came out), but other people seems to disagree with me. This includes family members who I know are decent human beings doing what they think is best. Giving those folks a more centered choice would probably help.
I think the dems left wanted to use Trumps obvious unfitness to push left and thought that would work. It’s looking like that strategy was bad 2016 and is still at least dangerous in 2024.
There's a funny issue here, that while most politically engaged Democrats will agree that Trump is "manifestly unfit for office", but they won't agree on _why_. Especially in 2016, if you asked 20 Democrats to write down why Trump was unfit for office, 10 would give reasons that applied equally to any other Republican, 5 would claim Trump was openly racist (never true for a definition that doesn't apply to all Republicans), and 5 would gesture in various ways to his personality and their visceral reaction to him. Maybe there's a little bit more consensus post-Jan 6th, but there is no consensus.
And if the question is, "why would anyone vote for Trump, when my friends and I would never imagine it (for what are assumed to be common reasons)?" that's a question that Democrats ought to have been asking of themselves and their bubbles, not Trump voters.
Yes, this is why I thought Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “first white president” column was a good one.
"why did anyone at all vote for Donald Trump, given his manifest unfitness"
I didn't vote for Trump in 2016, but did vote for him in 2020. Plus most of my family did as well (and plan to vote for him in 2024) so I believe I can answer this question.
1. The belief that Hillary Clinton was also manifestly unfit as well (I agree with that). She is corrupt, and her unsecure server was a HUGE problem.
2. Disagreed with the vast majority of Democrat police positions. Abortions, guns, immigration policies, lack of school choice, over regulation, blatant race baiting, hostility to Christians and/or traditional values etc etc
> her unsecure server was a HUGE problem.
Jesus Christ, how can you still believe this? BTW the "unsecure" part is only vaguely accurate. Through the telephone game you have come to believe this, but it's based on second-hand reports that her IT guy hadn't installed the latest security patches. There is no evidence the server was ever compromised.
But more to the point, all the emails were released *anyway*, with what, like a dozen being deemed classified? So your feelings here are based on a) unfounded supposition and b) ex post facto reasoning that has already been debunked. You're basically going "yeah so there was nothing harmful on that server, sure, but what if there *was*???". Stating that as a reason for not liking Clinton is insane, and so I don't believe you.
*Democratic, please
An important factor that’s missing here— Trump’s personal qualities and rhetoric were so repulsive to a certain kind of voter (basically, educated professionals who are also generally interpersonally nice and prosocial) that they perceived him as very extreme and had a hard time assigning significance to his (actually very important) moderation relative to GOP consensus on entitlements and same-sex marriage. To those people, Trump’s victory strongly read as the GOP going crazy and getting rewarded for it, and it both a: led to a need for special explanations of the Trump phenomenon and b: affectively polarized a lot of them into going much further left than they were before.
My dad grew up in a Republican family and was a genuine swing voter for most of his adult life. His favorite politician for most of my youth was our congressional district’s nice guy moderate Republican representative. But Trump just appalled him— and he decided never to vote for Republicans in a federal race again, and gradually drifted left to the point where he was collecting signatures for Mayor Pete in 2020. He wasn’t and isn’t any sort of far-left extremist, but he perceived Clinton as being much more reasonable and moderate than Trump was in 2016.
Clearly a reflection of my media diet - but I thought it was generally accepted Trump was perceived as the more moderate candidate by voters in 2016 and that along with thermostatic shifts against the Democrats were the main drivers of his win. Clinton was busy telling Virginian coal miners to “learn to code” and talking about intersectionality, while trump was promising to bring back manufacturing jobs.
And yet Clinton still won the popular vote... The rules are the rules but it's not like this caused a dominating loss.
Didn’t you see Michigan this week? Biden squeaked by with 85% of the vote and Trump won a landslide with 60% of the primary vote.
Don’t let reality get in the way of disparaging Democrats.
Biden is running functionally unopposed. Biden’s margin in Michigan is likely to be narrow. That 15% is more than enough to make a difference in November.
That 15% will only matter if Trump tries to cozy up to the Muslims in Dearborn (at least enough to keep them away from Biden) -- but then again, I wouldn't put it past Trump to turn against the Jews. (I'm sure Jared could get the Saudis to buy him a ranch somewhere on the West Bank, if he hasn't already set up such a refuge on his own.)
I can see some Muslims sitting home because of Gaza. I think memories of the Muslim ban and the moving of the US embassy in Israel will keep most any of them from voting for Trump ever. Most Jews I know consider Trump to be pro-Israel but antisemetic (with an exception for his son-in-law). Antisemetism is more of a conspiracy theory than a mere social prejudice. It is possible, like Trump, to think that Jews are smart and good with money and therefore useful but also think that they sneaky, unAmerican, and involved in some sort of shady conspiracy to run the media and non-profits for their own agenda. But he clearly hates Muslims more.
Don’t be ugly now.
Who are Biden’s two opponents anyway. Are you counting “undecided” as a candidate?
Crystal lady and pathetic House rep.
Three memories (however accurate) from 2015-2016 stand out for me. One, how utterly bizarre, petty and childish the primaries were (especially the Republican primary). Two, how often I heard Trump talking about sensible and moderate things like ending the carried interest loophole, but read articles in the NYT about how he was a lying scumbag who cheated on his wife with porn stars and refused to release his tax returns. And three, a dry, boring interview with Clinton in which she demonstrated a jaw-dropping grasp of the nuances and details of an astonishingly wide range of policies, but read articles in the NYT about how she was probably a criminal because she used a private email server and that calling Trump supporters a basket of deplorable was the worst thing a politician had ever done. (The only thing I remember about Bernie was how it sounds funny when he says "millionaires and billionaires".)
Which fact about Trump turned out to be more important: that he opposed the carried interest loophole or that he's a huge scumbag? The first one turned out to be not a fact at all, so it's hard to fault the media's emphasis here.
Don't make fun of Bernie's Brooklyn accent! My mom also went to Madison HS, and she was smart as a whip! :-)
This is a really rosy picture of Trump in 2016 that makes him sound like a nice centrist figure... He also said that Mexicans are rapists, waterboarding is great and that John McCain is not a war hero because he got caught.
He did not say “Mexicans are rapists” nor did he say that white supremacists are “good people” Read the whole quotes. I don’t like the man but fair is fair. His actual defects are bad enough.
Really splitting hairs here aren’t we? I was around for 2016-2017; I remember the quotes in full; that is what he said and what he meant.
Well, I looked up the full quotes because they were edited in the press, which as you may recall was openly biased at that time. Accuracy is important. As we have seen it is hard to reach his mistrustful voters even with accurate stuff. Thus, I continue to differ with you in my opinion. However I am sure that holding the view you hold is comforting to you, in assurance of your own righteousness. In this you have a lot of company in the Democratic Party which may well lose in November because of it. Stop getting your panties in a twist about the man’s crudity, and start thinking about how to beat him at the ballot box.
