Absolutely, totally agree. Joe Manchin made everything, the very little chance we have, possible. He is utterly shamefully wrong on the filibuster. But I appreciate him, he's not evil, and that's a high bar right now.
One edit though: his first elected office was *1982* not 1986! He was in the House of Delegates before the State Senate :)
Absolutely, totally agree. Joe Manchin made everything, the very little chance we have, possible. He is utterly shamefully wrong on the filibuster. But I appreciate him, he's not evil, and that's a high bar right now.
One edit though: his first elected office was *1982* not 1986! He was in the House of Delegates before the State Senate :)
Excellent essay. I disagree with Joe Manchin on energy policy but on pretty much everything else Manchin and I agree. I call the far left wing of the Democratic party The Stupids and the far right wing of the Republican party The Nutcases. Both of these groups are loud, obnoxious and distracting. Thank goodness for Joe Manchin. I just wish every senator and congressman/woman over age 70 retired.
It is because the most probable future is one where Democrats are locked out of control of the federal government for a decade or (much) more that Democrats are so angry at Joe Manchin (and, let us not forget, Kyrsten Sinema). This period is the one chance to address many Democratic priorities and show voters that Democratic (and democratic) government is good. You can blame Democrats for trying to get past "whatever Joe Manchin wants", but it is not hard to understand why they wanted to get everything they can.
… Steny Hoyer doers not have some massive fandom that’s swelling his ego and convincing him he’s indispensable. And it doesn’t appear he’ll ever be Speaker. He’s holding on for unclear reasons, probably because Congress attracts ambitious, power-hungry, and supremely self-confident people.
Overall, I agree on Manchin, but people get emotional. For instance, liberals ***hate*** Susan Collins, because there’s some sense of betrayal that she saved Obamacare, and we hoped she was a Democrat in Republican clothing. But she’s not. She’s a Republican. Of course, per the reasoning of this article, we should be grateful she saved the ACA.
I would just add that Progressive strategy, drive out the base and damn the consequences, doesn't work. Bernie has tried that twice and failed: twice. Current party ID shows: the Dems no longer have a larger, more reliable, base than Republicans. They need to change course.
Unfortunately, I think the odds are low that they adapt. They're kinda at where the GOP was on 2012: "we haven't really TRIED our strategy yet!" which means we'll get a "standard bearer" Democrat in 2024 or 2028, and it will be a disaster.
While I agree with this piece almost entirely, I think it's missing an important factor, which is the weakness of our political parties. Internecine fights with a political party is about the surest sign of weakness as one can get.
And the effect of this is that individual politicians have fewer incentives to make compromises for the good of the party as a whole. This doesn't just apply to Joe Manchin, it also applies to the DSA-progressive wing who are, if anything, less willing compromise than Manchin is. Some of them voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill for reasoning that seems based in virtue signaling to their base and not because of the merits of the bill.
In short, it is a massive problem for collective action when individual politicians are incentivized to only or primarily care about their base voters. So you get a situation where progressives in the safest of safe seats demand that moderates in unsafe seats should commit political seppuku to support progressive legislation.
In a normal party system, this wouldn't happen. Party leadership would have authority and one of their main goals would be to ensure they stay in the majority. And to stay in the majority, you make the people in safe seats compromise to the collective party goals and not the people in vulnerable seats.
And that is the way things used to work, when party structures had more control of campaign money and more ability to help incumbents and forge (and sometimes force) inter-party compromises. None of that exists today.
Added onto this disfunction is party leadership in Congress that tries to run things like a parliamentary party system when the necessary mechanisms for that don't exist. Major legislation no longer goes through regular order - rather it's crafted largely in secret by leadership and then presented to the membership. That is not the way our system is supposed to work and party leaders have a lot of power, but they don't have the power to compel party members to support they legislation they crafted.
