That level of poverty described in the 1988 speech (which was describing Jackson’s own childhood in the 50s) has become less salient because it just doesn’t really exist in the US today—people do not have outhouses for bathrooms or lack running water or unable to afford socks even in the poorest inner-city areas.
On some level it’s all relative and abundance is just the flip side of the coin. But it does seem to be the death knell for traditional social democratic economics-focused leftism when poverty of the type described by Jackson no longer exists in the first world. Maybe if we had a world government we could revive that type of leftism by focusing on this kind of poverty that does still exist in the third world.
Clearly, I go different places and know different people than you know. That kind of poverty still exists. People who live in camper shells. Or tents on vacant lots. Or worse than that.
The long-term homelessness necessary to experience these conditions describes approximately 10-15,000 people in the whole country. In 1950, it described something like 35% of the housing stock. It wasn't until 1970 that only a single-digit percentage of the country's housing lacked *any* indoor plumbing, and until 1990 that only a percent or two lacked full indoor plumbing with sewerage.
It is not, cannot, will never, be the basis for a mass politics.
Yes, there are a small number of homeless encampments but those problems usually aren’t strictly financial and even they have much better access to healthcare than they used to.
I grew up in a zip code with under half the median US income and am kind of traumatized from that, but most of the trauma was not getting toys I wanted and social stuff like going to crappy public schools with violence and uncaring bureaucracy and not fitting in when I later went to college; I did not know anyone to lack indoor plumbing or running water.
I'm talking about the people who live in crap substandard housing. Come take a tour of Commerce City, Colorado, with me. The women who live in what are basically shacks, and put out requests on Facebook for laundry detergent because their kid needs clean clothes for school. I've driven over with laundry detergent and quarters; I've seen that world.
I'm tooling around the areas closest to major petrochemical and industrial facilities now and it would seem to prove the point: they're 1950's houses with municipal sewer hookups, a car in the driveway, and bikes on the front lawn.
This is not the form "poverty" took when "poverty" was the basis for a working-to-middle-class coalition that could dominate politics.
You gotta pay the water bill and sewer bill, though. One woman I was driving to the doctor had all her...sewage...in big black trash bags beside the house. The smell, my God. The flies. Some of the windows were broken and covered with cardboard. She'd inherited the house from her grandmother. It was disintegrating around her.
Again, though. Not going to be the basis for mass politics.
I'm center-left and in favor of basically every universal and means-tested benefit we have and a few more, but if you want me to genuinely sympathize with the folks you describe, it's going to be hard. Because I too have volunteered and spent a lot of time with people like them, and have found that basically every sinew of agency they have is turned towards the end of making their lives worse.
I support existing social programs, not for the sake of the long-term poor, but for the sake of the transient poor who will, if given a hand, through their own efforts make their way out of poverty within a couple years.
As regards long-term poverty, the best we can do is to build the school system into something that can more ably substitute for a parent and try to rescue as many of their children as possible.
Girding poverty is less common, though—far less common—than in the 1940s and 1950s (the era Jackson was talking about). That's something to be glad about. And overall poverty was roughly cut in half just between 1980 and 2020, never mind what it was back in 1950.
We haven't eradicated poverty, sadly, but we have made it less common, and less severe from a material standpoint (though I doubt it's less painful psychologically).
Sometimes I wonder if the people doing the census and the poverty counts are really finding everyone, though.
Things have improved. I won't deny that. But we affluent Slow Borer types can be kind of dismissive about the people who remain in very bad circumstances.
I don't think it's dismissive to note that there are far fewer people suffering these conditions than in the past. It would be dismissive to say that therefore we owe these people nothing. Indeed, we owe these people even *more* because to be poor in today's much richer society is unacceptable.
"we affluent Slow Borer types can be kind of dismissive about the people who remain in very bad circumstances."
I agree that there are very hard circumstances for people today. But I think its even more difficult for people living in the world now to truly understand how horrific being poor could truly be back then. People have a terrible grasp of how awful things were for most of human history.
Jackson’s mom was clearly a motivated person with a job, and was trapped in crushing poverty despite this fact. There just wasn’t enough of a social safety net and wasn’t enough redistribution—and consumer goods and food were also much more expensive.
My impression is that most of the people on the street or in tents on vacant lots have other issues—like mental health issues or substance abuse issues—and that their crushing poverty is downstream of those issues. Is that not your impression?
They still need to be clothed and fed but I think “people who have other disabling issues end up on the streets” is a different problem than “normal working class people live in abject poverty squalor because the conditions of the working poor are horrific”.
Incomes were more evenly distributed in the 50s than at any time after. However, the median was so much lower that even half a standard deviation below the mean sucked hard.
In that stage of development, reducing poverty to 2% would have required massive redistribution. Today, it would not.
If done with thoughtfulness and understanding that the definition has changed, sure. But so many people look at poverty today and compare it poverty in the past when what is meant by that has changed.
That depends on the type of homeless. Temporary homeless has a lot of causes and many solutions. Permanent homeless is almost entirely mental illness or drug abuse and has no good solutions and few acceptable ones.
You're right, but *politically* the dimensions are very different. It used to be that grinding poverty and the working class went hand-in-hand, some people would be better off than others and have running water or might have an easier time hosting a proper Thanksgiving, but the vast bulk of the working class (even if a bit richer than Jackson describes in his quote) felt extremely precarious and felt real material hardship. It was a self-interested politics of uplifting this broad base of millions of people who could be the core of a voting bloc.
Now, anti-poverty politics is something that is mostly about the compassion of middle class people. Working class voters themselves are not particularly keen on it, largely because they largely have what middle class people would consider extremely reactionary opinions on the very poor, notably that it's mostly their own fault and they don't want to see anyone surviving on welfare when they have to work very hard to provide a (comfortable, but modest) life for their family.
You are talking about a very small number of people in a very large and populous country. Jackson was describing whole neighborhoods common in every town, city, and rural area.
My cousins, boomers, grew up with nothing but an outhouse until the late 1960s, and they were not the poorest people they or I knew.
WIC, food stamps, AFDC, EITC, school lunches, etc., and just the general level of prosperity have driven this kind of poverty down to rates unseen in our or anyone else's history.
Try making friends with people who live in rural regions and find out how they live. Heck, I know a fellow who has worked all his life as a ranch hand, always lived in an RV with no plumbing. He retired to the five acres owned by another former hand there who lives in the used trailer she bought from that the ranch where they both worked and lived when it closed down. Now she is getting old enough that she worries about her critters dying of thirst should she die and nobody might discover this for weeks, so she moved the other ranch hand onto her land where he continues living in his RV.
I could tell you more first-hand stories. I get around a lot among ranch hands, farm hands. Heck, visit a poultry swap or a livestock auction, get to know the rural working poor. Meet saddle tramps, guys with a well-worn saddle and a beat-up pickup (beat-up from mud/ice roads, sliding off sometimes and hitting a boulder), too busted up from their careers rodeoing to buck hay bales up onto stacks anymore, just picking up the work they still can do.
That is a gross insult to the working poor who live in extreme poverty, for example many of the homeless. Or are too disabled to work. The mentally ill through no fault of their own. Open your eyes and ears. Engage and aid the homeless.
Your comment gives the impression that you assume that those who are mentally ill and in dire poverty, even homeless, are that way through their own fault. Yes, some can't live with family because their illness makes them violent, for example bipolar disorder. But that isn't their fault. It's genetic and they got snake eyes at the gamble of conception. Some don't live with their family because they suffer paranoid delusions against family members. That's usually due to a genetic-based illness. Some families have broken up, each going their own way, none of them with resources to be caretakers -- not the fault of the homeless poor. Some families are selfish and cruel. Some families are criminals.
There is a homeless guy in our town who has tried about 60 times to start brush fires on the hillsides above downtown. The judges keep letting him go because it's not his fault he's bipolar or schizophrenic and there are no (enforced) laws saying he needs to be institutionalized and there are no institutions to send him too. One of these days he may succeed on burning down the town.
I don’t really see where this argument is going. Yes it is tragic that a fairly tiny share of the US are destitute as a result of genetic conditions that make it impossible for them to integrate with our broader society (or really, any society). Resolving that is a hard problem of management and program design. Not remotely a call to mobilize massive resources to transform 30%+ of the country.
In all these cases, people have access to running water and a bathroom; it’s just not exclusively theirs. That’s just qualitatively different from the situation in the 50’s, when whole communities lived like this.
Lots of people in Catron County, NM live without running watter. Also people in rural Loudoun County, VA. I know because they graciously invited me into their homes. Poor people can be really nice, *not* drug addicted or anything. One was an elderly woman living not in a camper, but just the shell of one that used to be on the back of a pickup. Rural Loudoun County, VA. She'd not the only one without plumbing who I met just in Loudoun County.
Can you define this some? I would expect it to be less than .1% of the US population. Which can still be an absolute large number of people, but dramatically different from the past when it was 1/3 or more of the population.
Defining the problem will depend on how well the next US Census is conducted. As I don't have comparable resources to the Census, all I can do is share my own observations.
The weirdos here don’t understand that a lot of people are really poor in the us. Some terrific reading they could do on dollar a day poverty since I don’t think they’ll be stepping foot in rural or urban places that are really tough.
Loudoun County, VA, is the wealthiest county in the US. In such places, the most salient problem is the hollowing-out (and immiseration) of the middle class amid the predations of an oligarchy. Long-term, intergenerational "grinding poverty" is quite another matter.
Thank you, yes. Now I'm experimenting with ways to distinguish between the textual outputs of GenAI bots vs humans. It's the ultimate in computer security challenges, especially as someday they might try to kill us all -- or do that unintentionally as a side effect of something else they choose to do. My personal website: https://meinel.com.
Our website bestworldgroup.com is down for maintenance right now, should be back up soon. Also, we need to get out contact us buttons working. Recovering from a cyberattack by an insider, the worst kind.
There is still quite a bit of extreme poverty in the US. This is especially evident in homelessness data. The exact figures vary a lot by the source and how you define “homeless”, but there are somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of homeless children.
To your point, these numbers aren’t high enough to drive a mass political movement, but it’s not like we solved poverty either.
Personally, I would much rather live in a house with a slop bucket and no running water than sleep in a shelter ever night. Or not know where my kids will sleep next week.
The extreme poverty the US has left seems to be a downstream affect of disability, mental illness and/or drug addiction. The solutions to reducing current extreme poverty are very different than 70 years ago.
That comment is unfair to those non-disabled people in extreme poverty who are good citizens but have fallen on hard times. We could be on the brink of mass unemployment of the white collar class. How many could transition to farm labor? Work in a slaughterhouse? Underground mining? These are hard, skilled jobs that pay poorly.
Those case are all general poverty, and there is an wildly effective solution, just giving those people money. EITC to help people that can't get higher paying jobs. Unemployment for those who lost there job. Emergency housing funds for those who are in danger of losing their place to live. Sadly, pure monetary solutions don't solve extreme poverty in the US.
I think this is undermined by two simple points. First is that 2/3rds of homeless are in temporary conditions, only about 1/3 of the homeless population is 'chronic.' Second is that 94% of homeless population owns a cell phone. People have the means to change their condition and many do, every day. That was not true for most of our history in dealing with poverty.
Not the point of your comment, but I know two people around 25-35 years old who grew up in Alaska in middle-class homes with outhouses. They’re apparently common enough if the soil is too unworkable for septic systems.
I feel like a compost toilet and a proper disposal pit are the play there, with an outhouse as a backup. Would much rather bundle up to spend ten minutes emptying the toilet once every few days than fumble my way outside to the bathroom at 6:30 AM.
What does one do with gray water in this situation? Just pump it to an outlet away from and downhill from the house?
You have a leachfield similar to what you have downstream of a septic tank. By the time you're at this stage, though, you're making it up and making do.
I grew up with an outhouse at our cabin until about 1995. We had running water and a leachfield for the greywater until we added a modern addition that doubled the size of the house, together with a modern concrete basement and septic tank system. The trick is to keep the toilet seat inside next to the wood stove.
Objectively true but I took Matt to mean not a coherent economic message for the 21st century. Sanders attempted to frame the debate between the 99% vs the 1% but clearly hasn’t resonated. Affordability has taken center stage. I don’t think either party has real solutions, and the Dems have long been poor at articulating their message.
We should always aspire to raise people's living standards, especially those lower down on the scale, and never be satisfied that people are better off than they were in the past. But too many on the left tend to live in a dream world in which poverty continues to crush people and there has been no visible progress.
I was an adult throughout this period. You fail to mention how the wind was taken out of Jesse Jackson's sails when his organization, Operation PUSH, was rocked with financial mismanagement, scandal and blatant self dealing (shades of Trump). His failure to run his own house efficiently and honestly doomed him to play a far lesser role than he could have.
There’s also the assassination of MLK: Jackson claimed to have been next to King when he was shot, and later appeared on camera, with blood on his shirt, claiming to have cradled King in his arms as he lay dying. Eyewitnesses reported instead that Jackson was not on the balcony when King was shot, and that he later smeared blood on his shirt by dipping his hands in the pool remaining after King’s body ws removed.
Jackson was a grubby little grifter from the start.
The 70s movements outlined spectacularly well in Burrough's 'Days of Rage' are almost a mirror image of what is happening with their descendent ideologues today. As you say the post-Vietnam movements of the 70s collapsed under the weight of their own incompetence, and it seems that though learning nothing those ideological children are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
Most deep poverty today is grown men with mental issues who would rather live in a tent or a camper than in a group home. That seems like a valid choice to me, especially in gentle climates like California or Florida.
A friend and I ran out of gas on the Pacific Coast Highway around 2016. We were debating philosophy and didn’t notice how low the tank was. Our Plan B failed because of a steep hill — the car stalled even though we technically had enough gas for seven miles on a flat road.
Anyway, there were all these quasi-homeless types around who had cars and, I assume, SSI or food stamps. None of them looked or acted hungry. No one was in acute distress. They were all living very frugally, most likely because they hated working for the man.
I ended up paying a young woman $60 for a ride into town and the use of her boyfriend’s fuel canister, which we stopped at her place to pick up. She and her boyfriend lived in a small trailer — very modest — but they had electricity and a garden hose out front. I don’t know if there was a toilet because we didn’t go inside. The boyfriend took jobs now and then when he wanted money, and the woman who drove me in her old VW basically smoked pot most of the time.
This is what freedom looks like. I don’t feel sorry for them.
Children who are abandoned by their fathers still face hardship. They now get health care, food stamps, and there’s the EITC, but instability is real.
I would like a more elaborate safety net. I suspect it would lead to more people living comfortably in their cars — maybe trailers or yurts. But I’m more of a fan of freedom than most, and I don’t think the median voter wants to make it easier to drop out.
I’ve opted out of full-time employment for the last 18 years and maintained a bourgeois lifestyle. In fact, I’m writing this from a very cool hotel room in the fortress of Rhodes.
The man had a powerful message, but yes, his grifting and the grifting of his children has been very damaging. I rarely see mention of how he turned the black boycott of Budweiser into a massive financial windfall for his family. A few years after the boycott, his sons were quietly granted one of the most lucrative distribution territories in Chicago. Complete with an interest free loan from a Daley-aligned back. A very Chicago story, sadly.
He leaves a victorious economic legacy -- investments in poverty reduction have grown 10x since the 70s, adjusted welfare benefits exploding from $7500(ish) to $64k for the bottom quintile over that time, fueled by property taxes (60%+ higher) and local taxes (8%>13% of all output) today. The poverty rate commensurately plummeted to 10%ish today in official metrics, but looking at consumption metrics it fell from nearly 33% to 6% today.
As Matt says this is basically unacknowledged by the left and the other side of the coin is the "victorious" social legacy of "intersectionality" he also leaves. The oppressor/oppressed frame today is almost word-for-word unchanged despite those huge gains in economic progressive success.
The economic reality does not match the messaging anymore, but the anti semitic slurs and vitriolic nature of the leftist social politics remains. It cannot last, imo. Without a legitimate economic message to couple the social frame the movement lacks internal coherence. Doordash just reported it's largest jump in orders ever. We can thank Jackson for his work while also recognizing that perhaps it is time for a new movement in democratic politics.
Dylan Matthews has a blog post about how he tried to pitch a book about this fact and highlight the people that were integral to making it happen, but it went nowhere
It's like some kind of insatiable guilt that afflicts the far left and they need something to feed that fire. Compassion is a wonderful thing and a major step in our personal evolution but even that can be overdone (the Buddhists call it idiot compassion).
I agree that there have been massive economic improvements but I don’t think that’s unacknowledged by the left—most of the 50s nostalgia is coming from the right while most on the left seem to agree that the 50s were a crappy time for poor people and that only rich white men had a good time of it then (even as sometimes they are nostalgic for the high tax rates).
Economic improvements also don’t negate the social issues or inequality or the oppressed/oppressor frame (which is usually applied to situations where the oppressed party is genuinely poor and at the mercy of the oppressing party’s superior capacity to do organized violence).
