I've put a one week ban on "Galetta" for being an overall jerk. If when he comes back he's a jerk again, he'll get an indefinite ban. Don't be assholes on here.
Having finally noticed "Galetta" I would argue in favor of a permanent ban immediately. I've moderated other places, and announced a "one strike and you're reduced to your component electrons" policy - it's amazing how only 2-3 "disappearances" were necessary to "whack the mules" and get their attention.
But not everyone uses FB (or Twitter, or Instagram, or LinkedIn). And if you give people an "I don't use FB" option, the a-holes will all select it whether they're on FB or not.
The killer catch phrase that liberals decided to use was that a bad thing like COVID or poverty “disproportionally affects Black and Brown communities” which was supposed to make a case more persuasive, but politically did the opposite
Inside the progressive bubble saying "X problem is specifically bad for non-whites" is supposed to make the problem more morally urgent. But the logic of electoral politics is exactly the opposite of that — you are telling the white majority that they should maybe feel bad about this thing but don't need to actually care about it.
But as this rhetoric has risen post-2012, the Dems are doing better with whites, especially ones living in educated suburbs. Which suggests they're not losing competitiveness in quite the way you're suggesting this rhetoric will cause them to. The most consolidated white voter vs non-white voter election occurred under Mitt Romney vs Barack Obama. Not exactly the peak of this rhetoric as far as I know.
A pragmatic question, Covid does very clearly disproportionately affect Black communities. Where should you deploy vaccines first? There is only one right answer to this.
The technocratic answer, I believe, is that you deploy the vaccine first to the people most likely to *spread* the virus. Health care workers first, for sure. Other essential workers next, probably. Incidentally, this would probably be just the kind of race-neutral policy that would disproportionately benefit Black and Brown communities, but perhaps shouldn't be sold that way.
That is a good answer to the question of using the vaccine to prevent spread. But that isn't precisely what I am asking. Death is absolute but long term damage and the future costs associated with it tell me initial distribution should be targeted to minimize both future suffering and costs.
Sure, but I think the way you target the initial distribution to minimize future suffering and costs, would be to target spread (potentially with a small number of exceptions for the extremely vulnerable). Once health care workers, grocery store and public transit employees, etc are immunized, you can more broadly prioritize people based on their vulnerability. But I think it's likely that the best way to protect vulnerable people is to stop the spread.
But maybe you are asking, *assuming* we're at a stage of assessing who is the most vulnerable, how do we assess that?
If the difference was down to genetics or biology yes, but it’s not.
This is a great example of the topic in the post! A race-neutral policy here will in fact benefit minorities most because they are objectively most at risk. Putting a racial frame on this policy (or worse, actually including race in the policy) is unnecessary and politically toxic.
To perhaps put too fine a point on it: imagine, hypothetically, a well-regarded study really is published with the topline result that many Black americans, by quirk of common genetics, are more susceptible to COVID-19's pathology.
To write a policy to compensate, you can (and should) still write it broadly assisting "individuals with genetic predisposition to COVID-19".
Because when you write the policy, you can't predict what other groups will be discovered to have such a predisposition, and *you want to help them too, right*?
And you know this how? There are many diseases that behave exactly in that way. Given the very expensive long term effects of Covid it makes perfect sense to mitigate those effects on exactly the basis of who is disproportionately affected regardless of cause.
I'd agree that you should ideally consider race as one of many factors, if you have the capability to distribute vaccines using a complicated algorithm for getting them to the highest-risk people first. In the real world, though, we don't have the logistical ability to take more than a few factors into account. Race is a much worse predictor of risk than things like age, occupation and existing medical conditions. So since we can realistically only take a few factors into account, those should be the ones, not race.
And, interestingly enough, taking in those "limited" factors you list will actually help the racial side of it. Just take a look at the "essential workers" the next time you're at the grocery store. And the old people most at risk.
Why do you regard it as more "morally urgent"? Why is there such resistance to identifying the manner in which systemic inequalities manifest during a crisis? And what message does it send to people who are disproportionately affected when you advocate that we ignore this reality?
I also think that it's wrong morally to suppress discussions of disparate impact. Acknowledging disparate impacts shines light on the structural inequalities that exist in our society. If a disaster disproportionately affects Black and/or Latino people, do we really think that something beneficial is acheived by pretending that this isn't the case?
When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, or when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, do we really think that there is a benefit to pretending we don't know who was impacted?
I hear you about not wanting to suppress the disparate impacts, and I don't have evidence gathered. My personal experience this cycle was as a precinct captain calling my 85% white/15% Latino neighborhood in Chicago and phone banking for Wisconsin and Kansas.
I am not pretending that the inequality isn't there, I just find that rhetorically appealing to something unifying (helping people in need, solidarity, foundational values) rather than the underlying inequality is more effective if the goal is to motivate the listener to change their behavior.
Oh and maybe we leave the 6-syllable words out of the call script to voters who maybe didn't go to college?
Thanks for sharing your experience, that's a valid point to make. I agree that it is rhetorically appealing to speak in unifying terms, and I agree that having culturally competent messaging matters a lot. While it is great that so many highly educated people want to volunteer, it does make me uncomfortable when campaigns and volunteer groups are homogenous in terms of socieconomics. I like listening to leadeers like Chuck Rocha, Stacey Abrams, LaTosha Brown, etc.
I don’t understand the suggestion to be sticking your head in the sand about who was affected or never mentioning it – but in the long run I think it would absolutely be more beneficial if the predominant framing were that hundreds of thousands of Americans were struck by a hurricane, to use your examples.
I agree that a unifying message makes sense for political purposes. On a related note, there has been a lot of tension over the framing of COVID-19 "hotspots" in the NYC area in neighborhoods with large haredi/ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations. There has been significant tension between the communities and both the Mayor and Governor, and Mayor De Blasio in particular had made some problematic statements about these communities. However, having culturally competent messaging and having trusted surrogates in these communities makes a big difference. Also, a few months before there was news of rising anti-Asian sentiment because of the perception that the virus was coming from China, which was being enflamed by President Trump's rhetoric. The issues of scapegoating, divisive rhetoric, "hotspots", and disparate impact messaging are all related.
Your last paragraphs seem to get to the deeper problem.
Seems to me the basic issue with the Democratic Party is that virtually all of its leaders (not its rank and file) are college educated and have high levels of trust in institutions. And so they can't relate to the viewpoint of non-college educated people with low social trust. Which is a huge percentage of Americans (maybe a majority?).
Take this whole debate about "free college" or student loan debt relief. I bet Democratic leaders think this is a populist idea. But if you're an average person, and most of your social circle hasn't been anywhere near college — it sounds like an elitist idea, not a populist one!
Not that this is enough to fix the problem, but Democrats should start an "affirmative action" program of their own, seeking out talented non-college educated people and promoting them to national leadership levels. Joe Biden should appoint a non-grad to his Cabinet and draw attention to it (there are plenty of great people in the union and entrepreneurship fields). Same goes for party committees, congressional staff, candidate recruitment, and so on.
I see this as not just smart politics, but almost a moral imperative. Descriptive representation matters. It isn't remotely acceptable that the two-thirds of Americans who lack a degree are represented by only about 2-3% of Congress. If we were talking about race or gender instead of education level, that would speak for itself.
They think community college is what poor people do, when it's actually working retail jobs and trades. They can't imagine what success looks like without a college degree.
To be fair, without a degree you are much more limited. Although, a degree is no guarantee now compared to what it used to be. I went back to college in my 30's (3rd gen single mom). I looked strategically at my options. I could find only a handful of degrees that were worth the endeavor - healthcare, engineering, and tech mainly. Got my bachelors in Software Development, which has been great for me! But I worry about how few options there are to a stable quality of life. Not everyone can be in these few limited sectors that pay well. Entrepreneurship is a good option - landscapers, plumbing, etc. But thats not a path everyone wants to take.
LBJ was probably one of the most clever politicians of his time and he didn't go to an elite school or come from an elite background.
Or as Paul Douglas of Illinois said
>Douglas usually found himself in the minority in the Chicago City Council. His attempts to reform the public education system and lower public transportation fares were met with derision and he typically ended up on the losing end of 49–1 votes. "I have three degrees," Douglas once said after a particularly hard-fought rout. "I have been associated with intelligent and intellectual people for many years. Some of these aldermen haven't gone through the fifth grade. But they're the smartest bunch of bastards I ever saw grouped together."[citation needed]
I totally agree. Until we college-educated “elites” can see ourselves through the same lens Trump supporters see us, we will never come to terms with our own hypocrisy. Just as White liberals can empathize with minorities in a struggle against white supremacy, we have the tools needed to empathize with non-college grads in their struggle against what they experience as “elite supremacy.” They resent that we think we’re morally and intellectually better than them, that we’re more enlightened and worthy of power. Empathizing is not the same thing as agreeing. But if you truly want to understand why their seemingly contradictory electoral choices are in fact personally rational from their perspective, you have to set your biases aside and truly attempt to empathize.
I think it's important to support a pipeline of candidates who do not come from "elite" backgrounds. There are some in Congress (or are newly elected)- Jon Tester, AOC, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Ritchie Torres...
This phenomenon is both heart wrenching on one end as Black man, but such an obvious political imperative for our current realities.
In many ways Kendi calls for this in his book when he discusses moving from “feel good advocacy” to “outcomes based advocacy”. And affirmative action is the perfect policy to apply it too. It sure would feel good for this country to explicitly do something that recognized historical and current racial injustice, but the reality is that if we make the policies about class solidarity we will be able to drive real equitable outcomes.