I work for a Democratic polling firm. I’m doing my part. What are you doing to help Biden besides grousing about how poor Donald Trump is being slandered?
> Well, I looked up the full quotes because they were edited in the press, which as you may recall was openly biased at that time
Holy shit, are you really doing that thing lying Trumpers do where you argue he said "their" instead of "they're" and then pretending that it makes any difference in the interpretation.
Trump said, very directly, that the people Mexico was "sending" were, with few exceptions, criminals and rapists. You are a liar, full stop, if you are claiming anything different.
That's right, that's exactly what he said. What he didn't say is "Mexicans are rapists." Those are two different things. The first is crude and nasty (and inaccurate), the second is directly racist.
I think this depended on your issue set.
Trump was definitely seen as more "change", vs Clinton being more continuity, and that's one lens of "moderate"
2016 in one line:
Trump was seen as boorish, Hillary was seen as radical, and voters get more turned off by bad vibes than by bad behavior.
Clinton was busy trying to fend off the NYT "emails" attacks.
I really don’t remember Clinton talking much about intersectionality.
Here you go
https://www.npr.org/2015/12/26/461116160/-memeoftheweek-hillary-clinton-not-quite-an-abuela
This is a bit of a weird post to me. I don’t actually disagree agree per se., but I’m sorry it’s just way to pat and what’s weird is that this take is sort of contradicted by a post Matt had a few months ago. Let me explain.
You can’t explain 2016 without talking about media coverage and you can’t talk about media coverage without acknowledging important part of why coverage was the way it was in 2016; the vast majority of political press and press in general clearly thought there was no chance Trump could win. It explains so much about “her emails” coverage, particular questions that Clinton got in interviews and just tenor of coverage in general. If I’m not mistaken polls showed by Election Day the electorate thought Trump and Hilary were equally corrupt which is insane but clearly only possible because of media coverage.
Where it comes back around to a Matt post is he sort of acknowledged this when he had his post that media is going to put their thumbs on the scale for Trump due to financial incentives. I pushed back a bit at the time but acknowledged that Matt may have based his take on actual conversations with reporters and editors and lo and behold he noted on Twitter a very revealing connection he had with a New York Times editor about 2016 coverage. My point is you don’t write a post like that without implicitly acknowledging the role media played. And I actually think Matt turned out to be right; hence the over the top coverage of Biden’s age and hence insane NYTimes headlines where Biden’s bigger victory in Michigan is a worry for Biden and Trump’s narrow victory is a show of his strength*. So to not even bring it up in this post is kind of a why I said this is a weird post at the top.
* this is the headline that finally pushed me to say that maybe it isn’t media, but editors who very much want Trump to win to increase the number of readers and viewers. Which also speaks to a blind spot about reporters and whether too many at the Times are too liberal (or at other outlets). As Murdoch realized years ago, your headlines and story placement are much more important than the actual articles. Sort of doesn’t matter if the body of an article has a leftist slant if the headline doesn’t have that same slant.
Dirty little secret: the swing state voters who put Trump over the top had already decided to vote for him and didn't read the NYT email coverage.
A lot of liberal Times readers confuse "I don't want to read this in my paper" with "swinging the election".
Dirty little secret; NYT still has tremendous second order power. Whether people directly read the New York Times or not, they read other newspapers, watch other news programs or read other Facebook posts that are directly influenced by what the Times puts out.
Don't believe me? For a bigger deep dive on this issue. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/fake-news-media-election-trump.php
The biggest influence on the media is the Associated Press and other wire services, 1000 times more influential than the Times because they produce the copy and background run in thousands of outlets, and liberal press critics NEVER talk about wire services.
Sorry, the NYT narrative is BS. Liberals are just obsessed with the Times because liberals read it.
"Blinks rapidly" wut? You're telling me AP "just the facts" news has more impact than Times or Fox for that matter? This is nuts. AP does not determine news placement, headlines, which stories get emphasized and which ones don't. They provide the nuts and bolts of stories.
This is like arguing the makers of televisions sets and movie theater chains have more impact on culture than the actual shows and movies Hollywood puts out.
Yep I am. Literally 60% or more of voters never read a NYT story during the entire election year. But everyone who reads any newspaper, follows any Facebook news feed, or watches any TV news sees wire service content.
It's shocking how many people on the Left know absolutely nothing about the media business they constantly criticize. The NYT is an elite thing that has nothing to do with Rust Belt swing voters.
And its amazing to me that people can't realize that NYT has a reach well beyond it's actual readership and actual subscriptions given it's impact on what gets into other news stories.
Ever seen the actual viewership numbers for Fox News? The actual numbers for their primetime lineup is at most 5 million people. And usually less 3 million. And yet if you were to argue that Fox has no impact on general discourse, politics and news cycle because only a few million people a night watch any one show you would be correctly admonished for being willfully naïve.
The article is about whether "fake" news was a deciding factor in the election. But keep reading as the article gets into a deep dive about specifically New York Times coverage.
And yes, the letter and most important subsequent coverage almost certainly did swing the election. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/
538 is saying it knows what caused this one fluctuation when there were 30 fluctuations in the polls in 2016 and it can't explain the other 29.
Tracking polls are BS. Voters aren't changing their minds back and forth and in any event there's no basis to conclude RUST BELT SWING VOTERS were who shifted in any poll even if there was a shift.
The Comey narrative is Copium.
Yes I'm quite aware of this. I'm very aware that lots of fluctuations in polls are non-response bias. In fact I've been noting this recently noting this in polling with the specific data that the people Trump is most overperforming with compared to 2020 are the groups also most likely to say they aren't paying attention to the election right now. I'm also aware that when in the past candidates got post nomination bounces it was likely due to supporters being fired up and more likely to answer the phone for a week. If you're argument that in general polls can fluctuate for all sorts of reasons that don't actually reflect voting preference but randomness than yes of course I know that.
You know who taught me that? Nate Silver, the person who wrote this article stating the Comey letter likely swayed the election. In other words someone who has some standing to note whether a swing in polls is randomness or reflects some actual shift; whether it was swaying opinion or convincing a soft supporter to stay home.
If you're argument is that lots of different factors can impact an election over the course of a year, yeah no duh. There's a reason there is going to be lots of focus on inflation, unemployment and inflation and GDP growth over the next 6 months in large part because many people understand these factors are historically pretty impactful on elections.
Here's the equivalent of you're arguing. If I say, 49ers would have very likely would have won the Super Bowl if they had converted a 3rd and 4 late 4th quarter in Chiefs territory and you come back and say "no that didn't matter. There were all sorts of plays that happened before that if they had gone differently would have changed the outcome". I mean sure strictly speaking true for literally any game, but that's basically argument for saying no single play ever makes the difference for the outcome of any game which is just manifestly untrue.
