according to my twitter feed it seems like the most existentially important issue of our times is canceling the student loan debt of upper middle class knowledge workers
I have said this before, but I would be very happy with a 10k loan forgiveness. Despite who gets airtime in the media, most of the actual loan defaults occur with people with low loan balances but no degree, and it will wipe out the debt for most of those people + a lot of people who took out loans to attend a public college.
But I would rather they did something to get tuition under control instead.
Turn off (or at least turn down) the free money spigot. No loans without strict conditions on the universities receiving them, e.g., minimum average salary upon graduation.
We could hope that this would lead to the administrations reducing their size, but since the administrations themselves would be deciding how to allocate the reduced funds I have my doubts they would unemploy themselves. After all, previous rounds of budget cuts haven’t done so.
You're right - the administrations would remain unchanged; they'd simply eliminate or phase out more full-time teaching positions and replace them with adjuncts. Problem solved!
Oh, right, fair point. But I hope it would at least slow the growth. Still, they would probably start slashing costs in other places, like hiring even more adjuncts to teach.
One thing that may be worth noting, which I think is rarely understood: an R1 university already brings in a lot more from federal research dollars than it does from tuition. So you can't just get rid of all the professors, who obtain those dollars and the massive indirects that come along with them, either. If tuition is limited, the administration may try to grow more on the research side.
What might be interesting is to see a greater separation between the research and teaching parts of universities, but now I'm just daydreaming.
I assumed by "they" and "Dems" we meant the government—do you think the government has hiring and firing power at universities (let alone the ability to eliminate entire job positions)? It seems like that would be pretty remarkable government overreach and not something I'd expect them to be able to do efficiently.
Regarding reducing guarantees, as I said in another comment I have no idea how this would result in smaller university administrations—that isn't what previous rounds of budget cuts have accomplished.
I thinkbit would probably be a good idea on balance, to cancel student loan debt, although I'm concerned about the immediate inflatin implications. However, it strikes me as off how important people make this out to be. Student load debt can be rough, but most people whobhave student loan debt are better off than if they hadn't gone to college.
I mean I don't blame people for supporting a bad policy that would result in them personally getting tens of thousands of dollars. I'd do the same (but that doesn't mean it's not bad policy).
The comparison to PPP is kind of disingenuous. PPP was designed with a provision that it would be cancelled if employers didn't lay off workers during COVID. It was called a loan but (insofar as it is cancellable) it was effectively a grant intended to subsidize payrolls.
The rules are pretty clear that you had to maintain employment/compensation and use most of the money directly on payroll (of course, money is fungible). Are people cheating/gaming the system? Wouldn't surprise me. But it doesn't change the fact that the expectation and intent of these loans was that they would function more as grants and that the intended beneficiary were really workers who would otherwise have been laid off.
Was there a better way to design the program or accomplish this goal? ¯\_( )_/¯. My recollection was that it was designed this way because it was necessary to allow them to shovel as much money out the door as quickly as possible to limit the impacts of a national emergency. "Waste fraud and abuse" is a cost you pay to ensure that you are getting the program to everyone who you want to get it to as fast as you can.
But ultimately saying "we forgave this loan to businesses that was designed to be forgiven if it was used to benefit workers, so we should also forgive this other loan that was expressly not designed to be forgiven which was intended to benefit (and typically did benefit) the borrowers" is a bit of a non sequitur.
Just anecdotal, but I know (1) a couple and (2) a sole proprietorship who both got PPP loans wiped away for their businesses. What payroll they were protecting, I have no idea.
First off, my comment was clearly sarcastic, but yes I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the establishment cares more about giving money to businesses then it does to people. I wasn’t party to the PPP discussions, but as far as how the program was structured: unsecured loans accruing interest at 1% with no payments due for a year, of which most were even forgiven before that date…you don’t have to be a genius to figure it out. Oh and I bet you didn’t know that if you should negative book income in 2019 than you weren’t even eligible. Only businesses that reported positive income the prior year were eligible for funds.
Hell, TARP funds were immensely more punitive than this and yet the level of complaining about the program is completely different: those assholes at least paid it back. PPP was the largest permanent monetary expansion since I don’t even know when.
Look at the loan to deposit ratio in the banking system. Some of that is partially distorted by the fed, but most of it ramps up at the same time the C&I call code ramps down ie a ppp loan disappeared and what was left was just a bank deposit.
Think of student loans as the opposite of inheritance taxes - a poor tax on people that have don't family money. It may not be the most important issue, but student financial aid reform is a clear-cut equal opportunity issue that should be addressed to create a more fair society, instead of one where intergenerational wealth disparities are compounded.
The challenge, of course, is doing it in a way that doesn't lead to inefficiency and cost inflation. Whether it's healthcare or education, adding a third party payor to the mix creates bad incentives for providers that need to be countered with structural reforms to reward efficiency rather than bloat.
Except the people advocating for it never actually talk about reform in the future, only giving themselves a one time get out of jail free card. Kids were in high school get shit out of it. It’s pure selfishness on their part. They are not serious people.
The mechanism by which progressives got to this conclusion is interesting. They convinced themselves that there was a secret cache of voters, that actually aggressively's progressive legislation was _necessary_ to win.
"The way to get one thing I want is actually to get two things I want" is always dangerous reasoning.