Sheryl Cashin in “Place not Race” does a fantastic job of arguing for class/place based affirmative action policies, while offering the perspective as a Black Women and how angering it is that we can’t put race front & center when the policies actually don’t empower us vs disenfranchising us.
I tend to take Cashin’s view, and want outcomes more than I care about people agreeing that policy should put race front and center.
Place I think can be a powerful tool, because while it is would be extremely helpful to many hard-pressed Black communities you can also identity select white-dominated areas that benefit from place-based policies and highlight them. There's something to be said for underscoring the reality that concentrated poverty is tough, whether it's in Appalachia or East St Louis or wherever else.
There is plenty of money in the black community. It's priorities and habits.
Nike and 150 dollah tennis shoes are a thang.
Meanwhile, immigrants outwork all of us, shop at Walmart, live 11 to a 1 bedroom apt and send large portions of their income outside of our economic formula.
Lol. I must say that’s pretty cool for Matt to be able to profit off of someone else’s desire to be a troll. Someone should write an economics paper about that
Some people might say, the only purpose for money is to make more money.
If you put what money you have to making more money, it compounds exponentially and you find yourself better off.
Now I am not denying red lining. I am not denying the struggle. But the black community I have walked about has few black owned businesses. It sounds like, knowing that Black Americans are just as capable, they had more businesses prior to integration than now. Why? It isn't that more obstacles have been placed in their way.
Try to find an answer that incorporates the huge numbers of Americans who desperately want Black Americans to succeed in every area of life, who voted for Barack Obama in large numbers, who tiptoe around the realities of life if you ain't got YT to blame everything upon.
Matt points out that Democrats didn't emphasize a minimum wage increase. A bigger issue is why didn't Democrats focus on attacking the 2017 tax cuts as tax cuts for the rich, which statistically they were. Kerry made that a big issue in 2004 in regards to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.
I was shocked that the tax cuts and botched ACA repeal were barely mentioned in the campaign. Those moments marked the low point of Trump's approval ratings!
The true strength of Trump/Trumpism to the extent it exists is that he is so acutely grotesque to highly politically attuned liberals that they spend all of their energy campaigning against his personal eccentricities and failures, Ukraine, democratic slippage, Hatch Act, etc. that really are only salient to the most hyper plugged in voters while ignoring the most basic attacks against normie republican economics, tax cuts for billionaires, cutting social programs, attacking the ACA, polluting rivers. I constantly think of the masterful effort the Obama 2012 campaign exerted to frame a reasonably popular, formerly moderate governor as a completely out of touch ruthless capitalist. And I wonder if it would have just been better for Dems to try to do the same thing vs Trump. But that would have required such strict messaging discipline by all members of the liberal cinematic universe I'm not sure it was ever truly possible.
That message discipline is tough, especially with the media environment.
The right has explicitly partisan media - talk radio, Fox News, various websites - and they get the best ratings and clicks when they gin up culture war issues. That aligns with the interests of the Republican Party, which thrives when culture war issues are front and center.
While there are partisan leftist media outlets, most left of center people don't consume news that is explicitly partisan. These "mainstream media" outlets do tend to have a liberal bias on social issues, but not so much on economic issues. Like the conservative news outlets, they get the best ratings when social issues are front and center.
As a result you get Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper on air every day calling out Trump on the latest outrageous thing he's said, but they aren't going to hit him for cutting the corporate tax rate to 20% or rolling back EPA air pollution standards.
That's a great point. Something that I really noticed in the last 4 years was that there was almost nothing being discussed that would touch the lives of regular people. Talk about stupid tweet every 15 minutes, talk about Russia, etc. Absolutely worthless to most people. The things he did to harm people went under the radar. Let's face it, nearly everyone is in the clickbait business..
I almost wonder if a solution is for dems to be a tough more adversarial with mainstream press? Not in a "Fake News" way but in a way that shows they give GOP a pass, aren't talking about normie issues. Sanders does a bit of this but if you can do it without talking about the impending socialist revolution or also implying they are rigging a primary against you it might stick better. But yea circling back to the AOC/Spanberger fight.\, how do you keep that message discipline all the way down? My *hope* is that some of the Dems messaging problems the last four years are a consequence of being out of power and having an enormous primary field and while Joe Biden basically went wire to wire as the leader, he was not treated as such until Super Tuesday. But now as literally Commander in Chief, it will be a lot more stupid for lazy media to reach out to the Squad for their thoughts on the current issue of the day when there are dozens of normie Administration officials and closer allies of the administration in congress that can give more informative response.
I think there's something to the idea about being adversarial with the media in that way. When a Democratic congressperson or senator is on CNN they should call out questions and segments that distract from the "real issues," or just change the subject.
"Yes Wolf, what the president said today was outrageous. But let's be clear: the failure of this president is not just in how he communicates. It's what he's done. More air pollution, less health insurance..."
ACA repeal failed. That's not a negative for Trump, it's a positive. It failed because the Trump replacement for ObamaCare is some version of Medicaid for All. Republicans didn't want to do that.
Biden talked a lot about the tax changes he proposed which included an increase in the corporate tax rate. Biden was infrastructure, public option, and tax increases (to finance infrastructure). Or that's what I got out of his campaign.
Of course, Biden could have talked about 2017 if he wanted to, but I thought David Shor said you should just talk about what you are going to do as that is more effective.
I follow politics closely, and even I never saw a Democrat say clearly, "We want to lower premium, deductibles and copays. Republicans want to raise them because they prioritize tax cuts for the wealthy."
The closest we got was messaging around preexisting conditions, but between the people on Medicare and the people who get good health insurance through their jobs, that's a relatively small number of people who are impacted.
I mean the Trump Admin and aligned AG's are in court now fighting it. Unlikely to go through but nonetheless. I mean I don't think there is one messaging panacea but I wish that message was elevated more by all dems throughout the entire Trump admin. Or just rehire David Shor lmao <3
My understanding was that it was a major talking point in the 2018 mid-terms (both the tax cuts and attempted ACA repeal) and helped Democrats substantially then. It was also a major element of 2020 messaging but just got drowned out by the usual Trump nonsense.
It seems to me that, especially post-2016, there has been a desire to do antiracism in a way that isn't merely a general leveling of society. The proximate reason for this desire is that if you allow general leveling to count, then it's always the case that the most far-left egalitarian agenda is the most antiracist agenda. That then means Bernieism is peak antiracism, which is a repugnant conclusion to the Hillaryites who are still among us.
The problem with this desire is that there are actually very few antiracist things you can do that aren't general leveling. The solutions to this problem have been (1) to flock to the few things that are not general leveling such as affirmative action, calling out racism in discourse, microaggressions, etc., and (2) finding a few problems that do actually require general leveling to solve -- like fixing the criminal justice system or reducing maternal and infant mortality -- and aggressively branding them as antiracism issues even though they help people of all races.
I think you're right to see 2016 as a watershed moment here, but disagree with your diagnosis of the contemporary landscape because what happened *after* the 2016 election is that the Berniesphere actually moved in Clinton's dimension on race and identity issues.
And the whiteness of Bernie's 2016 voters ended up being deceptive as it turns out a lot of them were just anti-Hillary and left him in 2020, making his coalition relatively more diverse
Was that a change in strategy driven by 2016, or was it a function of the Berniesphere getting more integrated into the Democratic party and picking up some of its inclinations on this dimension?
So Matt Y seems to be arguing that explicitly anti-racist messaging is ineffective in general politics. But so much of criminal justice reform is quite clearly extremely local, coming down to city- and county-level policies on policing and prosecution. In many very liberal cities, anti-racism is now a way to win in politics, courtesy of the great Awokening. This doesn't necessarily bode well for the necessary state-level reforms in criminal justice, including things like fixing parole systems, reducing sentences, etc.
Activists can and do coordinate changes to their messaging for state-level actors, but I worry that a lot of the criminal justice advocacy is being driven by nationally funded actors that don't always realize this. The same politics that can make race-conscious activism successful in liberal cities also pervades progressive grant offices, and may make it more difficult for the less sophisticated funders to realize the need for that shift in messaging.
This depends on the assumption that Sanders-style policies would not stifle growth or progress in a way that would lower all boats, though. But there are many ways that could end up happening. Medicare For All, for example, would reduce incentives for the development of new drugs and procedures, which are almost entirely funded by US insurance industry spending as things stand today. If that leads to a five-year delay in the development of a superior new treatment for diabetes, that delay would do disproportionate harm to Black folks who suffer from higher rates of the disease.
Can I ask what is your opinion on requiring people to use real names in this comment section tied to a Facebook or LinkedIn Account? I like engaging with conservatives and as a Neo Liberal Matt's blog isn't a bad place for conservatives but people talk differently if everyone in their life can hear them.
I would just chime in that I am using my real name, but I am one of those weird people that doesn't have a Facebook or LinkedIn account so that would exclude me. I understand the rationale, but there are folks out here who are not into social media, but would like to participate in a public discussion about policy.
Another lesson here seems to be that unbundling Democrats' popular policies and putting them on the ballot in purple states has electoral downsides - why should Florida voters care about what Biden (or state legislative a candidate) supports if they can get the popular policy they want without voting for him? And unlike some GOP-led ballot measures on social issues, these don't seem designed to drive partisan turnout.
This is an interesting empirical question. One school of thought says progressive initiatives boost turnout of progressive voters, another says it will depress vote share via the mechanism you posit.