I see no evidence of acknowledgement of economic improvement due to drastic increase in taxation on the left. Quite the opposite -- leftist mayors and governors around the country are chalking up current failures of democratic governance to revenue failures alone.
On the social front, in America today, can you argue with a straight face that it is the 'oppressor class' performing organized violence?
Hey, I think you’re on to something. You know what, I think we should ask our good friends Alex Pretti and Renee Good to give their thoughts about the oppressor class engaging in performing organized violence. Wait, what’s that? They were both murdered by armed agents or the state? And the agents involved have suffered basically zero real consequences for their actions? And their leaders went out smeared the victims with easily disprovable lies?
If you want to make the argument that far left types invoke the “oppressor/oppressed” dynamic way too often as some catch all for every problem in the world? Fine, I have time for that argument. But for you to write the statement you wrote in your last paragraph was an absolute “are you fucking kidding me?!l moment from me. These murders just happened. Do you have the memory of a goldfish?!!
I was waiting for this comment, and it's exactly the sort of frame I think is misguided and wrong.
In the 60s and 70s, the FBI targeted American civil rights leaders, famously wiretapping MLK jr to blackmail him and other civil rights leaders under COINTELPRO. War on Drugs over reach, mass arrests in Birmingham, urban militarization, etc.
Today, far-leftist like you have decided that increases in completely normal immigration enforcement, voted into power in response to Dem leadership abdication of border responsibilities in the prior admin, is seen as de-facto illegitimate and oppressive.
Its awful what happened to Pretti and Good, but bringing a gun* or ramming a car into the law enforcement action* to interfere with legitimate law enforcement action and having tragedy occur in the commotion that follows is not the same thing at all. It would never have occurred had local law enforcement been able to work with ICE but was prevented under Sanctuary City legislation.
Paradoxically now we have urban white progressives yelling slurs and interfering with overwhelmingly more racially mixed ICE officers while claiming the mantle of the oppressed. I find both sides of the current ICE debate disgusting, and in no way can leftists legitimately claim that this conflict exists within an oppressor/oppressed framework.
edited for accuracy -- Pretti's gun was licensed, but has a history of discharge
"It would never have occurred had local law enforcement been able to work with ICE but was prevented under Sanctuary City legislation."
I'm sorry this is bananas. ICE officers were driven to execute Alex Pretti because months/years earlier, therefore ICE officers were what driven to execute an American citizen? This some real "Murc's law" stuff taken to it's logical endpoint. You realize this is the same logic far leftist people give for rioting in 2020 right? "The people were driven to destroy small businesses because of systematic racism".
Hate to break it to you buddy but the COINTELPRO stuff is happening right now. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-social-media.html. Key pull out quote "The Trump administration has aggressively tried tamping down criticism of ICE, partly by identifying Americans who have demonstrated against the agency. ICE agents told protesters in Minneapolis and Chicago that they were being recorded and identified with facial recognition technology." Again, literally on Monday we had a glaring example of the state making it clear they'll step in to try to stop "speech" they don't like from getting aired.
And sorry the racially mixed ICE is not the "gotchya" you think it is. Collaborators with the state has been a thing for a very long time. Remember this story in Memphis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tyre_Nichols
And as for this "Today, far-leftist like you have decided that increases in completely normal immigration enforcement" Yeah hate to break it to you but only the hardcore base is onboard with the extreme measures taken by ICE. https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-february-2026/ . But to be frank the fact you think that I must be a "far leftist" is kind of all I really need to know where you're coming from. I would really ask you go ahead and look what MattY wrote https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-turning-point-in-minnesota. Seriously, read the whole thing and if you're conclusion is Matt is making a "far leftist" argument I really really don't know what to tell you.
The only way to support the Trump administrations rejection of American values like due process, habeas corpus, free speech, the right to bear arms, etc is to be anti-American.
The whole “you cannot treat these violations of rights and law as illegitimate” is dishonest and circular. It’s basically “you cannot criticize the violation of law because those violating the law are THE LAW.”
The fact that you feel a need to flagrantly lie about the most basic facts of the Good and Pretti shootings (Good did not "ram a car," Pretti's handgun was licensed) in an effort to smear the victims (not to mention idiotically speculate about what would have happened if police departments turned their staff over to ICE to act as additional attack dogs) says all we need to know about this position.
I know you think arguments like this is convincing, but these moralisms aren't convincing to anyone that don't already agree with you and are useless rhetorical devices.
Good rammed her car into the law enforcement action is what I mean, which she did, whether or not you think she ran into a cop. Pretti bringing a gun with a history of discharge into a law enforcement action and getting involved clearly was the reason he got shot. I'm very anti gun for this reason. I apologize in that I thought it was also unlicensed.
The point remains that (a) neither exists as an oppressed class in any way, and (b) jumping into law enforcement action is not a legitimate form of protest simply because you don't like the action being taken. Using a car or a literal gun in that act will obviously lead to bad results.
I find both the ICE arrests of American citizens in wide sweeps disgusting, and the lefts inability to distinguish between those Americans, illegal immigrants here without issue for decades, and illegal immigrant felony criminals also disgusting. The later is due to the oppressor/oppressed frame that they bring to the idea of immigration enforcement in general. It makes no sense and has given rise to the anti-anti-ICE coalitions legitimate pushback.
You are wrong to frame this as “normal.” Especially since the most effective use of resources would target employers and not random people on the street as a performative action in specific Democratic cities.
You can argue the ‘Kavanaugh Stops’ and at-large raids are retaliatory and not as effective as they could be, but you cannot argue that it's illegitimate oppressors cracking down extra-judicially on an oppressed class of Americans.
>abdication of border responsibilities in the prior admin
I am really tired of this take. When a ton of people show up at the border claiming asylum, the options are:
1. Saying no.
2. Sending them to deportation proceedings but telling them to stay in Mexico until their immigration court hearing
3. Sending them to deportation proceedings and Imprisoning them in the US until their immigration court hearing
4. Sending them to deportation proceedings and letting them live in the US until their immigration court hearing
Given the costs of options 1-3 (costs to the migrants in 1 and 2, and costs to both the migrants and government of #3), choosing #4 is perfectly reasonable as the best of several bad options, and it is nowhere close to "abdication of border responsibilities"
The US government has responsibilities towards it’s citizens, not migrants or other governments. So, yes, abdication of border responsibilities seems accurate, especially when reverting to Trump’s policies in year 4 wasn’t much of a problem.
(1) was clearly the best option after it started to get bad, but that didn't happen. (4) is what happened but it leads to the huge necessity in increased ICE enforcement we are seeing now as a backlash to that policy. It seems to me that if you accept (4) then you must accept aggressive deportation actions when 7% of the nation of Nicaragua (et al) were not found to be legitimate asylum seekers.
Spending billions to accommodate (4) and then spending hundreds of millions to enforce the rejected claims has imo been an abdication of basic responsibility.
Except Alex Pretti was a legal gun owner who had a permit for his gun. There is a reason the NRA contested the administrations response. Renee good is not ramming her car into anything. Even if she did brush the ICE officer, she likely didn’t see him as she was focused on the offer outside of her window. If this is how you frame these state murders, it makes the rest of your statements and biases suspect.
Driving a car through or bringing a handgun to a law enforcement action is obviously going to end poorly. That is the point. Even on the worst issue for the Trump admin where legitimate civil rights issues are at stake, the framework that does not distinguish between American civil liberties being violated, illegal immigrants being here for decades without issue, and illegal immigrant felons is a framework that is dumb and wrong, and it does not mean that people are 'oppressed' by the State in a systemic way.
ICE has clearly overreached, which is why the Trump administration decided to back down, but deporting illegal immigrants is not oppression, even if you want to argue that Obama and Clinton were oppressors.
Warrantless searches of what turn out to be citizen households with children held at gunpoint, routine brutality against any civilian nearby, use of force practices that would have made the Soviets in Czechoslovakia in 1968 blush, deliberately declining to accept evidence of citizenship and holding or deporting native-born and naturalized Americans... get back to me when you want to claim that forcibly quartering ICE in local households isn't oppressive, lol.
IDGAF about deporting people with deportation orders in public places or executing judicial warrants for access to private ones, but that's not what's been happening.
A lot of the reduction in poverty was a result of things become cheaper over time, not only expansion in welfare. Food, clothes, electronics, appliances, etc have all become much cheaper relatively since the 1970s.
On the flip side, housing, medical care and child care have become much more expensive, and difficulty accessing those do not get considered usually in poverty metrics. I do think a lot of the messaging on the left has shifted to focusing on these things.
They do have an economic message. Unfortunately, the progressive left’s proposed policy agenda on these topics are often in opposition to actually making these things more accessible. And with Republicans slowly shifting towards immigration and culture issues and being more open to populist economic messages, the Democrats are not the only ones talking about these issues.
The vitriol and antisemitism is not sustainable on the left, I agree. I didn’t realize how deep rooted it was, until recently, unlike how I was aware of it on the far right, but it clearly goes way back.
But I do think there is an economic message. Whether it’s a message that can beat out Republicans and whether the policy platform matches the economic message is another story.
Don't the kids in social medias res say that Doordash is cheaper than cooking, because groceries cost too much these days? Seems like there's still an appetite for outdated economic messaging in this economy.
I should note, I have some major disagreement clearly with one of your follow up posts, but I actually agree with a lot of this initial post. What's funny to me is I've read multiple articles/posts from right leaning pundits in places like National Review arguing against Bernie/far left policies in part by arguing poverty in not nearly as bad as far lefties make it out to be because social programs reduce income inequality and government transfers mean very few people in America live in abject poverty. I say "funny" because these very same people will than pivot to saying this is why we need to cut Social Security, cut Medicare/Medicaid or cut SNAP benefits when they just made the argument as to why these programs are so important and shouldn't be cut (or at least not cut in the manner they advocate. MattY has written I think quite persuasively we could save a ton of money tomorrow just eliminating Medicare Advantage with basically not much downside to benefits to the elderly).
Of course I bring Medicare in part to note the big big caveats to this is housing and health care especially the former (Given Medicaid covers the lowest rungs of society). And housing is (one of many examples) as to why I actually agreed with you that the "oppressor/oppressed" framing as a catch all explanation of how the world works. It's not actually the case that the 0.1% "oppressors" are primarily responsible for high housing costs, but in fact mostly middle and upper middle class citizens of both parties that are primarily responsible via NIMBY.
I just thought of all the places to criticize this "oppressor/oppressed" framework, talking about ICE actions in the last 12 months might be the absolute last example I'd give and in fact the example I'd give where this framework is possibly it's most correct in our current moment.
The point about the ICE discussion is that it definitely is the place where the administration has arguably stretched their legal authority the most, and STILL is not representative of an ‘oppressor’ class railroading an ‘oppressed’ class. You can disagree with their methods as I do, but the logic of the anti-ICE coalition still doesn't make sense in their own frame of the issue. If that issue does not fit the overall moral logic of the left any longer than what does? Nothing.
I suspect that with civil rights you have greater sorting of people based on ability and culture. High ability people experience new opportunities to move and remove themselves from areas where bad cultures (a perverse form of Southern honor culture) result in violence and dysfunction.
With the FHA the African American middle class leaves from dysfunctional cities (that were facing fiscal crunches in the 60s and 70s for broader structural issues.) This concentrates dysfunction and bad cultural patterns. Those problems result in the rise of narcotics use and trade. Poverty relief programs exacerbate this only inasmuch as it contributed to the midcentury sorting.
In short, it’s an unintentional market for lemons. This is my hypothesis for why many U.S. cities have crime and dysfunction.
This is an excellent point. Reading about Jesse Jackson's mother, it's obvious she was a more functional person than myself or probably most of the posters here, and it's inconceivable that someone with as much agency as her would be eating turkey carcass on Thanksgiving in 2026.
There’s a lot of whitewashing of some fairly vicious antisemitism, with no counterpart anti black racism, that goes into these anodyne recaps of the black-Jewish relationship - such as the NYT article Matt is cribbing from. The Crown Heights Riot, for example, was very much a unilateral affair. Ah well, I guess I can look forward to explaining to my kids that no, the reason Jews weren’t involved in the Women’s March wasn’t “disagreements about the Palestinians”, and that Tamika Mallory’s relationship with Farrakhan wasn’t some cute sidenote.
I think when MY says meeting with the PLO and Arafat in 1979 was “spicy in the pre-Oslo period”, he downplays what that actually meant.
It was just a few years after a string of high profile airplane hijackings conducted by groups that were within the PLO (PFLP and Fatah for instance). The PLO was operating out of Lebanon and had orchestrated countless cross border attacks on Israel. The PLO was operating under its founding charter, which made it clear that their intention was to destroy Israel and create Palestine to replace Israel, and that the only Jews that would be welcome would be those who could demonstrate a family connection to Palestine pre-1882 (“before the Zionist invasion”), meaning that the majority of Israeli Jews who were the descendants of immigrants would not be welcome. The PLO had not yet adopted its current strategy of recognizing Israel but trying to stop it from being a Jewish state by “refugee return” and creating a Palestinian state in the W Bank and Gaza.
So when Jackson met with Arafat, he was a leader of a terrorist organization actively sponsoring violent attacks on Jews and others, operating based on an explicitly eliminationist ideology.
It wasn’t just “spicy”. People who don’t understand this context may be misled about why there was pushback to him meeting with Arafat.
Correct, and I should have been much more explicit about this. And even this leaves out the 1972 Munich massacre - granted, this was Black September’s doing - and the Lebanese civil war that Arafat and the PLO kicked off (again, this gets a bit obscured in English-language accounts; the civil war was primarily a function of Arafat’s large militia showing up in Lebanon and contesting the state’s sovereignty). Arafat at the time was perceived much more similarly to Che Guevara than to Mandela.
Or, well, he was comparable to Hamas or Hizbollah today. Suffice it to say that if Barack Obama went to meet with Hassan Nasrallah on the campaign trail, he (rightly) would not have successfully rehabilitated.
Yep, one of the reasons people don't trust Democrats to actually uphold the liberal norms that Matt likes to talk about is that they really don't like holding certain members of their own coalition to those norms.
On the flip side, Norm Finkelstein referred to Van Jones using uncle Tom and the Yiddish equivalent of the N-word. I found it deeply shocking how little pushback he got for that. He hasn't felt a need to delete the comments. It seems a community that could scarcely proclaim any louder the importance of anti-racism will shrug at people using racial slurs so long as it's in the service of anti-Zionism.
How true was that however? My grandfather experienced anti-semitism from members of the black community when he was a teacher and later principal in Queens (there was more local control of the schools at the time). There was also a lot of racism towards black people including in places with a high Jewish population (I was pretty shocked reading about just this random NYC neighborhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canarsie,_Brooklyn#Racial_tensions_and_growing_black_population). Nassau County (where my dad grew up and my parent's currently live) was deliberately segregated in the post-war era.
Let me know when you find a Wikipedia article about a Jewish lynch mob, or an American Jewish leader with on the order of a million supporters who says “Adolf Hitler was a great man.” (I don’t know who the black equivalent of Hitler would be - Jefferson Davis?) If you think a middle class school board objecting to sharing a school with students from the NYCHA projects serves as a counterpart to a pogrom and/or allying with Yasser Arafat (see Brian Ross’s comment for more context about what that actually signified) then you’re probably ready to burn down every upper middle class suburb in the country.
[Jean-Jacques Dessalines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Dessalines) is not even close to Hitler levels (just on sheer scale) but might be in the running for helping end slavery in Haiti, the massacres that followed, and then basically re-implementing slavery with new branding.
This doesn't seem really accurate wrt Jews and the Women's March? From what I remember, stuff around Farrakhan wasn't really part of the discourse around the first Women's March right after the inauguration in 2017 at all, and there were plenty of Jewish participants. Tamika Mallory became an issue when she was the face of an attempt to half-heartedly build an organization around it, and said organizing effort entirely fizzled, indicating that the negative coverage of her associations mattered. It's not like this became a successful organization that held many large marches with broad buy-in from progressive constituencies and dissent from Jews that went ignored.
What is inaccurate about a) Jews were shoved out of the Women’s March movement and b) Tamika Mallory shrugged off Farrakhan’s antisemitism? Here’s the long form; anyone else is welcome to read it and judge for themselves whether my remarks are accurate.
As for coverage - the coverage of Jessie Jackson’s remarks mattered at the time. As did Al Sharpton’s performance whipping up Crown Heights rioters into a frenzy. Etc etc. All of that is neatly buried underneath the surface of “the Black-Jewish coalition ruptured due to tensions on both sides”. The same way the riot itself is now described as “violent unrest between black people and Jews in Crown Heights”.
I think MY may be right that a lot of Jackson's vision won out, despite the Clintonian interlude that Obama mostly followed in substance.
