As I watch some moderate democrats try and kill drug pricing reform, literally the most popular part of the democratic agenda, I’ve come back to this article, and I think it might be the best thing you’ve written for Slow Boring. It perfectly explains both how an item gets on the agenda & what the problem with moderates is, even while agreeing that moderation is important when it comes to winning elections.
This is a good piece that I will need to read again to digest fully, but a couple of things kept ringing in the back of my mind as I read along, a bit paradoxical perhaps:
1. On a macro level, for many or even most voters, it’s fairly clear none of the Econ stuff matters. We wouldn’t have such a deep rural-urban divide it if most voters cared a lot about Econ policy, and particularly the direction of that divide!
2. But of course the elections that matter are these days super close and we are in an era with very slim majorities. These econ issues actually can matter a *lot* because just turning 1-2% of voters can matter a lot if it’s done consistently across the country. But this whole piece is geared towards strategies trying to shift a very small % of the electorate.
3. Some issues are both economic and cultural: immigration is a great example.
I think this misses another bigger issue which is the misconception that Democratic moderates and their staff have an idea of politics along a left-right spectrum in which businesses are defined as the interest group that balances left-wing organizations like unions or consumer advocates, so therefore any pandering or appeasing to businesses makes an idea by definition moderate, cutting a loaf in half.
Counterpoint: The last time major gun control passed was during the peak of major crime. We're going to hit a crescendo with that again, sometime this decade. Speaking as a flyover Heartland Midwesterner, even people in my area, at some point, will want the carnage stopped. If they can't get it stopped with a jackboot authoritarian like Trump or Trump's acolytes, they may go with something more conventional. You discount even minor gun control proposals as some kind of unpopular political suicide too quickly, Matt.
“But on the other hand, they are afraid of losing so they want to be friendly with business lobbyists to have strong fallback options.” Where is your evidence for this bold claim?
Modest proposal: rich lefty activists should direct some of their resources to post-loss sinecures for moderate Democrats in purple electorates/states.
Interesting note on Social Security. Begich's signature legislative policy was removing the income cap on the Social Security/Medicare payroll taxes, which would be a huge tax increase on everyone making over $140k but is also very popular and would ensure stability for both programs. Begich was nearly reelected in a terrible Dem year- lost by 2 points/6,000 votes in 2014.
Red state dems, particularly from the west, have been fairly conservative on resource/enviro issues, which does create problems with the donor base. My theory is that most of these issues are social/performative now, making them tricky to resolve.
To some extent, I think this might overrate how much voters care about policy. Manchin's obstructionism in large part is purely to brandish himself as someone who sticks it progressives. The aesthetics of that obstruction are what makes him popular to WV voters who by and large don't care a whole lot about the difference between 25% and 28% corporate income tax rates
Tough post for me, as someone who is sincerely more economically conservative than the public. In particular, "a lot of the absolute most popular stuff you can do on economics is proposals that obscure costs with regulatory mandates" seems pretty scary, since it making means you're making decisions without counting the true costs (indeed, willfully blinding yourself to the true costs). Seems like a recipe for making a lot of bad decisions. Especially since IMO the natural endpoint of "lawyer-brain" is "no one is allowed to do anything, since doing something means you might do something wrong".
But I suppose the usual advice applies; politicians should just try and get elected, and people like me with unpopular views should try and make them more popular. Seems tough. Especially since plausibly the only reason libertarianism is even as popular as it is is the questionable anti-tax stuff and not the good pro-freedom stuff.
To give a concrete example: "The Loan Shark Prevention Act, which would cap interest rates on consumer loans, tests extremely well even with rigorous pro and con arguments. This would get a lot of people a better deal on their credit cards and basically eliminate the payday lending industry — an industry that is not admired or liked."
My understanding is that payday loans, while unpopular, are actually a valuable service to low-income people who would be worse off if they were gone. The interest rates are absurdly high, but that mostly reflects that the loans are very short-term and the non-interest costs of making loans to low-income people are very high (lots of in-person assistance required; relatively low repayment rates), and in fact the actual profits of these companies are not exorbitant.
Do you have any evidence that states that more stringently regulate payday lenders have worse outcomes for impoverished people? This paper suggests that banning payday loans causes people to find less expensive ways of raising cash:
Yes! This! Trying to ban payday loans is typical upper middle class bullshit, harming the poor while trying to help them. It won’t mean cheaper loans, it’ll just mean no loans - so uh, good luck to you if your car breaks and you can’t get cash for a repair! We can do better than opposing payday loans just because they are tacky.