Agree that The Times isn't the real cause here, it's more a symptom. The argument that Comey's the real guy to blame is pretty strong: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/
> the electorate thought Trump and Hilary were equally corrupt which is insane but clearly only possible because of media coverage
People have thought the Clintons were corrupt for decades. Feel free to argue with them, but this was not invented by coverage of bad email handling.
Fair...to a point. But I think there is a very key difference between "Clintons are shady maybe corrupt" and "Clinton is as corrupt as Trump". The foundation for the latter to take hold in public consciousness isn't possible without Whitewater, Bill's "indiscretions" shall we say, and the general unseemliness of the Clinton Foundation.
But that last one is I think worth dwelling on. Whatever unseemliness there was with the Clinton Foundation, it just pales in comparison to anything uncovered by David Farenthold in regards to the Trump Foundation which as far as I can tell just pure and simple a completely fraudulent organization. Like there is no comparison between the two despite what "Clinton Cash" and Steve Bannon may tell you. Which is where media role is important. In order for there to people out there beyond just hardcore GOP voters who believe Trump and Clinton are equally corrupt requires a real assist from media organizations.
I mean, I totally agree with you that Donald Trump is much more corrupt than Hillary Clinton. But I don't think 80%+ of voters can tell you what the Clinton Foundation is, much less remember the term "Whitewater." They just have the vibe that they know Hillary is corrupt, and they know Trump is corrupt, and so they treat the question like "do you approve of these two candidates" rather than "have you measured their corruption and is one more corrupt on balance."
Twice as many primary voters in Michigan voted for Nikki Haley than voted for "uncommitted." Trump had a much weaker showing than Biden. Trump has underperformed the polls in all primaries so far.
So the super condensed version of what I think happened is this: Between Iraq, the financial crisis, the national debt, and the failure of immigration reform, the establishment political parties so thoroughly discredited themselves they essentially collapsed. Then there was a choice... Would the realignment be about basically Tea Party vs Occupy, Ron Paul vs Bernie or would it be Trump vs Hillary, Nikole Hanna Jones vs Chris Rufo.
Obviously we got the worse timeline where the second realignment won out and people are voting on their identitarian tribalist affiliations and policy only matters to the extent of which "side" is "winning". And now it's all been turbocharged by covid/inflation, scarcity/zero sum economic thinking.
Trump-cult Republicans would rather watch hysterical lib tears on MSNBC and Twitter because Trump says something crazy than own the libs in real life through policy victories.
Very, very true, IMO! I've attributed this to the combination of how vulnerable much of the more vocal left is to trolling these days combined with many right-wingers having gotten so used to losing on policy issues for the last few decades that making liberals cry is the only thing they can think of plausibly succeeding.
The Right has gotten plenty of policy victories over the past 30 years. TANF reform. Low taxes (Democrats are not attempting to raise the corporate income tax back to its previous level, they are not raising income taxes on people making less than 400k, and are not raising marginal rates above 40%). Repealed the individual mandate for health insurance. Vastly expanded school choice. Got Democrats to agree to an enforcement-only immigration bill (before stupidly tanking it). End of Roe v. Wade. Much less onerous gun laws. Much greater deference for religious liberty in the judiciary. Trump killed TPP and got Mexico, Canada, and Senate Democrats to agree to a revised NAFTA. Everyone loves to focus only on the negatives though.
(1) Several of these things happened literally in only the last five to six years. That's why I said, "having gotten so used to losing on policy issues for the last *few decades* . . . ." "Trump-cult Republicans [preferring to watch] hysterical lib tears on MSNBC and Twitter" predates those wins and what we're observing now represents a sort of learned helplessness.
(2) Some of those aren't things that I don't think most "Trump-cult Republicans" even care about (e.g., corporate tax rates) and thus don't think of as wins.
At one point the Right considered the Iraq War a win.
I think it’s funny to credit the party establishments with Iraq when it was a public demand that started the moment the Gulf War ended.
Hillary Clinton was an oxymoron: a driven, careerist woman who owed her place on the national stage to marrying the right man and stomaching his infidelities. There are thousands of women with her academic credentials yet only a handful whose parties cleared the field in their senate race.
Sleeping your way to the top (whether with one man or several) is often effective, but rarely makes you popular. It threatens both women who are unwilling to do it and men who are unable to. Harris’ affair with the speaker of the California Assembly when he was twice her age has a similar dynamic. It’s just gross and voters don’t like it. The refusal of the mainstream media to even talk about it is a huge blind spot.
Getting married before your spouse is a famous politician is not sleeping your way to the top. I’m no fan of Hillary, but this is a totally unfair and frankly sexist claim. She wasn’t some talentless hack.
It’s IS fair and accurate IMO to say that she rode on Bills coat tails in the same way that family members often do - see for example the Bush family.
But you see the Bush family members don’t have two X chromosomes so the same disparaging and dismissive narratives don’t apply. The fact this misogynistic bigotry is being tolerated on here is glaring.
The fact that you would call me a bigot or a misogynist for saying truthful things about female politicians speaks poorly of your ability to engage in civil discourse.
Moderate your tone and recant your insults.
The subject “ misogynistic bigotry “ references to the specious accusations you have made about two women who have or currently hold positions power.
The subject is not the speaker. You are equating a rebuke of repeated repetitions of a misogynistic trope as a personal attack. This misdirection is an action called lying. This action of lying is then used to support a false claim of “uncivil” behavior.
All in defense of an assertion that Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris owe their political positions due to sleeping with men.
Well said. Would also point out that Joe Biden owes his current position to being Obama’s VP for 8 years but nobody is dinging him for that!
David you are not the moderator, don’t forget that.
I will defend my right to be addressed civilly. I have never called anyone a bigot or insulted any commenter in this space.
These are both commenters who have been around for a while and are aware of your general misogyny, so they are likely interpreting your comment through that lens as well.
when did the word “misogynist” come to mean “not my type of feminist?” i like women and enjoy their company!
Absolutely. She’s a better politician than a lot of people want to admit, and the evidence for that is how much she improved as a NY senator. Just look at her vote totals in her reelection vs her initial election. Also note how many counties she swung towards her- she got a lot more votes and not just by running up the score in deep blue NYC and suburbs- she significantly improved upstate as well.
Getting married before your spouse is a famous politician is not intentionally sleeping your way to the top. Staying with him through multiple affairs and then running for senate with his backing is.
People stay married to unfaithful spouses for all kinds of reasons. It would be wrong to assume that we can read Clinton's mind, or understand the dynamics of their long marriage well enough to conclude that the reason she didn't dump him was purely about political advantage.
Edited to add: And Clinton's political career is effectively over at this point. If she was keeping Bill around for political expediency, there is no reason to continue that charade now, yet they are still married.
This strikes me as a deeply silly claim.
Like, I accept that it matters a lot to you, for whatever reason, but I think you are confusing the strength of your own feelings for strength of analysis.
How do you explain Clinton’s high unfavorability ratings? Why did people like Bernie more?