I'm not really sure that's a good thing though, not when there aren't enough squares, and where they aren't distributed well for Senate and Electoral College purposes. In terms of big picture I think it's also always interesting how Democrats back in the day took for granted having the working class. You can add 'white' to that if you need to but even though they've been the first to depart the coalition it's under threat across races, and in particular with men.
My take is that the quilt is a lovely metaphor for the political world Jackson inhabited, or at least a plausible enough perspective of it, particularly pre-90s, but it isn't good politics anymore. In the 2020s it's just grievance groups with claims of dubious merit looking for satisfaction against a unified majority that no longer exists. I've said before we need someone with a vision, and part of that vision is going to have to be very deliberately leaving Jackson in the past.
I really strongly disagree that Obama was 'Clintonian' as opposed to closer to the anti-poverty intersectional coalition mold. the ACA burned absolutely enormous amounts of political capital all to help poor people pay for healthcare, and the Obama admin was pretty famous for handing out social issue wins to every constituent 'oppressed' group in the coalition.
He absolutely came from the world of activism and academia but I just don't see it. On a macro policy level his presidency can probably be boiled down to:
-deference to economic orthodoxy that may have been been too cautious in that it left us with a near decade of under stimulation coming out of the Great Recession
-healthcare reform that amounted to saving the private insurance industry from itself
-very, slow and cautious wind down from the GWOT but still plenty of room to drone people all over the ME and overthrow Gaddafi
-stalemates with the GOP Congress over 'split the baby' immigration reform (including a unilateral massive deportation effort) and Clinton-like attempts at deficit reduction
A few things I do appreciate and a few things I don't appreciate about Jackson:
What I do appreciate, he genuinely grew up in grinding poverty and experienced a type of racism that mostly doesn't exist today, and that's a valuable perspective that's getting lost in today's politics. Very few of our remaining politicians have that sort of background now.
Secondly, I appreciate his oratory, and I think we've gone way to far in the opposite direction of having politicians speak too casually and say "ummm," "ya know," and "like," and things like that. I miss politicians making actual speeches that were full of crafted rhetoric. Also, I appreciate his use of Christian language without getting bogged down in to specifics (he probably did this elsewhere). I've seen James Talarico's version of Christian lefty politics, and while I appreciate what he's trying to do, it reminds me of the mid-2000s, and I'm scared it's going to kick off a very dumb argument at the next family gathering about God and pronouns or something. The type of rhetoric like "I am my brother's keeper" is searing but also vague enough to not kick off a tedious argument.
On the other side of things, the patchwork quilt approach to politics kind of reminds me of why I was on the right to begin with. In general I prefer the government not to act, and if there is an issue that rises to the level of requiring government action (and I do think Civil Rights rises to this level), the action taken should be specific and targeted to the actual problem. I don't like the idea that because I support Civil Rights legislation, or some anti-poverty measures that I must also support farm subsidies, or some regulation that benefits some union somewhere by restricting competition. Jackson didn't get that specific, but that's often where that impulse leads. Funny enough, today it's the right that's doing this. If you support, I don't know, lax gun regulations, that means you must also support property tax breaks for seniors. The only thing holding the coalition together is one guy. I wonder if the patchwork quilt has room for "I don't really have any personal policy demands, but the other guys are crazy."
Ultimately, I think principled small government types like you are going to have to resign yourselves to the fact that no matter which party is a better fit at a given time, you'll always have to be part of a patchwork because your views are only held by a pretty small minority. Most people are not actually intellectually consistent on government; they want big government services and low taxes, a combination that generally makes no sense.
If it makes you feel any better, this lack of consistency also means the big-government high-tax constituency is a weird minority as well. Both archetypes have to find common cause with a bunch of people who don't have a particular view on the size of the government but want action on a variety of other things.
Having consistent views on anything makes you a minority. I don't even know I’d call myself a small government person, more of just, if it's a coin flip of whether or not policy X is a good idea, I lean towards “don't do it.”
Yes, which is why you're probably conservative in temperament! My inclination is always to try it if we're not sure, because it may be great, which is why I always lean liberal.
I don't think you mention at any point during this post that you're doing it because Jessie Jackson just died. I mean, probably most people heard but in this fractured news environment maybe someone didn't. And as an archive read a year from now or something, it might help to have added a sentence near the beginning "in light of Jessie Jackson's recent death" or something.
Where do Never Trump conservatives fit into this "quilt" of a Democratic party?
From my perspective, the whole progressive coalition is a liability; the Democrats' advantage is that they're the last bastion of the decency and constitutionalist patriotism that I used to take for granted as an inherent and permanent trait of the American people.
How do you make the Democratic Party more welcoming to Reaganauts?
The fact is that it's not going to happen, and it probably shouldn't. Speaking as the kind of person that I think you mean (more a Rockefeller Republican actually, but I voted for Reagan twice and am still proud of it), the Democrats have the right to their own coalition and to exclude us, and we have the right not to join. We're allies in the effort to preserve liberal democracy, to end the current kleptocracy/kakistocracy, and to make sure that it can't return. I value and respect them for that, but I don't delude myself that we're ideological soulmates.
It's up to us to form the new Second Party, a Center-Right, Constitutionalist party dedicated to free thought, free people, free nations, and free markets, as the Conscience Whigs and the Anti-Slavery Democrats formed the Republican Party 170 years ago when the Whigs became as irredeemably corrupt as the Republicans are now. It's my ongoing frustration that the people who should be leading this, like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, seem to be afraid to put in the kind of hard work that Lincoln, Frémont, and Seward stepped up to do then.
What your comment makes me think of is that there might be common ground in favor of electoral reforms in the direction of proportional representation. Third parties in the US have always been pretty futile because of our electoral system. Open primaries and ranked choice voting... What are the options here?
It would be fun if Matt wrote a post about how Democrats can integrate Never Trump conservatives to grow their support base and win. :)
I agree about third parties, and I'm not talking about one. I'm talking about a new SECOND Party (PoliSci talk for the consecutive US Party Systems, in which the Democrats have been the "First Party" since Jefferson, competing with a series of rising and falling "Second Parties", the Republicans being the most recent) to REPLACE the Republicans, the way that they replaced the Whigs and the Whigs replaced the Federalists.
I live in Brazil these days, which has around 30 parties and proportional representation for every legislative body except the Federal Senate, and I would caution against proportional representation schemes. Whatever else they do, they break the line of responsibility -- and responsiveness -- between a specific legislator and his/her specific voters. And when legislators don't feel a need to respond to voters, they're going to respond to someone else, who's probably hard to identify.
One possibility I've considered is a hypothetical new constitution with a "house of representatives" where geographically contiguous communities of similar population each elect one member, as well as a "house of parties" where voters vote for their preferred party (including smaller parties) and each state, or the country at large, elect a slate representing the parties proportionally.
Maybe the "house of representatives" can be the more powerful chamber, electing a sort of prime minister, with the "house of parties" reserved for issues of partisan fairness or representation of small and/or geographically dispersed parties?
If your goal as the new Second Party is to take down the Republican party, how will this party win voters from its current MAGA manifestation? Do you think there's a large body of current Republican voters hungering for a message of free thought, free people, free nations and free markets?
I don't think that the diehard MAGAts can be converted: like the ex-Confederates during the last third of the 19th Century, we'll have to isolate them and wait for them to die off. But in what is still basically a Center-Right country, if there aren't enough Center-Right people left who identify with and respond to the message of the Revolution to support it with their voices and their votes, then the Republic really IS cooked, and we deserve to lose it.
For perspective here, I'd describe myself as a high partisan/low ideology Democrat.
I think that there's a fundamental problem of this driven by the inherently weak parties in the US. As Matt has said before, in most countries the coalition bargaining happens *after* the elections, when it's clear how many votes each faction has to bring to form a government. In the US, that bargaining happens before the election with the "how many votes does this faction bring?" question being unknowable.
Additionally, since these factions are amorphous and leaderless, there's nobody empowered to bargain on behalf of the "Reaganauts" or "Rockefeller Republicans" or "NatSec Hawks" or any other faction of the conservative movement that would be Dem-curious given a Trump-led GOP. On the Dem side, given how administrations are constrained by Congress, there's not a lot of policy wins that could conceivably be guaranteed by a Democratic nominee. In a hypothetical Harris/Jeffries dynamic, where Harris made promises to the NatSec hawks to build a 600-ship Navy, there's nothing that Harris can do to force House appropriators to fund that priority.
And because there's no guaranteed policy wins or guaranteed votes, you sort of fall back on vibes where the best guarantee we have for you is "you don't have to live under the Mad King." Now in a parliamentary system, even without guarantees beyond "defeat the Mad King," the Reaganaut Party would be able to sink the government if it felt the terms of the bargain were not being upheld, which incentivizes everyone to play nice and keep the coalition together.
This has been a very longwinded way to say that my best answer for "How do you make the Democratic Party more welcoming to Reaganauts?" is that you Reaganauts should become Democrats and work to make the party more welcoming to your co-ideologues because there's nobody who can exert control over an American political party other than the members of it. (and yes, I understand that Trump is the exception to this maxim)
One more thing: free trade. The recent big successful Dem presidents have negotiated big trade deals and been friendly to free trade. Cool! Own that! We are seeing the harm from tariffs, both on the economy, on the rule of law, and on foreign affairs. There are lots of appealing ways for the Democrats to assert themselves as the party of free trade (absolutely or relatively) right now. And it would appeal to Reaganites.
He attacked Clinton from the Progressive-left and won. He was anti-NAFTA and more generally, anti-"free" trade. Probably the #1 reason he re-established the blue wall.
Obama had a big Trans-Pacific Partnership he negotiated for Asian trade. And I'm talking about Clinton too. Anyway, tariffs had been consistently lower for decades than they are now. And Trump is using spurious emergency powers to jack up tariffs without Congress. All the Dems need to do is go back to normal and not follow Trump's example to be a huge improvement from a free marketeer point of view.
I guess the question is do you want to be competitive in Ohio or not. Obama won by 5%p in 08. Trump just won by 12%p. I'm just going to trust former Sen. Brown that "all the Dems need to do is go back to normal" -- isn't going to cut it:
I'm curious your thoughts on this as I seen you express great skepticism about free trade. Do you think the US is better off pulling back from free trade with its historical trading partners?
edit - by pulling back, I mean both in accepting imports and sending exports.
I'm 100% down for free and fair trade; like Obama. I loved our ~ balanced relationship with Canada before Trump destroyed it. Our net trade seemed nicely balanced with Japan and S. Korea. But when China ~ simply blocks imports and is manipulating it's currency to such an insane degree that the entire industrial output becomes a global dumping operation then yes ... drive tariffs as high as they need to go to balance the manipulation. Which thankfully is now the global consensus (i.e., Biden only increased Trump's tariffs). When NAFTA was used to just break unions across 800k factories -- yeah, that's bullshit. Because all that did was roll increased profits into shareholder earnings and accelerated our inequality. We're weaker not stronger because of it. When the EU tariffs the fuck out of US auto imports -- that's not "free" trade.
By the way, one thing I'd advocate if I'm to put on a hat of “Reaganite giving advice from inside the Dem tent” would be: can we embrace constitutional originalism?
Roe v. Wade looks like a mistake now, doesn't it? It was a 50-year detour through pretending that a right to abortion was in the Constitution, when it obviously isn't. It left tens of millions of voters, angry and disenfranchised and willing to go to extremes. And then it was overturned. If the Dems would just say, “we're not going to try to appoint judges that will reinstate Roe, just let it be a state issue,” that would free a lot of nose-holding pro-life GOPers to flip.
And probably a lot of Dems would be horrified at the idea of reversing Obergefell, as would be required by originalism since the Constitution obviously doesn't really contain a right to gay marriage. Would that matter much at this point? There's federal backstop legislation anyway.
It's hard for Dems to position themselves as defenders of democracy when they have long sided with legislating from the bench. Originalism would be a really good way to consolidate the Democratic brand around constitutional integrity. And it doesn't require substantive reversal on the social issues, just the process issue of whether we enact these things democratically or tell lies about what the Constitution means.
That's probably gonna win us at least one Quiet Car's worth of voters.
Jokes aside, I don't find these arguments particularly persuasive. But if you, as the leader of the House Reaganite Party, were to come to me as the leader of the House Democratic Party and say "My 10 Members will vote for you to be Speaker if you [take specific actions that will accomplish those goals]," I'd be pretty willing to be persuaded. This is a place where we political fans tend to lose sight of the fact that politics is about the obtaining and wielding of power, not just position-taking for the sake of position taking.
Under this scenario the "no activist judges" pledge delivers concrete results (setting aside that the House doesn't have a role in nominating or confirming judges, we're still in Hypothetical Land) that the cross-pressured pro-choice members of our coalition could support. But without the guaranteed votes for power, then it's just a political gambit that has to be weighed against other members of the coalition (and frankly, those members are in better standing with the party than newcomers).
Again, I'd be interested in your polling. The pro-life movement is huge. It has mobilized millions, including lots of single-issue voters. I've certainly known lots of people who don't like the GOP but feel they have to vote for it on the abortion issue alone. The notion that Democrats would gain no additional political support by neutralizing the issue doesn't seem plausible. And if the party's position were "Roe was wrong, leave it to the states," then there would be no daylight between them and Trump. How could you possibly argue that that wouldn't move substantial votes? I don't get it.
And while it's true that the House can't influence judicial appointments, the Senate can.
Abortion rights are incredibly popular and getting more so; it's laughable to think that the Democratic Party throwing women to the Republican wolves would somehow win over support. It would be more likely to split the party outright.
I wasn't trying to get into the issue itself. My point is that for any issue that involves a change like this, the mechanics of the American system make that a gamble that your co-partisans would dislike, as opposed to a hard-nosed deal to obtain power. Issue groups used to be able to play some role here (see the NRA's endorsement of moderate Dems that lasted through the mid-2010s), but more and more these groups have become organs of the party, not vehicles for single-issue voters to register their support.
Well, there's the minor problem that "originalism" is a practically moronic and morally evil way to organize a government. (There you go, fellow commentator-- that IS me moralizing about something!) There's no democratic justification for binding present generations to the dead hand of perpetual rule by premodern slaveowners.
That's what the amendment process is for. If you don't like the Constitution, it has a process for changing it. If, instead of that, you have judges just make up the law, you're violating democracy. Democrats have done that too long, and done profound damage to the legitimacy of the republic by disenfranchising people. It's a big problem.
The amendment process is deliberately designed to prevent even a huge majority of the current populace from using it. When something like two percent of the US population (whatever 50%+1 of the smallest 13 states is) can block an amendment at their leisure, you do not have a democratically legitimate process. You have a fig leaf.
And interpreting the written text in accord with what an ordinary person today would understand it to mean is far from "making up the law." That is what legal interpretation, for the most part, consists of-- construing texts in accord with what a reasonable reader would think them to mean. It is a far more legitimate process than the sort of historical cherrypicking of arcana that characterizes "originalist" reasoning.
The only reason we were able to add words saying that black people have human rights is that the states that think black people don't have human rights were forcibly prevented at the point of a bayonet from acting on that belief in the ratification process. The amendment process is not fit for purpose. It can only add amendments that are functionally unopposed by any significant political faction, even a tiny minority one.
The Constitution contains no right to marriage whatsoever. It does, however, contain a right to equal protection under the law by which gay marriage is must be treated on the same footing as straight marriage.
Right. One generation’s elite chooses to mean something different by “marriage” than humanity had ever meant, and suddenly a social revolution that would have horrified the founders and the framers of the 14th Amendment is implied by the “equal protection” clause. And does that clause also mean that men should have equal rights to be treated as women, or that polygamous marriages should have equal protection with monogamous ones? If fashionable opinion can get five judges to say so, then yes! Regardless of what the people think.
These sophistries are disgraceful. If you want to change the law, use the democratic process! Disenfranchising the people through lying non-originalist jurisprudence is the left's analog of January 6, 2021. It backfired mightily in the case of Roe, and the timing of Trump's rise, coinciding almost exactly with Obergefell, strongly suggests that that disgraceful decision drove it. Liberals need to repent and return to democracy, which can only mean originalism.
Presumably because you don't want to live under the Mad King. If you are willing to accept life under the Mad King because you get policy outcomes you like, or because the Mad King's party seems to want you around, that's a fair choice to make.
I would want to ask why you don't feel welcome by the Democratic party and what would make you feel welcome. I mean this very literally and straightforwardly: Did you want to have Kamala Harris make a particular statement? Have the Democratic platform adopt a particular policy proposal?
From my point of view, a lot of this is similar posturing we saw from the left over Israel/Palestine, an attitude of "____ has to earn my vote by adopting my particular views on [issue]". And what this tends to miss is that parties are coalitions and anybody's one particular views on [issue] may be a minority view among other members of the coalition. Painting with a broad brush here, there's a reason successful politicians aren't going around checking the boxes with enough interest groups to get a majority of voters and instead tend to assemble broad electoral support. And the way I see it is because most voters aren't like me (highly partisan, lowly ideological) and are instead cross-pressured among an array of issues, and so being locked down by one interest group will lose you votes among other voters who don't prioritize that group's issue above all else (sorry if this doesn't make sense, I'm trying not to ramble here).