'payday loans, while unpopular, are actually a valuable service to low-income people . . . in fact the actual profits of these companies are not exorbitant.'
If they provided a valuable service, then they would be extremely profitable, because they would get repeat custom while demanding a huge vig. In fact, they are mostly low-profit businesses, precisely because there is no repeat custom and their balance sheet is full of garbage liabilities. The basic problem is that people who have a realistic chance of making the short-term repayment have little reason to use the service, and the people who need the service have little chance of making the short-term repayment. You essentially noted this in your comment ('relatively low repayment rates'), so I don't understand why you think it's 'actually a valuable service'.
My guess is "relatively low" is more like 90% (vs. a normal loan being like 99%), not like 50% (those are all made up numbers). My guess is there are lots of repeat customers.
It seems valuable to me because sometimes money now is a lot better than money in two weeks (e.g. it'll stop you from being evicted), and sometimes there is no other good source of "money now".
There are not many customers who have no access to 'money now', ie a credit card, an overdraft, in the worst case anything to pawn, who are also a good credit risk.
Right, so the point of payday loans is for people who are bad credit risks. And the high fees are partially to make up for the extra risk.
Is your theory that everyone who uses payday loans is being duped and has a negative experience? That seems very implausible and paternalistic to me; I'd guess the people who use them are doing a good job looking out for their own interests and are actually benefiting from them (in general I think it's true and respectful to assume people are better at making choices for themselves than outsiders would be, and this is a strong argument for not banning things)
I hear you Matt, but I think you ought to rethink this argument. Disaster is the most likely cause of the realignment you’re urging, that plus a party that’s prepared to benefit from opportunity with a well thought out agenda.
Important to crystalize here that an obstacle among others to John Bel Edwards for Red State Senate Races model is that for all the scornful invocation of the term, the revealed preference is many Democrats (including many of the "above the fray" types) genuinely care about the culture war, think the culture war is important, and would like to use politics to argue about cultural values and how they should be reflected in political leaders.
Surely there are lots of people out there in reddish states who (a) have the right package of views, (b) are politically talented, and (c) aren't interested in becoming DC lobbyists. Why can't those people rise to the top with greater frequency? It's a big country, there ought to be multiple John Bel Edwardses out there.
One possibility, other than lack of funding, is that it's a pipeline problem. Even *within* red states, there aren't many smaller jurisdictions with suitable electorates to cultivate candidates like this. For instance, there aren't many Democratic state legislators in Tennessee, but the few that exist are either corporate types or far left. There are few places where this talent can be developed.
I'm also reminded of the 2020 Senate race in Tennessee, where the state Dems wanted to run a "man of faith & Army officer" (description from his campaign website). No doubt he would have gotten stomped in the general election, but it was a candidacy that made sense for taking a longshot in a very red state. But he lost in the primary to a Sunrise endorsed Sierra Club activist.
My acid test for this is Jon Tester. If, upon leaving the Senate, he became a DC lobbyist, all my naive optimism for the kind of people you describe would evaporate.
I don't think this is a very good thesis. The most obvious flaw is that it rests on the notion that moderate Democrats are primarily motivated by K-street interests. That's a questionable assertion at best.
The political issues and incentives for politicians are more complicated than the political safety triangle would suggest. Fundamentally, politicians want to get reelected and that is what primarily drives their incentive structure. The incentive structure for someone like Manchin is very different from those in safe districts. Politicians in safe districts only have to worry about the base because the only threat to them comes from primaries. Politicians like Manchin have to contend with threats from the base in primaries, but also the other side because winning in the general election is not assured.
It's not clear to me how "popularism" changes this incentive structure, particularly in a political environment where culture war issues dominate.
There's no such thing as strategic moderates in the majority, because if at heart they are true believers in the cause, they will eventually fall on their sword for an important vote that's unpopular, whipped on the promise that this one vote won't doom them if they "emphasize" their other popular positions, and then lose their seats anyways under a barrage of negative ads. What we have instead are Republicans who are convinced by Party organs they can win if they run as a Democrat. That's the key reason they are a Democrat. So their policy preference is Republican-lite, not Democratic-populust.