Personally I think that kind of tactical consideration is just secondary to strategic messages and party brands. Are Democrats seen as the party of minimum wage hikes, Medicaid expansion, and increased school funding or are they seen as the party of affirmative action, DE & I initiatives, and policing everyone’s speech for maximum politeness?
In your deal world, is such a rebrand led by outside groups or by individual Democratic leaders? If the latter, who are they?
Strategic messaging may > tactics, but a bunch of those areas have GOP-advantaged tactical solutions (school funding from local property tax while voting GOP, medicaid and minimum wage via ballot) while the other stuff is litigated super publicly & nationally
And then the Florida GOP can come in and kneecap it like they did with the felon voting rights proposition.
I'm not saying the Dems are bad at politics, they might be I don't know, but the system is totally rigged against them, so they need to be unreasonably good at politics to win. That sucks but leftists haven't internalized that yet.
Such a great take. The GOP has been able to win on irrational garbage for years, ranging from tax cuts always to Black and Brown folk needing to lift ourselves by our bootstraps.
In another comment you said that the Black community has as much money as the white community, but they spend all their money on Nikes. That is an example of the lift your self up by your bootstraps argument .
Electoral, maybe, but I tend to think it's actually good for Democrats in terms of agenda. There's a gap between symbolic politics and actual discussion of policy, especially at the national level. If you find alternative ways for the electorate to show its preferences for a particular policy decoupled from partisanship, that's quite an information mechanism for politicians. Works for Democrats too, but notice how, away from the culture wars in the national spotlight, Republican governors can take stances that wouldn't fly at the national level (which in turn my have a positive effect on the national level in the medium term).
Two-party polarization is quite reductionist, especially with the intense polarization now, in a big country. Strengthening ballot initiatives and federalism can help.
But maybe the unbundling would be a good idea in a lot of circumstances, even if it hurts the Democratic Party, especially given how much we misjudged Florida's political leanings. Maybe there are a lot of good policies that can be passed by ballot initiative, and that Republican legislatures wouldn't mind all that much precisely because they've been depoliticized.
The argument about people carrying forward their campus politics makes a lot of sense to me. I work at a large DC non-profit that's currently going through a diversity, equity, and inclusion review. I tried to introduce the concern that we tend to exclusively hire interns and entry level staff from private (expensive) universities, which has led to a pretty uniformly wealthy staff (at least among the Americans. We have a lot of foreign born staff to which this does not apply). These staff from expensive universities in turn bring their race/gender-focused politics to the organization and perpetuate the cycle. My concern was not not taken up by the DEI committee. To be clear, I think there are very legitimate race and gender concerns, but the unequivocal dismissal of my class concern was telling.
Well plus it doesn't work mathematically! One DC non-profit can increase its racial diversity while continuing to recruit exclusively from the rich kid graduates of a handful of selective universities. But if *every* major institution tries to do this they will find that there are simply not enough candidates to go around. The Black and Latino population is disproportionately working class and lower income so it's not conceptually coherent to try to do the uplift exclusively along ethnic lines without addressing the class composition.
This is a giant problem at prestigious law firms. *So* much DEI talk, but zero willingness to consider the thing that might actually improve DEI across the board (and I'd argue the only thing that *law firms* can realistically do at all): putting in the time and effort to recruit outside the "top 14."
"Internships" (i.e., "free labor") are inherently a bad thing if one wants to promote any sort of a work force that will be good. Unpaid work is immediately limited to those with another source of income, which cuts off those not from the upper middle/upper classes. I'll give an example from the business I know - Hollywood. I'm a proud graduate of the "Roger Corman Film School." Back when I was attending, the running joke was whether one's crappy car down in the parking lot was going to get them home that night. People there got paid. Not much, and you had to work fast and get it right the first time if you were to get enough work to get enough income to survive. A list of the "graduates" from that "school" back in those days contains many of the Great Names of Hollywood (I'm not on that list). Then in the 90s, as the studios got gobbled up by the intergalactic lords of widgetmaking, the "born on third base" types with their trust funds started going to fillum skool where the failures who worked as perfessers (anyone with talent is making way too much money to be a fillum skool perfesser - I personally have more produced credits than all the fillum skool perfessers combined at UCLA) taught them how to parrot-back successfully. Then they came to Hollywood and took jobs as "interns" while they paid the rent with the trust fund, and all of a sudden all the people with the crappy cars weren't there. I had cause in the mid-90s to see Roget at his office. Drove in and immediately noticed that all the cars were Volvos or BMW 323s or Mercedes 190s. Upstairs all the people, other than the department heads, were "interns." I asked Roger, "So, who's the next James Cameron out there" to which he replied "Beats me." Back about 8 years ago, I went to Roger's last public birthday party. One of those "Great Names of Hollywood" showed up. We were talking at the bar and he commented that he was glad he had come to Hollywood when he did. "I don't see how you can make it in this business anymore if all you have is talent."
That's right out of Hayes' "Twilight of the Elites" as to what has happened to opportunity in America.
Not to mention the fact that the "upwardly mobile" graduates of the state colleges and universities generally tend to be more capable and competent than the "born on third base" kids (read Chris Hayes' "Twilight of the Elites" to see what the system promotes).
1st post. Last paragraph has my specific thoughts.
Hey everyone. I’m just subscribed. Ive followed Matt for about 10 years I think. Part of it hate following. But, I paid money for this… Good work Matty for convincing me you would be worth it. So I want to be respectful.
Might as well do a quick bio. Raised in New Zealand and Los Angeles. 22 years in the Air Force. Deployed many times. Im a swing voter. I’d like to think of myself as a reasoned moderate.
I have five kids, I live in Idaho, I work in the power industry, in a skilled blue-collar field, traveling all over the United States (not glamorous places) and Latin America. 220 days a year. I work side-by-side with a diverse set of people. But a lot of flyover country Union Millwrights, welders, laborers. I hear firsthand every day what these people care about. I should add, that my wife’s family is in the restaurant business as well. Small business owners.
Now to get to the point. I think the positions that target white non-college educated voters, are also going to be very appealing to Hispanic non-college educated voters. I think Matt is absolutely right, on trying to target these concrete things to help the poor/working class.
Unfortunately because of tribalism, white non college educated voters have resisted things that would be good for them, because of the associated social views that go with them. But as I travel around the country, I’m starting to notice that the white and Hispanic non-college educated voters are starting to merge culturally. Especially as Hispanics have penetrated in to fly over land.
I think there’s a good chance that this is going to open an avenue for more of this demographic to open up to the things they actually need.
The secret is can Democrats appeal to these people. Gridlock in Congress makes it hard to do anything concrete. The Republicans don’t really offer them anything, except for resentment. Some of this resentment is made easier by the perception that many Democrats have gone to this bourgeois social elite partial socialism view. I think with many in this new persuadable demographic need is respect. But not in a token way. Imagine being a welder or an auto mechanic… You work hard to support your family. You feel like you contribute to society. But in the back of your mind, you know that all the people on TV, and violence in ministration, admonish their kids to get good grades and go to a good college, so they can be anything except an auto mechanic or a welder. We can only have so many marketing consultants, or coders, or social workers. The simple fact is, not everyone can go to college. I just don’t think the Democrats have done a good job of connecting with these people.
I’m not sure what the answer is. Change in small increments maybe.
Last comment. Blanket student loan forgiveness will backfire unless it is partnered with other policies.
I’m dictating on my iPhone. Forgive any grammatical mistakes.
Chuck Rocha - a self described Latino “red neck farm boy from East Texas” preaches this message constantly. Latino and non-HIspanic white working class people have a lot in common in some parts of the country. What counts is talking to people early and often. Rocha has talked about how well the Harry Reid had done in Nevada by forming deep relationships with the Culinary Union. Heck, Stacey Abrams went to every county in Georgia during her 2018 gubernertorial campaign - urban, suburban, and rural areas.
I'm recently leaning more into this idea that we are overproducing elites (or wannabe elites at least). Working in the trades can provide a really good quality of life, often better than those of us in so-called "elite" fields.
I also agree that student loan forgiveness would backfire so hard that democrats would get wiped out (and they probably should if they prioritize something that only benefits the top fraction of their base).
This is the first substack I have ever subscribed to, so I might just be naive, but someone with the username of Galleta seems to be needlessly harrassing commenters. I am unsure if their ideas are any good, but their tone is pretty flippant.
Is this the way it usually is in substack?
I have been really impressed by the earnestness of the conversation over these past few days, but if this is the way substack comment sections typically head, I understand.
I think there's something instructive and on topic about that fact that this user choose to spend $8 to yell at us "libtards" over this particular issue.
If the people who shout abuse at Matt Yglesias on Twitter are willing to pay money to do so on in a comments section he should be able to retire comfortably in a few years.
Yeah, I really hope Matt sees this Galleta’s persons comments and bans them. If not, I don’t plan to renew my subscription. If I want a comment section overrun by racist trolls, I’ll just stick to Twitter for free instead of paying $8/month for the privilege.
Interesting article, and while I recognize that this a very parochial perspective, from my perch in upper NW DC it seems like a small part of the problem is that the vast majority of people who live here have two different type of interactions: interactions with their wealthy, predominantly white neighbors, and then interactions with "workers" that are predominantly nonwhite. "Working class whites," "poor whites," or whatever you want to call them, are largely nonexistent here, and so I wonder if therefore the wealthy professionals that live in places like NW DC end up ignoring broad class-based policies because in their minds, class becomes associated with race in a way that is not representative of the majority of the United States.