Pushing back here-- it is in fact NOT a "fair choice to make" to say that you think other people should be deprived of rights to political participation because doing so gives you policy outcomes you like. That is the definition of an unfair choice, and it makes you a traitor to democracy.
"Fair" in the sense of "I don't agree with his Bart-killing policy. But I do approve of his Selma-killing policy." Plenty of voters balance these considerations, and while I don't agree with their conclusions, it's a choice thousands of voters made.
I will note that in general I refuse to just to vote for the lessor of two evils. I couldn't vote for Trump because of Jan 6th. But I broadly disagree with many Democratic policy goals, also, I thought the Biden/Harris administration was a disaster (no I'm not in favor of a lot of what Trump has done either)
"I would want to ask why you don't feel welcome by the Democratic party and what would make you feel welcome. "
the immediate examples that spring to mind, I'm called a racist because I want immigration enforcement, or a transphobe because I don't want biological men playing women's sports, in woman's bathrooms, nor minors taking puberty blockers are any other "gender affirming care"
Theoretically there is a a Democrat that could get my vote. One very focused on actually delivering on an Abundance agenda, but dropping all the culture war stuff I oppose.
From what little I know of you I do think you should be voting in Democratic primaries. The problem with the primaries is that the composition of primary electorates is quite strange. The Republicans probably cannot be changed via primaries at this point but the Democrats can.
"or a transphobe because I don't want biological men . . . in woman's bathrooms"
This is literally the dictionary definition of transphobia-- an irrational fear of trans people totally unsupported by evidence.
If what you want is for Democrats to be transphobic, then you can say that, and we can diagnose that claim as such and respond accordingly. But don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining.
So I'm going to push to get into specifics, because I don't think any Democratic candidate has called you a racist or a transphobe. Or if they have, that's a bad way of trying to win votes and I don't begrudge you not wanting to vote for that person.
What are the concrete actions you'd want to see from a Democratic candidate to earn your vote? For the sake of this we'll limit it to policy proposals or statements that you'd like to see a Democratic candidate adopt or make.
Side note, thanks for engaging respectfully here. I'd sworn off comments sections for over a decade, but the SB section so far has been fun to be a part of.
"I don't think any Democratic candidate has called you a racist or a transphobe"
Literally the next guy in the thread
"This is literally the dictionary definition of transphobia-- an irrational fear of trans people totally unsupported by evidence."
But moving on towards that, actually running and delivering on an abundance style agenda would be REALLY appealing to me. I thought that book was great, and just making that the core focus would be great.
But I would actually have to believe that Dems were really interested in making government effective and efficient. I used to live in CA, and now I'm in Oregon. To put it mildly I haven't been impressed by blue state governance.
If in these places with blue state trifecta's we started to see a drastic turn around, that could make a difference. Actually delivering on kitchen table issues like housing costs, and infrastructure building, and getting rid of burdensome red tape would be very compelling.
My wife used work in real property for the US government. I asked her how long a typical project takes she said 1 to 2 years.
I asked her how long it should take if you cleared away the red tape, and everyone did their jobs, but you still protected the environment. She said 1 to 2 months.
There's just too many veto points, and yes to many lazy government employees that use red tape to avoid doing work.
Finally agreed, SB has one of the best comment sections on the internet. I've had a number of good faith discussions with people over policy differences. Very refreshing. I've often had better discussions here than in other places where I'm more aligned policy wise.
That's right. I took the pledge of allegiance to the Republic, and since the GOP has sold its soul to the insurrectionist felon, it's clear that the only way to be loyal to the republic is to vote for the Democrats. I don't feel particularly welcome since I'm on the other side on key issues of policy and constitutional interpretation. But still, it's a normal American political party, the only one left, and that feels nice and homely and wholesome, so I don't mind.
Statistically, Never Trump conservatives are a trivially small percentage of the population that needs to get used to the fact that they are a trivially small percentage of the population that neither party feels, or should feel, any obligation to cater to.
After 2024, they can claim to have some level of moral persuasive power, but they cannot any longer stake any claim to electoral relevance. The Democratic Party will not become more welcoming to Reaganauts, it shouldn't, and if it did it would lose votes, not gain them.
There are far more socialists in the USA than there are libertarians. It's not even close.
"DSA" is an organization, not a political position, but if you're looking for popular political positions socialism kicks libertarianism's ass halfway to the moon.
Got polls to support that? It's prima facie implausible, and the fact that Democrats have struggled to regain popularity despite Trump's severe unpopularity doesn't favor it. It sounds like wishful thinking.
(The graph, not the associated commentary, which I care nothing about.)
The reason Dems have struggled to regain popularity is that people with economically liberal views do not reliably support them. They already have very strong support among the fraction of economic conservatives with socially and politically liberal leanings, it's just that that group is trivially small. It convinces itself that it is much bigger than it is because it's full of rich people who spend lots of money on creating rich-people propaganda that mostly only convinces themselves. But it's become increasingly, and readily, apparent that they have no electoral muscle.
We had a very large and statistically significant opinion poll in 2024 that got about 150 million respondents, so... like Samuel Johnson, I refute it thus.
This chart is wildly wrong and paying even slight attention to what it suggests would illustrate that. Do you even know what they used to measure "liberal" vs "conservative" to make this chart?
That the chart is clearly wrong has been noted by the Niskanen center, Noah Smith had a post about it, it doesn't match most other research by political scientists who think its wrong, etc. If nothing else, the fact that there is a massive cluster on the wall of the left side of the chart should tell you that something is off about how it is being compiled. IMO, the best criticisms were about how they defined "liberal' vs "conservative" which is why I specifically asked about that.
If you disagree with the criticisms of the chart that's fine. I'd be interested to understand why. But most people who post that think that it proves their point, but haven't actually dug into how it was created or why most political scientists disagree with it.
But you are welcome to block me at your leisure if you think this is a "nuh-uh" discussion.
Not really. Approximately all authoritarian conservatives support Trump, because he's doing exactly what they want and they have contempt for democratic values.
The Democrats should cast a wide net and not do things to repulse any significant potential bloc of new supporters but the Reaganauts should know that it's *their* party that is the greatest threat to our democracy and our future so they should keep their demands for how Democrats should cater to them very modest indeed.
Reaganauts had a chance in 2016 when the Democrats nominated infamous warmonger Hillary Clinton to get their votes and most Democrats were willing to go along with it hoping that Lincoln Project and such had a real constituency, but then when 90+% of Republicans voted for Trump anyway, the chance to take over the Democratic Party faded away.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, there is no leader of "The Dems" that can bargain with the leader of "Never Trump Republicans" in any credible manner. In part because there is no leader of Never Trump Republicans and the leader of The Dems changes every 4-8 years, and also for all the ways a presidential system is different form a parliamentary one.
As I've said above, if you want the Democratic party to reflect your values, become a Democrat. We just don't have the coalition-forming mechanisms of a parliamentary system that lets minor parties join coalitions and get power that way. They have to join one of the two main parties.
It would also be nice for you to recognize that * your * erstwhile party, the Republicans, fucked up bigly by allowing itself to be taken over by the Orange God King, so that now all the people who value public decency and rule of law have to fit themselves in awkwardly into the other party. So yeah, no matter what we do, somebody in the Democratic/anti-Trump coalition will be unhappy. There’s no way around that.
And since the overwhelmingly vast majority of conservatives don't value public decency and the rule of law, the handful who do had better get used to voting for a party they disagree with on other issues. (Most of them have instead simply abandoned their claimed support for public decency and the rule of law, suggesting that their allegiance to those principles was probably never real to begin with.)
If you are one percent of a party's potential voting coalition (if anything, probably overoptimistic) you have no claim on its policy apparatus. If you're lucky they will throw you a bone here and there when it doesn't cost them anything.
Given how far her son went Jackson's mom was likely a very smart lady. If she'd been born in 1994 vs 1924 she would likely have gone to college and gone on to a professional career. But in the south in the 1920s there were intense racist and sexist forces in place to make that essentially impossible and poverty was the result.
Would it be fare to say that the kind of intense poverty Jackson and his family experienced would today be largely confined to people who, through no fault of their own, are facing intense challenges of a different nature - substance abuse, mental illness etc?
And for those on the left they are still too focused on the structural forces rather than the real issues faced by the desperately poor.
Yes, this is something I've brought up here before -- 21st Century progressives by and large do a poor job of engaging with the fact that in the developed world there are very few "deserving poor" in Victorian terms today, i.e., people who really do just need "a hand up" to get on a fairly stable life course, compared to what existed in the 19th to early 20th Centuries.
It really, really depends on your definition of “poor.” You’re right that there’s way less of the utter “I live in a shack with an outhouse and no running water” kind of poverty.
But there’s lots of, how do I say it, “deserving precarious” - people who did everything right, who work hard and obey the law, who are one bad event (a major illness or injury, car gets totaled, etc.) away from destitution, and that kind of life is hella stressful.
I don't know if the "did everything right" is good political framing in terms of the non-college suburban Milwaukee swing voting mom. She's looks at her ne'er-do-well relatives and balks at your "did everything right" framing.
I'm sure there are "ne'er-do-well" people who are in a bad position because of their own mistakes and screwups.
But, famously, the Success Sequence the conservatives tout is: 1. graduate high school 2. get a job, any job 3. stay away from crime/gangs 4. wait until after you're married to have children.
You can absolutely do all of the above and still be in a very precarious position, where one bad event (through no fault of your own, like, being hit by a drunk driver) equals financial ruin.
So the driver is uninsured, their job doesn't offer disability insurance, they can't negotiate to pay the out of pocket max from their health insurance ...what chain of events are you envisioning?
Insurance companies screw people all the time, that’s how we got Luigi (doesn’t justify murder of course). Insurance doesn’t actually protect you reliably. I max out the deductible on all my insurance to minimize premiums assuming they won’t actually cover anything lol.
Think about the knock on effects of that racism and sexism. If she had been a white male born in 1924, she would have gone to college for free on the GI Bill, then gone on to an upper middle class life with a nice home and small portfolio. Her kids, especially if they were male, would have gone to very good schools, graduated with little to no debt, built their own wealth, inherited their mother's, and been a position today to transfer that multigenerational advantage to their kid born in 1994. Absent being as extraordinary as Jesse Jackson, the first person in that family likely to go to college is the one born in 1994, or maybe 1984, and already down two generations of at least some passed on prosperity.
I'm in my early sixties, I know for certain that the early jobs I had that kickstarted my career would not have been offered to anyone not white, and only maybe gone to someone not male.
That's not what adoption studies say. Kids adopted at birth end up much more like their biological parents than their adoptive parents. Nature being much more important than nurture.
Generational wealth transfer means past disadvantages still compound today. $1 invested in the S&P 500 in 1960 would be worth about $70 today after adjusting for inflation. So to catch up with the heirs of so someone who was allowed to make money in 1960 and pass it down, a person today would have to make 70 times more money. That’s a tall order.
You can see this in housing too—someone could’ve bought land for a house in SF for peanuts 100 years ago (or even received it for free), that someone today needs to be a high-ranking executive at Google to buy. If your ancestors had gotten that land cheaply you have a massive advantage over someone who has to work very hard today to buy it. Even if someone with ancestors who did not have those opportunities converged to their ability in terms of income they still would be severely disadvantaged in buying a house over someone who just inherits it.
“There was the foundation of National Review in 1955 with the explicit thesis that free market Republicans should make common cause with Dixiecrats to forge a conservative movement. There was Barry Goldwater’s victory in the 1964 Republican Party primary as an exponent of that strategy.”
This is a historical error you keep repeating. The conservative movement was first founded in 1955 on the basis of “fusionism” (anti-communists + libertarians/free-marketers + traditionalists) - there was no explicit common cause with Dixiecrats until after 1964 and the full evolution of factional change from Democrats to Republicans took another 30 years.
The modern Democratic Party may very well have realized Jesse Jackson’s coalition building vision that peaked with Obama’s 2008 win but ideologically it’s an incoherent mess because of identity politics and focus on the bottom 15-20% instead of the middle class. No matter how many times Bernie lies about 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, less than 15% can be considered as poor and even they have access to many benefits. Most Americans do not want big changes in policy. Whichever party realizes that first and focuses on narrow but tangible things to improve on will expand their coalition.
I saw Jackson speak at a get out the vote rally in 1996, at Bates College. He was supporting the Democratic candidates then in the middle of the Clinton era, including the then Mayor of Lewiston, a middle class black business owner who was not particularly progressive, although he was my former karate teacher. But he also reprised many of the lines from his 1988 convention speech. Thinking back on it now, it was a clear demonstration of what Matt is saying -- he maintained his principles and his goals, he recognized both that he was succeeded in taking the party in that direction and that his goals were best served by supporting candidates much more moderate than he was.
But at the time, it was just the best speech I had ever been to. And it still is.
Tangent: I wish people would stop saying "20 years ago" or "30 years ago" as if 30 years ago were 1931. 30 years ago was 1996, and things were actually going pretty well!
I’m old enough to remember 1988 - I was in college at the time and Jackson came to speak. He was a very impressive speaker in person and what was refreshing is that most of his message to students was about voting and not the usual stump speech stuff. That is one memory from college that has really stuck with me and although I had several disagreements with Jackson, I always respected him after that.
That level of poverty described in the 1988 speech (which was describing Jackson’s own childhood in the 50s) has become less salient because it just doesn’t really exist in the US today—people do not have outhouses for bathrooms or lack running water or unable to afford socks even in the poorest inner-city areas.
On some level it’s all relative and abundance is just the flip side of the coin. But it does seem to be the death knell for traditional social democratic economics-focused leftism when poverty of the type described by Jackson no longer exists in the first world. Maybe if we had a world government we could revive that type of leftism by focusing on this kind of poverty that does still exist in the third world.
Clearly, I go different places and know different people than you know. That kind of poverty still exists. People who live in camper shells. Or tents on vacant lots. Or worse than that.
I took the above comment to mean that it doesn’t exist nearly at the levels that it used to or at the levels we see in many developing countries.
A look at the supplemental poverty rate in the US bears that out. And it’s worth celebrating/ acknowledging when you’re crafting a policy agenda.
Not when that agenda is grift and siphoning off public funds for non-profits.
West coast municipal governance for th... wait, what "governance"?
The long-term homelessness necessary to experience these conditions describes approximately 10-15,000 people in the whole country. In 1950, it described something like 35% of the housing stock. It wasn't until 1970 that only a single-digit percentage of the country's housing lacked *any* indoor plumbing, and until 1990 that only a percent or two lacked full indoor plumbing with sewerage.
It is not, cannot, will never, be the basis for a mass politics.
Yes, there are a small number of homeless encampments but those problems usually aren’t strictly financial and even they have much better access to healthcare than they used to.
I grew up in a zip code with under half the median US income and am kind of traumatized from that, but most of the trauma was not getting toys I wanted and social stuff like going to crappy public schools with violence and uncaring bureaucracy and not fitting in when I later went to college; I did not know anyone to lack indoor plumbing or running water.
I'm talking about the people who live in crap substandard housing. Come take a tour of Commerce City, Colorado, with me. The women who live in what are basically shacks, and put out requests on Facebook for laundry detergent because their kid needs clean clothes for school. I've driven over with laundry detergent and quarters; I've seen that world.
I'm tooling around the areas closest to major petrochemical and industrial facilities now and it would seem to prove the point: they're 1950's houses with municipal sewer hookups, a car in the driveway, and bikes on the front lawn.
This is not the form "poverty" took when "poverty" was the basis for a working-to-middle-class coalition that could dominate politics.
You gotta pay the water bill and sewer bill, though. One woman I was driving to the doctor had all her...sewage...in big black trash bags beside the house. The smell, my God. The flies. Some of the windows were broken and covered with cardboard. She'd inherited the house from her grandmother. It was disintegrating around her.
Again, though. Not going to be the basis for mass politics.
I'm center-left and in favor of basically every universal and means-tested benefit we have and a few more, but if you want me to genuinely sympathize with the folks you describe, it's going to be hard. Because I too have volunteered and spent a lot of time with people like them, and have found that basically every sinew of agency they have is turned towards the end of making their lives worse.
I support existing social programs, not for the sake of the long-term poor, but for the sake of the transient poor who will, if given a hand, through their own efforts make their way out of poverty within a couple years.
As regards long-term poverty, the best we can do is to build the school system into something that can more ably substitute for a parent and try to rescue as many of their children as possible.
Girding poverty is less common, though—far less common—than in the 1940s and 1950s (the era Jackson was talking about). That's something to be glad about. And overall poverty was roughly cut in half just between 1980 and 2020, never mind what it was back in 1950.
https://jabberwocking.com/helping-the-poor-has-been-one-of-the-great-triumphs-of-the-progressive-movement/#:
We haven't eradicated poverty, sadly, but we have made it less common, and less severe from a material standpoint (though I doubt it's less painful psychologically).
