Why we need to think of ALL the poor and ALL the precariat working class. If blacks, or any other group, are overly represented in these classes, they will benefit disproportionately from anything done for those classes.
Re: the transit costs project. Very interesting and necessary work, I have often wondered this myself. But if we are to look at transit from the perspective of utility, it is critical that we look at bus rapid transit as well. There are certainly wide variabilities in the cost of BRT projects (we have documented these variabilities but never gotten into the level of detail regarding *why* that Goldwyn & Levy did).
But one of the core tenets of BRT is that it is almost always cheaper than building subways. One of the other core tenets is that you can carry as many passengers as a single-tracked subway at almost the same speeds. Some (Levy included) would disagree with this but it is simply a technical truth based on empirical data. There are also almost no corridors in the US that reach the demand levels at which a subway truly becomes necessary.
Great post, reminds me of something from the excellent book American Pharoh by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one) about the life and times of Richard J. Daley. They were talking about Daley's political rise to power in The Depression and had a great story about a black street minister shouting to a crowd: "Let Jesus lead you, and Roosevelt feed you!" and the crowd cheering their approval.
These days it seems like there is a bipartisan obsession with saying the 'right' things, exhibiting that you have the 'right' intentions (signaling our virtue). Results? Maybe, but probably not.
It's hard for people to get on board with the idea that a bad person can be used (sometimes manipulated) into choosing the right policies. I always thought there was a slim chance for Donald Trump on this point regarding infrastructure and gun control. Even though his brain was melted by years of Fox News viewership, there was still that 1980's New Yorker in there. He was too weak willed to cross McConnel, so it's probably moot, but it's sad that we'll never know.
This is great history and I learned a lot, but I'm not sure I get the relevance. FDR had a huge majority and did a lot for the country which to some extent also benefited Blacks. Obama had a huge majority (made narrower by keeping the filibuster) and did a lot for the country which to some extent also benefited Blacks (e.g., ACA).
Biden will have at best a 50/50 Senate and is not likely to be able to get much passed, certainly not on the scale of Obama or needless to say FDR. So are we just talking about how he talks about issues? Or trying to reframe debates more toward class than ethnicity? Sure, fine, but I don't think that will mean much to the body politic.
The question is how you get to governing majorities without being able to run on a very successful record so you can help people. The country is deeply split, with a slight bias toward Republicans (i.e., Dems have a slight advantage for President, the R's for the Senate, and probably 50/50 with regard to the House). That's just a recipe for paralysis. Not sure what the relevance of FDR or, frankly, Obama is for that situation.
I don't know how to change this dynamic. E.g., Biden was a perfectly-built Democratic candidate to win back those historic Democratic strongholds in, say, smaller cities in Pennsylvania (like Scranton!) which in 2016 for the first time broke solidly R with Trump running. And he did *barely* better than Hillary. If Scranton Joe can't win back Scranton for the Dems, it's not likely to happen. And without that kind of change, I suspect we'll be looking at 50/50 government for a long time.
It's a question of how Dems run elections. Giving people things is a really underrated strategy as opposed to talking about big, overarching issues. Biden might have a harder time getting things done but it's still relevant. For example, he could give people student loan relief and make a lot of noise about minimum wage to show that R's are opposed.
I think an appropriate course of action would be to nationally adopt more centrist policies to win back the Senate. I think Biden *could* have done that but he moved left on nearly every issue vs. Obama.
I'm sorry. I don't think I'm tracking your comment.
I said Biden is more progressive than Obama. I don't think that's in dispute. My position is because he is more progressive, our likelihood to win the Senate decreased.
As Obama said recently, Iowa didn't become "more Republican". It's hard to explain this 17 point move there vs. Obama. I interpret Obama as saying it was the Democratic party that move left, leaving states like Iowa behind. And we need Senators from states like Iowa.
Sorry, yes, the party has moved left of Obama, but I feel that Biden was seen as closer to the center. I don't have data to back it up, but just an impression. Note that a lot of attacks on him didn't claim he was a radical leftist but rather that he would be controlled by "radical leftists".
I think when 156 million are motivated to come out to vote (up from 136 million in 2016), it's not issues that are drawing them to the polls. It was Trump (for and against) and a deep tribal opposition to the other side.
Adopting more centrist policies would have been lost in the noise.
I'm only selecting two examples, but I see an emerging pattern:
"The New Deal was Good
On its face it seems like we should believe Mitchell and his constituents about this...FDR’s record on civil rights was not good...But African-Americans voted for him because they liked his economic agenda."