Sure, though I doubt there is a place that is "representative of the majority of the United States", so people in other areas are mostly just as parochial, but in different ways according to what the population, economy, etc. is like in their area.
I basically agree with everything here, but consciously downplaying race to pass redistributive policies does start to smell like "Trojan Horse" politics that Fox News has a hypersensitive nose for. Isn't it better to be explicit that these policies will help address racial inequalities while, critically, also materially bettering the lives of millions of white Americans? If the problem is that conservatives have primed large swaths of white voters to flinch at any policy that helps people who don't look like them, even though it would also help people who do look like them, how do we address this without demotivating progressive voters who seem to be equally sensitive but in the other direction? Feels like we're past the point of being able to just not talk about race while trying to address inequalities.
I'm not even arguing for "consciously downplaying race." I'm saying that progressives have started overtly racializing issues that are facially race-neutral.
Hopefully, I'm not going to go too far down the rabbit hole here, but given the shifts in progressive attitudes since the Floyd protests, is there a way for any semi-lefty politician who doesn't espouse explicit race-based policies to make it through many Dem primaries? (Not saying whether that's good or bad -- just that the politics on the left seem to have shifted.)
If you read Matt’s take, I think he’d say “yes”. The first people to repudiate strongly identity politics and champion race-blind measures aimed at narrowing the class/opportunity divide might have a huge advantage. Which I suspect means that many non-racist liberals who say the “right things” in public are privately suspicious of explicitly race-conscious identity politics.
Bernie sort of ran in this way that Matt's describing: economically progressive ideas presented without that aspect of cultural progressivism on social issues. He did sort of alienate elite, cultural progressives in that regard, but it seems like he more than made up for it by motivating voters who may have been (justifiably or not) weirded out by liberal academia-speak on gender and race.
I'm not sure we talk enough in The Discourse about how much of said Discourse happened *around* Bernie Sanders or was literally *projected* onto him by more eager activist groups (oddly enough from both the Progressive side and the Anti-Woke side). To me this explains why Matt was targeted so much by the Bruenig / Jacobin bunch for his advice about just having Bernie lean into the Democratic brand to win and make nice,....even if he didn't really mean it....
It was always apparent, but then it became exceedingly clear when I read about AOC's House cleaning of her Congressional staff and one if the guys who was "let go" had advocated that she should advocate further Left if M4A to a full Nationalized Health system if only to "expand the debate"...which seemed.... shortsighted given her talents.
I think David Shor has talked about how Bernie had really good numbers in 2016 because he undercut Trump's support among white working class voters by appealing to their economic interests in an explicitly non-racialized frame
The now conventional Wisdom on Bernie 2016 is that "did so well because people who hated Clinton went to him" which I don't think is *untrue* but I also think its true that that campaign had unique strengths because it was very economically focused -- while progressive on race/gender, but not emphasizing it.
I depends on where you perceive the “head fake”. From where I sit, plenty of smart democrats who know class is the real keystone issue are nonetheless using woke language because it’s perceived to be in vogue. (Cue Andrew Cuomo inserting “black and brown” conspicuously by what he really means - “poor” - which, isn’t that a little racist? 🤔) If they were secret kendi-an “equity-ites” I’d advocate a dose of “cut the bullshit” but it’s my instinct that most of the bullshit runs the other way.
I find way Kamala Harris talks about race and gender politically clumsy.
During her victory speech, praised Joe Biden at length for having "the courage and audacity" to pick her as VP. The virus and the economy she mentioned just in passing. Leaving white people aside, I wonder if this sort of rhetoric appeals even to the non-college male Black voters who have started shifting slightly Republican: if the daughter of two immigrants with PhDs can make it here, so can you!
Obama talked a lot about the historic nature of his candidacy as well, but from the way he framed it you could tell he always knew who his voters were. With Harris I'm less sure.
I was going to say Kamala is a surprisingly clumsy politician for a vice president, and then I remembered Dan Quayle was a vice president during my lifetime.
The thing is, Harris isn't really a progressive. I think the clumsiness that Secret Squirrel sees is in part due to her being advised to pander to the progressive segment of the audience. She does her best to follow her campaign team's advice, but she's not really comfortable doing it. She'd much rather be cross-examining someone in a Senate hearing.
I'm from a place in the deep south where almost everyone is poor. There is a small percentage of white people who are middle class or wealthy but that's about it. In places like that any argument that tries to frame one racial group as having it worse is immediately met with vicious scorn by most poor white people. They could care less if the rich white people agree with them or not. It will be hard to make any sort of argument to these people from a progressive standpoint but refocusing on economics would help. The problem is that this refocused message probably needs to be persistent and produce results for a decade or more to start swaying anyone. The anti-socialists pitch is as strong in these communities as with Cubans in Florida.
I have heard that in liberal policy and political circles Twitter is part of the problem. It creates a highly curated environment that leads policy makers and politicians to believe that certain terms and polices are vastly more popular than they are actually are with the median voter.
To Matt K's point - someone uses a term like "disproportionally affects Black and Brown communities” and fellow progressives retweet approvingly not realizing how off-putting that term is to the median voter.
Twitter is just a reflection of the people on Twitter. I think the larger problem is that highly educated, high income white people, in general, are more comfortable taking about racial inequality than they are about income inequality.
I could see that. One can attack racial inequality without attacking the meritocracy. It's harder to avoid talking about meritocracy's flaws if you focus on income inequality.
Right. For example, at my firm, we have a diversity committee and diversity events where we talk about trying to increase the number of women and minority members. Participation is highly encouraged.
But if I tried to start a income inequality committee that advocated paying our secretaries the same as our senior partners, it would not go over nearly as well.
I don't know how much is due to a loser pays legal system but I was struck by the fact that law firm partners in a big Stockholm law firm only make $250k.
I think this is a really solid argument on minimum wage--I thought that was Biden's best moment in the debates. I wonder if Affirmative Action might be a uniquely unpopular issue, though. When I was a high school government teacher, I was never even able to convince my (majority Black) students that there were good arguments for it--they just thought it was wildly unfair.
I'm more interested in the implications of the failure of Prop 15--raising taxes on businesses to fund public education should be such a core Democratic message that its failure in California worries me.
I agree that affirmative action is in some ways unique. But I don't think you should think of it as just one particular boutique issue. The underlying thought that it's super duper duper important to hit explicit diversity goals is very deeply woven into the thread of contemporary progressive politics.
As I say in the post, it's come to be the case that when the progressive coalition engaged in internal dialogue about issue prioritization you are always supposed to say "X is good because it helps close racial gap Y." Progressives will try to make the case, in other words, that a minimum wage hike or Medicaid expansion or whatever is a form of affirmative action.
Old politics was the other way around. Progressives would emphasize the universality of these programs and *conservatives* would try to link them to unpopular ideas like affirmative action or reparations.
Right--that's certainly how Obama approached things. I do think it's important for progressives to have this type of conversation though. For example, when the student debt forgiveness issue came up, I worried that perhaps this might be an unusual policy that would be "universal" but disproportionately favor whites. That turns out not to be the case, which certainly raised my level of support for the project.
For what its worth, Prop 15 is probably even more of a unique issue -- since it is dealing with both Prop 13 (which home-owners love) and specifically targeted businesses (so created a big constituency against it)
Prop 13 is sort of a third rail in California politics. The proponents of 15 tried to get around it by only targeting commercial real estate, but a lot of people (correctly, IMO), saw it as the first attack on Prop 13.
I've put a one week ban on "Galetta" for being an overall jerk. If when he comes back he's a jerk again, he'll get an indefinite ban. Don't be assholes on here.
Another Section 230 success story! ;)
Thanks! That move alone made me start the subscription up, and a minor bit of continued jerk-removal will keep it going.
Thank you! Sometimes moderating is the key to free speech, not an enemy of it.
Having finally noticed "Galetta" I would argue in favor of a permanent ban immediately. I've moderated other places, and announced a "one strike and you're reduced to your component electrons" policy - it's amazing how only 2-3 "disappearances" were necessary to "whack the mules" and get their attention.
Thank you! Aggressive moderation is most appreciated
I'd love to see all of their replies hidden too; it adds a bunch of noise to the comments making them pretty difficult to read through.
Thank you!
Do you keep the $8?
Also, maybe maybe making people link a FB account would cut down on it
I'd think a paid account is a better filter than a FB account.
I'm sure it helps, but no solution will ever be perfect.
But not everyone uses FB (or Twitter, or Instagram, or LinkedIn). And if you give people an "I don't use FB" option, the a-holes will all select it whether they're on FB or not.
Yeah, sadly "aggressive moderation" is crucial to the overall success of a place like this. Good luck on that.
The killer catch phrase that liberals decided to use was that a bad thing like COVID or poverty “disproportionally affects Black and Brown communities” which was supposed to make a case more persuasive, but politically did the opposite
Yes, this is another great example.
Inside the progressive bubble saying "X problem is specifically bad for non-whites" is supposed to make the problem more morally urgent. But the logic of electoral politics is exactly the opposite of that — you are telling the white majority that they should maybe feel bad about this thing but don't need to actually care about it.
But as this rhetoric has risen post-2012, the Dems are doing better with whites, especially ones living in educated suburbs. Which suggests they're not losing competitiveness in quite the way you're suggesting this rhetoric will cause them to. The most consolidated white voter vs non-white voter election occurred under Mitt Romney vs Barack Obama. Not exactly the peak of this rhetoric as far as I know.