Hillary Clinton was extremely popular for a long time, this analysis makes literally no sense
She became unpopular because she became a totemic representation of the most easily-hateable elements of the Democratic coalition: scoldy hyper-educated elites who look down on everyone
Pokemon GO to the polls!
See also Warren, Elizabeth.
"Why did people like Bernie more?"
They didn't. There was an election, and Bernie lost.
^
"How do you explain Clinton's high unfavorability ratings?"
I came of age as a politics nerd during the Clinton administration, and as I have mentioned many times on this forum, I grew up in an evangelical Christian community in the upper middle class burbs of Houston--my dad is a minister. So I was actually there when the whole Clinton mythology was born. I could have waxed eloquent for you on all the terrible things about the Clintons; I was extremely proud to vote for W to "restore dignity" to the White House and scrub away the residual Clinton slime <editor's note: hahahahahaha...a lot changed for me in the ensuing decades>.
^
And one thing I can tell you is that you actually have it exactly backwards: for many anti-Clintonians, HRC's marriage to Bill was the one sympathetic thing about her. My mother-in-law--a Trump voter who believes Hillary is an awful human--dithered about whether she would pull the lever for him at the last minute in part because of that stunt he pulled at the debates where he brought along Bill's old victims.
^
In the end, however, she did vote for Trump. And she did that because she knew that Hillary was a socialist who would enforce socialized medicine on older Americans, sending them to death panels that would cut off their care after the government seized all their assets through taxation to give money to undeserving poor people to fund their abortions.
^
Bernie lost for a reason, and it's the same reason that he would have lost to Trump.
>How do you explain Clinton’s high unfavorability ratings? Why did people like Bernie more?<
She codes as "limousine liberal" — especially after she moved to NY to run for the Senate. She made enemies on the left because of foreign policy. She had long been vilified by the right because they hated her husband. A bunch of reasons. I don't think the fact that her husband was unfaithful had much effect either way. If anything it made her a more sympathetic person.
Millions of voters idiotically want a "common touch" in their political leaders. Hillary Clinton mostly lacks that. So does Nancy Pelosi. It's unfair. But politics ain't fair. Normies (again, with maximum inanity) want a president they can imagine having a bear with. I think for similar reasons Gavin Newsom's national aspirations aren't going anywhere.
EDIT: Sanders is the exact opposite of "limousine liberal coded." With his shock of uncombed hair, rumpled suits and think Brooklyn twang, he exudes authenticity. Voters like that. Again, I think voters are wrong not to be coldly calculating policy wonks (like SB readers) when they vote. But I didn't invent human nature.
How do you explain her very high favorability ratings as SoS? Why did people like her so much while she was doing that job if they hate her so much for having slept her way into it (in your telling)?
She was just doing a job as a subordinate. The top person takes all the heat.
Really, that's it. I bet Joe Biden had higher ratings as Obama's veep than he does now. When you become the top dog whatever flaws you have get magnified.
That's a perfectly valid explanation, but an entirely different one than "people hate her because they perceive her as having slept her way to the top", which is why I was asking David how he can account for those facts that seem to run counter to his narrative. If people hate you for who you are then the things you're currently doing shouldn't really impact how much they like you.
I don't think any gettable voter dislikes Hillary because she did the nasty with Bill Clinton.
But I do think the fact that she obviously couldn't have had the political career she had without Bill, and she screwed up a lot and wasn't as good at politics as Bill was, probably blunted her feminist message somewhat. And that probably contributed to her unpopularity on the margins, when she was going for the ultimate brass ring in politics.
Most people don’t know about Harris’ relationship with Willie Brown.
Which presumably means that her favorability is likely to lower even further when it comes to light.
That seems pretty doubtful. No one except people over the age of 40 *in* California even know who he is.
1. If she were the nominee, that story would get much more play. It’s a huge negative that isn’t built into her polling, a strong reason she should not be the nominee.
2. Harris does give off the vibe of someone who would have a career advancing affair. She is very ambitious, quite attractive and not quite as smart. She also flip flops more wildly than most politicians.
(1) is greatly overstated.
Kamala Harris is extremely smart and I really don't understand why so many people think she isn't.
"It's time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day."
A lot of political discourse is meaningless. Remember FDR's "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"? Does that make any sense?
Yes. He's saying "we must have courage to do the difficult things which will let us succeed." It's catchy and bold. It's good oration! You remember it! You know what he meant!
It does, actually. Irrational anxiety is stultifying.
I would not say that that was the vibe she gave off at least during the VP debates.
Even with affirmative action, she only went to UC Hastings for law school. I doubt her LSATS were much over 162. She’s free to release them if it would prove me wrong.
I see we’re back to the Obama-era stuff
I have long appreciated David Abbott for speaking all of his mind, even when I vehemently disagreed, but it seems to have taken a different tone in the last few months.
“Show me your birth certificate so that I can disregard it and move the goal post to assert that you are inherently unqualified for ‘reasons.’”
But remember, the people who push back and point out that these statements are bigoted are just name calling the speaker.
There’s a difference between a dude who gets into Harvard law through affirmative action (and might not have needed it if he’s smoked less pot his first two years in college) and someone who could only get into UC Hastings even with affirmative action.
Also, Obama’s temperament is simply exemplary. The mix of discipline and empathy is so rare.
People think she's a smarty-pants -- i.e., too smart by half. That's why I call her "snotty Kamala." She gives off exactly that kind of vibe.
Here in the Bay Area, we know all about the Kamel with the Brown hump. Just wait until Trump gets going on that!
(Lest anyone call me misogynist, I think Nikki Haley could demolish Biden [if she could somehow get the nomination] -- though she's way too far-right on economics for me.)
David is explicitly stating that Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris have their political and social positions due to “sleeping their way to the top.”
-__________________-
The case is clearer for Clinton, but Harris certainly tried.
If only Clinton had been a senator or a major member of a cabinet, like Secretary of State, then people may have seen her as qualified as a television game show host that ran a privately run family business.
Even there, why did she get all those jobs?
I know a lot of people in the Democratic Party believe she would have gotten ahead anyway by her obvious merit, but really, she actually screwed up a lot (health care, billing records, Libya) and always seemed to fall up and not down, because she had the brand name last name (which gets back to who she married).
You shouldn't make this your all encompassing theory of Hillary, but I bet a lot of the voters who DIDN’T like her could see this while Dems who were in love with her and saw all opposition to her as sexist missed it.
The question isn't whether Hillary was qualified. The question (as Obama put it) is whether she's likeable enough. ;-)
It's an offensive way of putting it but there is a kernel of truth in the point with Hillary (less so with Harris).
Sounds like a comment from someone younger than me who thinks things were always the way they are now. When my generation came up, women were still pretty much ignored across the board in business, politics, science, academia etc (talk about "systemic!"). There was some kind of deep denial or even fear among men when it came to recognizing intelligence and skill in female persons. Standing on the shoulders of a spouse was one of the few ways a woman could be successful in politics.