Most of this toxic dynamic is driven by our primary system and the well-intentioned but ultimately counter-productive efforts at campaign finance reform. These have materially weakened parties to the point they are really just brands. This is why the median primary voter has so much de facto political power. The current incentives drive most politicians to care about primaries and primary voters more than anything else. The exception are moderates who have to balance the threat of getting primaried with the threat of losing a general election. The fact that politicians in safe seats who don't need to worry about winning in the general demand that the moderates must be the ones to compromise just illustrates how backwards party politics and structure currently is.
Part of the issue a lot of folks have a sense of what the "high salience disagreements" would be, and have a strong negative reaction to that (e.g. the Slow Boring post that was comment-locked). Not clear how one works through that.
I generally think this piece gets a lot of things right as a descriptive matter. However, one thing that I keep coming back to with all these kinds of pieces is how exactly the party should be identifying the proto Manchin types in more competitive states.
In particular, it seems that there is a complex interaction of both a nominee’s perceived affect with voters and their professed policy positions. Further, it seems that prescriptive remedy is to focus only on policy issues at the expense of affect, which seems like a mistake. As an example, do we know with high certainty that Connor Lamb or John Fetterman codes to voters as the more moderate candidate in PA senate? I think there are arguments on both sides.
My personal feeling is that professed policy positions are basically meaningless, except for some parochial issues. I think what really matters are things like relatability and "authenticity". Connor Lamb has had a twenty year plan to get to the Senate since he was in high school. I think that kind of credentialism/striverism/brown nosing is a turn off to the kinds of voters we're talking about. They need to be looking at more Tester/Sherrod Brown/Angus King types- unpolished, unconventional candidates.
1. A big part of the problem is the narrowing of the realm of acceptable-yet-disagreed-with-views. (On both sides of the aisle)
2. Without a wide-enough realm the only recourse is hatred, and eventually, violence.
3. The realm of acceptable-yet-disagreed-with-views just *has* to include things you *really* disagree with or else you end up with #2.
4. The main way to expand this realm is to lessen reliance on winner-takes-all government, voting, parties, etc.
5. While I agree with the sentiment of telling people to not be mad at Joe Manchin, I don't think it works without addressing these underlying causes.
6. Winner-takes-all is a large source of the narrowing of the realm of acceptable-yet-disagreed-with-views.
7. Less winner-takes-all means more persuasion and compromise and less vitriol, hatred, violence, and frankly, emotional or psychological harm for the electorate and politicians.
8. I know it can feel like you *have* to beat the other side to enact insert-policy-that-solves-some-sort-of-harm-to-some-group-of-people rather than be more accepting and compromising, but you're paying a real and dangerous price.
9. It's probably logical on some level to be uncompromising and less accepting in our current system, but if I could have my wishes all of that energy would go into improving government, voting, etc.
After long consideration, I've concluded that our political environment can be captured via the Restaurant Metaphor:
At the restaurant, the Democrats are a family with two harried parents with a toddler who is constantly on the verge of erupting into earth shattering tantrums, with screaming and tossing food around. The parents wheedle and try to placate their obnoxious child with treats and promises while other customers, most of whom write or read Substack, glare at them and think that *they* would certainly be able to control that horrible kid.
I remain puzzled by Progressive fury. It seems to me that two different things are going on: You point to a visceral tribal reaction, that surely captures much of the anger. I suspect that there's an additional factor: I gather that professional fund-raisers typically get a fixed cut of the money they raise. Accordingly, it may be a sound business practice to cultivate outrage, since the more anger they can generate amongst partisans, the more money they'll take in. This might extend also to Democratic politicians, especially those who fear being outflanked on the left due to the pathologies of the primary process.
"At some point in the 2030s or whenever, all kinds of mainstream progressives are going to be tired of losing and are going to get excited about a new crop of dynamic, ideologically heterodox candidates who are capable of winning races in right-of-center states. "
Good article. But given I'm looking forward to Mitch McConnell being in charge again, I'm glad most dems will ignore you 😀
Absolutely, totally agree. Joe Manchin made everything, the very little chance we have, possible. He is utterly shamefully wrong on the filibuster. But I appreciate him, he's not evil, and that's a high bar right now.
One edit though: his first elected office was *1982* not 1986! He was in the House of Delegates before the State Senate :)
Fantastic post.