They really do believe they’re so blindingly correct they can’t even imagine a good faith counter argument. That’s why they’re insufferable to talk to.
To be fair, that’s true of plenty of people across the political spectrum. It’s just that there’s no risk of me talking to people at most points on the political spectrum.
The "secret cache of voters" was the explicit theory behind the Bernie Sanders campaign (2020 edition). Not only did they not want to reach out to never-Trump Republicans, but they wanted to also take the "PMC" wing of the existing Democratic coalition and throw it overboard in order to attract and make room for the secret non-voters.
Yeah, I think Matt is under-estimating, here, the ability of prog college activists to talk themselves into the idea that the reason the youth vote is so chronically depressed is because young voters are waiting for the socialist of their dreams to inspire them to come out, as opposed to simply being more interested in their jobs and social lives.
Just mechanically on the numbers, if you could somehow cause the existing youth vote to expand to the rate of the senior vote, while the partisan tilt within it stayed the same, you would suddenly have overwhelming progressive victories all over purple states. I'm actually not sure that there are that many prog young people, though -- young people who vote are generally more partisan, in either direction, than their non-voting peers. The non-voters are squishier on both economic issues, and on some of the cutting edge social issues. (Although I would expect young people _very_ broadly to understand the housing shortage as a crisis, just due to their lived experience, in a way that older voters don't.)
I think many millennial progs, who were just coming of age around 2008, saw Obama win in 2008 with huge youth vote enthusiasm and high turnout, saw Democrats passing a watered-down agenda that disappointed them, and then saw Democrats get destroyed in 2010 as turnout cratered, and used these data point to conclude that Democrats lost in 2010 because the youth vote didn't show up and that they didn't show up because they were disappointed by the Democrat's agenda not going far enough.
This set of assumptions, of course, ignores a ton of other more important factors pertaining to how Democrats won in 2008 and then lost in 2010.
I'd say in particular it ignores the question of _why_ the bills passed in '09-'10 were watered down relative to what Obama supporters might have hoped for. Like, even before Ted Kennedy died, we never had sixty votes for, say, single payer healthcare. Hell, we never had _fifty_ votes for single payer healthcare. You could've had President Sanders, and unless we also elected enough Democratic Senators who wanted to play ball, we wouldn't get the Sanders agenda.
I agree the story you're telling here captures what a lot of people seem to think, I just find it frustrating. It seems like an attempt to take the politics out of politics. You have to work to elect the best person you can, given the electorate you're facing. We used to have a Democratic Senator from Wyoming! We still have one from Montana! Those folks have to answer to an electorate that is _much_ more conservative than the median voter of the country, and if you want to pass some big legislative package, you're gonna have to earn their votes. That's just the system we have. Unless we abolish the Senate, or at least admit DC and PR (and get some center-lefty Senators from PR, which would not be a given -- Puerto Ricans have the same kind of social-conservative tilt as a lot of Hispanic ethnicities), we have to campaign within the system we have, not the one we might want or wish to have. :-P
I appreciate you writing this very much, Matt, even though I know you're going to get absolutely torched for it. I've been pointing out for the past several years the bizarre disconnect between the progressive rhetoric of "Trump's a *literal* fascist who's going to declare himself president for life and *literally* re-enslave black people, reduce women to the status of 'The Handmaid's Tale,' and genocide the American LGBTQ population," with the continued progressive-business-as-usual take of, "Federalism is terrible and the states as sovereign entities should be destroyed; as much governing power as possible should be transferred to the central government and administrative agencies should be given maximum discretion to pursue their missions without interference by the courts."
I mean, for about 30 seconds in fall of 2020, progressives dialed down the latter, but it's really stunning to me to witness people in progressive spaces who are unironically talking about the urgent necessity of "blue state secession" flip five minutes later to how Biden should issue executive orders on gun control, overriding whatever DeSantis is doing today on COVID, federalizing the Texas National Guard to protect access to abortion, etc., etc. A world in which the latter is happening is a world in which the former is basically impossible. If someone sincerely thinks a totalitarian dictator is inevitably going to seize the presidency in the near future, then if that person is sane they would want maximum devolution of power *away* from the central government, and the failure to adopt that logical position gives away the game -- either the speaker is deeply insincere about their fears of such a takeover or that speaker is a totalitarian at heart themself and just hopes that someone who favors their views can seize that power in the future.
I tend to discount Option C because if the problem was mainly idiocy you'd expect to see a lot more "born-again federalists," who seem to very much still be the exception rather than the rule.
Progressives often act like they're too righteous to need to worry about reality. Centrists often act like it's 1982 and a couple of drinks with Republicans can fix everything. Journalists often amplify their audience's delusions. A rising tide of Patreon/Substack grifters is telling people that progress is easy and is only not happening due to deliberate betrayals by the leadership.
It's really a very bad system and it's not surprising it's working so poorly.
I absolutely would have taken this deal, and I think progressives would have taken it too. But it was even more of a non-starter for Manchin than BBB. The Democrats didn't make a calculated gamble that BBB was more important than democracy protection - democracy protection was never possible. And it wasn't possible because Manchin (and Sinema) unequivocally refused to entertain any changes that didn't have the imprimatur of the Republican Party. However, Manchin and Sinema expressed various shades of willingness to do reconciliation bills, including BBB.