Well you need the non-college whites in the senate
A pragmatic question, Covid does very clearly disproportionately affect Black communities. Where should you deploy vaccines first? There is only one right answer to this.
The technocratic answer, I believe, is that you deploy the vaccine first to the people most likely to *spread* the virus. Health care workers first, for sure. Other essential workers next, probably. Incidentally, this would probably be just the kind of race-neutral policy that would disproportionately benefit Black and Brown communities, but perhaps shouldn't be sold that way.
That is a good answer to the question of using the vaccine to prevent spread. But that isn't precisely what I am asking. Death is absolute but long term damage and the future costs associated with it tell me initial distribution should be targeted to minimize both future suffering and costs.
Sure, but I think the way you target the initial distribution to minimize future suffering and costs, would be to target spread (potentially with a small number of exceptions for the extremely vulnerable). Once health care workers, grocery store and public transit employees, etc are immunized, you can more broadly prioritize people based on their vulnerability. But I think it's likely that the best way to protect vulnerable people is to stop the spread.
But maybe you are asking, *assuming* we're at a stage of assessing who is the most vulnerable, how do we assess that?
The people objectively most at risk (elderly and essential workers?). No reason to bring race into it.
Unless, of course, it disproportionately affects people of certain races. Then it must.
If the difference was down to genetics or biology yes, but it’s not.
This is a great example of the topic in the post! A race-neutral policy here will in fact benefit minorities most because they are objectively most at risk. Putting a racial frame on this policy (or worse, actually including race in the policy) is unnecessary and politically toxic.
To perhaps put too fine a point on it: imagine, hypothetically, a well-regarded study really is published with the topline result that many Black americans, by quirk of common genetics, are more susceptible to COVID-19's pathology.
To write a policy to compensate, you can (and should) still write it broadly assisting "individuals with genetic predisposition to COVID-19".
Because when you write the policy, you can't predict what other groups will be discovered to have such a predisposition, and *you want to help them too, right*?
And you know this how? There are many diseases that behave exactly in that way. Given the very expensive long term effects of Covid it makes perfect sense to mitigate those effects on exactly the basis of who is disproportionately affected regardless of cause.
I'd agree that you should ideally consider race as one of many factors, if you have the capability to distribute vaccines using a complicated algorithm for getting them to the highest-risk people first. In the real world, though, we don't have the logistical ability to take more than a few factors into account. Race is a much worse predictor of risk than things like age, occupation and existing medical conditions. So since we can realistically only take a few factors into account, those should be the ones, not race.
And, interestingly enough, taking in those "limited" factors you list will actually help the racial side of it. Just take a look at the "essential workers" the next time you're at the grocery store. And the old people most at risk.
Deploy to "at risk" groups, and lump "low-income" into those at-risk groups.
Why do you regard it as more "morally urgent"? Why is there such resistance to identifying the manner in which systemic inequalities manifest during a crisis? And what message does it send to people who are disproportionately affected when you advocate that we ignore this reality?
Is there evidence that this was bad politically?
I also think that it's wrong morally to suppress discussions of disparate impact. Acknowledging disparate impacts shines light on the structural inequalities that exist in our society. If a disaster disproportionately affects Black and/or Latino people, do we really think that something beneficial is acheived by pretending that this isn't the case?
When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, or when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, do we really think that there is a benefit to pretending we don't know who was impacted?
I hear you about not wanting to suppress the disparate impacts, and I don't have evidence gathered. My personal experience this cycle was as a precinct captain calling my 85% white/15% Latino neighborhood in Chicago and phone banking for Wisconsin and Kansas.
I am not pretending that the inequality isn't there, I just find that rhetorically appealing to something unifying (helping people in need, solidarity, foundational values) rather than the underlying inequality is more effective if the goal is to motivate the listener to change their behavior.
Oh and maybe we leave the 6-syllable words out of the call script to voters who maybe didn't go to college?
Thanks for sharing your experience, that's a valid point to make. I agree that it is rhetorically appealing to speak in unifying terms, and I agree that having culturally competent messaging matters a lot. While it is great that so many highly educated people want to volunteer, it does make me uncomfortable when campaigns and volunteer groups are homogenous in terms of socieconomics. I like listening to leadeers like Chuck Rocha, Stacey Abrams, LaTosha Brown, etc.
I don’t understand the suggestion to be sticking your head in the sand about who was affected or never mentioning it – but in the long run I think it would absolutely be more beneficial if the predominant framing were that hundreds of thousands of Americans were struck by a hurricane, to use your examples.
I agree that a unifying message makes sense for political purposes. On a related note, there has been a lot of tension over the framing of COVID-19 "hotspots" in the NYC area in neighborhoods with large haredi/ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations. There has been significant tension between the communities and both the Mayor and Governor, and Mayor De Blasio in particular had made some problematic statements about these communities. However, having culturally competent messaging and having trusted surrogates in these communities makes a big difference. Also, a few months before there was news of rising anti-Asian sentiment because of the perception that the virus was coming from China, which was being enflamed by President Trump's rhetoric. The issues of scapegoating, divisive rhetoric, "hotspots", and disparate impact messaging are all related.
Your last paragraphs seem to get to the deeper problem.
Seems to me the basic issue with the Democratic Party is that virtually all of its leaders (not its rank and file) are college educated and have high levels of trust in institutions. And so they can't relate to the viewpoint of non-college educated people with low social trust. Which is a huge percentage of Americans (maybe a majority?).
Take this whole debate about "free college" or student loan debt relief. I bet Democratic leaders think this is a populist idea. But if you're an average person, and most of your social circle hasn't been anywhere near college — it sounds like an elitist idea, not a populist one!
Not that this is enough to fix the problem, but Democrats should start an "affirmative action" program of their own, seeking out talented non-college educated people and promoting them to national leadership levels. Joe Biden should appoint a non-grad to his Cabinet and draw attention to it (there are plenty of great people in the union and entrepreneurship fields). Same goes for party committees, congressional staff, candidate recruitment, and so on.
I see this as not just smart politics, but almost a moral imperative. Descriptive representation matters. It isn't remotely acceptable that the two-thirds of Americans who lack a degree are represented by only about 2-3% of Congress. If we were talking about race or gender instead of education level, that would speak for itself.
They think community college is what poor people do, when it's actually working retail jobs and trades. They can't imagine what success looks like without a college degree.
To be fair, without a degree you are much more limited. Although, a degree is no guarantee now compared to what it used to be. I went back to college in my 30's (3rd gen single mom). I looked strategically at my options. I could find only a handful of degrees that were worth the endeavor - healthcare, engineering, and tech mainly. Got my bachelors in Software Development, which has been great for me! But I worry about how few options there are to a stable quality of life. Not everyone can be in these few limited sectors that pay well. Entrepreneurship is a good option - landscapers, plumbing, etc. But thats not a path everyone wants to take.
LBJ was probably one of the most clever politicians of his time and he didn't go to an elite school or come from an elite background.
Or as Paul Douglas of Illinois said
>Douglas usually found himself in the minority in the Chicago City Council. His attempts to reform the public education system and lower public transportation fares were met with derision and he typically ended up on the losing end of 49–1 votes. "I have three degrees," Douglas once said after a particularly hard-fought rout. "I have been associated with intelligent and intellectual people for many years. Some of these aldermen haven't gone through the fifth grade. But they're the smartest bunch of bastards I ever saw grouped together."[citation needed]
I totally agree. Until we college-educated “elites” can see ourselves through the same lens Trump supporters see us, we will never come to terms with our own hypocrisy. Just as White liberals can empathize with minorities in a struggle against white supremacy, we have the tools needed to empathize with non-college grads in their struggle against what they experience as “elite supremacy.” They resent that we think we’re morally and intellectually better than them, that we’re more enlightened and worthy of power. Empathizing is not the same thing as agreeing. But if you truly want to understand why their seemingly contradictory electoral choices are in fact personally rational from their perspective, you have to set your biases aside and truly attempt to empathize.
I think it's important to support a pipeline of candidates who do not come from "elite" backgrounds. There are some in Congress (or are newly elected)- Jon Tester, AOC, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Ritchie Torres...
This phenomenon is both heart wrenching on one end as Black man, but such an obvious political imperative for our current realities.
In many ways Kendi calls for this in his book when he discusses moving from “feel good advocacy” to “outcomes based advocacy”. And affirmative action is the perfect policy to apply it too. It sure would feel good for this country to explicitly do something that recognized historical and current racial injustice, but the reality is that if we make the policies about class solidarity we will be able to drive real equitable outcomes.
Sheryl Cashin in “Place not Race” does a fantastic job of arguing for class/place based affirmative action policies, while offering the perspective as a Black Women and how angering it is that we can’t put race front & center when the policies actually don’t empower us vs disenfranchising us.
I tend to take Cashin’s view, and want outcomes more than I care about people agreeing that policy should put race front and center.
Place I think can be a powerful tool, because while it is would be extremely helpful to many hard-pressed Black communities you can also identity select white-dominated areas that benefit from place-based policies and highlight them. There's something to be said for underscoring the reality that concentrated poverty is tough, whether it's in Appalachia or East St Louis or wherever else.
There is plenty of money in the black community. It's priorities and habits.
Nike and 150 dollah tennis shoes are a thang.
Meanwhile, immigrants outwork all of us, shop at Walmart, live 11 to a 1 bedroom apt and send large portions of their income outside of our economic formula.