What is the evidence based case for this? Clearly it would be infinitely easier for Joe Manchin to continue holding his job as a Republican even if he became a slightly quixotic Lisa Murkowski type Republican. If anything accepting the challenge to be a Democrat in a deeply red state signals greater personal commitment to the cause and the values they believe in, otherwise he would just flip as their governor Jim Justice did or many southern Democrats did during the 94 wave.
I think it would be very hard for Joe Manchin to win a Republican primary for the same reason it was very hard for Arlen Specter to hold his seat as a Democrat, except more so, because WV is so much more conservative than PA was liberal.
"Some loser like me will be out there making the point that it doesn’t actually help women to replace Senator Popularist with a replacement-level Republican who supports much more severe abortion restrictions and also makes it impossible for Democratic presidents to get federal judges confirmed. "
I've thought a lot about why this reality seems so unintuitive to leftists, how people will tell me without blinking an eye that "Joe Manchin is the same as (insert Republican)", and I'm slowly realizing that this sentiment is partially coming from an ugly place of privilege.
The young left-leaning college grads (including myself) may have felt the mental and emotional exhaustion from the Trump years, but the reality is that most of us were not materially worse off in 2020 than 2016. We are not the demographic that heavily relies on Social Security, or Medicare, or unemployment benefits, or abortion clinics, so a lot of us can really afford to not care if Joe Manchin loses his seat to an actual Republican, as long as we can pat ourselves on the back that we sufficiently harassed the moderate Dems and stuck to our values. And that is sad, because for the vast majority of people who actually need social safety nets and government support, the difference between Manchin and an actual Republican is very, very real...
I think a lot of this is true, and we also can't underestimate the impact that social media has had on the way in which a certain kind of leftist politics has metastasized. How much of the issues that animate Twitter - and thus a lot of political discussion - come down specifically to the challenges that struggling journalists have? I support Medicare for All but it's not lost on me how much of the momentum that picked up in elite circles was driven basically by freelancers finding dealing with the exchanges annoying. Whenever the topic of student debt comes up the conversation shifts from 'eat the rich' to 'Pete Buttigieg is literally a Republican if he's only going to focus canceling student debt on low-income people instead of wiping away the $200k in debt I have from getting an English BA at Oberlin.'
These people center themselves and their anxieties in the American political experience and it poisons the discourse entirely. Think of how they told everyone the CARES Act was nothing but one stimulus check - because they were well-off enough not to need to access any of its other benefits - and tried to do the same thing with Biden's follow-up stimulus.
At a baseline level, Twitter plays such an outsized role in shaping the views of media and policymakers and so much of 'leftist' advocacy on those platforms and shaping the conversation are coming from a specific kind of self-loathing upper middle class 'PMC' types. The ones who work in media are lashing out because they work in a largely dying industry but they're laundering their specific class concerns through language about helping the most distressed people in America. And especially for the elite media people driving a lot of leftist conversation, a combination of not REALLY being all that economically vulnerable, combined with the fact that their own professional incentives in regards to building their personal brand push them in the direction of rejecting any sort political pragmatism to prove they are the One True Leftist, makes for a basically broken media ecosystem in which hopelessness sells and compromise is always betrayal.
In modern American political discourse it has sort of become a useless meta-term because the only people who know what it means are themselves members of the PMC but they nonetheless use the term as an epithet to try and assert their own leftist bonafides.
Having people on your team not advancing a given goal of the team feels shitty; it’s easy to overlook that politics is often zero-sum so *just having people on the team* helps the overall goals. This led Republicans to purge a bunch of people and lose some races they didn’t have to lose; we’re now catching up with them.
yup, in many ways GOP is far more ruthless to its non-team players. That ruthlessness is why they never crack 55 senate seats despite a map that is insanely biased in their direction.
As I watch some moderate democrats try and kill drug pricing reform, literally the most popular part of the democratic agenda, I’ve come back to this article, and I think it might be the best thing you’ve written for Slow Boring. It perfectly explains both how an item gets on the agenda & what the problem with moderates is, even while agreeing that moderation is important when it comes to winning elections.
This is a good piece that I will need to read again to digest fully, but a couple of things kept ringing in the back of my mind as I read along, a bit paradoxical perhaps:
1. On a macro level, for many or even most voters, it’s fairly clear none of the Econ stuff matters. We wouldn’t have such a deep rural-urban divide it if most voters cared a lot about Econ policy, and particularly the direction of that divide!