Sometimes I wonder if the people doing the census and the poverty counts are really finding everyone, though.
Things have improved. I won't deny that. But we affluent Slow Borer types can be kind of dismissive about the people who remain in very bad circumstances.
I don't think it's dismissive to note that there are far fewer people suffering these conditions than in the past. It would be dismissive to say that therefore we owe these people nothing. Indeed, we owe these people even *more* because to be poor in today's much richer society is unacceptable.
"we affluent Slow Borer types can be kind of dismissive about the people who remain in very bad circumstances."
I agree that there are very hard circumstances for people today. But I think its even more difficult for people living in the world now to truly understand how horrific being poor could truly be back then. People have a terrible grasp of how awful things were for most of human history.
Jackson’s mom was clearly a motivated person with a job, and was trapped in crushing poverty despite this fact. There just wasn’t enough of a social safety net and wasn’t enough redistribution—and consumer goods and food were also much more expensive.
My impression is that most of the people on the street or in tents on vacant lots have other issues—like mental health issues or substance abuse issues—and that their crushing poverty is downstream of those issues. Is that not your impression?
They still need to be clothed and fed but I think “people who have other disabling issues end up on the streets” is a different problem than “normal working class people live in abject poverty squalor because the conditions of the working poor are horrific”.
Incomes were more evenly distributed in the 50s than at any time after. However, the median was so much lower that even half a standard deviation below the mean sucked hard.
In that stage of development, reducing poverty to 2% would have required massive redistribution. Today, it would not.
"Today, it would not."
I think it would because poverty would be redefined yet again to a new standard.
Is there a problem with that, though?
If done with thoughtfulness and understanding that the definition has changed, sure. But so many people look at poverty today and compare it poverty in the past when what is meant by that has changed.
You don't know why someone is homeless until you have walked in their shoes.
That depends on the type of homeless. Temporary homeless has a lot of causes and many solutions. Permanent homeless is almost entirely mental illness or drug abuse and has no good solutions and few acceptable ones.
I've been homeless and destitute in the past. There's ALWAYS someplace else to go -- another way to approach life.
You're right, but *politically* the dimensions are very different. It used to be that grinding poverty and the working class went hand-in-hand, some people would be better off than others and have running water or might have an easier time hosting a proper Thanksgiving, but the vast bulk of the working class (even if a bit richer than Jackson describes in his quote) felt extremely precarious and felt real material hardship. It was a self-interested politics of uplifting this broad base of millions of people who could be the core of a voting bloc.
Now, anti-poverty politics is something that is mostly about the compassion of middle class people. Working class voters themselves are not particularly keen on it, largely because they largely have what middle class people would consider extremely reactionary opinions on the very poor, notably that it's mostly their own fault and they don't want to see anyone surviving on welfare when they have to work very hard to provide a (comfortable, but modest) life for their family.
You are talking about a very small number of people in a very large and populous country. Jackson was describing whole neighborhoods common in every town, city, and rural area.
My cousins, boomers, grew up with nothing but an outhouse until the late 1960s, and they were not the poorest people they or I knew.
WIC, food stamps, AFDC, EITC, school lunches, etc., and just the general level of prosperity have driven this kind of poverty down to rates unseen in our or anyone else's history.
Try making friends with people who live in rural regions and find out how they live. Heck, I know a fellow who has worked all his life as a ranch hand, always lived in an RV with no plumbing. He retired to the five acres owned by another former hand there who lives in the used trailer she bought from that the ranch where they both worked and lived when it closed down. Now she is getting old enough that she worries about her critters dying of thirst should she die and nobody might discover this for weeks, so she moved the other ranch hand onto her land where he continues living in his RV.
I could tell you more first-hand stories. I get around a lot among ranch hands, farm hands. Heck, visit a poultry swap or a livestock auction, get to know the rural working poor. Meet saddle tramps, guys with a well-worn saddle and a beat-up pickup (beat-up from mud/ice roads, sliding off sometimes and hitting a boulder), too busted up from their careers rodeoing to buck hay bales up onto stacks anymore, just picking up the work they still can do.
Normies differentiate between working poor and junkie poor.
That is a gross insult to the working poor who live in extreme poverty, for example many of the homeless. Or are too disabled to work. The mentally ill through no fault of their own. Open your eyes and ears. Engage and aid the homeless.
They won’t be homeless if they were forcibly committed. Their own families don’t want to help them. That should tell you something.
Your comment gives the impression that you assume that those who are mentally ill and in dire poverty, even homeless, are that way through their own fault. Yes, some can't live with family because their illness makes them violent, for example bipolar disorder. But that isn't their fault. It's genetic and they got snake eyes at the gamble of conception. Some don't live with their family because they suffer paranoid delusions against family members. That's usually due to a genetic-based illness. Some families have broken up, each going their own way, none of them with resources to be caretakers -- not the fault of the homeless poor. Some families are selfish and cruel. Some families are criminals.
This sounds like a case *for* mandatory institutional treatment, not against.
There is a homeless guy in our town who has tried about 60 times to start brush fires on the hillsides above downtown. The judges keep letting him go because it's not his fault he's bipolar or schizophrenic and there are no (enforced) laws saying he needs to be institutionalized and there are no institutions to send him too. One of these days he may succeed on burning down the town.
I don’t really see where this argument is going. Yes it is tragic that a fairly tiny share of the US are destitute as a result of genetic conditions that make it impossible for them to integrate with our broader society (or really, any society). Resolving that is a hard problem of management and program design. Not remotely a call to mobilize massive resources to transform 30%+ of the country.
He's trolling. DFTT sounds so "2011" but sometimes it's worth saying.
Depends on what you mean by "fault." They are what they are.
(If they're indeed to be regarded as having no agency of their own, "what" is more appropriate than "who.")
It's not anyone else's fault that they are what they are.
If they were alone in the world, they'd be that way (and would struggle accordingly) nonetheless. So what's all the talk of "social justice"?
Empathy is a two-way street.
Lots of people in the 1960s thought the people in Appalachia were the undeserving poor.
I’m telling you what the normie view is. Deserving or undeserving is a personal opinion.
I know, but I'm pointing out that many normies in the 50s and 60s felt the same way.
Still do!
In all these cases, people have access to running water and a bathroom; it’s just not exclusively theirs. That’s just qualitatively different from the situation in the 50’s, when whole communities lived like this.
Lots of people in Catron County, NM live without running watter. Also people in rural Loudoun County, VA. I know because they graciously invited me into their homes. Poor people can be really nice, *not* drug addicted or anything. One was an elderly woman living not in a camper, but just the shell of one that used to be on the back of a pickup. Rural Loudoun County, VA. She'd not the only one without plumbing who I met just in Loudoun County.
"Lots of people"
Can you define this some? I would expect it to be less than .1% of the US population. Which can still be an absolute large number of people, but dramatically different from the past when it was 1/3 or more of the population.
Defining the problem will depend on how well the next US Census is conducted. As I don't have comparable resources to the Census, all I can do is share my own observations.
What would you say the 2010 or 2020 census says?
The weirdos here don’t understand that a lot of people are really poor in the us. Some terrific reading they could do on dollar a day poverty since I don’t think they’ll be stepping foot in rural or urban places that are really tough.
Loudoun County, VA, is the wealthiest county in the US. In such places, the most salient problem is the hollowing-out (and immiseration) of the middle class amid the predations of an oligarchy. Long-term, intergenerational "grinding poverty" is quite another matter.
Cool, didn’t know that there were any number of people like this in the US today.
You’re edgy. Congratulations! Out there meeting the real people.
Or, you could drop your liberal pretentiousness and agree that the point made is reasonable.
But you fucking people can’t help yourselves, ever.
... are you the Carolyn Meinel who ran Happy Hacker in the ~2000 era?
Thank you, yes. Now I'm experimenting with ways to distinguish between the textual outputs of GenAI bots vs humans. It's the ultimate in computer security challenges, especially as someday they might try to kill us all -- or do that unintentionally as a side effect of something else they choose to do. My personal website: https://meinel.com.
I'll check it out, I loved Happy Hacker way back in the day!
Our website bestworldgroup.com is down for maintenance right now, should be back up soon. Also, we need to get out contact us buttons working. Recovering from a cyberattack by an insider, the worst kind.
Thank you. I was going to start sputtering about the people I've volunteered with.
Exactly and the inequality is worse
There is still quite a bit of extreme poverty in the US. This is especially evident in homelessness data. The exact figures vary a lot by the source and how you define “homeless”, but there are somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of homeless children.
To your point, these numbers aren’t high enough to drive a mass political movement, but it’s not like we solved poverty either.
Personally, I would much rather live in a house with a slop bucket and no running water than sleep in a shelter ever night. Or not know where my kids will sleep next week.
The extreme poverty the US has left seems to be a downstream affect of disability, mental illness and/or drug addiction. The solutions to reducing current extreme poverty are very different than 70 years ago.
That comment is unfair to those non-disabled people in extreme poverty who are good citizens but have fallen on hard times. We could be on the brink of mass unemployment of the white collar class. How many could transition to farm labor? Work in a slaughterhouse? Underground mining? These are hard, skilled jobs that pay poorly.
Those case are all general poverty, and there is an wildly effective solution, just giving those people money. EITC to help people that can't get higher paying jobs. Unemployment for those who lost there job. Emergency housing funds for those who are in danger of losing their place to live. Sadly, pure monetary solutions don't solve extreme poverty in the US.
I think this is undermined by two simple points. First is that 2/3rds of homeless are in temporary conditions, only about 1/3 of the homeless population is 'chronic.' Second is that 94% of homeless population owns a cell phone. People have the means to change their condition and many do, every day. That was not true for most of our history in dealing with poverty.
Not the point of your comment, but I know two people around 25-35 years old who grew up in Alaska in middle-class homes with outhouses. They’re apparently common enough if the soil is too unworkable for septic systems.
I feel like a compost toilet and a proper disposal pit are the play there, with an outhouse as a backup. Would much rather bundle up to spend ten minutes emptying the toilet once every few days than fumble my way outside to the bathroom at 6:30 AM.
What does one do with gray water in this situation? Just pump it to an outlet away from and downhill from the house?
You have a leachfield similar to what you have downstream of a septic tank. By the time you're at this stage, though, you're making it up and making do.
I grew up with an outhouse at our cabin until about 1995. We had running water and a leachfield for the greywater until we added a modern addition that doubled the size of the house, together with a modern concrete basement and septic tank system. The trick is to keep the toilet seat inside next to the wood stove.
Objectively true but I took Matt to mean not a coherent economic message for the 21st century. Sanders attempted to frame the debate between the 99% vs the 1% but clearly hasn’t resonated. Affordability has taken center stage. I don’t think either party has real solutions, and the Dems have long been poor at articulating their message.
We should always aspire to raise people's living standards, especially those lower down on the scale, and never be satisfied that people are better off than they were in the past. But too many on the left tend to live in a dream world in which poverty continues to crush people and there has been no visible progress.
I was an adult throughout this period. You fail to mention how the wind was taken out of Jesse Jackson's sails when his organization, Operation PUSH, was rocked with financial mismanagement, scandal and blatant self dealing (shades of Trump). His failure to run his own house efficiently and honestly doomed him to play a far lesser role than he could have.
If only financial mismanagement and self dealing were still fatal to a career in politics…
So true. Ah, the old days.
“…scandal and blatant self dealing…”
There’s also the assassination of MLK: Jackson claimed to have been next to King when he was shot, and later appeared on camera, with blood on his shirt, claiming to have cradled King in his arms as he lay dying. Eyewitnesses reported instead that Jackson was not on the balcony when King was shot, and that he later smeared blood on his shirt by dipping his hands in the pool remaining after King’s body ws removed.
Jackson was a grubby little grifter from the start.
I'll point out that that Jackson does appear to have been next to MLK, the dispute centers on whether he actually held King as he was dying, not whether he was present. See: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2001/08/08/pictures-back-up-jackson-on-slaying/
I don’t see any photos on that page.
Many were. Marion Barry was also a big mover in the Civil Rights era and was a total grifter pol.
The 70s movements outlined spectacularly well in Burrough's 'Days of Rage' are almost a mirror image of what is happening with their descendent ideologues today. As you say the post-Vietnam movements of the 70s collapsed under the weight of their own incompetence, and it seems that though learning nothing those ideological children are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
Most deep poverty today is grown men with mental issues who would rather live in a tent or a camper than in a group home. That seems like a valid choice to me, especially in gentle climates like California or Florida.
A friend and I ran out of gas on the Pacific Coast Highway around 2016. We were debating philosophy and didn’t notice how low the tank was. Our Plan B failed because of a steep hill — the car stalled even though we technically had enough gas for seven miles on a flat road.
Anyway, there were all these quasi-homeless types around who had cars and, I assume, SSI or food stamps. None of them looked or acted hungry. No one was in acute distress. They were all living very frugally, most likely because they hated working for the man.
I ended up paying a young woman $60 for a ride into town and the use of her boyfriend’s fuel canister, which we stopped at her place to pick up. She and her boyfriend lived in a small trailer — very modest — but they had electricity and a garden hose out front. I don’t know if there was a toilet because we didn’t go inside. The boyfriend took jobs now and then when he wanted money, and the woman who drove me in her old VW basically smoked pot most of the time.
This is what freedom looks like. I don’t feel sorry for them.
Children who are abandoned by their fathers still face hardship. They now get health care, food stamps, and there’s the EITC, but instability is real.
I would like a more elaborate safety net. I suspect it would lead to more people living comfortably in their cars — maybe trailers or yurts. But I’m more of a fan of freedom than most, and I don’t think the median voter wants to make it easier to drop out.
I’ve opted out of full-time employment for the last 18 years and maintained a bourgeois lifestyle. In fact, I’m writing this from a very cool hotel room in the fortress of Rhodes.
The man had a powerful message, but yes, his grifting and the grifting of his children has been very damaging. I rarely see mention of how he turned the black boycott of Budweiser into a massive financial windfall for his family. A few years after the boycott, his sons were quietly granted one of the most lucrative distribution territories in Chicago. Complete with an interest free loan from a Daley-aligned back. A very Chicago story, sadly.
He leaves a victorious economic legacy -- investments in poverty reduction have grown 10x since the 70s, adjusted welfare benefits exploding from $7500(ish) to $64k for the bottom quintile over that time, fueled by property taxes (60%+ higher) and local taxes (8%>13% of all output) today. The poverty rate commensurately plummeted to 10%ish today in official metrics, but looking at consumption metrics it fell from nearly 33% to 6% today.
As Matt says this is basically unacknowledged by the left and the other side of the coin is the "victorious" social legacy of "intersectionality" he also leaves. The oppressor/oppressed frame today is almost word-for-word unchanged despite those huge gains in economic progressive success.
The economic reality does not match the messaging anymore, but the anti semitic slurs and vitriolic nature of the leftist social politics remains. It cannot last, imo. Without a legitimate economic message to couple the social frame the movement lacks internal coherence. Doordash just reported it's largest jump in orders ever. We can thank Jackson for his work while also recognizing that perhaps it is time for a new movement in democratic politics.
Dylan Matthews has a blog post about how he tried to pitch a book about this fact and highlight the people that were integral to making it happen, but it went nowhere
https://open.substack.com/pub/dylanmatthews/p/so-its-come-to-this-a-dylan-matthews?r=1cj74&utm_medium=ios
On so many fronts, I feel like the left is describing a country from 30 years ago rather than the one I see around me. Thanks for sharing this post.
It's like some kind of insatiable guilt that afflicts the far left and they need something to feed that fire. Compassion is a wonderful thing and a major step in our personal evolution but even that can be overdone (the Buddhists call it idiot compassion).
All I can say is there’s plenty of awful poverty in Memphis
He should self publish I'd love to read it
I agree that there have been massive economic improvements but I don’t think that’s unacknowledged by the left—most of the 50s nostalgia is coming from the right while most on the left seem to agree that the 50s were a crappy time for poor people and that only rich white men had a good time of it then (even as sometimes they are nostalgic for the high tax rates).
Economic improvements also don’t negate the social issues or inequality or the oppressed/oppressor frame (which is usually applied to situations where the oppressed party is genuinely poor and at the mercy of the oppressing party’s superior capacity to do organized violence).
I see no evidence of acknowledgement of economic improvement due to drastic increase in taxation on the left. Quite the opposite -- leftist mayors and governors around the country are chalking up current failures of democratic governance to revenue failures alone.
On the social front, in America today, can you argue with a straight face that it is the 'oppressor class' performing organized violence?
Hey, I think you’re on to something. You know what, I think we should ask our good friends Alex Pretti and Renee Good to give their thoughts about the oppressor class engaging in performing organized violence. Wait, what’s that? They were both murdered by armed agents or the state? And the agents involved have suffered basically zero real consequences for their actions? And their leaders went out smeared the victims with easily disprovable lies?