I don’t know what you are responding to, because it’s obviously not my post. This comment doesn’t react to a single thing I mentioned.
sorry you don't approve of my comment 'tard
Matt, is this person a paying member?
Lol. I must say that’s pretty cool for Matt to be able to profit off of someone else’s desire to be a troll. Someone should write an economics paper about that
This is nonsense. There is objectively NOT as much money in the black community. https://equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/maduca-fig-1.png
Some people might say, the only purpose for money is to make more money.
If you put what money you have to making more money, it compounds exponentially and you find yourself better off.
Now I am not denying red lining. I am not denying the struggle. But the black community I have walked about has few black owned businesses. It sounds like, knowing that Black Americans are just as capable, they had more businesses prior to integration than now. Why? It isn't that more obstacles have been placed in their way.
Don't blow smoke cupcake.
Try to find an answer that incorporates the huge numbers of Americans who desperately want Black Americans to succeed in every area of life, who voted for Barack Obama in large numbers, who tiptoe around the realities of life if you ain't got YT to blame everything upon.
Realities like: If a Starbucks manager tells you to buy something or leave and you refuse, you are asking to be arrested. dumb phucks.
There's a reason why Fox News, Breitbart and Ben Shapiro don't talk about the virtues of conservative economic policy very often.
Exactly
Reminds me of the Rutger Bregman/Tucker Carlson interview.
Matt points out that Democrats didn't emphasize a minimum wage increase. A bigger issue is why didn't Democrats focus on attacking the 2017 tax cuts as tax cuts for the rich, which statistically they were. Kerry made that a big issue in 2004 in regards to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.
I was shocked that the tax cuts and botched ACA repeal were barely mentioned in the campaign. Those moments marked the low point of Trump's approval ratings!
The true strength of Trump/Trumpism to the extent it exists is that he is so acutely grotesque to highly politically attuned liberals that they spend all of their energy campaigning against his personal eccentricities and failures, Ukraine, democratic slippage, Hatch Act, etc. that really are only salient to the most hyper plugged in voters while ignoring the most basic attacks against normie republican economics, tax cuts for billionaires, cutting social programs, attacking the ACA, polluting rivers. I constantly think of the masterful effort the Obama 2012 campaign exerted to frame a reasonably popular, formerly moderate governor as a completely out of touch ruthless capitalist. And I wonder if it would have just been better for Dems to try to do the same thing vs Trump. But that would have required such strict messaging discipline by all members of the liberal cinematic universe I'm not sure it was ever truly possible.
That message discipline is tough, especially with the media environment.
The right has explicitly partisan media - talk radio, Fox News, various websites - and they get the best ratings and clicks when they gin up culture war issues. That aligns with the interests of the Republican Party, which thrives when culture war issues are front and center.
While there are partisan leftist media outlets, most left of center people don't consume news that is explicitly partisan. These "mainstream media" outlets do tend to have a liberal bias on social issues, but not so much on economic issues. Like the conservative news outlets, they get the best ratings when social issues are front and center.
As a result you get Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper on air every day calling out Trump on the latest outrageous thing he's said, but they aren't going to hit him for cutting the corporate tax rate to 20% or rolling back EPA air pollution standards.
This is a bad dynamic for Democrats.
That's a great point. Something that I really noticed in the last 4 years was that there was almost nothing being discussed that would touch the lives of regular people. Talk about stupid tweet every 15 minutes, talk about Russia, etc. Absolutely worthless to most people. The things he did to harm people went under the radar. Let's face it, nearly everyone is in the clickbait business..
I almost wonder if a solution is for dems to be a tough more adversarial with mainstream press? Not in a "Fake News" way but in a way that shows they give GOP a pass, aren't talking about normie issues. Sanders does a bit of this but if you can do it without talking about the impending socialist revolution or also implying they are rigging a primary against you it might stick better. But yea circling back to the AOC/Spanberger fight.\, how do you keep that message discipline all the way down? My *hope* is that some of the Dems messaging problems the last four years are a consequence of being out of power and having an enormous primary field and while Joe Biden basically went wire to wire as the leader, he was not treated as such until Super Tuesday. But now as literally Commander in Chief, it will be a lot more stupid for lazy media to reach out to the Squad for their thoughts on the current issue of the day when there are dozens of normie Administration officials and closer allies of the administration in congress that can give more informative response.
I think there's something to the idea about being adversarial with the media in that way. When a Democratic congressperson or senator is on CNN they should call out questions and segments that distract from the "real issues," or just change the subject.
"Yes Wolf, what the president said today was outrageous. But let's be clear: the failure of this president is not just in how he communicates. It's what he's done. More air pollution, less health insurance..."
?* not /
ACA repeal failed. That's not a negative for Trump, it's a positive. It failed because the Trump replacement for ObamaCare is some version of Medicaid for All. Republicans didn't want to do that.
Biden talked a lot about the tax changes he proposed which included an increase in the corporate tax rate. Biden was infrastructure, public option, and tax increases (to finance infrastructure). Or that's what I got out of his campaign.
Of course, Biden could have talked about 2017 if he wanted to, but I thought David Shor said you should just talk about what you are going to do as that is more effective.
I follow politics closely, and even I never saw a Democrat say clearly, "We want to lower premium, deductibles and copays. Republicans want to raise them because they prioritize tax cuts for the wealthy."
The closest we got was messaging around preexisting conditions, but between the people on Medicare and the people who get good health insurance through their jobs, that's a relatively small number of people who are impacted.
I mean the Trump Admin and aligned AG's are in court now fighting it. Unlikely to go through but nonetheless. I mean I don't think there is one messaging panacea but I wish that message was elevated more by all dems throughout the entire Trump admin. Or just rehire David Shor lmao <3
My understanding was that it was a major talking point in the 2018 mid-terms (both the tax cuts and attempted ACA repeal) and helped Democrats substantially then. It was also a major element of 2020 messaging but just got drowned out by the usual Trump nonsense.
It's incredible. Democrats allowed Republicans to pay almost no electoral price for a very unpopular bill.
Sure, but Kerry lost, so that strategy isn't exactly a surefire winner.
It seems to me that, especially post-2016, there has been a desire to do antiracism in a way that isn't merely a general leveling of society. The proximate reason for this desire is that if you allow general leveling to count, then it's always the case that the most far-left egalitarian agenda is the most antiracist agenda. That then means Bernieism is peak antiracism, which is a repugnant conclusion to the Hillaryites who are still among us.
The problem with this desire is that there are actually very few antiracist things you can do that aren't general leveling. The solutions to this problem have been (1) to flock to the few things that are not general leveling such as affirmative action, calling out racism in discourse, microaggressions, etc., and (2) finding a few problems that do actually require general leveling to solve -- like fixing the criminal justice system or reducing maternal and infant mortality -- and aggressively branding them as antiracism issues even though they help people of all races.
I think you're right to see 2016 as a watershed moment here, but disagree with your diagnosis of the contemporary landscape because what happened *after* the 2016 election is that the Berniesphere actually moved in Clinton's dimension on race and identity issues.
The wrap on Bernie's coalition of voters in 2016 is that it was too white which explains why they tried to shift.
And the whiteness of Bernie's 2016 voters ended up being deceptive as it turns out a lot of them were just anti-Hillary and left him in 2020, making his coalition relatively more diverse
Was that a change in strategy driven by 2016, or was it a function of the Berniesphere getting more integrated into the Democratic party and picking up some of its inclinations on this dimension?
So Matt Y seems to be arguing that explicitly anti-racist messaging is ineffective in general politics. But so much of criminal justice reform is quite clearly extremely local, coming down to city- and county-level policies on policing and prosecution. In many very liberal cities, anti-racism is now a way to win in politics, courtesy of the great Awokening. This doesn't necessarily bode well for the necessary state-level reforms in criminal justice, including things like fixing parole systems, reducing sentences, etc.
Activists can and do coordinate changes to their messaging for state-level actors, but I worry that a lot of the criminal justice advocacy is being driven by nationally funded actors that don't always realize this. The same politics that can make race-conscious activism successful in liberal cities also pervades progressive grant offices, and may make it more difficult for the less sophisticated funders to realize the need for that shift in messaging.
This depends on the assumption that Sanders-style policies would not stifle growth or progress in a way that would lower all boats, though. But there are many ways that could end up happening. Medicare For All, for example, would reduce incentives for the development of new drugs and procedures, which are almost entirely funded by US insurance industry spending as things stand today. If that leads to a five-year delay in the development of a superior new treatment for diabetes, that delay would do disproportionate harm to Black folks who suffer from higher rates of the disease.
Can I ask what is your opinion on requiring people to use real names in this comment section tied to a Facebook or LinkedIn Account? I like engaging with conservatives and as a Neo Liberal Matt's blog isn't a bad place for conservatives but people talk differently if everyone in their life can hear them.
I would just chime in that I am using my real name, but I am one of those weird people that doesn't have a Facebook or LinkedIn account so that would exclude me. I understand the rationale, but there are folks out here who are not into social media, but would like to participate in a public discussion about policy.
This isn't about different voices or dissenting opinions, this is about you being a dick whose goal is just to piss people off.
Another lesson here seems to be that unbundling Democrats' popular policies and putting them on the ballot in purple states has electoral downsides - why should Florida voters care about what Biden (or state legislative a candidate) supports if they can get the popular policy they want without voting for him? And unlike some GOP-led ballot measures on social issues, these don't seem designed to drive partisan turnout.