"Many more Hispanic voters say education as a very important issue to them than say that immigration is."
Why is it that (white?) liberals are apparently misreading the priorities of the people of color they are trying to champion? My guess is that white liberals of a certain age have grown up with the message that they are failing to be good allies to POCs, and that they need to "use their privilege" to be outspokenly anti-racist. But are they instead talking over the very people they are trying to speak up for?
How popular is "Defund the police" as a rallying cry among Black Americans compared to white, liberal Americans? I'm open to being wrong here, but I suspect that this slogan, even if it didn't necessarily originate among white liberals, only gained traction because it gave white liberals a chance to show that they weren't afraid of putting their own privilege aside (i.e. a generally positive relationship with the police in their communities), in order to vocally oppose injustice against Black and other POCs. But despite the enthusiasm some prominent Black intellectuals may have for defunding the police, it seems now that is was a misreading of Black priorities with respect to police reform.
When it comes to the legacy of FDR and the New Deal, I think white liberals, in their effort not to romanticize a past steeped in racism, have overstepped the mark and inadvertently misrepresent the concerns of Black Americans of that era.
There was a comment from an interview with Donald Glover (about his show Atlanta, not wider politics) that I felt was a good framing. I don't have an exact quote, but he said something like, "It's all about white people. It happens that right now, white people enjoy seeing themselves in a mirror held up by black people, but don't mistake it, it's all about what white people like."
That's unnuanced, and I don't endorse it as the only truth, but consider strongly how much of white liberal policy is about flattering the white liberals who endorse it, visibly showing themselves as Caring About Antiracism, versus actually amplifying the views of the people they're championing.
It's very easy, also, to tell yourself that you know what's best for someone, even if they don't.
Yeah, I find this so frustrating. A lot of the conversation about being good allies to POC ends up turning them into monoliths and making assumptions about what they want and need. But there are a lot of POC in the country with diverse experiences and opinions. What bothers me is how moralistic the focus on having specific opinions gets and how it's concentrated in a group of people who think of themselves as highly educated and intelligent despite having an aversion to conflicting opinions.
The most interesting theory I read on this is that it's basically religion for some secular people. It has original sin (racism) and redemption (being woke).
Another interesting one is that there are fewer elite positions on society than there are people who feel they should be elite and a lot of this is competition for those positions.
There's definitely a class signaling element to this, but I think it's worthwhile thinking about material interests involved. If you're a young, college educated, middle class POC living in an integrated middle class (or gentrified) neighborhood, then you're genuinely far more impacted by discriminatory police contacts, implicit bias at work, and generalized racist sentiment by e.g. store owners than you are by high unemployment and perennial under-policing of non-drug crime in low income neighborhoods. Young white college-educated elites are aligning themselves with the interests of their peers.
Even in cases where you see cross-class solidarity going on follows similar patterns - Fight For 15 has focussed labor sector activism on raising the minimum wage for service workers in high-cost cities rather than on increasing the pressure for wage increases for non-minimum wage non-college workers who've seen their incomes stagnate. (Similarly, see so much of the left lose their minds at Matt Bruenig for suggesting we should give a payment to parents, who for some reason much of the left don't imagine as being a working class on average.)
Sure, but I think it's important to recognize that while these priorities are grounded in genuine empathy and solidarity, it imagines a very limited world that doesn't extend much beyond what college educated liberals interact directly with or read about online.
That has consequences both for its ability to build an electoral coalition and for its ability to target useful policies for improving many people's lives.
For sure. A big part of the limitation is the class issue - a lot of young college educated professionals who want others to adopt their preferences in how to talk and what to believe without trying to understand people who don't agree with them. That is a limitation in a lot of areas. There are policy professionals who behave that way, rich people who behave that way, religious people who behave that way. It is always frustrating but shouldn't wholly discredit the profession, ideology, or religion that person says they represent.
You're probably thinking of John McWhorter's writings in comparison antiracism to religion. He and Matt also went over it on The Weeds a few months back.
I'm interested to hear more about competition for elite status as a driver of wokeness. I can't shake the feeling that wokeness is a symptom of class, namely middle-to-upper-middle class values. But that might also be because I'm projecting.
The religion theory holds less sway to me, personally, because at times I find woke cultural criticism persuasive, and at other times I feel allergic to it. In other words, I believe you can vacillate in your wokeness, especially on different issues. But other people are more dogmatic about it, I grant you.