If you want to make the argument that far left types invoke the “oppressor/oppressed” dynamic way too often as some catch all for every problem in the world? Fine, I have time for that argument. But for you to write the statement you wrote in your last paragraph was an absolute “are you fucking kidding me?!l moment from me. These murders just happened. Do you have the memory of a goldfish?!!
I was waiting for this comment, and it's exactly the sort of frame I think is misguided and wrong.
In the 60s and 70s, the FBI targeted American civil rights leaders, famously wiretapping MLK jr to blackmail him and other civil rights leaders under COINTELPRO. War on Drugs over reach, mass arrests in Birmingham, urban militarization, etc.
Today, far-leftist like you have decided that increases in completely normal immigration enforcement, voted into power in response to Dem leadership abdication of border responsibilities in the prior admin, is seen as de-facto illegitimate and oppressive.
Its awful what happened to Pretti and Good, but bringing a gun* or ramming a car into the law enforcement action* to interfere with legitimate law enforcement action and having tragedy occur in the commotion that follows is not the same thing at all. It would never have occurred had local law enforcement been able to work with ICE but was prevented under Sanctuary City legislation.
Paradoxically now we have urban white progressives yelling slurs and interfering with overwhelmingly more racially mixed ICE officers while claiming the mantle of the oppressed. I find both sides of the current ICE debate disgusting, and in no way can leftists legitimately claim that this conflict exists within an oppressor/oppressed framework.
edited for accuracy -- Pretti's gun was licensed, but has a history of discharge
"It would never have occurred had local law enforcement been able to work with ICE but was prevented under Sanctuary City legislation."
I'm sorry this is bananas. ICE officers were driven to execute Alex Pretti because months/years earlier, therefore ICE officers were what driven to execute an American citizen? This some real "Murc's law" stuff taken to it's logical endpoint. You realize this is the same logic far leftist people give for rioting in 2020 right? "The people were driven to destroy small businesses because of systematic racism".
Hate to break it to you buddy but the COINTELPRO stuff is happening right now. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-social-media.html. Key pull out quote "The Trump administration has aggressively tried tamping down criticism of ICE, partly by identifying Americans who have demonstrated against the agency. ICE agents told protesters in Minneapolis and Chicago that they were being recorded and identified with facial recognition technology." Again, literally on Monday we had a glaring example of the state making it clear they'll step in to try to stop "speech" they don't like from getting aired.
And sorry the racially mixed ICE is not the "gotchya" you think it is. Collaborators with the state has been a thing for a very long time. Remember this story in Memphis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tyre_Nichols
And as for this "Today, far-leftist like you have decided that increases in completely normal immigration enforcement" Yeah hate to break it to you but only the hardcore base is onboard with the extreme measures taken by ICE. https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-february-2026/ . But to be frank the fact you think that I must be a "far leftist" is kind of all I really need to know where you're coming from. I would really ask you go ahead and look what MattY wrote https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-turning-point-in-minnesota. Seriously, read the whole thing and if you're conclusion is Matt is making a "far leftist" argument I really really don't know what to tell you.
The only way to support the Trump administrations rejection of American values like due process, habeas corpus, free speech, the right to bear arms, etc is to be anti-American.
The whole “you cannot treat these violations of rights and law as illegitimate” is dishonest and circular. It’s basically “you cannot criticize the violation of law because those violating the law are THE LAW.”
The fact that you feel a need to flagrantly lie about the most basic facts of the Good and Pretti shootings (Good did not "ram a car," Pretti's handgun was licensed) in an effort to smear the victims (not to mention idiotically speculate about what would have happened if police departments turned their staff over to ICE to act as additional attack dogs) says all we need to know about this position.
I know you think arguments like this is convincing, but these moralisms aren't convincing to anyone that don't already agree with you and are useless rhetorical devices.
Good rammed her car into the law enforcement action is what I mean, which she did, whether or not you think she ran into a cop. Pretti bringing a gun with a history of discharge into a law enforcement action and getting involved clearly was the reason he got shot. I'm very anti gun for this reason. I apologize in that I thought it was also unlicensed.
The point remains that (a) neither exists as an oppressed class in any way, and (b) jumping into law enforcement action is not a legitimate form of protest simply because you don't like the action being taken. Using a car or a literal gun in that act will obviously lead to bad results.
I find both the ICE arrests of American citizens in wide sweeps disgusting, and the lefts inability to distinguish between those Americans, illegal immigrants here without issue for decades, and illegal immigrant felony criminals also disgusting. The later is due to the oppressor/oppressed frame that they bring to the idea of immigration enforcement in general. It makes no sense and has given rise to the anti-anti-ICE coalitions legitimate pushback.
“… did not ‘ram a car’”
It was widely reported the that ICE agent in front of the car sustained internal injuries.
I'm not going to wade into this debate other than to say that, knowing Colin's posting history, calling him a "far leftist" is absurd.
I felt that too.
I dont know the guy, just this comment
You are wrong to frame this as “normal.” Especially since the most effective use of resources would target employers and not random people on the street as a performative action in specific Democratic cities.
You can argue the ‘Kavanaugh Stops’ and at-large raids are retaliatory and not as effective as they could be, but you cannot argue that it's illegitimate oppressors cracking down extra-judicially on an oppressed class of Americans.
Quinn, your argument would be more compelling if you didn't make things up.
As I have said before, if one’s opinions have merit then they don’t need to lie to substantiate them.
>abdication of border responsibilities in the prior admin
I am really tired of this take. When a ton of people show up at the border claiming asylum, the options are:
1. Saying no.
2. Sending them to deportation proceedings but telling them to stay in Mexico until their immigration court hearing
3. Sending them to deportation proceedings and Imprisoning them in the US until their immigration court hearing
4. Sending them to deportation proceedings and letting them live in the US until their immigration court hearing
Given the costs of options 1-3 (costs to the migrants in 1 and 2, and costs to both the migrants and government of #3), choosing #4 is perfectly reasonable as the best of several bad options, and it is nowhere close to "abdication of border responsibilities"
The US government has responsibilities towards it’s citizens, not migrants or other governments. So, yes, abdication of border responsibilities seems accurate, especially when reverting to Trump’s policies in year 4 wasn’t much of a problem.
This misses the scale of the problem -- https://share.google/bU7QSIvvsedEUavg1
(1) was clearly the best option after it started to get bad, but that didn't happen. (4) is what happened but it leads to the huge necessity in increased ICE enforcement we are seeing now as a backlash to that policy. It seems to me that if you accept (4) then you must accept aggressive deportation actions when 7% of the nation of Nicaragua (et al) were not found to be legitimate asylum seekers.
Spending billions to accommodate (4) and then spending hundreds of millions to enforce the rejected claims has imo been an abdication of basic responsibility.
Except Alex Pretti was a legal gun owner who had a permit for his gun. There is a reason the NRA contested the administrations response. Renee good is not ramming her car into anything. Even if she did brush the ICE officer, she likely didn’t see him as she was focused on the offer outside of her window. If this is how you frame these state murders, it makes the rest of your statements and biases suspect.
Driving a car through or bringing a handgun to a law enforcement action is obviously going to end poorly. That is the point. Even on the worst issue for the Trump admin where legitimate civil rights issues are at stake, the framework that does not distinguish between American civil liberties being violated, illegal immigrants being here for decades without issue, and illegal immigrant felons is a framework that is dumb and wrong, and it does not mean that people are 'oppressed' by the State in a systemic way.
ICE has clearly overreached, which is why the Trump administration decided to back down, but deporting illegal immigrants is not oppression, even if you want to argue that Obama and Clinton were oppressors.
Warrantless searches of what turn out to be citizen households with children held at gunpoint, routine brutality against any civilian nearby, use of force practices that would have made the Soviets in Czechoslovakia in 1968 blush, deliberately declining to accept evidence of citizenship and holding or deporting native-born and naturalized Americans... get back to me when you want to claim that forcibly quartering ICE in local households isn't oppressive, lol.
IDGAF about deporting people with deportation orders in public places or executing judicial warrants for access to private ones, but that's not what's been happening.
Which part of “ICE has clearly overreached” was not clear to you?
The Republican Party being the oppressor class, yes
A lot of the reduction in poverty was a result of things become cheaper over time, not only expansion in welfare. Food, clothes, electronics, appliances, etc have all become much cheaper relatively since the 1970s.
On the flip side, housing, medical care and child care have become much more expensive, and difficulty accessing those do not get considered usually in poverty metrics. I do think a lot of the messaging on the left has shifted to focusing on these things.
They do have an economic message. Unfortunately, the progressive left’s proposed policy agenda on these topics are often in opposition to actually making these things more accessible. And with Republicans slowly shifting towards immigration and culture issues and being more open to populist economic messages, the Democrats are not the only ones talking about these issues.
The vitriol and antisemitism is not sustainable on the left, I agree. I didn’t realize how deep rooted it was, until recently, unlike how I was aware of it on the far right, but it clearly goes way back.
But I do think there is an economic message. Whether it’s a message that can beat out Republicans and whether the policy platform matches the economic message is another story.
Don't the kids in social medias res say that Doordash is cheaper than cooking, because groceries cost too much these days? Seems like there's still an appetite for outdated economic messaging in this economy.
They also tried to eat tide pods because TikTok told them too.
Wasn't that more of a YouTube thing? Could've sworn the "Tide pod Challenge" was pre-TikTok dominance.
I wonder if that thinking is a reason for higher rates of colon cancer in young people these days.
I should note, I have some major disagreement clearly with one of your follow up posts, but I actually agree with a lot of this initial post. What's funny to me is I've read multiple articles/posts from right leaning pundits in places like National Review arguing against Bernie/far left policies in part by arguing poverty in not nearly as bad as far lefties make it out to be because social programs reduce income inequality and government transfers mean very few people in America live in abject poverty. I say "funny" because these very same people will than pivot to saying this is why we need to cut Social Security, cut Medicare/Medicaid or cut SNAP benefits when they just made the argument as to why these programs are so important and shouldn't be cut (or at least not cut in the manner they advocate. MattY has written I think quite persuasively we could save a ton of money tomorrow just eliminating Medicare Advantage with basically not much downside to benefits to the elderly).
Of course I bring Medicare in part to note the big big caveats to this is housing and health care especially the former (Given Medicaid covers the lowest rungs of society). And housing is (one of many examples) as to why I actually agreed with you that the "oppressor/oppressed" framing as a catch all explanation of how the world works. It's not actually the case that the 0.1% "oppressors" are primarily responsible for high housing costs, but in fact mostly middle and upper middle class citizens of both parties that are primarily responsible via NIMBY.
I just thought of all the places to criticize this "oppressor/oppressed" framework, talking about ICE actions in the last 12 months might be the absolute last example I'd give and in fact the example I'd give where this framework is possibly it's most correct in our current moment.
The point about the ICE discussion is that it definitely is the place where the administration has arguably stretched their legal authority the most, and STILL is not representative of an ‘oppressor’ class railroading an ‘oppressed’ class. You can disagree with their methods as I do, but the logic of the anti-ICE coalition still doesn't make sense in their own frame of the issue. If that issue does not fit the overall moral logic of the left any longer than what does? Nothing.
Ironically the anti-poverty push coincided with urban disintegration, disorder and the explosion in the drug trade.
I suspect that with civil rights you have greater sorting of people based on ability and culture. High ability people experience new opportunities to move and remove themselves from areas where bad cultures (a perverse form of Southern honor culture) result in violence and dysfunction.
With the FHA the African American middle class leaves from dysfunctional cities (that were facing fiscal crunches in the 60s and 70s for broader structural issues.) This concentrates dysfunction and bad cultural patterns. Those problems result in the rise of narcotics use and trade. Poverty relief programs exacerbate this only inasmuch as it contributed to the midcentury sorting.
In short, it’s an unintentional market for lemons. This is my hypothesis for why many U.S. cities have crime and dysfunction.
This is an excellent point. Reading about Jesse Jackson's mother, it's obvious she was a more functional person than myself or probably most of the posters here, and it's inconceivable that someone with as much agency as her would be eating turkey carcass on Thanksgiving in 2026.
Where are you getting $64k adjusted welfare benefits for the bottom quintile?!?
There’s a lot of whitewashing of some fairly vicious antisemitism, with no counterpart anti black racism, that goes into these anodyne recaps of the black-Jewish relationship - such as the NYT article Matt is cribbing from. The Crown Heights Riot, for example, was very much a unilateral affair. Ah well, I guess I can look forward to explaining to my kids that no, the reason Jews weren’t involved in the Women’s March wasn’t “disagreements about the Palestinians”, and that Tamika Mallory’s relationship with Farrakhan wasn’t some cute sidenote.
I think when MY says meeting with the PLO and Arafat in 1979 was “spicy in the pre-Oslo period”, he downplays what that actually meant.
It was just a few years after a string of high profile airplane hijackings conducted by groups that were within the PLO (PFLP and Fatah for instance). The PLO was operating out of Lebanon and had orchestrated countless cross border attacks on Israel. The PLO was operating under its founding charter, which made it clear that their intention was to destroy Israel and create Palestine to replace Israel, and that the only Jews that would be welcome would be those who could demonstrate a family connection to Palestine pre-1882 (“before the Zionist invasion”), meaning that the majority of Israeli Jews who were the descendants of immigrants would not be welcome. The PLO had not yet adopted its current strategy of recognizing Israel but trying to stop it from being a Jewish state by “refugee return” and creating a Palestinian state in the W Bank and Gaza.
So when Jackson met with Arafat, he was a leader of a terrorist organization actively sponsoring violent attacks on Jews and others, operating based on an explicitly eliminationist ideology.
It wasn’t just “spicy”. People who don’t understand this context may be misled about why there was pushback to him meeting with Arafat.
Correct, and I should have been much more explicit about this. And even this leaves out the 1972 Munich massacre - granted, this was Black September’s doing - and the Lebanese civil war that Arafat and the PLO kicked off (again, this gets a bit obscured in English-language accounts; the civil war was primarily a function of Arafat’s large militia showing up in Lebanon and contesting the state’s sovereignty). Arafat at the time was perceived much more similarly to Che Guevara than to Mandela.
Or, well, he was comparable to Hamas or Hizbollah today. Suffice it to say that if Barack Obama went to meet with Hassan Nasrallah on the campaign trail, he (rightly) would not have successfully rehabilitated.
Yep, one of the reasons people don't trust Democrats to actually uphold the liberal norms that Matt likes to talk about is that they really don't like holding certain members of their own coalition to those norms.
On the flip side, Norm Finkelstein referred to Van Jones using uncle Tom and the Yiddish equivalent of the N-word. I found it deeply shocking how little pushback he got for that. He hasn't felt a need to delete the comments. It seems a community that could scarcely proclaim any louder the importance of anti-racism will shrug at people using racial slurs so long as it's in the service of anti-Zionism.
https://x.com/normfinkelstein/status/1975603277690536163
https://x.com/normfinkelstein/status/1975672998439878908
Number 1 is clearly imputing tokenism to TFP
Farrakhan was a very flawed leader , sorry an anti semite like him should not claim to be a spokesperson for blacks….
"with no counterpart anti black racism"
How true was that however? My grandfather experienced anti-semitism from members of the black community when he was a teacher and later principal in Queens (there was more local control of the schools at the time). There was also a lot of racism towards black people including in places with a high Jewish population (I was pretty shocked reading about just this random NYC neighborhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canarsie,_Brooklyn#Racial_tensions_and_growing_black_population). Nassau County (where my dad grew up and my parent's currently live) was deliberately segregated in the post-war era.
Let me know when you find a Wikipedia article about a Jewish lynch mob, or an American Jewish leader with on the order of a million supporters who says “Adolf Hitler was a great man.” (I don’t know who the black equivalent of Hitler would be - Jefferson Davis?) If you think a middle class school board objecting to sharing a school with students from the NYCHA projects serves as a counterpart to a pogrom and/or allying with Yasser Arafat (see Brian Ross’s comment for more context about what that actually signified) then you’re probably ready to burn down every upper middle class suburb in the country.
[Jean-Jacques Dessalines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Dessalines) is not even close to Hitler levels (just on sheer scale) but might be in the running for helping end slavery in Haiti, the massacres that followed, and then basically re-implementing slavery with new branding.
This doesn't seem really accurate wrt Jews and the Women's March? From what I remember, stuff around Farrakhan wasn't really part of the discourse around the first Women's March right after the inauguration in 2017 at all, and there were plenty of Jewish participants. Tamika Mallory became an issue when she was the face of an attempt to half-heartedly build an organization around it, and said organizing effort entirely fizzled, indicating that the negative coverage of her associations mattered. It's not like this became a successful organization that held many large marches with broad buy-in from progressive constituencies and dissent from Jews that went ignored.