This is an interesting empirical question. One school of thought says progressive initiatives boost turnout of progressive voters, another says it will depress vote share via the mechanism you posit.
Personally I think that kind of tactical consideration is just secondary to strategic messages and party brands. Are Democrats seen as the party of minimum wage hikes, Medicaid expansion, and increased school funding or are they seen as the party of affirmative action, DE & I initiatives, and policing everyone’s speech for maximum politeness?
In your deal world, is such a rebrand led by outside groups or by individual Democratic leaders? If the latter, who are they?
Strategic messaging may > tactics, but a bunch of those areas have GOP-advantaged tactical solutions (school funding from local property tax while voting GOP, medicaid and minimum wage via ballot) while the other stuff is litigated super publicly & nationally
And then the Florida GOP can come in and kneecap it like they did with the felon voting rights proposition.
I'm not saying the Dems are bad at politics, they might be I don't know, but the system is totally rigged against them, so they need to be unreasonably good at politics to win. That sucks but leftists haven't internalized that yet.
Such a great take. The GOP has been able to win on irrational garbage for years, ranging from tax cuts always to Black and Brown folk needing to lift ourselves by our bootstraps.
I consume all kinds of media and I have literally never heard anyone say that about black and brown folk.
You're a self absorbed paranoid straw man illogical bullshitter
In another comment you said that the Black community has as much money as the white community, but they spend all their money on Nikes. That is an example of the lift your self up by your bootstraps argument .
No I didn't. You have a reading comprehension problem.
I said, there is plenty of money in the black community.
I made no comparisons TARD
Gawd help these whiners if Lebron James and Barack Obama have convinced themselves they're amongst the world's oppressed
Americans are being out hustled. consistently. by immigrants who see opportunity and not obstacles.
Electoral, maybe, but I tend to think it's actually good for Democrats in terms of agenda. There's a gap between symbolic politics and actual discussion of policy, especially at the national level. If you find alternative ways for the electorate to show its preferences for a particular policy decoupled from partisanship, that's quite an information mechanism for politicians. Works for Democrats too, but notice how, away from the culture wars in the national spotlight, Republican governors can take stances that wouldn't fly at the national level (which in turn my have a positive effect on the national level in the medium term).
Two-party polarization is quite reductionist, especially with the intense polarization now, in a big country. Strengthening ballot initiatives and federalism can help.
But maybe the unbundling would be a good idea in a lot of circumstances, even if it hurts the Democratic Party, especially given how much we misjudged Florida's political leanings. Maybe there are a lot of good policies that can be passed by ballot initiative, and that Republican legislatures wouldn't mind all that much precisely because they've been depoliticized.
Totally agree, just acknowledging the electoral downside to it.
The argument about people carrying forward their campus politics makes a lot of sense to me. I work at a large DC non-profit that's currently going through a diversity, equity, and inclusion review. I tried to introduce the concern that we tend to exclusively hire interns and entry level staff from private (expensive) universities, which has led to a pretty uniformly wealthy staff (at least among the Americans. We have a lot of foreign born staff to which this does not apply). These staff from expensive universities in turn bring their race/gender-focused politics to the organization and perpetuate the cycle. My concern was not not taken up by the DEI committee. To be clear, I think there are very legitimate race and gender concerns, but the unequivocal dismissal of my class concern was telling.
Well plus it doesn't work mathematically! One DC non-profit can increase its racial diversity while continuing to recruit exclusively from the rich kid graduates of a handful of selective universities. But if *every* major institution tries to do this they will find that there are simply not enough candidates to go around. The Black and Latino population is disproportionately working class and lower income so it's not conceptually coherent to try to do the uplift exclusively along ethnic lines without addressing the class composition.
This is a giant problem at prestigious law firms. *So* much DEI talk, but zero willingness to consider the thing that might actually improve DEI across the board (and I'd argue the only thing that *law firms* can realistically do at all): putting in the time and effort to recruit outside the "top 14."
"Internships" (i.e., "free labor") are inherently a bad thing if one wants to promote any sort of a work force that will be good. Unpaid work is immediately limited to those with another source of income, which cuts off those not from the upper middle/upper classes. I'll give an example from the business I know - Hollywood. I'm a proud graduate of the "Roger Corman Film School." Back when I was attending, the running joke was whether one's crappy car down in the parking lot was going to get them home that night. People there got paid. Not much, and you had to work fast and get it right the first time if you were to get enough work to get enough income to survive. A list of the "graduates" from that "school" back in those days contains many of the Great Names of Hollywood (I'm not on that list). Then in the 90s, as the studios got gobbled up by the intergalactic lords of widgetmaking, the "born on third base" types with their trust funds started going to fillum skool where the failures who worked as perfessers (anyone with talent is making way too much money to be a fillum skool perfesser - I personally have more produced credits than all the fillum skool perfessers combined at UCLA) taught them how to parrot-back successfully. Then they came to Hollywood and took jobs as "interns" while they paid the rent with the trust fund, and all of a sudden all the people with the crappy cars weren't there. I had cause in the mid-90s to see Roget at his office. Drove in and immediately noticed that all the cars were Volvos or BMW 323s or Mercedes 190s. Upstairs all the people, other than the department heads, were "interns." I asked Roger, "So, who's the next James Cameron out there" to which he replied "Beats me." Back about 8 years ago, I went to Roger's last public birthday party. One of those "Great Names of Hollywood" showed up. We were talking at the bar and he commented that he was glad he had come to Hollywood when he did. "I don't see how you can make it in this business anymore if all you have is talent."
That's right out of Hayes' "Twilight of the Elites" as to what has happened to opportunity in America.
Not to mention the fact that the "upwardly mobile" graduates of the state colleges and universities generally tend to be more capable and competent than the "born on third base" kids (read Chris Hayes' "Twilight of the Elites" to see what the system promotes).
1st post. Last paragraph has my specific thoughts.
Hey everyone. I’m just subscribed. Ive followed Matt for about 10 years I think. Part of it hate following. But, I paid money for this… Good work Matty for convincing me you would be worth it. So I want to be respectful.
Might as well do a quick bio. Raised in New Zealand and Los Angeles. 22 years in the Air Force. Deployed many times. Im a swing voter. I’d like to think of myself as a reasoned moderate.
I have five kids, I live in Idaho, I work in the power industry, in a skilled blue-collar field, traveling all over the United States (not glamorous places) and Latin America. 220 days a year. I work side-by-side with a diverse set of people. But a lot of flyover country Union Millwrights, welders, laborers. I hear firsthand every day what these people care about. I should add, that my wife’s family is in the restaurant business as well. Small business owners.
Now to get to the point. I think the positions that target white non-college educated voters, are also going to be very appealing to Hispanic non-college educated voters. I think Matt is absolutely right, on trying to target these concrete things to help the poor/working class.
Unfortunately because of tribalism, white non college educated voters have resisted things that would be good for them, because of the associated social views that go with them. But as I travel around the country, I’m starting to notice that the white and Hispanic non-college educated voters are starting to merge culturally. Especially as Hispanics have penetrated in to fly over land.
I think there’s a good chance that this is going to open an avenue for more of this demographic to open up to the things they actually need.
Minimum wage. Labor Unions. Child care. Quality schools. Healthcare. Unemployment Benefits, etc...
The secret is can Democrats appeal to these people. Gridlock in Congress makes it hard to do anything concrete. The Republicans don’t really offer them anything, except for resentment. Some of this resentment is made easier by the perception that many Democrats have gone to this bourgeois social elite partial socialism view. I think with many in this new persuadable demographic need is respect. But not in a token way. Imagine being a welder or an auto mechanic… You work hard to support your family. You feel like you contribute to society. But in the back of your mind, you know that all the people on TV, and violence in ministration, admonish their kids to get good grades and go to a good college, so they can be anything except an auto mechanic or a welder. We can only have so many marketing consultants, or coders, or social workers. The simple fact is, not everyone can go to college. I just don’t think the Democrats have done a good job of connecting with these people.
I’m not sure what the answer is. Change in small increments maybe.
Last comment. Blanket student loan forgiveness will backfire unless it is partnered with other policies.
I’m dictating on my iPhone. Forgive any grammatical mistakes.
Chuck Rocha - a self described Latino “red neck farm boy from East Texas” preaches this message constantly. Latino and non-HIspanic white working class people have a lot in common in some parts of the country. What counts is talking to people early and often. Rocha has talked about how well the Harry Reid had done in Nevada by forming deep relationships with the Culinary Union. Heck, Stacey Abrams went to every county in Georgia during her 2018 gubernertorial campaign - urban, suburban, and rural areas.
I'm recently leaning more into this idea that we are overproducing elites (or wannabe elites at least). Working in the trades can provide a really good quality of life, often better than those of us in so-called "elite" fields.
I also agree that student loan forgiveness would backfire so hard that democrats would get wiped out (and they probably should if they prioritize something that only benefits the top fraction of their base).
This is the first substack I have ever subscribed to, so I might just be naive, but someone with the username of Galleta seems to be needlessly harrassing commenters. I am unsure if their ideas are any good, but their tone is pretty flippant.
Is this the way it usually is in substack?
I have been really impressed by the earnestness of the conversation over these past few days, but if this is the way substack comment sections typically head, I understand.
I think there's something instructive and on topic about that fact that this user choose to spend $8 to yell at us "libtards" over this particular issue.
If the people who shout abuse at Matt Yglesias on Twitter are willing to pay money to do so on in a comments section he should be able to retire comfortably in a few years.