I'm having trouble finding where I read the elite competition thing.
I definitely think this is partly class. I only hear it from young college educated progressives. That's not class by wealth but I think it's a group (that admittedly I'm part of) that has a lot of people who conceive of themselves as deserving a high-prestige place in society.
There is definitely a lot to learn from wokeness about racism and how to have a better society. At the end of the day, I think there are always people in any religion or ideology who like a black-and-white worldview with purity and heretics. In fact, that's a psychological trait of some people. Whether it's religion or not, I think it's unhealthy.
I found that entire article to be like late night post-shroom trip college conversations with philosophy majors in that I'm not qualified to know whether or not it was complete bullshit but it sure was interesting
The problem with the emphasis of Democrats rhetorical emphasis on "identity" issues is in
framing them (or allowing Republicans to frame them as zero sum. Status is zero sum but freer trade, more immigration (especially high skilled immigration), allowing transgender people to serve in the military, reducing racial, ethnic, religious biases, better access to health insurance materially favors (almost) everyone, not just the the immediate beneficiaries. And to the extent that some boat don't rise with the tide, that's what progressive taxation, especially targeted progressivity like a much higher EITC and Child Tax Credit, is for.
This was a good post, but it's leaving an important element of geography out of the analysis. There is never just one homogenous Black (or anything else) voting community. Black Americans in the '30s are disproportionately in rural agricultural communities in the South, whereas the Black communities in the North are in the urban working class, i.e. industry and service jobs. FDR's New Deal policies tended to provide significantly more benefit to the latter group, which joined the New Deal FDR coalition. The former group, by contrast, gets cut out of a lot of policy (like the exemptions for agricultural workers in the entitlement policies) that is either opposed by or unappealing to the Dixiecrats, whose voting power is partly based on having disfranchised Black voters and, to a lesser but significant degree, working-class Whites.
All this good policy discussion and I'm hung up on how ordinary Matts apartment/house/condo looked in the video discussion. Tastefully decorated and neat though.
I wasn't ever aware that Dems had an issue with FDR. Maybe I'm too much of a pragmatist. I have never understood the need to judge historical figures with modern social woke standards.
Matts point about how Latin/Hispanic specialists over emphasize immigration as an issue. Having lived with/worked with Hispanic Americans all my life, I'm always dumbfounded by the issue.
I assumed it was because east coast elites just weren't around Hispanics in any large numbers like those of us from California and the South West. Even my undocumented friends (wife is in Restaurant industry) aren't as concerned about immigration policies as much as my upper middle class progressive brothers and sisters.
The difference between what is a hot topic on social media (usually driven by vocal minority activists) and what is important among real working middle class people is astounding.
This is one area where I think Republicans have an advantage over Democrats.
For instance... Republicans hot issue right now (mandates, opening businesses, Covid stuff)... lots of people care about in daily life.
Whereas things like Student Loan Forgiveness and defunding police just aren't important to most peoples daily lives.
I really am curious as to what will happen if the Democrats win the two Georgia seats. I imagine it could actually hurt the Democrats in a small way. They can paper over internal policy differences when they have the Republican Senate to blame, but if they have a path through the Senate, the moderate vs progressive disagreements really will be magnified.
All I know is sending money to people is always a winning strategy.
Also... the weed episode with Karl Smith is great. First time Ive listed to the weeds podcast.
The point about leftists' view of FDR is also true about Lula. I came of age in Brazil in the Lula years, and I clearly remember that "true" leftists despised the guy as a sellout to neoliberalism and corrupt. That's why I think it's hilarious when today I see progressives both in Brazil and the US idolizing the guy.
Come on Matt, we can't compare Japanese internment camps to what Obama did to Yemen. The human rights violations are not of the same order of magnitude.
On the global stage, FDR was unambiguously a good guy and helped save the world from the Axis. Obama, on the other hand, was bad! And now we have to listen to him complain about how "the system" coerced him into drone striking shepherds.
You're right, they're not comparable. One was a military action that ended up killing civilians by accident, the other was isolating entire groups of civilians due to their ethnicity
The main person responsible for the hundreds of thousands of dead are the United States and Obama. Their proxy (Saudi Arabia) has been slaughtering people, blowing up school buses, etc. with US weapons, intelligence, and approval.