2. But of course the elections that matter are these days super close and we are in an era with very slim majorities. These econ issues actually can matter a *lot* because just turning 1-2% of voters can matter a lot if it’s done consistently across the country. But this whole piece is geared towards strategies trying to shift a very small % of the electorate.
3. Some issues are both economic and cultural: immigration is a great example.
I think this misses another bigger issue which is the misconception that Democratic moderates and their staff have an idea of politics along a left-right spectrum in which businesses are defined as the interest group that balances left-wing organizations like unions or consumer advocates, so therefore any pandering or appeasing to businesses makes an idea by definition moderate, cutting a loaf in half.
Counterpoint: The last time major gun control passed was during the peak of major crime. We're going to hit a crescendo with that again, sometime this decade. Speaking as a flyover Heartland Midwesterner, even people in my area, at some point, will want the carnage stopped. If they can't get it stopped with a jackboot authoritarian like Trump or Trump's acolytes, they may go with something more conventional. You discount even minor gun control proposals as some kind of unpopular political suicide too quickly, Matt.
“But on the other hand, they are afraid of losing so they want to be friendly with business lobbyists to have strong fallback options.” Where is your evidence for this bold claim?
Modest proposal: rich lefty activists should direct some of their resources to post-loss sinecures for moderate Democrats in purple electorates/states.
Interesting note on Social Security. Begich's signature legislative policy was removing the income cap on the Social Security/Medicare payroll taxes, which would be a huge tax increase on everyone making over $140k but is also very popular and would ensure stability for both programs. Begich was nearly reelected in a terrible Dem year- lost by 2 points/6,000 votes in 2014.
Red state dems, particularly from the west, have been fairly conservative on resource/enviro issues, which does create problems with the donor base. My theory is that most of these issues are social/performative now, making them tricky to resolve.
To some extent, I think this might overrate how much voters care about policy. Manchin's obstructionism in large part is purely to brandish himself as someone who sticks it progressives. The aesthetics of that obstruction are what makes him popular to WV voters who by and large don't care a whole lot about the difference between 25% and 28% corporate income tax rates
Tough post for me, as someone who is sincerely more economically conservative than the public. In particular, "a lot of the absolute most popular stuff you can do on economics is proposals that obscure costs with regulatory mandates" seems pretty scary, since it making means you're making decisions without counting the true costs (indeed, willfully blinding yourself to the true costs). Seems like a recipe for making a lot of bad decisions. Especially since IMO the natural endpoint of "lawyer-brain" is "no one is allowed to do anything, since doing something means you might do something wrong".
But I suppose the usual advice applies; politicians should just try and get elected, and people like me with unpopular views should try and make them more popular. Seems tough. Especially since plausibly the only reason libertarianism is even as popular as it is is the questionable anti-tax stuff and not the good pro-freedom stuff.
To give a concrete example: "The Loan Shark Prevention Act, which would cap interest rates on consumer loans, tests extremely well even with rigorous pro and con arguments. This would get a lot of people a better deal on their credit cards and basically eliminate the payday lending industry — an industry that is not admired or liked."
My understanding is that payday loans, while unpopular, are actually a valuable service to low-income people who would be worse off if they were gone. The interest rates are absurdly high, but that mostly reflects that the loans are very short-term and the non-interest costs of making loans to low-income people are very high (lots of in-person assistance required; relatively low repayment rates), and in fact the actual profits of these companies are not exorbitant.
Do you have any evidence that states that more stringently regulate payday lenders have worse outcomes for impoverished people? This paper suggests that banning payday loans causes people to find less expensive ways of raising cash:
https://www.responsiblelending.org/sites/default/files/nodes/files/research-publication/crl-shark-free-waters-sep2017.pdf
Yes! This! Trying to ban payday loans is typical upper middle class bullshit, harming the poor while trying to help them. It won’t mean cheaper loans, it’ll just mean no loans - so uh, good luck to you if your car breaks and you can’t get cash for a repair! We can do better than opposing payday loans just because they are tacky.
'payday loans, while unpopular, are actually a valuable service to low-income people . . . in fact the actual profits of these companies are not exorbitant.'
If they provided a valuable service, then they would be extremely profitable, because they would get repeat custom while demanding a huge vig. In fact, they are mostly low-profit businesses, precisely because there is no repeat custom and their balance sheet is full of garbage liabilities. The basic problem is that people who have a realistic chance of making the short-term repayment have little reason to use the service, and the people who need the service have little chance of making the short-term repayment. You essentially noted this in your comment ('relatively low repayment rates'), so I don't understand why you think it's 'actually a valuable service'.