On the bright side, they did get me to look up what the acronyms ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) and CRT (Critical Race Theory) meant.
Maybe the guideline should be that commenters arguing in bad faith can only use acronyms, that way there is still some utility for the rest of us.
CRT will always be Cathode Ray Tube to me :)
ADOS twitter is something to behold.
Thanks for saving me the Google search. I didn't know what they meant either.
When will political activists learn that using obscure acronyms is alienating to unindoctrinated readers such as myself?
Yeah, I really hope Matt sees this Galleta’s persons comments and bans them. If not, I don’t plan to renew my subscription. If I want a comment section overrun by racist trolls, I’ll just stick to Twitter for free instead of paying $8/month for the privilege.
I'm needlessly harrassing commenters?
hahahaha
cupcake
You could have purchased a bowl from chipotle (sans guac) for the price of yelling at the libs, which you can do for free on twitter dot com
Interesting article, and while I recognize that this a very parochial perspective, from my perch in upper NW DC it seems like a small part of the problem is that the vast majority of people who live here have two different type of interactions: interactions with their wealthy, predominantly white neighbors, and then interactions with "workers" that are predominantly nonwhite. "Working class whites," "poor whites," or whatever you want to call them, are largely nonexistent here, and so I wonder if therefore the wealthy professionals that live in places like NW DC end up ignoring broad class-based policies because in their minds, class becomes associated with race in a way that is not representative of the majority of the United States.
Sure, though I doubt there is a place that is "representative of the majority of the United States", so people in other areas are mostly just as parochial, but in different ways according to what the population, economy, etc. is like in their area.
I basically agree with everything here, but consciously downplaying race to pass redistributive policies does start to smell like "Trojan Horse" politics that Fox News has a hypersensitive nose for. Isn't it better to be explicit that these policies will help address racial inequalities while, critically, also materially bettering the lives of millions of white Americans? If the problem is that conservatives have primed large swaths of white voters to flinch at any policy that helps people who don't look like them, even though it would also help people who do look like them, how do we address this without demotivating progressive voters who seem to be equally sensitive but in the other direction? Feels like we're past the point of being able to just not talk about race while trying to address inequalities.
I'm not even arguing for "consciously downplaying race." I'm saying that progressives have started overtly racializing issues that are facially race-neutral.
Hopefully, I'm not going to go too far down the rabbit hole here, but given the shifts in progressive attitudes since the Floyd protests, is there a way for any semi-lefty politician who doesn't espouse explicit race-based policies to make it through many Dem primaries? (Not saying whether that's good or bad -- just that the politics on the left seem to have shifted.)
If you read Matt’s take, I think he’d say “yes”. The first people to repudiate strongly identity politics and champion race-blind measures aimed at narrowing the class/opportunity divide might have a huge advantage. Which I suspect means that many non-racist liberals who say the “right things” in public are privately suspicious of explicitly race-conscious identity politics.
Bernie sort of ran in this way that Matt's describing: economically progressive ideas presented without that aspect of cultural progressivism on social issues. He did sort of alienate elite, cultural progressives in that regard, but it seems like he more than made up for it by motivating voters who may have been (justifiably or not) weirded out by liberal academia-speak on gender and race.
I think Bernie's 2016 campaign was a good model. His 2020 approach was not as good.
Yep, absolutely. Should have specified Bernie 2016
I'm not sure we talk enough in The Discourse about how much of said Discourse happened *around* Bernie Sanders or was literally *projected* onto him by more eager activist groups (oddly enough from both the Progressive side and the Anti-Woke side). To me this explains why Matt was targeted so much by the Bruenig / Jacobin bunch for his advice about just having Bernie lean into the Democratic brand to win and make nice,....even if he didn't really mean it....
It was always apparent, but then it became exceedingly clear when I read about AOC's House cleaning of her Congressional staff and one if the guys who was "let go" had advocated that she should advocate further Left if M4A to a full Nationalized Health system if only to "expand the debate"...which seemed.... shortsighted given her talents.
https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2020/03/29/the-new-aoc-divides-the-left-1269548
Bernie 2016 +Democrat -Socialism = winning combo for primary and general.
Don't really have to change anything else.
I think David Shor has talked about how Bernie had really good numbers in 2016 because he undercut Trump's support among white working class voters by appealing to their economic interests in an explicitly non-racialized frame
The now conventional Wisdom on Bernie 2016 is that "did so well because people who hated Clinton went to him" which I don't think is *untrue* but I also think its true that that campaign had unique strengths because it was very economically focused -- while progressive on race/gender, but not emphasizing it.
I depends on where you perceive the “head fake”. From where I sit, plenty of smart democrats who know class is the real keystone issue are nonetheless using woke language because it’s perceived to be in vogue. (Cue Andrew Cuomo inserting “black and brown” conspicuously by what he really means - “poor” - which, isn’t that a little racist? 🤔) If they were secret kendi-an “equity-ites” I’d advocate a dose of “cut the bullshit” but it’s my instinct that most of the bullshit runs the other way.
"Homo movement", LOL. Maybe you thought this was Parler?
I find way Kamala Harris talks about race and gender politically clumsy.
During her victory speech, praised Joe Biden at length for having "the courage and audacity" to pick her as VP. The virus and the economy she mentioned just in passing. Leaving white people aside, I wonder if this sort of rhetoric appeals even to the non-college male Black voters who have started shifting slightly Republican: if the daughter of two immigrants with PhDs can make it here, so can you!
Obama talked a lot about the historic nature of his candidacy as well, but from the way he framed it you could tell he always knew who his voters were. With Harris I'm less sure.
I was going to say Kamala is a surprisingly clumsy politician for a vice president, and then I remembered Dan Quayle was a vice president during my lifetime.
I find it to be pretty standard progressive speech. It’s just weird how much traction progressive rhetoric has gotten.
The thing is, Harris isn't really a progressive. I think the clumsiness that Secret Squirrel sees is in part due to her being advised to pander to the progressive segment of the audience. She does her best to follow her campaign team's advice, but she's not really comfortable doing it. She'd much rather be cross-examining someone in a Senate hearing.
I'm from a place in the deep south where almost everyone is poor. There is a small percentage of white people who are middle class or wealthy but that's about it. In places like that any argument that tries to frame one racial group as having it worse is immediately met with vicious scorn by most poor white people. They could care less if the rich white people agree with them or not. It will be hard to make any sort of argument to these people from a progressive standpoint but refocusing on economics would help. The problem is that this refocused message probably needs to be persistent and produce results for a decade or more to start swaying anyone. The anti-socialists pitch is as strong in these communities as with Cubans in Florida.
I have heard that in liberal policy and political circles Twitter is part of the problem. It creates a highly curated environment that leads policy makers and politicians to believe that certain terms and polices are vastly more popular than they are actually are with the median voter.
To Matt K's point - someone uses a term like "disproportionally affects Black and Brown communities” and fellow progressives retweet approvingly not realizing how off-putting that term is to the median voter.
Twitter is just a reflection of the people on Twitter. I think the larger problem is that highly educated, high income white people, in general, are more comfortable taking about racial inequality than they are about income inequality.
I could see that. One can attack racial inequality without attacking the meritocracy. It's harder to avoid talking about meritocracy's flaws if you focus on income inequality.
Right. For example, at my firm, we have a diversity committee and diversity events where we talk about trying to increase the number of women and minority members. Participation is highly encouraged.
But if I tried to start a income inequality committee that advocated paying our secretaries the same as our senior partners, it would not go over nearly as well.
I don't know how much is due to a loser pays legal system but I was struck by the fact that law firm partners in a big Stockholm law firm only make $250k.
God Bless America. :-)
I think this is a really solid argument on minimum wage--I thought that was Biden's best moment in the debates. I wonder if Affirmative Action might be a uniquely unpopular issue, though. When I was a high school government teacher, I was never even able to convince my (majority Black) students that there were good arguments for it--they just thought it was wildly unfair.
I'm more interested in the implications of the failure of Prop 15--raising taxes on businesses to fund public education should be such a core Democratic message that its failure in California worries me.
I agree that affirmative action is in some ways unique. But I don't think you should think of it as just one particular boutique issue. The underlying thought that it's super duper duper important to hit explicit diversity goals is very deeply woven into the thread of contemporary progressive politics.
As I say in the post, it's come to be the case that when the progressive coalition engaged in internal dialogue about issue prioritization you are always supposed to say "X is good because it helps close racial gap Y." Progressives will try to make the case, in other words, that a minimum wage hike or Medicaid expansion or whatever is a form of affirmative action.
Old politics was the other way around. Progressives would emphasize the universality of these programs and *conservatives* would try to link them to unpopular ideas like affirmative action or reparations.
Right--that's certainly how Obama approached things. I do think it's important for progressives to have this type of conversation though. For example, when the student debt forgiveness issue came up, I worried that perhaps this might be an unusual policy that would be "universal" but disproportionately favor whites. That turns out not to be the case, which certainly raised my level of support for the project.
For what its worth, Prop 15 is probably even more of a unique issue -- since it is dealing with both Prop 13 (which home-owners love) and specifically targeted businesses (so created a big constituency against it)
Prop 13 is sort of a third rail in California politics. The proponents of 15 tried to get around it by only targeting commercial real estate, but a lot of people (correctly, IMO), saw it as the first attack on Prop 13.
(for the record, we should get rid of Prop 13)
Isn't Prop 13 supposed to be on the ballot again soon?