Hillary Clinton was fully qualified to be President, both in terms of intelligence and experience (including her experience as First Lady.) Unfortunately she couldn't resist appealing to natural human tendencies to demonize our opponents, and thus deploringly contributed to the self-righteous trend of dismissing our "better angels." (Those so-called Christian nationalists aren't the only group that rejects the true message of the Gospels.)
Note - not labeling anyone here, although perhaps making assumptions about perspective.
This is a weak argument.
Why does Michelle Obama have such high favorability in that case?
A more accurate reading is that when a First Lady has credentials beyond fashion model, people give them credit for doing a difficult job and are open to seeing them use a set of transferable skills in a different context.
Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton were a power couple. Both have been very effective networkers and political operatives. The idea that HRC’s political career and success is primarily due to her relationship with her husband dismisses her qualities and successes.
And this misogynistic narrative/accusation only applies to one half the population.
"The idea that HRC’s political career and success is primarily due to her relationship with her husband dismisses her qualities and successes."
What successes?
She didn't succeed very much and screwed up a lot (her idiocy on Iraq cost her the presidency), and the last job she held that wasn't derivative of Bill's success was at the Rose Law Firm.
Had she not married Bill she would have ended up head of the Children's Defense Fund or something- not nothing but not a presidential candidate by far.
You could argue that her election to Senate in New York was bolstered by Bill Clinton's popularity. But she took that opportunity to become one of the most respected people in the Senate and eventually a leading candidate for the party nomination 8 years later. I don't think that was all on Bill's coattails.
>You could argue that her election to Senate in New York was bolstered by Bill Clinton's popularity<
That election was no gimme for HRC. Rick Lazio was a popular, skilled, moderate Republican from Long Island—the kind of Republicans New Yorkers used to elect to statewide office with regularity. Indeed, IIRC he was ahead in the polls for much of that race: New Yorkers can suss out carpetbagging and don't always award it. She ran a strong campaign and ultimately prevailed. But it wasn't a foregone conclusion in early 2000.
This is probably a controversial opinion, but I don't think she actually did anything important in the Senate (other than support the Iraq War which was terrible). I think what happened is that because she was already seen as a potential presidential candidate and had all of Bill's party connections and favor-owers behind her, she was guaranteed to get favorable coverage and be showered with "striking out on her own narratives".
Matt talks in his OP about how The Groups shape narratives. Well a lot of Groups, especially feminist groups within the Dem coalition, saw Hillary as the first women president and went to work immediately portraying her as the star as the Senate to raise her profile even further and try to ensure she became a presidential candidate. So of course she was respected-- it's like what Arthur Miller said about JP Morgan: with his pockets on he was very respected. Well, the Clintons had a lot of power in the Democratic Party (BTW an underrated story right now is how much power the Obamas still wield in the Party) and they were making sure that people knew they had to respect and promote Hillary if they wanted to be the beneficiaries of that power.
Yeah, not a bad take. I'm still very confident that Hillary earned her rep as a well-prepared and highly intelligent Senator. But you're right, her legislative record isn't remarkable. And the Clinton machine was there for her.
She was also a terrible Secretary of State, largely responsible along with Madeline Albright for the country's terrible relations with Russia today. Her condescending treatment of Vladimir Putin whenever they met, along with her advocating the expansion of NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia got exactly the result George Kennan predicted. Her dig at at Putin in her speech last September at the State Department just emphasized how unqualified she was ro be the country's top diplomat, and without the Clinton connection and Obama's desire to keep her in the tent, she never would have got it.
Men can’t be president if they are under 6 feet or go bald in middle age.
Have you seen Biden’s hairline?
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1759637937216442515
We need to bring back James Madison to talk about this. (And then right after, of course ask him how our form of government has fared over more than two centuries.)
"And then right after, of course ask him how our form of government has fared over more than two centuries."
I do wonder how long the Founders expected our peculiar form of government to last. Rome stayed a republic for about twice as long, and Venice twice that, although of course both lacked universal suffrage for most or all of it. Here's hoping we can outdo both!
There are plenty of women who have risen to power, even in the US, that didn't require marrying some up and coming mover. Discounting Hillary Clinton riding Bill's coat tails is ahistorical.
Michelle Obama didn't spearhead health care reform the way Hillary Clinton did, as if she had been elected or appointed to a position of power in her husband's administration.
I still remember Hillary presuming to go to Congress to negotiate with them and feeling like my head was going to explode. i was 15 or 16 and I knew nepotism when I saw it.
First Ladies are actually popular because they are fashion models who get Vogue covers and basically are a repository for positive coverage, plus they have the brand names of their husbands.
A lot of Democrats saw Hillary as the first woman President so they missed this, but actually the entire notion of a "First Lady" who decorates the White House and runs the social calendar is terribly anti-feminist and a big reason First Ladies are popular is because a lot of people still buy into vestiges of 1950's morality.
Nobody, least of all Michelle Obama, pretends that she has any real influence that isn't directly related to her being the spouse of Barack Obama. People are 100% okay with people sleeping their way to the position of First Lady and doing First Lady-like things. They look askanse when this is used to catapult them into elected or meritocratic positions.
The propensity of men on this thread to describe being married to someone as "sleeping their way to the top" or "sleeping their way to the position of First Lady" is pretty shocking.
yeah i feel like i'm taking crazy pills. 'sleeping your way to the top' is an accusation you level at someone who has an affair with their boss for a promotion, not a marriage...
It's an offensive way of putting it, I agree.
But do VOTERS see it that way? And more theoretically, isn't marriage a social construction, and often transactional? E.g., why do you think Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis?
Marriage is also much more complicated than sex, which is why ultimately I agree it isn't helpful to say anyone slept their way to the top by marrying. But that doesn't mean voters didn't see some contradiction between Hillary's stated feminism and her actual route to power.
The actual way voters perceive this issue is entirely different from the "slept her way to the top" framing. There is a cynical view related to her staying with Bill after the scandals that implies she STAYED with him for calculated reasons (which, to be clear, is a fucking bullshit attitude. Judging a marriage and what happens between two people who, by all accounts of anyone who knows them, love and loved one another is absurd), but that's very different from "she's where she is because she fucked Bill Clinton".
It’s not even like Hillary married the scion of a political family. She married a penniless man from Arkansas with a broken family and zero political connections. She took her Yale JD and moved to fucking Fayetteville for that man. Sorry, nobody does that for the career boost. She loved him.
This whole subthread has not been the finest moment for Slow Borers.
The thing that's been really shocking are the folks that are sticking with these claims despite being called out. I could almost understand the attacks if they were rhetorical shorthands in service of some other point. David's original comment is pretty rough in my opinion, but I think he's mostly critiquing HRC as a candidate, which is more inbounds than intentionally accusing her of fucking a man for political gain. But some of the guys on here are insisting that not only is that what she did but it's also what most Americans believe and disliked her for. These claims are pretty horrifying IMHO.
