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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Very frustrating comment section today :(
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.