It seems like FDR employed a strategy I've heard you argue for before Matt: frame racial issues in more universal values to gain popular support. Like he ended the sharecropping system under the guise of preparing America for war in WWII. The new deal never explicitly targeted African Americans, but helped them implicitly as a way to get America out of the Great Depression. Not to say there weren't a lot of areas that could have been improved, but it seems like he was clearly in a political bind where racial equality issues were going to alienate major portions of his constituency, so he verbally made nods to white southerners which gave him the room to maneuver for better outcomes for African Americans he would never have been able to help if he were more explicit. It's a flip from the current way Democrats do this: talk about everything as a racial justice issue, when those same policies would also benefit the country at large.
It seems pretty significant here that Democrats will be unable to deliver meaningful material support unless they win control of the Senate. After all, Trump seems to have received credit for economic policies (stimulus checks/enhanced unemployment) that Democrats advocated.
In general I agree with this. In fact, I've been trying to get Jared Bernstein to advocate a School Modernization Act as an important node of Biden's "infrastructure" plan. The basic idea is to concentrate on rehabbing and rebuilding the hundreds of old, decrepit schools in both urban and rural areas. The advantages of such a focus are almost too numerous to count: environmental, health, economic. The historical analysis of the New Deal is right--especially about the centrality of economic issues. But something your analysis lacks is a focus on the impact of the ND on Black women, almost all of whom worked in domestic service or agriculture work and who were essential family breadwinners. Sadie T. M. Alexander (first Black woman to earn a PhD in economics, from Penn) focused on their plight intently, arguing before the PA legislature that Social Security should not bypass these women. In short, the impact of excluding Black women from the New Deal devastated many Black families. There's much more to be said about this, but for now, just keep it in mind.
Why we need to think of ALL the poor and ALL the precariat working class. If blacks, or any other group, are overly represented in these classes, they will benefit disproportionately from anything done for those classes.
Re: the transit costs project. Very interesting and necessary work, I have often wondered this myself. But if we are to look at transit from the perspective of utility, it is critical that we look at bus rapid transit as well. There are certainly wide variabilities in the cost of BRT projects (we have documented these variabilities but never gotten into the level of detail regarding *why* that Goldwyn & Levy did).
https://brtguide.itdp.org/branch/master/guide/why-brt/costs
But one of the core tenets of BRT is that it is almost always cheaper than building subways. One of the other core tenets is that you can carry as many passengers as a single-tracked subway at almost the same speeds. Some (Levy included) would disagree with this but it is simply a technical truth based on empirical data. There are also almost no corridors in the US that reach the demand levels at which a subway truly becomes necessary.
https://brtguide.itdp.org/branch/master/guide/why-brt/performance
All this to say, when you write your article about transit costs, please do not ignore this very important factor.
Great post, reminds me of something from the excellent book American Pharoh by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one) about the life and times of Richard J. Daley. They were talking about Daley's political rise to power in The Depression and had a great story about a black street minister shouting to a crowd: "Let Jesus lead you, and Roosevelt feed you!" and the crowd cheering their approval.
These days it seems like there is a bipartisan obsession with saying the 'right' things, exhibiting that you have the 'right' intentions (signaling our virtue). Results? Maybe, but probably not.
It's hard for people to get on board with the idea that a bad person can be used (sometimes manipulated) into choosing the right policies. I always thought there was a slim chance for Donald Trump on this point regarding infrastructure and gun control. Even though his brain was melted by years of Fox News viewership, there was still that 1980's New Yorker in there. He was too weak willed to cross McConnel, so it's probably moot, but it's sad that we'll never know.
This is great history and I learned a lot, but I'm not sure I get the relevance. FDR had a huge majority and did a lot for the country which to some extent also benefited Blacks. Obama had a huge majority (made narrower by keeping the filibuster) and did a lot for the country which to some extent also benefited Blacks (e.g., ACA).
Biden will have at best a 50/50 Senate and is not likely to be able to get much passed, certainly not on the scale of Obama or needless to say FDR. So are we just talking about how he talks about issues? Or trying to reframe debates more toward class than ethnicity? Sure, fine, but I don't think that will mean much to the body politic.
The question is how you get to governing majorities without being able to run on a very successful record so you can help people. The country is deeply split, with a slight bias toward Republicans (i.e., Dems have a slight advantage for President, the R's for the Senate, and probably 50/50 with regard to the House). That's just a recipe for paralysis. Not sure what the relevance of FDR or, frankly, Obama is for that situation.