Yes. The explicit misogyny and dishonest attempts to rationalize such sexist bigotry is shocking, disgusting, and completely unwarranted.
Unless you are dating an asexual you are by definition sleeping your way to the position of First Lady or First Gentleman.
That's how you view all the marriages amongst your friends and family (and your own if married)? People who are just sleeping together? And doing so in order to achieve some monetary or career goals?
It's a common euphemism for relationship-based nepotism that I'm honestly shocked anybody would bother to take offense to. Someone may marry a business magnate for love, but if that someone then starts finding their way onto the boards of companies that magnate owns, it's perfectly common if not very polite to say that they slept their way to that position.
I actually disagree with this. I do think being First Lady contradicts feminist messaging, but there's no doubt marrying a politician has always been an entree into politics and that's probably even more true now due to Americans' obsession with celebrities.
Michelle Obama has never sought office. Hillary was actually quite popular when she was secretary of state. If Michelle ran for President, her numbers would sag.
Well sure - but that has nothing to do with voters hating someone sleeping their way to the top, which is your main contention.
There is more than one variable. Appearing to be ambitious is bad. Being self made is good. However, having high name recognition is also good. Being from a political family pushes in both directions. I’m pretty confident that: (1) people from political families are more likely to hold office than the median American (p<0.0001) and (2) other things constant, the median politician who is closely related to a prominent politician has less political acumen than average. For similar reasons, I think the median Harvard student shows dad contributed 8 or 9 figures to Harvard has a lower IQ than the median college student.
Massachusetts is going through this cycle except with a lesbian relationship. Plenty of people have taken the rage bait but I think most people are chill about it.
https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2024/02/28/gov-healeys-ex-romantic-partner-wolohojian-wins-council-ok-to-serve-on-states-highest-court/
I see this corrective account of yours as directionally right but overstated. A lot of non-Donald voters (liberals and Democrats, but also moderates and independents) just assume that everyone shares their utility functions and prioritizes values and tradeoffs the same way they do. They wish away ideology and conclude that different votes are due to ignorance or confusion brought on by misinformation. This naive view blinds people to the big risk of being uncompromising (which is that you end up demanding your side take a position that’s farther from the median voter than the other side and your side loses).
But I believe there was a more reasonable and sophisticated view of the 2016 election that didn’t ignore ideology. On this view the important aspects of Donald that were orthogonal to his location in the liberal–conservative ideological dimension were so bad that the typical ideological tradeoffs you’d expect in a campaign with a normal candidate didn’t apply. That is, Donald was so obviously unfit for office that many typical Republican voters would never vote for him. As a result you could essentially “load up” on liberal positions more than you normally could against a normal Republican opponent and still win.
That he said and did enough things to attract the wild enthusiasm of White supremacists made this calculus more plausible. “Surely,” Democrats thought, “our reasonable and responsible Republican friends—with whom we disagree about a lot of things, but ultimately share a commitment to longstanding American values of pluralism and democracy—will not vote for this guy.” But they did. So this view was wrong.
"That is, Donald was so obviously unfit for office that many typical Republican voters would never vote for him. As a result you could essentially “load up” on liberal positions more than you normally could against a normal Republican opponent and still win."
I think this happened, and then a lot of moderate and center right folks who probably wouldn't have voted for Trump got spooked by Democrats "showing their true colors" and displaying everyone their wishlist.
Maybe - but it’s fundamentally true that many reasonable Republicans did not vote for Trump (eg Orange County went blue for the first time ever).
Trump actually won by getting a lot of historic non-voters off the sidelines.
Not really? Turnout was lower than 2012, he won because he persuaded a lot of Obama voters.
Uh, turnout was higher in 2016 than 2012?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections
Also absolute turnout says nothing about persuasion - in a country where only 60% of people vote, you could easily subtract 5M votes from the D category, add 5M votes to the R category, and not have persuaded a single person.
To be clear I think persuasion is a better strategy than base mobilization and do believe there are a lot of persuadable voters! But it’s undoubtedly true Trump brought out 2012 non-voters, while a lot of 2012 Obama voters stayed home.
Whoops got the top line number wrong. But second chart on that article shows GOP turnout flat and Dem turnout down from 2012-2016.
Yes, GOP turnout stayed flat in raw numbers from 2012 to 2016, but the third-party vote share skyrocketed, with the largest part of it almost certainly coming from Republican voters going to Libertarian. (LP raw vote count more than tripled between 2012 and 2016 and Gary Johnson was the LP presidential candidate both times, so we've obviously got an excellent experimental control for candidate name recognition and quality!) That would imply Trump motivated probably at least a few hundred thousand non-2012 voters to come out to vote for him.
The thing being, it's a two-party system, so if you "load up" on liberal positions because you "know" your Republican "friends" won't dare vote for this white supremacist asshole, you're basically smirking in their faces and giving them the finger while daring them to vote for the white supremacist asshole. You haven't actually made it harder for them to vote Trump (ie: by deregistering them from voter rolls or some other dirty trick), just given them more reason to stop you by shooting your hostage.
I basically agree with this. That said, I think the big surprise was the fact that the evangelical voters seemed to have such a flexible view of morality, when it came to choosing a candidate. We simply didn’t believe they were so willing to sell their souls for a Supreme Court justice.
"We simply didn't believe our enemies were rational and effective political actors" is a major failure.
Reminds me of the time I realized that a priest of the True Faith was baldly lying to my face. I thought myself a man of the world but this venal act was deeply upsetting.
Democrats had 8 years to neutralize the threat of Trump by moderating on immigration but they assumed that if someone is against illegal immigration or asylum spamming, it must be because they’re racists.
For me probably one of the most annoying things about post-2016 Dem politics is the assertion from the Sanders wing of this latent untapped support for their brand among the electorate. In all this time their style of candidates has yet to win in an election redder than R+0 yet there are still those that are convinced a Sanders style candidate could somehow sweep a place like WV.
The main lesson people in that camp have reached, AFAICT, is that the mistake was not moving far enough left. They sincerely believe there is a vast reserve army of non-voters who are just craving nationalization of major industries, etc.
The dishwasher efficiency rules are so bad they are actually self defeating. They led to increased water use as people disappointed by dishwasher performance swapped to more hand washing, which is much less efficient overall.
EDIT: Please disregard! I was wrong! (Maybe.) See Tyler G's comment and my response below.
My unpopular view -- household water usage is fine. In most cases, it's a closed loop system where treated water is used, made dirty, then sent back to be cleaned again. I want my high-flow shower heads back.