What is inaccurate about a) Jews were shoved out of the Women’s March movement and b) Tamika Mallory shrugged off Farrakhan’s antisemitism? Here’s the long form; anyone else is welcome to read it and judge for themselves whether my remarks are accurate.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/is-the-womens-march-melting-down
As for coverage - the coverage of Jessie Jackson’s remarks mattered at the time. As did Al Sharpton’s performance whipping up Crown Heights rioters into a frenzy. Etc etc. All of that is neatly buried underneath the surface of “the Black-Jewish coalition ruptured due to tensions on both sides”. The same way the riot itself is now described as “violent unrest between black people and Jews in Crown Heights”.
I think MY may be right that a lot of Jackson's vision won out, despite the Clintonian interlude that Obama mostly followed in substance.
I'm not really sure that's a good thing though, not when there aren't enough squares, and where they aren't distributed well for Senate and Electoral College purposes. In terms of big picture I think it's also always interesting how Democrats back in the day took for granted having the working class. You can add 'white' to that if you need to but even though they've been the first to depart the coalition it's under threat across races, and in particular with men.
My take is that the quilt is a lovely metaphor for the political world Jackson inhabited, or at least a plausible enough perspective of it, particularly pre-90s, but it isn't good politics anymore. In the 2020s it's just grievance groups with claims of dubious merit looking for satisfaction against a unified majority that no longer exists. I've said before we need someone with a vision, and part of that vision is going to have to be very deliberately leaving Jackson in the past.
I really strongly disagree that Obama was 'Clintonian' as opposed to closer to the anti-poverty intersectional coalition mold. the ACA burned absolutely enormous amounts of political capital all to help poor people pay for healthcare, and the Obama admin was pretty famous for handing out social issue wins to every constituent 'oppressed' group in the coalition.
He absolutely came from the world of activism and academia but I just don't see it. On a macro policy level his presidency can probably be boiled down to:
-deference to economic orthodoxy that may have been been too cautious in that it left us with a near decade of under stimulation coming out of the Great Recession
-healthcare reform that amounted to saving the private insurance industry from itself
-very, slow and cautious wind down from the GWOT but still plenty of room to drone people all over the ME and overthrow Gaddafi
-stalemates with the GOP Congress over 'split the baby' immigration reform (including a unilateral massive deportation effort) and Clinton-like attempts at deficit reduction
A few things I do appreciate and a few things I don't appreciate about Jackson:
What I do appreciate, he genuinely grew up in grinding poverty and experienced a type of racism that mostly doesn't exist today, and that's a valuable perspective that's getting lost in today's politics. Very few of our remaining politicians have that sort of background now.
Secondly, I appreciate his oratory, and I think we've gone way to far in the opposite direction of having politicians speak too casually and say "ummm," "ya know," and "like," and things like that. I miss politicians making actual speeches that were full of crafted rhetoric. Also, I appreciate his use of Christian language without getting bogged down in to specifics (he probably did this elsewhere). I've seen James Talarico's version of Christian lefty politics, and while I appreciate what he's trying to do, it reminds me of the mid-2000s, and I'm scared it's going to kick off a very dumb argument at the next family gathering about God and pronouns or something. The type of rhetoric like "I am my brother's keeper" is searing but also vague enough to not kick off a tedious argument.
On the other side of things, the patchwork quilt approach to politics kind of reminds me of why I was on the right to begin with. In general I prefer the government not to act, and if there is an issue that rises to the level of requiring government action (and I do think Civil Rights rises to this level), the action taken should be specific and targeted to the actual problem. I don't like the idea that because I support Civil Rights legislation, or some anti-poverty measures that I must also support farm subsidies, or some regulation that benefits some union somewhere by restricting competition. Jackson didn't get that specific, but that's often where that impulse leads. Funny enough, today it's the right that's doing this. If you support, I don't know, lax gun regulations, that means you must also support property tax breaks for seniors. The only thing holding the coalition together is one guy. I wonder if the patchwork quilt has room for "I don't really have any personal policy demands, but the other guys are crazy."
Ultimately, I think principled small government types like you are going to have to resign yourselves to the fact that no matter which party is a better fit at a given time, you'll always have to be part of a patchwork because your views are only held by a pretty small minority. Most people are not actually intellectually consistent on government; they want big government services and low taxes, a combination that generally makes no sense.
If it makes you feel any better, this lack of consistency also means the big-government high-tax constituency is a weird minority as well. Both archetypes have to find common cause with a bunch of people who don't have a particular view on the size of the government but want action on a variety of other things.
Having consistent views on anything makes you a minority. I don't even know I’d call myself a small government person, more of just, if it's a coin flip of whether or not policy X is a good idea, I lean towards “don't do it.”
Yes, which is why you're probably conservative in temperament! My inclination is always to try it if we're not sure, because it may be great, which is why I always lean liberal.
I don't think you mention at any point during this post that you're doing it because Jessie Jackson just died. I mean, probably most people heard but in this fractured news environment maybe someone didn't. And as an archive read a year from now or something, it might help to have added a sentence near the beginning "in light of Jessie Jackson's recent death" or something.
Where do Never Trump conservatives fit into this "quilt" of a Democratic party?
From my perspective, the whole progressive coalition is a liability; the Democrats' advantage is that they're the last bastion of the decency and constitutionalist patriotism that I used to take for granted as an inherent and permanent trait of the American people.
How do you make the Democratic Party more welcoming to Reaganauts?
The fact is that it's not going to happen, and it probably shouldn't. Speaking as the kind of person that I think you mean (more a Rockefeller Republican actually, but I voted for Reagan twice and am still proud of it), the Democrats have the right to their own coalition and to exclude us, and we have the right not to join. We're allies in the effort to preserve liberal democracy, to end the current kleptocracy/kakistocracy, and to make sure that it can't return. I value and respect them for that, but I don't delude myself that we're ideological soulmates.
It's up to us to form the new Second Party, a Center-Right, Constitutionalist party dedicated to free thought, free people, free nations, and free markets, as the Conscience Whigs and the Anti-Slavery Democrats formed the Republican Party 170 years ago when the Whigs became as irredeemably corrupt as the Republicans are now. It's my ongoing frustration that the people who should be leading this, like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, seem to be afraid to put in the kind of hard work that Lincoln, Frémont, and Seward stepped up to do then.
What your comment makes me think of is that there might be common ground in favor of electoral reforms in the direction of proportional representation. Third parties in the US have always been pretty futile because of our electoral system. Open primaries and ranked choice voting... What are the options here?
It would be fun if Matt wrote a post about how Democrats can integrate Never Trump conservatives to grow their support base and win. :)
I agree about third parties, and I'm not talking about one. I'm talking about a new SECOND Party (PoliSci talk for the consecutive US Party Systems, in which the Democrats have been the "First Party" since Jefferson, competing with a series of rising and falling "Second Parties", the Republicans being the most recent) to REPLACE the Republicans, the way that they replaced the Whigs and the Whigs replaced the Federalists.
I live in Brazil these days, which has around 30 parties and proportional representation for every legislative body except the Federal Senate, and I would caution against proportional representation schemes. Whatever else they do, they break the line of responsibility -- and responsiveness -- between a specific legislator and his/her specific voters. And when legislators don't feel a need to respond to voters, they're going to respond to someone else, who's probably hard to identify.
One possibility I've considered is a hypothetical new constitution with a "house of representatives" where geographically contiguous communities of similar population each elect one member, as well as a "house of parties" where voters vote for their preferred party (including smaller parties) and each state, or the country at large, elect a slate representing the parties proportionally.
Maybe the "house of representatives" can be the more powerful chamber, electing a sort of prime minister, with the "house of parties" reserved for issues of partisan fairness or representation of small and/or geographically dispersed parties?
If your goal as the new Second Party is to take down the Republican party, how will this party win voters from its current MAGA manifestation? Do you think there's a large body of current Republican voters hungering for a message of free thought, free people, free nations and free markets?
In a top two primary state, all you would need to do is peel off enough republicans and democrats to get to ~35% of the electorate.
I don't think that the diehard MAGAts can be converted: like the ex-Confederates during the last third of the 19th Century, we'll have to isolate them and wait for them to die off. But in what is still basically a Center-Right country, if there aren't enough Center-Right people left who identify with and respond to the message of the Revolution to support it with their voices and their votes, then the Republic really IS cooked, and we deserve to lose it.
I sincerely hope you're right!
I think this is why ranked choice voting is so needed. Without that 3rd parties really don't work in our system.
For perspective here, I'd describe myself as a high partisan/low ideology Democrat.
I think that there's a fundamental problem of this driven by the inherently weak parties in the US. As Matt has said before, in most countries the coalition bargaining happens *after* the elections, when it's clear how many votes each faction has to bring to form a government. In the US, that bargaining happens before the election with the "how many votes does this faction bring?" question being unknowable.
Additionally, since these factions are amorphous and leaderless, there's nobody empowered to bargain on behalf of the "Reaganauts" or "Rockefeller Republicans" or "NatSec Hawks" or any other faction of the conservative movement that would be Dem-curious given a Trump-led GOP. On the Dem side, given how administrations are constrained by Congress, there's not a lot of policy wins that could conceivably be guaranteed by a Democratic nominee. In a hypothetical Harris/Jeffries dynamic, where Harris made promises to the NatSec hawks to build a 600-ship Navy, there's nothing that Harris can do to force House appropriators to fund that priority.
And because there's no guaranteed policy wins or guaranteed votes, you sort of fall back on vibes where the best guarantee we have for you is "you don't have to live under the Mad King." Now in a parliamentary system, even without guarantees beyond "defeat the Mad King," the Reaganaut Party would be able to sink the government if it felt the terms of the bargain were not being upheld, which incentivizes everyone to play nice and keep the coalition together.
This has been a very longwinded way to say that my best answer for "How do you make the Democratic Party more welcoming to Reaganauts?" is that you Reaganauts should become Democrats and work to make the party more welcoming to your co-ideologues because there's nobody who can exert control over an American political party other than the members of it. (and yes, I understand that Trump is the exception to this maxim)
One more thing: free trade. The recent big successful Dem presidents have negotiated big trade deals and been friendly to free trade. Cool! Own that! We are seeing the harm from tariffs, both on the economy, on the rule of law, and on foreign affairs. There are lots of appealing ways for the Democrats to assert themselves as the party of free trade (absolutely or relatively) right now. And it would appeal to Reaganites.
"The recent big successful Dem presidents have negotiated big trade deals and been friendly to free trade."
I assume you're talking about Obama here and I just need to point out that this is not at all the Obama I remember. Here's the Obama I remember:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/obama-campaign-press-release-obama-discusses-job-creation-plan-with-workers-national
He attacked Clinton from the Progressive-left and won. He was anti-NAFTA and more generally, anti-"free" trade. Probably the #1 reason he re-established the blue wall.
Obama had a big Trans-Pacific Partnership he negotiated for Asian trade. And I'm talking about Clinton too. Anyway, tariffs had been consistently lower for decades than they are now. And Trump is using spurious emergency powers to jack up tariffs without Congress. All the Dems need to do is go back to normal and not follow Trump's example to be a huge improvement from a free marketeer point of view.
I guess the question is do you want to be competitive in Ohio or not. Obama won by 5%p in 08. Trump just won by 12%p. I'm just going to trust former Sen. Brown that "all the Dems need to do is go back to normal" -- isn't going to cut it:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/16/sherrod-brown-democrats-00189956
Play with any EC map and start with Republicans breaking the blue wall and the paths to 270 become very challenging.
I'm curious your thoughts on this as I seen you express great skepticism about free trade. Do you think the US is better off pulling back from free trade with its historical trading partners?
edit - by pulling back, I mean both in accepting imports and sending exports.
I'm 100% down for free and fair trade; like Obama. I loved our ~ balanced relationship with Canada before Trump destroyed it. Our net trade seemed nicely balanced with Japan and S. Korea. But when China ~ simply blocks imports and is manipulating it's currency to such an insane degree that the entire industrial output becomes a global dumping operation then yes ... drive tariffs as high as they need to go to balance the manipulation. Which thankfully is now the global consensus (i.e., Biden only increased Trump's tariffs). When NAFTA was used to just break unions across 800k factories -- yeah, that's bullshit. Because all that did was roll increased profits into shareholder earnings and accelerated our inequality. We're weaker not stronger because of it. When the EU tariffs the fuck out of US auto imports -- that's not "free" trade.
Probably thinking of the TPP which got preemptively killed (followed by Trump staking it) by Clinton's campaign just to try to keep the blue wall.
By the way, one thing I'd advocate if I'm to put on a hat of “Reaganite giving advice from inside the Dem tent” would be: can we embrace constitutional originalism?
Roe v. Wade looks like a mistake now, doesn't it? It was a 50-year detour through pretending that a right to abortion was in the Constitution, when it obviously isn't. It left tens of millions of voters, angry and disenfranchised and willing to go to extremes. And then it was overturned. If the Dems would just say, “we're not going to try to appoint judges that will reinstate Roe, just let it be a state issue,” that would free a lot of nose-holding pro-life GOPers to flip.
And probably a lot of Dems would be horrified at the idea of reversing Obergefell, as would be required by originalism since the Constitution obviously doesn't really contain a right to gay marriage. Would that matter much at this point? There's federal backstop legislation anyway.
It's hard for Dems to position themselves as defenders of democracy when they have long sided with legislating from the bench. Originalism would be a really good way to consolidate the Democratic brand around constitutional integrity. And it doesn't require substantive reversal on the social issues, just the process issue of whether we enact these things democratically or tell lies about what the Constitution means.
That's probably gonna win us at least one Quiet Car's worth of voters.
Jokes aside, I don't find these arguments particularly persuasive. But if you, as the leader of the House Reaganite Party, were to come to me as the leader of the House Democratic Party and say "My 10 Members will vote for you to be Speaker if you [take specific actions that will accomplish those goals]," I'd be pretty willing to be persuaded. This is a place where we political fans tend to lose sight of the fact that politics is about the obtaining and wielding of power, not just position-taking for the sake of position taking.
Under this scenario the "no activist judges" pledge delivers concrete results (setting aside that the House doesn't have a role in nominating or confirming judges, we're still in Hypothetical Land) that the cross-pressured pro-choice members of our coalition could support. But without the guaranteed votes for power, then it's just a political gambit that has to be weighed against other members of the coalition (and frankly, those members are in better standing with the party than newcomers).
Again, I'd be interested in your polling. The pro-life movement is huge. It has mobilized millions, including lots of single-issue voters. I've certainly known lots of people who don't like the GOP but feel they have to vote for it on the abortion issue alone. The notion that Democrats would gain no additional political support by neutralizing the issue doesn't seem plausible. And if the party's position were "Roe was wrong, leave it to the states," then there would be no daylight between them and Trump. How could you possibly argue that that wouldn't move substantial votes? I don't get it.
And while it's true that the House can't influence judicial appointments, the Senate can.
Abortion rights are incredibly popular and getting more so; it's laughable to think that the Democratic Party throwing women to the Republican wolves would somehow win over support. It would be more likely to split the party outright.
I wasn't trying to get into the issue itself. My point is that for any issue that involves a change like this, the mechanics of the American system make that a gamble that your co-partisans would dislike, as opposed to a hard-nosed deal to obtain power. Issue groups used to be able to play some role here (see the NRA's endorsement of moderate Dems that lasted through the mid-2010s), but more and more these groups have become organs of the party, not vehicles for single-issue voters to register their support.
Well, there's the minor problem that "originalism" is a practically moronic and morally evil way to organize a government. (There you go, fellow commentator-- that IS me moralizing about something!) There's no democratic justification for binding present generations to the dead hand of perpetual rule by premodern slaveowners.
But apart from that...
That's what the amendment process is for. If you don't like the Constitution, it has a process for changing it. If, instead of that, you have judges just make up the law, you're violating democracy. Democrats have done that too long, and done profound damage to the legitimacy of the republic by disenfranchising people. It's a big problem.
The amendment process is deliberately designed to prevent even a huge majority of the current populace from using it. When something like two percent of the US population (whatever 50%+1 of the smallest 13 states is) can block an amendment at their leisure, you do not have a democratically legitimate process. You have a fig leaf.
And interpreting the written text in accord with what an ordinary person today would understand it to mean is far from "making up the law." That is what legal interpretation, for the most part, consists of-- construing texts in accord with what a reasonable reader would think them to mean. It is a far more legitimate process than the sort of historical cherrypicking of arcana that characterizes "originalist" reasoning.
I would like to keep the Bill of Rights as written, even if written by a long-dead generation.
And if we want to change the words to mean something else or even add words, we can! It's been done many times.
The only reason we were able to add words saying that black people have human rights is that the states that think black people don't have human rights were forcibly prevented at the point of a bayonet from acting on that belief in the ratification process. The amendment process is not fit for purpose. It can only add amendments that are functionally unopposed by any significant political faction, even a tiny minority one.
The Constitution contains no right to marriage whatsoever. It does, however, contain a right to equal protection under the law by which gay marriage is must be treated on the same footing as straight marriage.