I don't know how to change this dynamic. E.g., Biden was a perfectly-built Democratic candidate to win back those historic Democratic strongholds in, say, smaller cities in Pennsylvania (like Scranton!) which in 2016 for the first time broke solidly R with Trump running. And he did *barely* better than Hillary. If Scranton Joe can't win back Scranton for the Dems, it's not likely to happen. And without that kind of change, I suspect we'll be looking at 50/50 government for a long time.
It's a question of how Dems run elections. Giving people things is a really underrated strategy as opposed to talking about big, overarching issues. Biden might have a harder time getting things done but it's still relevant. For example, he could give people student loan relief and make a lot of noise about minimum wage to show that R's are opposed.
I think an appropriate course of action would be to nationally adopt more centrist policies to win back the Senate. I think Biden *could* have done that but he moved left on nearly every issue vs. Obama.
I think Biden *did* do that and won, in part, because of it.
I'm sorry. I don't think I'm tracking your comment.
I said Biden is more progressive than Obama. I don't think that's in dispute. My position is because he is more progressive, our likelihood to win the Senate decreased.
As Obama said recently, Iowa didn't become "more Republican". It's hard to explain this 17 point move there vs. Obama. I interpret Obama as saying it was the Democratic party that move left, leaving states like Iowa behind. And we need Senators from states like Iowa.
https://www.vox.com/21322478/joe-biden-overton-window-bidenism
Sorry, yes, the party has moved left of Obama, but I feel that Biden was seen as closer to the center. I don't have data to back it up, but just an impression. Note that a lot of attacks on him didn't claim he was a radical leftist but rather that he would be controlled by "radical leftists".
Closer to the center than the current state of the democratic party that is (I'm having a heck of a time explaining myself clearly today!).
I think when 156 million are motivated to come out to vote (up from 136 million in 2016), it's not issues that are drawing them to the polls. It was Trump (for and against) and a deep tribal opposition to the other side.
Adopting more centrist policies would have been lost in the noise.
I'm only selecting two examples, but I see an emerging pattern:
"The New Deal was Good
On its face it seems like we should believe Mitchell and his constituents about this...FDR’s record on civil rights was not good...But African-Americans voted for him because they liked his economic agenda."
"Many more Hispanic voters say education as a very important issue to them than say that immigration is."
Why is it that (white?) liberals are apparently misreading the priorities of the people of color they are trying to champion? My guess is that white liberals of a certain age have grown up with the message that they are failing to be good allies to POCs, and that they need to "use their privilege" to be outspokenly anti-racist. But are they instead talking over the very people they are trying to speak up for?
How popular is "Defund the police" as a rallying cry among Black Americans compared to white, liberal Americans? I'm open to being wrong here, but I suspect that this slogan, even if it didn't necessarily originate among white liberals, only gained traction because it gave white liberals a chance to show that they weren't afraid of putting their own privilege aside (i.e. a generally positive relationship with the police in their communities), in order to vocally oppose injustice against Black and other POCs. But despite the enthusiasm some prominent Black intellectuals may have for defunding the police, it seems now that is was a misreading of Black priorities with respect to police reform.
When it comes to the legacy of FDR and the New Deal, I think white liberals, in their effort not to romanticize a past steeped in racism, have overstepped the mark and inadvertently misrepresent the concerns of Black Americans of that era.
There was a comment from an interview with Donald Glover (about his show Atlanta, not wider politics) that I felt was a good framing. I don't have an exact quote, but he said something like, "It's all about white people. It happens that right now, white people enjoy seeing themselves in a mirror held up by black people, but don't mistake it, it's all about what white people like."
That's unnuanced, and I don't endorse it as the only truth, but consider strongly how much of white liberal policy is about flattering the white liberals who endorse it, visibly showing themselves as Caring About Antiracism, versus actually amplifying the views of the people they're championing.
It's very easy, also, to tell yourself that you know what's best for someone, even if they don't.
Yeah, I find this so frustrating. A lot of the conversation about being good allies to POC ends up turning them into monoliths and making assumptions about what they want and need. But there are a lot of POC in the country with diverse experiences and opinions. What bothers me is how moralistic the focus on having specific opinions gets and how it's concentrated in a group of people who think of themselves as highly educated and intelligent despite having an aversion to conflicting opinions.
The most interesting theory I read on this is that it's basically religion for some secular people. It has original sin (racism) and redemption (being woke).