The reason the Dems didn't run in 2020 on enacting none of the Democratic Party's ideas is not only because they wanted to take advantage of Trump's unpopularity to enact their platform - it's also that there's no viable cross coalition to make. There is no democracy-supportive Republican party (or Republican people) with which to form an alliance, and the Democrats have enough votes to take control of the country themselves. And I'm not saying this because I think Republicans are evil monsters who love fascism - it's just not in their political interest to support ending gerrymandering or reforming the Senate or the Supreme Court.
Which is why the hypothetical doesn't really make sense. These aren't common sense bipartisan procedural reforms - these are perceived by the other side (in some cases, correctly) as substantive advantages for the Democratic Party that are much more dangerous to them than 10 BBBs. There's no viable coalition for political reform outside the democratic party. And even within the Democratic Party you have a handful of veto point holders who strongly believe that these reforms are so substantively favorable to the Democrats that they can't be entertained without 10 Republican senators agreeing to them.
I think the point is that they didn't even try. There would have been some horse trading to get the votes democrat or republican, but no such effort was made.
There's nothing to try. There's no trade to make. DC Statehood, gerrymandering, court reform, these are all red lines for both Manchin and every single Republican. And we know this because Manchin and the Republicans were very explicit about it.
And any time Manchin showed any interest in talking about this, Democrats swiftly moved to give him whatever he wanted. When he came out with his voting rights proposal, Democrats fell over themselves to accept it, even though it created voter ID rules that many Democrats had previously opposed. But there's just no actual movement possible here, as long as Manchin is the 50th vote. Where there was a possibility for horse trading - the infrastructure bill, BBB - the Democrats worked hard on a deal.
The thing that makes us different than the Czechs or the Israelis is that there are only two parties, and one of those parties understands itself to benefit from democracy reforms, while the other regards those reforms as a mortal threat. In Israel or the Czech Republic, the various small parties can imagine themselves benefitting from those reforms. But how could Lisa Murkowski benefit from Biden getting to make Supreme Court picks? How would Romney benefit from Utah not being able to gerrymander? There's no deal to make.
If you immediately demonize the other party and give up, that's not a problem with the other party. Why not a real debate instead of a fantasy debate on MSNBC? If it's important, force the issue.
BBB was a half assed effort by house Democrats. Voting for the bill with the right list of programs was more important than passing a functional bill. If the goal was passing the legislation, we'd have had a reasonably solid bill but now instead of nothing. If we cared about democratic reform we'd be working hard on legislation instead of whining on Twitter. If we cared about climate change, BBB would not be hung up on childcare.
Sure, the House version of BBB was ugly. But if Manchin had said "Here's my version of the $1.75T BBB" my guess is that it would have passed. He could have, but he didn't (so far?) With great power, comes great, well, not responsibility but rather great jerking people around.
It's not a question of demonization. You can be as nice to them as you want - it's just not in their interest. I say this with a complete absence of malice. Just like you can be as nice to the Democrats as you want, they're just not gonna vote in favor of creating electoral colleges for gubernatorial elections or giving each county an equal number of seats in the legislature or giving only presidents who lose the popular vote extra supreme court seats to fill. You cannot expect the Republican Party to agree to weaken their ability to hold power.
Doubtful. No DC/PR Senators until 2022 at the earliest; gerrymandering's impact is grossly overstated; the Supreme Court expansion will be slowly phased in. Given that the Democrats would be virtually certain to lose the House in 2022 (especially with no other legislation to their credit), there would be *no* climate change legislation passed in 2023 or 2024.
Nothing prevents DC and PR from seating their delegations immediately. New states don't have to wait until the next elections to fill vacancies, just like old states.
ETA: But yes, assuming Manchin's condition holds, climate would be deferred until at least 2022.
Thank you for this comment - reading this piece, and especially the comments, was making me feel crazy because nobody seemed to acknowledge that Democrats are focused on relatively normal stuff _because they have no chance of addressing the radically dangerous stuff._
I think there’s an under-appreciated “chicken and the egg” aspect to all of this. Republicans are acting in maniacal, anti-democratic ways because they perceive Democrats to be acting in maniacal, anti-American ways. Is their perception accurate? Personally I think it’s warped by social media and their long-standing right-wing propaganda media universe. But it helps to see that an aggressive push to the left with policy is PART OF the justification the right uses for why they need a power grab to “save America.” It’s impossible to predict if they would perceive your recommended course of action as an aggressive Democratic power grab in order to substantiate their own.
Yes, and… I think both sides use the other side’s warped perception of reality as an excuse to grow into it. “Obama’s not a socialist anti-American, that’s ridiculous!” would have been totally true to say in 2009. Eventually you had influential liberals saying, “Well actually, maybe that was the problem, he wasn’t socialist enough! Maybe American democracy is fundamentally rooted in white supremacy and needs to be burned to the ground!” A self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Now, if your point it “Republicans gonna hysteric, and there’s no amount of being sane we on the left can do to stop it,” you might be right. But there are certainly things some people are doing to make it worse.
>> Democratic platforms have gotten more left-wing
Not just that, but at least in the snippets Matt pulled, they've become largely performative documents that "call out" and complain without proposing solutions or promising action.
There's a striking difference in phrasing in the 2008 vs 2020 paragraphs. In 2008, there were a lot of "we will" statements. In 2020, there were none. It's all complaining and posturing with nothing whatsoever about how they will make it better.