My guess is "relatively low" is more like 90% (vs. a normal loan being like 99%), not like 50% (those are all made up numbers). My guess is there are lots of repeat customers.
It seems valuable to me because sometimes money now is a lot better than money in two weeks (e.g. it'll stop you from being evicted), and sometimes there is no other good source of "money now".
There are not many customers who have no access to 'money now', ie a credit card, an overdraft, in the worst case anything to pawn, who are also a good credit risk.
Right, so the point of payday loans is for people who are bad credit risks. And the high fees are partially to make up for the extra risk.
Is your theory that everyone who uses payday loans is being duped and has a negative experience? That seems very implausible and paternalistic to me; I'd guess the people who use them are doing a good job looking out for their own interests and are actually benefiting from them (in general I think it's true and respectful to assume people are better at making choices for themselves than outsiders would be, and this is a strong argument for not banning things)
People clearly find value in it, no? If you took it away, you’d be harming the people who choose to use it.
What type of 'value' do you think it offers?
I don't think it's fair to say left-wing (and some centrist) members of Congress don't talk about expanding Social Security. Last year, Chuck Schumer, Ron Wyden, and Elizabeth Warren proposed an extra $200/month in Social Security during COVID https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/23/senate-democrats-want-to-boost-social-security-by-200-per-month.html
Back in 2018, Warren and Bernie Sanders launched an expand Social Security caucus with House co-chairs spanning the ideological spectrum from Raul Grijalva to Conor Lamb. https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/sanders-warren-larson-announce-expand-social-security-caucus/
It's more accurate to say that the media isn't that interested in covering Social Security expansion, because:
A. Unlike student debt cancellation and childcare, it doesn't impact most media folks or people in their social circles.
B. You can't do it through executive order or reconciliation, so it's not really on the table right now.
I hear you Matt, but I think you ought to rethink this argument. Disaster is the most likely cause of the realignment you’re urging, that plus a party that’s prepared to benefit from opportunity with a well thought out agenda.
Important to crystalize here that an obstacle among others to John Bel Edwards for Red State Senate Races model is that for all the scornful invocation of the term, the revealed preference is many Democrats (including many of the "above the fray" types) genuinely care about the culture war, think the culture war is important, and would like to use politics to argue about cultural values and how they should be reflected in political leaders.
Yeah, agree
Surely there are lots of people out there in reddish states who (a) have the right package of views, (b) are politically talented, and (c) aren't interested in becoming DC lobbyists. Why can't those people rise to the top with greater frequency? It's a big country, there ought to be multiple John Bel Edwardses out there.
One possibility, other than lack of funding, is that it's a pipeline problem. Even *within* red states, there aren't many smaller jurisdictions with suitable electorates to cultivate candidates like this. For instance, there aren't many Democratic state legislators in Tennessee, but the few that exist are either corporate types or far left. There are few places where this talent can be developed.
I'm also reminded of the 2020 Senate race in Tennessee, where the state Dems wanted to run a "man of faith & Army officer" (description from his campaign website). No doubt he would have gotten stomped in the general election, but it was a candidacy that made sense for taking a longshot in a very red state. But he lost in the primary to a Sunrise endorsed Sierra Club activist.
My acid test for this is Jon Tester. If, upon leaving the Senate, he became a DC lobbyist, all my naive optimism for the kind of people you describe would evaporate.
I don't think this is a very good thesis. The most obvious flaw is that it rests on the notion that moderate Democrats are primarily motivated by K-street interests. That's a questionable assertion at best.
The political issues and incentives for politicians are more complicated than the political safety triangle would suggest. Fundamentally, politicians want to get reelected and that is what primarily drives their incentive structure. The incentive structure for someone like Manchin is very different from those in safe districts. Politicians in safe districts only have to worry about the base because the only threat to them comes from primaries. Politicians like Manchin have to contend with threats from the base in primaries, but also the other side because winning in the general election is not assured.
It's not clear to me how "popularism" changes this incentive structure, particularly in a political environment where culture war issues dominate.