Another interesting one is that there are fewer elite positions on society than there are people who feel they should be elite and a lot of this is competition for those positions.
I see someone else pays for an Atlantic subscription. I too enjoy the works of John McWhorter and Graeme Wood's "Can History Predict the Future?".
There's definitely a class signaling element to this, but I think it's worthwhile thinking about material interests involved. If you're a young, college educated, middle class POC living in an integrated middle class (or gentrified) neighborhood, then you're genuinely far more impacted by discriminatory police contacts, implicit bias at work, and generalized racist sentiment by e.g. store owners than you are by high unemployment and perennial under-policing of non-drug crime in low income neighborhoods. Young white college-educated elites are aligning themselves with the interests of their peers.
Even in cases where you see cross-class solidarity going on follows similar patterns - Fight For 15 has focussed labor sector activism on raising the minimum wage for service workers in high-cost cities rather than on increasing the pressure for wage increases for non-minimum wage non-college workers who've seen their incomes stagnate. (Similarly, see so much of the left lose their minds at Matt Bruenig for suggesting we should give a payment to parents, who for some reason much of the left don't imagine as being a working class on average.)
That's a good point - there is a lot that is positive about "the great awokening". There is a lot of effort to bring in empathy and solidarity.
Sure, but I think it's important to recognize that while these priorities are grounded in genuine empathy and solidarity, it imagines a very limited world that doesn't extend much beyond what college educated liberals interact directly with or read about online.
That has consequences both for its ability to build an electoral coalition and for its ability to target useful policies for improving many people's lives.
For sure. A big part of the limitation is the class issue - a lot of young college educated professionals who want others to adopt their preferences in how to talk and what to believe without trying to understand people who don't agree with them. That is a limitation in a lot of areas. There are policy professionals who behave that way, rich people who behave that way, religious people who behave that way. It is always frustrating but shouldn't wholly discredit the profession, ideology, or religion that person says they represent.
You're probably thinking of John McWhorter's writings in comparison antiracism to religion. He and Matt also went over it on The Weeds a few months back.
Yeah, I think that's it
I'm interested to hear more about competition for elite status as a driver of wokeness. I can't shake the feeling that wokeness is a symptom of class, namely middle-to-upper-middle class values. But that might also be because I'm projecting.
The religion theory holds less sway to me, personally, because at times I find woke cultural criticism persuasive, and at other times I feel allergic to it. In other words, I believe you can vacillate in your wokeness, especially on different issues. But other people are more dogmatic about it, I grant you.
I'm having trouble finding where I read the elite competition thing.
I definitely think this is partly class. I only hear it from young college educated progressives. That's not class by wealth but I think it's a group (that admittedly I'm part of) that has a lot of people who conceive of themselves as deserving a high-prestige place in society.
There is definitely a lot to learn from wokeness about racism and how to have a better society. At the end of the day, I think there are always people in any religion or ideology who like a black-and-white worldview with purity and heretics. In fact, that's a psychological trait of some people. Whether it's religion or not, I think it's unhealthy.
As I mentioned in another comment, it's Graeme Wood's "Can History Predict the Future" feature for the Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/).
I found that entire article to be like late night post-shroom trip college conversations with philosophy majors in that I'm not qualified to know whether or not it was complete bullshit but it sure was interesting
The problem with the emphasis of Democrats rhetorical emphasis on "identity" issues is in
framing them (or allowing Republicans to frame them as zero sum. Status is zero sum but freer trade, more immigration (especially high skilled immigration), allowing transgender people to serve in the military, reducing racial, ethnic, religious biases, better access to health insurance materially favors (almost) everyone, not just the the immediate beneficiaries. And to the extent that some boat don't rise with the tide, that's what progressive taxation, especially targeted progressivity like a much higher EITC and Child Tax Credit, is for.
This was a good post, but it's leaving an important element of geography out of the analysis. There is never just one homogenous Black (or anything else) voting community. Black Americans in the '30s are disproportionately in rural agricultural communities in the South, whereas the Black communities in the North are in the urban working class, i.e. industry and service jobs. FDR's New Deal policies tended to provide significantly more benefit to the latter group, which joined the New Deal FDR coalition. The former group, by contrast, gets cut out of a lot of policy (like the exemptions for agricultural workers in the entitlement policies) that is either opposed by or unappealing to the Dixiecrats, whose voting power is partly based on having disfranchised Black voters and, to a lesser but significant degree, working-class Whites.