The motives of the extremely progressive part of the left, I think, can be summarized by one unifying theme: they want to feel as if they're living through a time of revolution. Any proposal that would help save democracy in non-revolutionary ways (as opposed to packing the courts, etc.) is unwelcome. Any policy that would help to reduce racial inequality without upending established systems is dismissed. To me, this explains why people of this particular persuasion seem to be steadfastly dedicated to strategies that will almost surely hurt Democrats.
Combo of "the worse the better"-ism with a belief that "the other side is antidemocratic and that's good!" Having the country be permanently dominated by an entrenched minority is the ideal end-state for these people - they just want themselves to be that minority.
Yeah, I think I agree with this. To me it looks like more of a Twitter/media phenomenon. Congresspeople probably don't hold these views, but those in very blue districts might fear getting primaried if they don't pursue the interests of the Twitter/media crowd.
Personally, I’m getting a bit tired of everything being called a “five-alarm fire”. There’s enough stress going on in our own lives that I’m frankly just starting to ignore stories about what bad things the republicans are going to do next. And if even self described media junkies start tuning out, imagine how it must be for the rest.
We need people like Dave Roberts, Ian Millhiser, etc. to actually like, bet on whether or not democracy is going to fail. There needs to be a way for people to put their money where their mouths are.
man, reminiscing about the 2008 platform & Obama always warms my heart - and leads me off on a tangent...
Isn't the real problem that Obama could be incredibly reasonable, but the GOP tried to stop him anyhow - and critically, the voters did not punish them for thwarting Obama's moderate agenda? I don't know what to do with that actual history. Like every instinct I have says Dems should try to replay "Obama 08", but really, we tried that and it didn't work out the way I would have hoped...
I think the big problem wasn't policy moderation, but PROCEDURAL moderation. Rerun 2008, but get rid of the filibuster (and be a bit less deficit averse.)
It’s notable that the sticking point then was Joe Lieberman at 60 votes. I suppose the technology of using reconciliation to do big things hadn’t been developed yet.
You don’t remember how the Affordable Care Act got passed in the end? They did try to get it through bipartisan process, when that didn’t work they had to negotiate with themselves (to get Lieberman et Al on board, then Kennedy dies and they were forced to resort to reconciliation. This year, with 50 vote majority and the last 10 years experience of how Republicans operate, reconciliation is the starting point.
Just to nitpick, the ACA was passed in the Senate over the filibuster, 60-39. The House also passed it as written to avoid another Senate vote. Reconciliation was used for a second bill with some minor fixes immediately after.
Even I didn't remember it being two separate bills until I just looked it up.
The U.S. has never been a democracy. Abolish the Senate, strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction, adopt the national popular vote compact, and the U.S. would still be a republic with huge House districts that only prominent, well-funded candidates could win.
I suspect MY’s true fear is that the US might become a big Wisconsin, where 45% of the voters can assemble legislative majorities because Democratic votes are inefficiently clustered in Milwaukee and Dane counties. This is actually a threat, but Wisconsin is hardly hell.
In the UK, the Tories haven’t polled over 44% since 1970. They have consistently polled less than the combined votes of the parties to their left, yet they’ve often had parliamentary majorities. Sometimes, there has been a Tory government even though 60% of the electorate voted for candidates to the Torys’ left. Britain isn’t hell either. Nor are there many formal safeguards. Nothing other than decency and maybe the queen prevents a Tory parliament from postponing the next election indefinitely.
If Matt wants to say America is at risk of a 4 to 30 year period where legislative majorities are based on a 45% vote share, I don’t disagree. It’s just that prospect is hardly terrifying.
How is this not terrifying? Like I live in Florida which is using the power of the state to target my political views from being expressed. It doesn't care about the teacher who literally says she thinks dinosaurs and men lived together, but that racism still effects people living today in subtle ways is unacceptable.
Then leveled up to a much more powerful government, by a coalition which has a lot of axes to grind with people like me even participating in life.
"but that racism still effects people living today in subtle ways is unacceptable."
People aren't being targeted for saying that.
The pushback is against the "anti-racist/CRT/woke" agenda which says that all white people are oppressors. That says stupid shit like math or being on time is racist. That is trying to re-segregate us by dividing us into affinity groups, and that says the single most important thing you can know about a person is the color of their skin, not the content of their character.
I don't know how you have certainty from the text of these laws. They all contain vague lines that are designed to allow people to be harassed by lunatic parents. And it's only against people with liberal views. The teacher who says she thinks dinosaurs and mankind coexisted is totally safe but there's no way to tell what is safe.
"Wisconsin, where 45% of the voters can assemble legislative majorities because Democratic votes are inefficiently clustered in Milwaukee and Dane counties."
I think the actual number is more like 40%. In 2018, Republicans got 44.75% of the vote but 63/99 of the assembly seats. As wikipedia notes "Based on the 2018 results, the tipping point district was District 29, which the Republicans won by a margin of 12.12%, therefore Democrats would have needed to win the statewide popular vote by a margin of 20.36% to win a majority of seats." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Wisconsin_State_Assembly_election
(Also, clustering certainly plays a role in this imbalance, but there's gerrymandering in there too.)
"In the UK, the Tories haven’t polled over 44% since 1970. They have consistently polled less than the combined votes of the parties to their left, yet they’ve often had parliamentary majorities."