Absolutely, totally agree. Joe Manchin made everything, the very little chance we have, possible. He is utterly shamefully wrong on the filibuster. But I appreciate him, he's not evil, and that's a high bar right now.
One edit though: his first elected office was *1982* not 1986! He was in the House of Delegates before the State Senate :)
Fantastic post.
Excellent essay. I disagree with Joe Manchin on energy policy but on pretty much everything else Manchin and I agree. I call the far left wing of the Democratic party The Stupids and the far right wing of the Republican party The Nutcases. Both of these groups are loud, obnoxious and distracting. Thank goodness for Joe Manchin. I just wish every senator and congressman/woman over age 70 retired.
It is because the most probable future is one where Democrats are locked out of control of the federal government for a decade or (much) more that Democrats are so angry at Joe Manchin (and, let us not forget, Kyrsten Sinema). This period is the one chance to address many Democratic priorities and show voters that Democratic (and democratic) government is good. You can blame Democrats for trying to get past "whatever Joe Manchin wants", but it is not hard to understand why they wanted to get everything they can.
… Steny Hoyer doers not have some massive fandom that’s swelling his ego and convincing him he’s indispensable. And it doesn’t appear he’ll ever be Speaker. He’s holding on for unclear reasons, probably because Congress attracts ambitious, power-hungry, and supremely self-confident people.
Overall, I agree on Manchin, but people get emotional. For instance, liberals ***hate*** Susan Collins, because there’s some sense of betrayal that she saved Obamacare, and we hoped she was a Democrat in Republican clothing. But she’s not. She’s a Republican. Of course, per the reasoning of this article, we should be grateful she saved the ACA.
I think Matt got an early copy of this episode of the Weeds. One of the hosts literally says "we'll have to wait for Joe Machine to retire" with respect to advancing cash payment policy. The anger at him over being a failed swing vote is warping smart people's ability to see that replacing him is not their problem/solution. https://listen.stitcher.com/yvap/?af_dp=stitcher://episode/201859117&af_web_dp=https://www.stitcher.com/episode/201859117&deep_link_value=stitcher://episode/201859117
I would just add that Progressive strategy, drive out the base and damn the consequences, doesn't work. Bernie has tried that twice and failed: twice. Current party ID shows: the Dems no longer have a larger, more reliable, base than Republicans. They need to change course.
Unfortunately, I think the odds are low that they adapt. They're kinda at where the GOP was on 2012: "we haven't really TRIED our strategy yet!" which means we'll get a "standard bearer" Democrat in 2024 or 2028, and it will be a disaster.
Robert Byrd was 93 when he passed away
That was a poorly written sentence.
While I agree with this piece almost entirely, I think it's missing an important factor, which is the weakness of our political parties. Internecine fights with a political party is about the surest sign of weakness as one can get.
And the effect of this is that individual politicians have fewer incentives to make compromises for the good of the party as a whole. This doesn't just apply to Joe Manchin, it also applies to the DSA-progressive wing who are, if anything, less willing compromise than Manchin is. Some of them voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill for reasoning that seems based in virtue signaling to their base and not because of the merits of the bill.
In short, it is a massive problem for collective action when individual politicians are incentivized to only or primarily care about their base voters. So you get a situation where progressives in the safest of safe seats demand that moderates in unsafe seats should commit political seppuku to support progressive legislation.
In a normal party system, this wouldn't happen. Party leadership would have authority and one of their main goals would be to ensure they stay in the majority. And to stay in the majority, you make the people in safe seats compromise to the collective party goals and not the people in vulnerable seats.
And that is the way things used to work, when party structures had more control of campaign money and more ability to help incumbents and forge (and sometimes force) inter-party compromises. None of that exists today.
Added onto this disfunction is party leadership in Congress that tries to run things like a parliamentary party system when the necessary mechanisms for that don't exist. Major legislation no longer goes through regular order - rather it's crafted largely in secret by leadership and then presented to the membership. That is not the way our system is supposed to work and party leaders have a lot of power, but they don't have the power to compel party members to support they legislation they crafted.