All this good policy discussion and I'm hung up on how ordinary Matts apartment/house/condo looked in the video discussion. Tastefully decorated and neat though.
I wasn't ever aware that Dems had an issue with FDR. Maybe I'm too much of a pragmatist. I have never understood the need to judge historical figures with modern social woke standards.
Matts point about how Latin/Hispanic specialists over emphasize immigration as an issue. Having lived with/worked with Hispanic Americans all my life, I'm always dumbfounded by the issue.
I assumed it was because east coast elites just weren't around Hispanics in any large numbers like those of us from California and the South West. Even my undocumented friends (wife is in Restaurant industry) aren't as concerned about immigration policies as much as my upper middle class progressive brothers and sisters.
The difference between what is a hot topic on social media (usually driven by vocal minority activists) and what is important among real working middle class people is astounding.
This is one area where I think Republicans have an advantage over Democrats.
For instance... Republicans hot issue right now (mandates, opening businesses, Covid stuff)... lots of people care about in daily life.
Whereas things like Student Loan Forgiveness and defunding police just aren't important to most peoples daily lives.
I really am curious as to what will happen if the Democrats win the two Georgia seats. I imagine it could actually hurt the Democrats in a small way. They can paper over internal policy differences when they have the Republican Senate to blame, but if they have a path through the Senate, the moderate vs progressive disagreements really will be magnified.
All I know is sending money to people is always a winning strategy.
Also... the weed episode with Karl Smith is great. First time Ive listed to the weeds podcast.
The point about leftists' view of FDR is also true about Lula. I came of age in Brazil in the Lula years, and I clearly remember that "true" leftists despised the guy as a sellout to neoliberalism and corrupt. That's why I think it's hilarious when today I see progressives both in Brazil and the US idolizing the guy.
Come on Matt, we can't compare Japanese internment camps to what Obama did to Yemen. The human rights violations are not of the same order of magnitude.
On the global stage, FDR was unambiguously a good guy and helped save the world from the Axis. Obama, on the other hand, was bad! And now we have to listen to him complain about how "the system" coerced him into drone striking shepherds.
You're right, they're not comparable. One was a military action that ended up killing civilians by accident, the other was isolating entire groups of civilians due to their ethnicity
Yemen is a modern day Holocaust.
The main person responsible for the hundreds of thousands of dead are the United States and Obama. Their proxy (Saudi Arabia) has been slaughtering people, blowing up school buses, etc. with US weapons, intelligence, and approval.
I really like this post and am pretty impressed by how much history you're bringin in, Matt. It's excellent!
It seems like FDR employed a strategy I've heard you argue for before Matt: frame racial issues in more universal values to gain popular support. Like he ended the sharecropping system under the guise of preparing America for war in WWII. The new deal never explicitly targeted African Americans, but helped them implicitly as a way to get America out of the Great Depression. Not to say there weren't a lot of areas that could have been improved, but it seems like he was clearly in a political bind where racial equality issues were going to alienate major portions of his constituency, so he verbally made nods to white southerners which gave him the room to maneuver for better outcomes for African Americans he would never have been able to help if he were more explicit. It's a flip from the current way Democrats do this: talk about everything as a racial justice issue, when those same policies would also benefit the country at large.
For anyone looking for additional discussion of the New Deal and related issues around race/class/inequality: https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no4/between-obama-and-coates
It seems pretty significant here that Democrats will be unable to deliver meaningful material support unless they win control of the Senate. After all, Trump seems to have received credit for economic policies (stimulus checks/enhanced unemployment) that Democrats advocated.
In general I agree with this. In fact, I've been trying to get Jared Bernstein to advocate a School Modernization Act as an important node of Biden's "infrastructure" plan. The basic idea is to concentrate on rehabbing and rebuilding the hundreds of old, decrepit schools in both urban and rural areas. The advantages of such a focus are almost too numerous to count: environmental, health, economic. The historical analysis of the New Deal is right--especially about the centrality of economic issues. But something your analysis lacks is a focus on the impact of the ND on Black women, almost all of whom worked in domestic service or agriculture work and who were essential family breadwinners. Sadie T. M. Alexander (first Black woman to earn a PhD in economics, from Penn) focused on their plight intently, arguing before the PA legislature that Social Security should not bypass these women. In short, the impact of excluding Black women from the New Deal devastated many Black families. There's much more to be said about this, but for now, just keep it in mind.