This is an unfair comparison. *No party* has polled over 44% since 1970 (in no small part because of third parties), but this cuts both ways: Sometimes the conservative party wins a majority with ~40%, and sometimes the Labour party wins with ~40%. If it cut both ways in WI, I'd be less concerned about it. However, it doesn't; the Democrats will never win in WI with 40%. They won't even win with 55%.
I’m more concerned than David because the WI status quo is insane and unsustainable, but less concerned than you because it cannot be replicated nationwide.
Could you explain what you mean by this? Not all states can be put into a WI-like situation? (No surprise there; most states aren't swingy.) The congress can't be put into a WI-like state?
First, most states don't have an electoral geography that lends itself to this quite so well, aside from the old rust belt states. WI, MI, OH, PA, and IN are about it. PA is somewhat protected by the makeup of the state Supreme Court, MI now has a non-partisan redistricting commission, and OH/IN/WI are already lost causes.
The West Coast and New England are so blue that you'd have to gerrymander *to avoid* disproportionately blue maps.
The New South and Mountain West are growing too fast in urban areas to do anything except play defense.
Second, to pull a Wisconsin everywhere would require you to control every state's redistricting at every ten-year interval, which is somewhere between astronomically unlikely and outright impossible.
Third, all of the more extreme alternatives (tossing of votes, etc) will provoke a hell of a lot worse problem than a period of herrenvolk democracy.
I mostly agree, but I'd argue that some of the new south states are probably already in that situation (and others may well grow into it).
Take the 2018 NC state house of representatives election. Democrats win the popular vote by 2.36 pp, but only win 55/120 seats. It looks like the tipping point seat had a margin of 5.6 pp, so roughly speaking, democrats would need to win the popular vote by a margin of 2.36+5.6=7.96 pp to win the chamber --- and that was 8 years after the last census! I'm sure the legislature is going to shore things up.
I'm guessing that GA and TX are in similar positions; it has just been a moot point so far because democrats haven't won a majority of the popular vote.
Also, ME and NH would like to have a word with you over your New England comments...
TX and GA could easily turn into dummymanders in a bad year, but yes, the New South is still going to be a challenge.
As for ME and NH, they're 4 of New England's 21 districts. Broadly speaking, the point stands.
Also, point #4: CA, WA, and NJ have Democratic enough electorates that they could, if this were perceived to be necessary, backtrack on their redistricting commissions via referendum. The former two could easily drown *every* GOP district in the state very safely.
Again, though, the current coalitions are not, IMO, durable. They're going to break faster than gerrymandering can hold back the tide
You're literally describing the status quo, in which we need a smaller majority of the vote to win in the House than the Presidency, let alone the Senate!
Again, gerrymandering is bad. It's anti-democratic, results in incentives that polarize the hell out of politics, and ends in bad policy.
But it's just not *DOOM*.
The Democrats are going to lose in 2022 because they've mismanaged a great many policy issues, COVID wasn't as amenable to being forcibly retired by vaccination as we hoped, and they've failed to silence or marginalize the loud and obnoxious voices that cost them the last few Senate and House seats in 2020. But they're virtually guaranteed to lose the popular vote for the House as well, which is the core reason they'll lose.
That sucks, because it will take decades, if ever, for the GOP to become a reasonable voice on policy. But it's hardly the end of American democracy; the GOP will eventually screw up, badly, because it can't govern. And when it does, another wave year will come along in which the Democrats seize control of both houses of Congress. It's likely that CA and WA will rescind or otherwise coopt their existing non-partisan redistricting process at some point, if things go far enough off the rails.
And this is all assuming that the current coalitions remain broadly intact, which I think is a very unwarranted assumption, given how much has changed just since 2000.
The future is hard to predict, but I simply don't see the GOP being *able* to create the conditions for a violent revolution.
"However, it doesn't; the Democrats will never win in WI with 40%. They won't even win with 55%."
The Republican share in Wisconsin isn't ordained. Dems can choose to start living in a more efficient voting manner. Instead of clumped up where it doesn't do any good.
IE stop the great sort where Dems move to Cities, and Republicans dominate the rural areas
if i were the hive mind controlling all democrats i would simply ensure they all live in areas that are politically maximally advantageous regardless of how that might affect their individual lives
Re vote efficiency, the worst that will happen for Dems is that purple states like WI, MI and OH will have Republican gerrymanders, but NY, CA, WA, MD and MA will have Democratic gerrymanders. Republicans might win with 45% of the two party vote, but even that is pushing it.
"Republicans might win with 45% of the two party vote, but even that is pushing it."
Just to clarify, you're talking about at the national level now?
Truth be told, I get more worked up about gerrymandering for state legislatures* than for congress. Gerrymandering congressional districts is bad, but like you point out, some of its effects can be partly cancelled out. The same doesn't happen within a state.
* Especially for states without a ballot initiative system (e.g. WI). MI has an independent redistricting process (thanks to a ballot initiative), so I'm not worried about an R gerrymander there. OH has a ballot initiative system, so they could change things if they wanted to (they tried a few years ago).
the 45% figure is a national figure. Wisconsin is about the limit of what gerrymandering can do, and republicans will never get an ideal gerrymander in every state
Re the UK, it is true that Labour hasn’t gotten north of 45% either *but* the lib dems are much more like labour than the tories.