Most of this toxic dynamic is driven by our primary system and the well-intentioned but ultimately counter-productive efforts at campaign finance reform. These have materially weakened parties to the point they are really just brands. This is why the median primary voter has so much de facto political power. The current incentives drive most politicians to care about primaries and primary voters more than anything else. The exception are moderates who have to balance the threat of getting primaried with the threat of losing a general election. The fact that politicians in safe seats who don't need to worry about winning in the general demand that the moderates must be the ones to compromise just illustrates how backwards party politics and structure currently is.
Part of the issue a lot of folks have a sense of what the "high salience disagreements" would be, and have a strong negative reaction to that (e.g. the Slow Boring post that was comment-locked). Not clear how one works through that.
I generally think this piece gets a lot of things right as a descriptive matter. However, one thing that I keep coming back to with all these kinds of pieces is how exactly the party should be identifying the proto Manchin types in more competitive states.
In particular, it seems that there is a complex interaction of both a nominee’s perceived affect with voters and their professed policy positions. Further, it seems that prescriptive remedy is to focus only on policy issues at the expense of affect, which seems like a mistake. As an example, do we know with high certainty that Connor Lamb or John Fetterman codes to voters as the more moderate candidate in PA senate? I think there are arguments on both sides.
My personal feeling is that professed policy positions are basically meaningless, except for some parochial issues. I think what really matters are things like relatability and "authenticity". Connor Lamb has had a twenty year plan to get to the Senate since he was in high school. I think that kind of credentialism/striverism/brown nosing is a turn off to the kinds of voters we're talking about. They need to be looking at more Tester/Sherrod Brown/Angus King types- unpolished, unconventional candidates.
I agree with this, but...
1. A big part of the problem is the narrowing of the realm of acceptable-yet-disagreed-with-views. (On both sides of the aisle)
2. Without a wide-enough realm the only recourse is hatred, and eventually, violence.
3. The realm of acceptable-yet-disagreed-with-views just *has* to include things you *really* disagree with or else you end up with #2.
4. The main way to expand this realm is to lessen reliance on winner-takes-all government, voting, parties, etc.
5. While I agree with the sentiment of telling people to not be mad at Joe Manchin, I don't think it works without addressing these underlying causes.
6. Winner-takes-all is a large source of the narrowing of the realm of acceptable-yet-disagreed-with-views.
7. Less winner-takes-all means more persuasion and compromise and less vitriol, hatred, violence, and frankly, emotional or psychological harm for the electorate and politicians.
8. I know it can feel like you *have* to beat the other side to enact insert-policy-that-solves-some-sort-of-harm-to-some-group-of-people rather than be more accepting and compromising, but you're paying a real and dangerous price.
9. It's probably logical on some level to be uncompromising and less accepting in our current system, but if I could have my wishes all of that energy would go into improving government, voting, etc.
After long consideration, I've concluded that our political environment can be captured via the Restaurant Metaphor:
At the restaurant, the Democrats are a family with two harried parents with a toddler who is constantly on the verge of erupting into earth shattering tantrums, with screaming and tossing food around. The parents wheedle and try to placate their obnoxious child with treats and promises while other customers, most of whom write or read Substack, glare at them and think that *they* would certainly be able to control that horrible kid.
The Republican party is just a toddler.
Thanks for your uncommon common sense.
I remain puzzled by Progressive fury. It seems to me that two different things are going on: You point to a visceral tribal reaction, that surely captures much of the anger. I suspect that there's an additional factor: I gather that professional fund-raisers typically get a fixed cut of the money they raise. Accordingly, it may be a sound business practice to cultivate outrage, since the more anger they can generate amongst partisans, the more money they'll take in. This might extend also to Democratic politicians, especially those who fear being outflanked on the left due to the pathologies of the primary process.
"At some point in the 2030s or whenever, all kinds of mainstream progressives are going to be tired of losing and are going to get excited about a new crop of dynamic, ideologically heterodox candidates who are capable of winning races in right-of-center states. "
See also: the 1992 Democratic Party.