There's no such thing as strategic moderates in the majority, because if at heart they are true believers in the cause, they will eventually fall on their sword for an important vote that's unpopular, whipped on the promise that this one vote won't doom them if they "emphasize" their other popular positions, and then lose their seats anyways under a barrage of negative ads. What we have instead are Republicans who are convinced by Party organs they can win if they run as a Democrat. That's the key reason they are a Democrat. So their policy preference is Republican-lite, not Democratic-populust.
What is the evidence based case for this? Clearly it would be infinitely easier for Joe Manchin to continue holding his job as a Republican even if he became a slightly quixotic Lisa Murkowski type Republican. If anything accepting the challenge to be a Democrat in a deeply red state signals greater personal commitment to the cause and the values they believe in, otherwise he would just flip as their governor Jim Justice did or many southern Democrats did during the 94 wave.
I think it would be very hard for Joe Manchin to win a Republican primary for the same reason it was very hard for Arlen Specter to hold his seat as a Democrat, except more so, because WV is so much more conservative than PA was liberal.
"Some loser like me will be out there making the point that it doesn’t actually help women to replace Senator Popularist with a replacement-level Republican who supports much more severe abortion restrictions and also makes it impossible for Democratic presidents to get federal judges confirmed. "
I've thought a lot about why this reality seems so unintuitive to leftists, how people will tell me without blinking an eye that "Joe Manchin is the same as (insert Republican)", and I'm slowly realizing that this sentiment is partially coming from an ugly place of privilege.
The young left-leaning college grads (including myself) may have felt the mental and emotional exhaustion from the Trump years, but the reality is that most of us were not materially worse off in 2020 than 2016. We are not the demographic that heavily relies on Social Security, or Medicare, or unemployment benefits, or abortion clinics, so a lot of us can really afford to not care if Joe Manchin loses his seat to an actual Republican, as long as we can pat ourselves on the back that we sufficiently harassed the moderate Dems and stuck to our values. And that is sad, because for the vast majority of people who actually need social safety nets and government support, the difference between Manchin and an actual Republican is very, very real...
It's political hobbyism, and I say that as a political hobbyist. I'm reading a book now, Politics is for Power, about exactly that.
I think a lot of this is true, and we also can't underestimate the impact that social media has had on the way in which a certain kind of leftist politics has metastasized. How much of the issues that animate Twitter - and thus a lot of political discussion - come down specifically to the challenges that struggling journalists have? I support Medicare for All but it's not lost on me how much of the momentum that picked up in elite circles was driven basically by freelancers finding dealing with the exchanges annoying. Whenever the topic of student debt comes up the conversation shifts from 'eat the rich' to 'Pete Buttigieg is literally a Republican if he's only going to focus canceling student debt on low-income people instead of wiping away the $200k in debt I have from getting an English BA at Oberlin.'
These people center themselves and their anxieties in the American political experience and it poisons the discourse entirely. Think of how they told everyone the CARES Act was nothing but one stimulus check - because they were well-off enough not to need to access any of its other benefits - and tried to do the same thing with Biden's follow-up stimulus.
At a baseline level, Twitter plays such an outsized role in shaping the views of media and policymakers and so much of 'leftist' advocacy on those platforms and shaping the conversation are coming from a specific kind of self-loathing upper middle class 'PMC' types. The ones who work in media are lashing out because they work in a largely dying industry but they're laundering their specific class concerns through language about helping the most distressed people in America. And especially for the elite media people driving a lot of leftist conversation, a combination of not REALLY being all that economically vulnerable, combined with the fact that their own professional incentives in regards to building their personal brand push them in the direction of rejecting any sort political pragmatism to prove they are the One True Leftist, makes for a basically broken media ecosystem in which hopelessness sells and compromise is always betrayal.
"PMC"?
Professional managerial class.
In modern American political discourse it has sort of become a useless meta-term because the only people who know what it means are themselves members of the PMC but they nonetheless use the term as an epithet to try and assert their own leftist bonafides.
I shared this link elsewhere in this comment section but whatever, it fits here too (re the Twitter left being animated by PMC concerns): https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/on-strasserism-and-the-decay-of-the-left/
Having people on your team not advancing a given goal of the team feels shitty; it’s easy to overlook that politics is often zero-sum so *just having people on the team* helps the overall goals. This led Republicans to purge a bunch of people and lose some races they didn’t have to lose; we’re now catching up with them.
yup, in many ways GOP is far more ruthless to its non-team players. That ruthlessness is why they never crack 55 senate seats despite a map that is insanely biased in their direction.