If the tories ever showed their fangs, the lib dems would collapse. the snp might survive because it’s vote is concentrated very efficiently and they could govern in a coalition with labour
I'm not knowledgeable enough about UK politics to directly argue, but there must be meaningful daylight between lib dems and labour, or else the lib dems wouldn't get votes.
I understand that the lib dem/conservative tie-up was considered weird, but likewise, there must have been some overlap or it wouldn't have happened.
I'm not quite sure how to interpret your "fangs" comment. The lib dems effectively pressure the conservatives to moderate? And if they stopped moderating, the lib dems would join labour? If so, it sounds like the lib dems are basically getting what they want.
Was the CARES Act worse than Brexit? The biggest unforced error in recent American politics was Iraq, and all that had very little to do with Congress.
I know you don’t believe in or give a flying fuck about climate change, which *will* get into existential threat territory if we let it fester for 40 years… but just looking at things you care about:
The healthcare system will continue to erode, physical infrastructure will be under-invested, regulation will systematically tilt away from labor and towards capital, no major reforms to housing supply will take place…
Also, if climate change is so threatening to you, you ought to want less democracy, not more. People hate gas taxes and carbon taxes and like their cars and furnaces. I like burning wood on my fireplace. I will give up my purely aesthetic carbon spewing when private jets and first class air travel are outlawed.
Or we could, you know… roll over the grid to green generation faster than depreciation dictates, create a closed-cycle system for aviation fuel and other necessary carbon-intensive applications, scale EV production, and live otherwise as we do now.
Amusing how the horseshoe wraps between climate change denier nuts and the deep green nuts…
EDIT: Your wood-burning fireplace is, by definition, carbon-neutral.
This article could just as easily be applied to Climate Change as it is to democracy. Democrats act like they think Climate Change is a pressing issue, but then it turns out that its less important than 5 years of matching grants for state Pre-K programs so...
If you think something is an A-1 important issue, you should compromise on the other issues to focus solely on that one. When you refuse to compromise on the rest, people don't believe you care about the first thing.
I would rather Democrats control Congress. One of the best things about going to Canada is knowing the waitresses have access to quality health care. It bothers me whenever a person willing to work a shit job doesn’t. Canadian waitresses also have better teeth and smile more, which creates a good vibe.
Still, tying my personal happiness to acts of Congress seems masochistic. Realistically, my prosperity depends upon the success of my law practice, the size of my wife’s bonus, the complexities of my grandfather’s estate, and whether my mother needs extended care before she dies. Other than allowing a depression to languish or making me a federal judge (pleeeeeeaase!!!) Congress won’t do much to affect my prosperity.
My happiness depends more upon my ability to win pickleball games and lose weight than anything else. My lifestyle isn’t that expensive. Owning our house and stocks gives us a decent cushion agsinst inflation.
Still, I’d really like the waitresses to have quality health care and better teeth.
Dems have become the party of the coastal professional class.
The SALT deduction doesn’t affect anyone that much. Anyone who is rich enough to benefit much from it is rich enough to not desperately need the deduction.
Put another way, SALT beneficiaries would benefit more from a promotion than from keeping the deduction and would be hurt more by losing their fancy job or business than by the SALT cap
The 13 colonies were hardly hell either, except for slaves, but a lot of people were willing to revolt, fight, and die to change the system. Preserving democracy isn’t really a matter of living conditions.
"It could be terrifying to people that might be targeted by Republicans."
Where's that list? The only people I could think of might be deporting illegal aliens.
As for the federal government, maybe we should be focused on making it less powerful then, so the thought of our opponent getting all that power isn't so scary
Well, “targeted” isn’t the right word here, but the people harmed by Trump’s undoing of environmental standards would have an interest in him not coming back. And of course reducing the government’s power wouldn’t help with that, since that’s exactly the harmful thing Trump did in that instance.
I don't want to exactly defend any of this, but I will say that I think it's more complex than them being just a bunch of Captain Planet villains. A couple years ago, when the mercury rules were being revised, I dug into the EPA's report justifying such a stringent standard as they wanted. Basically, through a long causal chain involving trace amounts of mercury getting into freshwater fish, being eaten by pregnant women, and causing IQ drops of a small fraction of a point, they were able to then aggregate these drops into a claimed significant economic impact on society (there are even more suppositions with weakly supported statistics in that chain that I know I'm forgetting now). Thus, this justified imposing costs on the order of tens of millions on companies to prevent the release of a small amount of mercury. It was hardly the most convincing argument in my opinion, and it made me realize that these are very complex decisions with myriad tradeoffs, not all-or-nothing propositions.
Every rule has a cost. Maybe you think the benefits of the rule outweigh those costs. I might even agree with you depending on the rule. But that doesn't mean the costs aren't there.
Trump did talk a good game. And he did shine a spotlight on some legitimate problems (China especially). Other than that he claimed a lot of "beautiful" victories and accomplished very little.
Yes, "illegal aliens" (read: mothers and father and sons and daughters who are typically more law-abiding than naturalized citizens) would be on that list, as would women who want abortions and the doctors that provide them, transgender people and probably gay people, Black people who seem a little too edgy (better shoot 'em, just to be on the safe side), and -- the biggest targets of all -- the poor.
But yeah, if you're a well-off straight cis White guy, Wisconsin's no biggie!