I think the bigger issue with the dishwasher regulations is the same issue with plastic bag bans; the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Even if the dishwasher regs and plastic bag bans did what they were suppose to*, the benefits are so small compared to the scale of the problem it's just not worth it. It's virtue signaling and perfect fodder for Fox or other right leaning outfits to tell viewers that environmentalism is about about elites trying to annoy you and tell you how to live your lives rather than it being about a real existential threat to the world. And so you've now lessened the chances of reaching swing voters or moderates on things that make up the IRA (a bill that may actually have very real and impactful long term positive effects) who may actually agree with you climate but associate environmentalists with people who've made their lives that much more annoying for no real reason.
* And will you look at that. Possible evidence plastic bag bans have actually backfired. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/25/new-jersey-plastic-bag-ban-study/72354533007/. I've noted to you before I have very profound disagreements and issues with libertarianism as an overall philosophy and guide for making policy generally. But I have a lot of time for libertarianism as a critique of particular regulations and particular cases of government overreach. This is a very good example of where I'm coming from on the latter.
I think the better argument for the plastic bag ban has to do with litter and trash rather than the carbon emissions.
I'm very confused as to how plastic bag bans starting becoming a *climate-change* issue. I've only heard them defended on Great Pacific Garbage Patch grounds.
There's a reason why I'm adding water rights owners to The List. They have it good in shifting the narrative of blame onto households and making them feel guilty, while they continue to rent seek on their rights at well below what the market price would be.
It's really mind-boggling to look at water usage in pretty much any western state. Domestic use (which even includes things like watering lawns) tends to be around 12% of water use.
And every time anyone proposes any sort of YIMBYism here in Colorado, a bunch of people start screeching about how we'll run out of water if more people live in Denver or Boulder.
And the Denver metro is on the other side of the continental divide, despite the shared name they're at least out of the Colorado River watershed clusterfuck.
There are several projects that divert water across the continental divide. To name one in Colorado: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alva_B._Adams_Tunnel
“ Today, the "C-BT" serves over 33 cities and towns in northeastern Colorado, including Fort Collins, Greeley, Loveland, Estes Park, Boulder, and Sterling, encompassed by 7 counties, providing a secondary source of water for around 1 million people and an irrigated area of 640,000 acres (2,500 km²).”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado%E2%80%93Big_Thompson_Project
Many shower heads have some kind of flow restrictor that can easily be removed.
I've seen this comment a few times, but is it true? I feel like dishwashers now (including the one I got last year) are waaaaay better than they were 30 years ago, which is my point of reference. I've had two mid-price-point dishwashers purchased in the last 5 years and don't ever have to pre-rinse or rewash my dishes.
Good question, thank you for asking. I’m now much less sure about this than I was. For my original comment I was relying on this Reason article:
https://reason.com/2020/11/12/department-of-energy-rolls-back-obamas-dishwasher-restrictions/
Which includes this quote:
“The tighter rules didn't lead to energy savings for customers. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers estimated that they actually increased water consumption by 63 billion gallons, as households would have to run their dishwashers multiple cycles, or pre-rinse their dishes by hand, in order to get dishes actually clean.”
But on further research, that Reason article appears to be disastrously wrong in several ways.
The rules it is talking about were never put into practice. They are the same proposed rules, referenced in the article from The Hill linked by Matt here, that ended up being abandoned in January 2017, when DOE decided to stick with the existing 2012 rules and not do any further tightening. The study from AHAM that the article references with that “63 billion gallons” number was not about rules actually in existence, it was an estimate of the impact of the proposed rules! And if you follow the citations on that 63 billion, you eventually get to this footnote, from the original AHAM comment on DOE’s NOPR:
“24 It is not clear why the water consumption increases. The NIA is sufficiently opaque that Shorey Consulting has not been able to trace through the reasons behind the changes in water consumption in a reasonable amount of time.”
But looking at the factors they are playing with in the model, there doesn’t seem to be any plausible way that it could be about changes in hand-washing behavior. So essentially everything in that quote from Reason is wrong and baseless.
It does seem to be the case that dishwasher use frequency, in houses with a dishwasher, is declining over time. This could be because cycle times are increasing, or other performance impacts from efficiency regulation, which make people hand wash more often. However, household sizes also decline over time, and people eat at home less frequently, which could just reduce demand for dishwashing in general.
Kudos for actually checking
Wow, I think we've both learned something from this...internet comment exchange?
I didn't think that was actually possible. You are wise indeed - thanks for putting in the work here to research!
I’d also like to take a moment to recognize the thankless work of being a Proctor and Gamble chemist optimizing the formula of Cascade detergent and saving the environment in the least sexy way possible.
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/laundry-done-right
No transcript 😢
The one article I could find providing evidence to support the argument said that they took existing dishwashers and modified them to use the lower amount and they were definitely worse. I can believe that!
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/the-grid/does-dishwasher-regulations-mandate-dishwashers-that-dont-wash-well/
But... with manufacturers having time to tweak things so they can still clean well at the lower amount, they may be working fine again now.
They’re back to being good, and it’s really nice being able to run a load with the six dishes we used for dinner that night and use less water that handwashing.
I think there’s an adjustment period after new regulations are introduced when corporate R&D hasn’t caught up yet, but products should get better in time.
My dishwasher broke down during peak pandemic, so I didn't have many options to choose from for a replacement, but the one I got has been outstanding.
Not everything the right says about regulation is wrong. See also Gavin Newsom and California Dems exempting Panera from the minimum wage.
Time to add Panera to The List!
Wut
https://ktla.com/news/california/panera-bread-exempt-from-following-californias-new-minimum-wage-law-due-to-relationship-with-newsom-reports/
A classic failure to use cost benefit analysis in regulatory rule making; it just paled in comparison to NEPA, and the CDC/FDA complex.
I’m not sure I agree. My original comment was not well founded, and in any case, you can review DOE’s justifications in the Federal Register entry for the 2012 rule, here:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2012/05/30/2012-12340/energy-conservation-program-energy-conservation-standards-for-residential-dishwashers
There is extensive argument about tradeoffs, cost-benefit analysis, etc. They do seem to be doing their best.
However, I do still feel that we should abolish the Energy Conservation Program for Consumer Products, because even to the extent that these guys are doing a good job within their mandate, their mandate isn’t actually useful/helpful anymore. This isn’t the 1970s, energy is plentiful and it is only going to get more so moving forward, and it’s time to get out of scarcity mindset. Ditto for water conservation for residential users.
Depends on your priorities I guess. But if I literally doubled my residential electricity use I would be responsible for about 1 extra metric ton of CO2 per year, given the current US average of 368g of CO2 equivalents per KWh. That’s just not a big fraction of my annual emissions.
I mean, in the 70s, we lowered speed limits and everything and that was understandable, desperate times call for desperate measures. But eventually things got better and we gave up on the speed limits. The crisis is past. We don’t need to have the federal government micromanaging everyone’s home appliances anymore, it’s just silly.
Speed limits were a mistake even then. What was called for was tariff on imported oil.
The shadow price of the CO2 emitted by the production of the energy would go into a proper cost benefit analysis. Indeed, there would be no other for regulating appliance design.
Seems like that should have been an obvious thing to take into consideration when designing the rules.