Right. One generation’s elite chooses to mean something different by “marriage” than humanity had ever meant, and suddenly a social revolution that would have horrified the founders and the framers of the 14th Amendment is implied by the “equal protection” clause. And does that clause also mean that men should have equal rights to be treated as women, or that polygamous marriages should have equal protection with monogamous ones? If fashionable opinion can get five judges to say so, then yes! Regardless of what the people think.
These sophistries are disgraceful. If you want to change the law, use the democratic process! Disenfranchising the people through lying non-originalist jurisprudence is the left's analog of January 6, 2021. It backfired mightily in the case of Roe, and the timing of Trump's rise, coinciding almost exactly with Obergefell, strongly suggests that that disgraceful decision drove it. Liberals need to repent and return to democracy, which can only mean originalism.
why would you join a party where you aren't welcome?
Presumably because you don't want to live under the Mad King. If you are willing to accept life under the Mad King because you get policy outcomes you like, or because the Mad King's party seems to want you around, that's a fair choice to make.
I would want to ask why you don't feel welcome by the Democratic party and what would make you feel welcome. I mean this very literally and straightforwardly: Did you want to have Kamala Harris make a particular statement? Have the Democratic platform adopt a particular policy proposal?
From my point of view, a lot of this is similar posturing we saw from the left over Israel/Palestine, an attitude of "____ has to earn my vote by adopting my particular views on [issue]". And what this tends to miss is that parties are coalitions and anybody's one particular views on [issue] may be a minority view among other members of the coalition. Painting with a broad brush here, there's a reason successful politicians aren't going around checking the boxes with enough interest groups to get a majority of voters and instead tend to assemble broad electoral support. And the way I see it is because most voters aren't like me (highly partisan, lowly ideological) and are instead cross-pressured among an array of issues, and so being locked down by one interest group will lose you votes among other voters who don't prioritize that group's issue above all else (sorry if this doesn't make sense, I'm trying not to ramble here).
Pushing back here-- it is in fact NOT a "fair choice to make" to say that you think other people should be deprived of rights to political participation because doing so gives you policy outcomes you like. That is the definition of an unfair choice, and it makes you a traitor to democracy.
"Fair" in the sense of "I don't agree with his Bart-killing policy. But I do approve of his Selma-killing policy." Plenty of voters balance these considerations, and while I don't agree with their conclusions, it's a choice thousands of voters made.
You realize that's a joke parodying what an utter moron Homer is, right?
I will note that in general I refuse to just to vote for the lessor of two evils. I couldn't vote for Trump because of Jan 6th. But I broadly disagree with many Democratic policy goals, also, I thought the Biden/Harris administration was a disaster (no I'm not in favor of a lot of what Trump has done either)
"I would want to ask why you don't feel welcome by the Democratic party and what would make you feel welcome. "
the immediate examples that spring to mind, I'm called a racist because I want immigration enforcement, or a transphobe because I don't want biological men playing women's sports, in woman's bathrooms, nor minors taking puberty blockers are any other "gender affirming care"
Theoretically there is a a Democrat that could get my vote. One very focused on actually delivering on an Abundance agenda, but dropping all the culture war stuff I oppose.
But I don't see that happening.
From what little I know of you I do think you should be voting in Democratic primaries. The problem with the primaries is that the composition of primary electorates is quite strange. The Republicans probably cannot be changed via primaries at this point but the Democrats can.
That's a fair point. Especially in Oregon.
"or a transphobe because I don't want biological men . . . in woman's bathrooms"
This is literally the dictionary definition of transphobia-- an irrational fear of trans people totally unsupported by evidence.
If what you want is for Democrats to be transphobic, then you can say that, and we can diagnose that claim as such and respond accordingly. But don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining.
Why do we have gender differentiated bathrooms in the first place?
So I'm going to push to get into specifics, because I don't think any Democratic candidate has called you a racist or a transphobe. Or if they have, that's a bad way of trying to win votes and I don't begrudge you not wanting to vote for that person.
What are the concrete actions you'd want to see from a Democratic candidate to earn your vote? For the sake of this we'll limit it to policy proposals or statements that you'd like to see a Democratic candidate adopt or make.
Side note, thanks for engaging respectfully here. I'd sworn off comments sections for over a decade, but the SB section so far has been fun to be a part of.
"I don't think any Democratic candidate has called you a racist or a transphobe"
Literally the next guy in the thread
"This is literally the dictionary definition of transphobia-- an irrational fear of trans people totally unsupported by evidence."
But moving on towards that, actually running and delivering on an abundance style agenda would be REALLY appealing to me. I thought that book was great, and just making that the core focus would be great.
But I would actually have to believe that Dems were really interested in making government effective and efficient. I used to live in CA, and now I'm in Oregon. To put it mildly I haven't been impressed by blue state governance.
If in these places with blue state trifecta's we started to see a drastic turn around, that could make a difference. Actually delivering on kitchen table issues like housing costs, and infrastructure building, and getting rid of burdensome red tape would be very compelling.
My wife used work in real property for the US government. I asked her how long a typical project takes she said 1 to 2 years.
I asked her how long it should take if you cleared away the red tape, and everyone did their jobs, but you still protected the environment. She said 1 to 2 months.
There's just too many veto points, and yes to many lazy government employees that use red tape to avoid doing work.
Finally agreed, SB has one of the best comment sections on the internet. I've had a number of good faith discussions with people over policy differences. Very refreshing. I've often had better discussions here than in other places where I'm more aligned policy wise.
That's right. I took the pledge of allegiance to the Republic, and since the GOP has sold its soul to the insurrectionist felon, it's clear that the only way to be loyal to the republic is to vote for the Democrats. I don't feel particularly welcome since I'm on the other side on key issues of policy and constitutional interpretation. But still, it's a normal American political party, the only one left, and that feels nice and homely and wholesome, so I don't mind.
I'm on board already. I'll do my best!
Statistically, Never Trump conservatives are a trivially small percentage of the population that needs to get used to the fact that they are a trivially small percentage of the population that neither party feels, or should feel, any obligation to cater to.
After 2024, they can claim to have some level of moral persuasive power, but they cannot any longer stake any claim to electoral relevance. The Democratic Party will not become more welcoming to Reaganauts, it shouldn't, and if it did it would lose votes, not gain them.
“…a trivially small percentage of the population…”
The same is true of the DSA.
There are far more socialists in the USA than there are libertarians. It's not even close.
"DSA" is an organization, not a political position, but if you're looking for popular political positions socialism kicks libertarianism's ass halfway to the moon.
Above you referedced never Trumpers, now it’s libertarians?
They are functionally indistinguishable. There are effectively no non-libertarian conservatives who are not all in on the Trump project.
George Will is one that comes to mind. Bill Barr is another. I could go on.
The entire staff of The Dispatch would disagree.
Got polls to support that? It's prima facie implausible, and the fact that Democrats have struggled to regain popularity despite Trump's severe unpopularity doesn't favor it. It sounds like wishful thinking.
https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/131a2ep/the_upper_left_hand_quadrant_problem_a/
(The graph, not the associated commentary, which I care nothing about.)
The reason Dems have struggled to regain popularity is that people with economically liberal views do not reliably support them. They already have very strong support among the fraction of economic conservatives with socially and politically liberal leanings, it's just that that group is trivially small. It convinces itself that it is much bigger than it is because it's full of rich people who spend lots of money on creating rich-people propaganda that mostly only convinces themselves. But it's become increasingly, and readily, apparent that they have no electoral muscle.
We had a very large and statistically significant opinion poll in 2024 that got about 150 million respondents, so... like Samuel Johnson, I refute it thus.
This chart is wildly wrong and paying even slight attention to what it suggests would illustrate that. Do you even know what they used to measure "liberal" vs "conservative" to make this chart?
"Nuh-uh" is not a productive response to a piece of evidence. Keep wasting my time and I'll not hesitate to block you.
That the chart is clearly wrong has been noted by the Niskanen center, Noah Smith had a post about it, it doesn't match most other research by political scientists who think its wrong, etc. If nothing else, the fact that there is a massive cluster on the wall of the left side of the chart should tell you that something is off about how it is being compiled. IMO, the best criticisms were about how they defined "liberal' vs "conservative" which is why I specifically asked about that.
If you disagree with the criticisms of the chart that's fine. I'd be interested to understand why. But most people who post that think that it proves their point, but haven't actually dug into how it was created or why most political scientists disagree with it.
But you are welcome to block me at your leisure if you think this is a "nuh-uh" discussion.
You seem to be arguing that there aren’t many libertarians, which is a different question
Not really. Approximately all authoritarian conservatives support Trump, because he's doing exactly what they want and they have contempt for democratic values.
The Democrats should cast a wide net and not do things to repulse any significant potential bloc of new supporters but the Reaganauts should know that it's *their* party that is the greatest threat to our democracy and our future so they should keep their demands for how Democrats should cater to them very modest indeed.
Reaganauts had a chance in 2016 when the Democrats nominated infamous warmonger Hillary Clinton to get their votes and most Democrats were willing to go along with it hoping that Lincoln Project and such had a real constituency, but then when 90+% of Republicans voted for Trump anyway, the chance to take over the Democratic Party faded away.
"Where do Never Trump conservatives fit into this "quilt" of a Democratic party"
It's quite clear that the Dems don't want our votes, or at least are not willing to make any concessions to get it besides saying Trump bad.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, there is no leader of "The Dems" that can bargain with the leader of "Never Trump Republicans" in any credible manner. In part because there is no leader of Never Trump Republicans and the leader of The Dems changes every 4-8 years, and also for all the ways a presidential system is different form a parliamentary one.
As I've said above, if you want the Democratic party to reflect your values, become a Democrat. We just don't have the coalition-forming mechanisms of a parliamentary system that lets minor parties join coalitions and get power that way. They have to join one of the two main parties.
We absolutely want your vote.
It would also be nice for you to recognize that * your * erstwhile party, the Republicans, fucked up bigly by allowing itself to be taken over by the Orange God King, so that now all the people who value public decency and rule of law have to fit themselves in awkwardly into the other party. So yeah, no matter what we do, somebody in the Democratic/anti-Trump coalition will be unhappy. There’s no way around that.
And since the overwhelmingly vast majority of conservatives don't value public decency and the rule of law, the handful who do had better get used to voting for a party they disagree with on other issues. (Most of them have instead simply abandoned their claimed support for public decency and the rule of law, suggesting that their allegiance to those principles was probably never real to begin with.)
If you are one percent of a party's potential voting coalition (if anything, probably overoptimistic) you have no claim on its policy apparatus. If you're lucky they will throw you a bone here and there when it doesn't cost them anything.
I have no problem w/ Never Trump Republicans
Now, Never Trump as long as the party moves to the Right Republicans on the other hand...
I feel old.
I feel naive
Just a thought:
Given how far her son went Jackson's mom was likely a very smart lady. If she'd been born in 1994 vs 1924 she would likely have gone to college and gone on to a professional career. But in the south in the 1920s there were intense racist and sexist forces in place to make that essentially impossible and poverty was the result.
Would it be fare to say that the kind of intense poverty Jackson and his family experienced would today be largely confined to people who, through no fault of their own, are facing intense challenges of a different nature - substance abuse, mental illness etc?
And for those on the left they are still too focused on the structural forces rather than the real issues faced by the desperately poor.
Yes, this is something I've brought up here before -- 21st Century progressives by and large do a poor job of engaging with the fact that in the developed world there are very few "deserving poor" in Victorian terms today, i.e., people who really do just need "a hand up" to get on a fairly stable life course, compared to what existed in the 19th to early 20th Centuries.
It really, really depends on your definition of “poor.” You’re right that there’s way less of the utter “I live in a shack with an outhouse and no running water” kind of poverty.
But there’s lots of, how do I say it, “deserving precarious” - people who did everything right, who work hard and obey the law, who are one bad event (a major illness or injury, car gets totaled, etc.) away from destitution, and that kind of life is hella stressful.
I don't know if the "did everything right" is good political framing in terms of the non-college suburban Milwaukee swing voting mom. She's looks at her ne'er-do-well relatives and balks at your "did everything right" framing.
I'm sure there are "ne'er-do-well" people who are in a bad position because of their own mistakes and screwups.
But, famously, the Success Sequence the conservatives tout is: 1. graduate high school 2. get a job, any job 3. stay away from crime/gangs 4. wait until after you're married to have children.
You can absolutely do all of the above and still be in a very precarious position, where one bad event (through no fault of your own, like, being hit by a drunk driver) equals financial ruin.
So the driver is uninsured, their job doesn't offer disability insurance, they can't negotiate to pay the out of pocket max from their health insurance ...what chain of events are you envisioning?
Insurance companies screw people all the time, that’s how we got Luigi (doesn’t justify murder of course). Insurance doesn’t actually protect you reliably. I max out the deductible on all my insurance to minimize premiums assuming they won’t actually cover anything lol.
Medical bankruptcy is literally the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States.
What a weird term the deserving poor…. Would make a good band name 🤔
Think about the knock on effects of that racism and sexism. If she had been a white male born in 1924, she would have gone to college for free on the GI Bill, then gone on to an upper middle class life with a nice home and small portfolio. Her kids, especially if they were male, would have gone to very good schools, graduated with little to no debt, built their own wealth, inherited their mother's, and been a position today to transfer that multigenerational advantage to their kid born in 1994. Absent being as extraordinary as Jesse Jackson, the first person in that family likely to go to college is the one born in 1994, or maybe 1984, and already down two generations of at least some passed on prosperity.
I'm in my early sixties, I know for certain that the early jobs I had that kickstarted my career would not have been offered to anyone not white, and only maybe gone to someone not male.
That's all true but it's 2026 and the issues aren't the same.
Your own life circumstances are influenced by your parents' life circumstances, though, so the legacy of defunct policies may still persist.
That's not what adoption studies say. Kids adopted at birth end up much more like their biological parents than their adoptive parents. Nature being much more important than nurture.
For IQ, yes. For inherited wealth and social position, no.
Generational wealth transfer means past disadvantages still compound today. $1 invested in the S&P 500 in 1960 would be worth about $70 today after adjusting for inflation. So to catch up with the heirs of so someone who was allowed to make money in 1960 and pass it down, a person today would have to make 70 times more money. That’s a tall order.
You can see this in housing too—someone could’ve bought land for a house in SF for peanuts 100 years ago (or even received it for free), that someone today needs to be a high-ranking executive at Google to buy. If your ancestors had gotten that land cheaply you have a massive advantage over someone who has to work very hard today to buy it. Even if someone with ancestors who did not have those opportunities converged to their ability in terms of income they still would be severely disadvantaged in buying a house over someone who just inherits it.
“There was the foundation of National Review in 1955 with the explicit thesis that free market Republicans should make common cause with Dixiecrats to forge a conservative movement. There was Barry Goldwater’s victory in the 1964 Republican Party primary as an exponent of that strategy.”
This is a historical error you keep repeating. The conservative movement was first founded in 1955 on the basis of “fusionism” (anti-communists + libertarians/free-marketers + traditionalists) - there was no explicit common cause with Dixiecrats until after 1964 and the full evolution of factional change from Democrats to Republicans took another 30 years.
There was the notorious Buckley essay but he did eventually recant.
The modern Democratic Party may very well have realized Jesse Jackson’s coalition building vision that peaked with Obama’s 2008 win but ideologically it’s an incoherent mess because of identity politics and focus on the bottom 15-20% instead of the middle class. No matter how many times Bernie lies about 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, less than 15% can be considered as poor and even they have access to many benefits. Most Americans do not want big changes in policy. Whichever party realizes that first and focuses on narrow but tangible things to improve on will expand their coalition.
Oh, man, "Hymie Town," I remember that. Yeah, that wasn't a good look.
I saw Jackson speak at a get out the vote rally in 1996, at Bates College. He was supporting the Democratic candidates then in the middle of the Clinton era, including the then Mayor of Lewiston, a middle class black business owner who was not particularly progressive, although he was my former karate teacher. But he also reprised many of the lines from his 1988 convention speech. Thinking back on it now, it was a clear demonstration of what Matt is saying -- he maintained his principles and his goals, he recognized both that he was succeeded in taking the party in that direction and that his goals were best served by supporting candidates much more moderate than he was.
But at the time, it was just the best speech I had ever been to. And it still is.
Tangent: I wish people would stop saying "20 years ago" or "30 years ago" as if 30 years ago were 1931. 30 years ago was 1996, and things were actually going pretty well!
Now get off my lawn.
Did you know that more time has passed between today and 1985 than passed between the end of World War 2 and 1985?
by a smidge, yes.
I’m old enough to remember 1988 - I was in college at the time and Jackson came to speak. He was a very impressive speaker in person and what was refreshing is that most of his message to students was about voting and not the usual stump speech stuff. That is one memory from college that has really stuck with me and although I had several disagreements with Jackson, I always respected him after that.