I'm a safe legal and rare kind of guy, so it's not like I have zero sympathy for the fetus. But if you can't think of one policy conservatives support that targets women who get abortions (or criminalizes poverty, for Christ's sake!) then I'm not sure we share enough premises to have a productive argument.
The feds can (and do) do very little on social issues like abortion and trans rights, and with the built-in direction of SCOTUS that won’t change. Same with criminal justice—the federal criminal system is very small compared to state ones and has very different issues (the FBI is nothing like the CPD or NYPD, and its sentencing regime is strange and bad in a very different way from state regimes). This is a very weak case for federal elections mattering. Climate, defense, and health policy are federal-dominated on the other hand.
Also, Britain has no real judicial, bicameralism, or federalism constraints, so complete Tory dominance is more complete.
2) I’m 44. And yes, so despair of political progress before I’m an old fart. My evolution since the Obama coalition spent its energy circa 2010 has been to focus more on private prosperity and happiness and less on politics. The poorer commenters on this blog might be happier if they devoted some of the energy they put into politics/commentary to their careers.
1) American progress has been more organic than political. We’ve consistently developed better technologies that have made workers more productive and politics have given us enough stability for trade to flourish, unlike Europe where war has often disrupted commerce and trade barriers didn’t help. When political progress has occurred in this country, it has usually happened in response to a crises (succession, the great depression, pearl harbor, maybe the pandemic) rather than through a coalition winning an election and legislating progress. Lincoln didn’t run on abolishing slavery in 1860 nor did FDR run on the New Deal. No one ever ran on “let’s have an industrial revolution” it’s just that the federal government was 4% of gdp, and markets functioned.
Your “what is your line” question is interesting. A lot of my friends talked about emigrating when Trump was elected. A few had the scratch to do it and stay upper middle class. No one left.
I used to admire Canada. My wife and I thought about emigrating, but they are experiencing a real estate bubble and professional salaries there are lower, so we would take a life style hit. We could probably get a visa because my wife is an accountant and we could scrape together $500k to get sn investment based visa if we had to, but that would tie up a lot of our liquidity and I’d really only do that if the Republicans were out for me. They aren’t. Worse case I have to pay to keep my son in private school to avoid forced prayer. An administration that drove people like me to emigrate couldn’t poll 45% and wouldn’t last
Could most people, if they didn't read the news, tell when the presidency changed hands? Other than a tax cut, what was the *material* impact of Trump being president for the lives of the vast majority of people?
I may be overlooking something obvious, but it doesn't immediately come to me. I'm not saying he wasn't terrible in a lot of ways, but at least not in ones affecting our everyday lives, at least on the timescale of just a few years.
A lot of environmental regulations were undone, which led to more people getting sick from pollutions of various sorts. And while this may open a can of worms, I think a more competent administration would have given us much better Covid results.
But as I said in a comment above, material conditions are kind of beside the point. There weren't many everyday life effects of the American Revolution, as far as I know, at least not in the short term. But philosophically the change was seismic.
I'm pretty liberal(you may have noticed already). All my friends and family are liberal. The idea of running away to a foreign country because your side lost an election seems completely bonkers to me. Hunter S. did 'off' himself over Bush and he was definitely bonkers.
I did, on the other hand, give a fair amount of money to numerous 2020 Democratic candidates and probably read too many political blogs.
Monetary policy was definitely on the ballot throughout the the Gilded Age. That doesn’t mean industrial policy was. Did Bryant run on nationalizing the railroads? Deindustrislizing? A wealth tax? No, and he was the most radical nominee before 1936.
Monetary policy was on the ballot because the government controlled the money supply. But industrial policy wasn’t really on the ballot because all the mainstream politicians were pro capitalist
What do you think tariffs and internal improvements *were*?
That’s your industrial policy, right there.
The only reason the US is a continent-spanning, developed nation instead of an agrarian backwater clinging tenuously to the Atlantic seaboard is that every generation has seen at least one sitting government with the balls to update national industrial policy for the then-modern era, until Reagan.
I don’t know where we’ll head without one, but “Chile” seems a good guess.
Because I don't think big changes should be forced through like that. I don't want Democrats passing big bills then the Republicans reversing those big bills 4 years later.
I do—if the Dems pass unpopular legislation, the Republicans should be able to undo it with a majority. Of course, it’s not always so simple—their failure to repeal the ACA shows that it’s easy to underestimate the popularity of social safety net legislation and overestimate the popularity of undoing it.
"the reality is that we've been having a growing demand for progress for several decades now, and barely anything has happened."
This is the part I don't get. The public generally hates change unless there is a genuine emergency and there have been two in the last 30+ years (9/11 and Covid). Exactly what changed do you think the masses are crying out for that isn't happening? If anything, I think that the challenge Progressives have is that they are pushing for social changes faster than the public is willing to accept and getting a lot of blow back because of it.
I think the problem with all the items you mention is that change is desired, but often in competing directions. To take the most obvious example - immigration reform in the Bush era was elite driven and the majority of the population is generally pretty antagonistic to significant immigration.
The other major problem is there isn't an easy solution to most of these without major trade offs. The cost disease issue is the prime example of this - if there was a simple solution just waiting to be implemented, then why hasn't a single state gone out and done it?
Which is my major contention - there are very few issues with 60% of the public strongly on one side of an issue that doesn't get resolved pretty quickly.