Great piece.
I always thought if Obama could have kept his 2010 tone, the GOP would have been all but dead and buried as a national party.. Maybe not quite as buried as Dems were in the 1980s but a clear regional minority party.
I think the leftward lurch by Dems on race going back to Trayvon Martin has been disastrous for them. Its hurt them especially with non college voters and also made it easier for Republicans to mobilize against despite have no policy agenda at all besides tax cuts. It's not even clear all the emphasis on diversity or lectures on systemic racism are helping with black voters who in 2016 regressed to historic mean in terms or vote share. Polls even show GOP in 2024 doing not so badly with non college younger black men.
I think the leftward lurch on race is a big part also of the Democrats fecklessness on immigration. You can almost imagine the absurd rhetoric: Can't enforce immigration laws for fear of disparate impact on vulnerable communities of color. To treat phony asylum claimants differently than US citizens is nothing but white supremacy.
The leftward lurch on race is also behind Democrat reluctance to crack down on this nationwide shoplifting craze. What are laws on theft anyway but expressions of systems of oppression?
I'm exaggerating a little but not that much!
With the GOP at peak crazy, Dems are poised to lose in 2024. Great job!
I think this is probably under-selling the role of the "groups" in creating the MOAR left wing everywhere all the time interpretation of 2016. They not only have influence shaping the media interpretation, but Dem politicians still rely on them to "represent" the opinion of groups they put in the title of their organization, even if none of them actually have any real members anymore. And the revolving door is more with the groups and campaign staff than traditional lobbying groups.
Plus they have all log rolled each other so the Climate Groups and the ACLU and the Hispanic groups all have the same opinion every issue and place the same importance on every issue.
Have never thought of it that way … but your point about the “revolving door” of staffers moving between The Groups and Dem Hill offices being more of the norm relative to traditional lobbyists is incredibly true.
I’m sure this is a rosy view of “traditional lobbying,” but it’s a line of work where results matter or you lose clients. The Groups just have to make noise. Those different contexts almost certainly are influencing the party at the staff level. More lobbyists on Dem staffs?
MOAR?
MOAR = more, but screamed with intensity.
Very frustrating comment section today :(
The number of crazies is multiplying the closer we get to November. The Slow Boring version of what happens to those of us in swing states regarding advertisements, robocalls, emails and text messages.
Paid disruptors.
I generally respect you as an honest commenter, so I'm saying this in good faith: this is an unhealthy and conspiratorial mindset. It encourages you to see people who you find disagreeable as non people, instead of actual people who have their own opinions which you might have to contend with.
I have work to do, so I can't fully address this now, but I will stress that I'm very willing to believe that the vast majority of commenters here are actual people who have their own opinions even if I disagree with them strongly. I am, however, highly suspicious of people who show up to comment on a blog or similar website where registration or (especially) a paid subscription is required, but who (1) don't seem to fit the "vibe" of the site and (2) don't engage with the content of the site, but instead create drama with other commenters, especially when in the process (3) they write patently ridiculous thingsthat sound like something a foreigner would think an American of a particular political bent would say, but which they would not. (E.g., an actual American conservative would almost certainly not write that Thomas Jefferson "was the first person to argue that one person was as good as another in this world. This has been very inspirational to many, many people since then.")
I get that, but it's a huge unfounded leap to 'paid (by who?) disruptor (what are they disrupting? Americas Strategic Comment Thread Reserve?).
Just... Please be careful.
Less paid disruptor and more paying disruptor.
"an actual American conservative would almost certainly not write that Thomas Jefferson 'was the first…then.'"
I just Ctrl-F'ed for "was the first", and your quote is the only hit. Was this edited out of somebody's post? Is the problem that I've minimized some comments and not clicked "Load More"? Or was this on some other site?
https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-we-got-here-ce8/comment/50632348
FWIW, Rock_M also pointed out he's a democrat, and an apparently very frustrated one at that. That seems pretty typical for this site, albeit maybe a little more upset than most of us.
I'm also generally not one to believe this kind of thing, but people who show up to *this* comments section to go "I voted Trump in 2020 and I'm doing it again in 2024"....I dunno man. What possible value could you be getting out of reading Matt?
People have posted comments here before, suggesting that they read Hanania or The Dispatch just to keep an eye on "what the other side is doing". It doesn't seem to implausible that either Republican faction might hate-read us too.
I'm just waiting for Matt Hagy to tell us if we broke any records with the amount of comments today.
This has been a weird one, I don't know how Matt's writing caused it but there's been a grab bag of multiple lengthy grievances all over the place today that skyrocketed the comment quantity. More revealed exposure of what really riles up Slow Borers, for better or worse.
Any opportunity to re-litigate the 2016 primary makes people lose their minds.
It certainly doesn't help that we've had the sudden appearance of "Rock_M." I don't think he's Spiky, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's a paid disruptor.
"I don't think he's Spiky, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's a paid disruptor."
I hope he doesn't get banned for today, though. His comments have been the best sort of discomfiting: each time I dig into them, the details I'm most concerned about are correct, even if I don't think he ought draw the conclusions he does from them.
Ah, I didn't read the comments! I scrolled and read like ten of them (I find the ways Americans view guns very interesting), and then gave up. That's why I'm waiting for Matt H. to tell us about the numbers.
I might have done the same if I didn't get up early today. I put in a few replies, didn't have anything I wanted to say on a top level comment...and then it just really took off after I got to work for a bit.
I don't know if we'll break a record, but I can feel the whole page getting queasy because of the sheer number of comments. It took me three tries to get this reply to work.
A response to myself, because we have an answer: https://www.slowboring.com/p/thursday-thread-aca/comment/50663720
Matt’s a little more open minded than Hillary and allows that there might be a third kind of Republican: “Everyone is either a really bad racist or else is being crushed by the man and in need of help. Nobody falls into what I think is the classic conservative posture of just, like, a person who is doing okay and is kinda selfish ”
THAT’s what I am! Just a little bit selfish. No possibility that we know that the more government redistributes our earnings the less productive we will choose to be? No chance we realize that the more we’re taxed, and the more they give away, the more people will choose to live off our largesse? No chance that we know that eventually the government will get so big that it is the citizen who will fear the government, instead of the other way around?
The unearned arrogance of the left is at least entertaining, lol.
Guy who is surprised that Matt Yglesias is a Democrat
I don't have a strong opinion on whether Matt is more arrogant than the average smart political commentator, and I'm happy to pay for his takes. What is interesting though, as Matt knows, is that income polarization is extremely low in US politics. So where in the Bush years the dealership/grocery/etc owner voted GOP, and the workers voted Dem unless they were pretty evangelical, it's like becoming more urban-rural where rural owners and workers vote GOP, urban owners and workers vote Dem. This is an exaggeration ofc, but it's more accurate than Matt's emphasis on owners (as part of his aspiration to bring back mid-century class polarization.)