If people wanted big change they could have voted the big change party in, and given them huge majorities.
Instead, they tend to vote the other party in, to stop those big changes.
Most big changes, close to 50% of the country doesn't want to see.
A big change should require big bi-partisan buy in.
The filibuster is supposed to stop that big change without the required buy in. It's possible to over come it. In fact the Democrats just did so with the infrastructure bill.
Failure to pass partisan BS like the BBB, HR1, or court packing is a sign the system is working as intended.
A lot of the hypothetical "save democracy" agenda looks to me like continuing the cycle of partisan procedural escalation. Ending the filibuster is a procedural escalation both parties have contemplated when they are in power but no one has done yet. Voting reforms would be difficult to do in a neutral way - there is some fundamental disagreement on what a fair voting system looks like - and at minimum would take some kind of bipartisan commission. A single-party voting reform bill would end up partisan even if they tried not to be, and I don't think they'd try very hard. Court-packing? STATE-packing? Come on.
That agenda sounds far *more* partisan than just trying to pass favored policies under the existing system. If you want to de-escalate our spiral away from democratic norms, burning down big parts of the current institutional structure doesn't sound like the most obvious place to start?
Well, because that wasn't the hypothetical Matt gave.
But yes, I do think there are plenty of potential procedural improvements out there. A federal anti-gerrymandering law seems like a good idea. I have no great love for the filibuster in the abstract - it's a key cause of "vetocracy" and gridlock. The Supreme Court as an institution would clearly benefit from term limits, as lifetime tenure incentivizes the appointment of the youngest plausible candidates and disincentivizes retirement even when clearly appropriate.
It's just that you can't do any of those things on a one-party basis in a way that would end up being fair or neutral. Let alone being *perceived* as fair and neutral, even if you thought you got close on substance. And we probably would need to cool down the overheated partisan cultural atmosphere before we'd have any chance of doing them on a bipartisan basis. Respectfully playing by the current institutional rules would be a good way to start cooling down IMO.
(I'm much less enthusiastic than Matt about court-packing or state-packing even in the abstract - those are just fundamentally partisan-driven proposals in my view)
I think what really happened is progressives convinced themselves that moderation / persuasion is for suckers- after all, the right rejected the 2012 “autopsy” report and swung to great electoral success in 2016. The problem is, as Matt has pointed out, that Trump really did moderate (at least in his campaign) - promising no entitlement cuts, and to get out of foreign wars. But it was hard to see given all the cultural red meat he was throwing.
I think a number of progressives really believe that there is a huge number of non-voters sitting on the sidelines who are discouraged by moderate timidity and just waiting to be excited by true progressive policies. I think this is also driving a lot of the anger towards Manchin and Sinema. It isn’t JUST that they are thwarting policy goals, in the progressive view they are also committing political malpractice.
If all this stuff is intrinsically popular, then there isn’t any need to prioritize. With the ACA (Obamacare) at some point most Democratic politicians realized it was electoral poison but the policy was important enough to do it anyway. If you really thought you were sending everyone down the plank, then you’d ficus on a handful of good, well designed programs that you could get by Manchin, and will stand the test of time (and Republican efforts to repeal), like the ACA But a lot of the BBB is a hot mess with a bunch of stuff done in a half assed way.
When they guy who thinks ACA is well designed (the gov is using its size to buy insurance at private rates) thinks BBB is half assed, you know it’s bad.
I don't think this is quite right. I think most partisan Democrats are deep enough in their echo chambers to think that a more left-wing agenda would be more popular with voters. Because that agenda is popular among their friends and online acquaintances. Many also have a cartoonish model of Republican voters where anyone who would consider voting for Trump is obviously a bigot and a moron so there's no point in trying to moderate to try to win their votes. So conveniently, the key to electoral victory is always to pass legislation that they think is good on the merits.
The GOP can, as David Abbott says below, tilt the playing field. I’m not sure that 45% is possible, but they can make it so a legislative trifecta requires them to get 48% of the vote, and preventing the Democrats from getting one requires just 46-7%.
That’s clearly and obviously bad.
But one of two things will happen: the Democrats will spend their time in the wilderness well until the GOP fucks up completely and they sweep to power prepared to make necessary changes… or the GOP will change on its own.
The contours of the current party system aren't some immutable law of nature, it will evolve out from under any attempt to lock it in permanently.
The more severe predictions of tossing election results are just going to result in an Avignon Presidency and all but the stupidest GOP leaders know it.
Matt and most of the commenters here are way too sanguine about democracy. Yes, Trump isn’t a fascist and American democracy won’t be transformed into dictatorship, but a world where Republicans further tilt the system in their favor is very imaginable. We are seeing a movement of Republicans at the state and local level that is laying the groundwork to give electors to Trump on the basis of BS claims of fraud, even if Biden actually won the state narrowly. We are also seeing Republicans further entrench their disproportionate gerrymandering advantage in the states they control. And, there’s a real risk the Supreme Court will start neutering democratically enacted laws by stripping Congress’ ability to delegate policy making to agencies like the EPA.
Plus, we have the fact that 70% of Republicans believe the election was stolen, and January 6.
Republicans are making it so that the system is stacked in their favor, and then signaling that they may refuse to accept a narrow Democratic victory, and possibly even take to the streets. It’s not the rise of facism, but it’s still scary.
The onus is on the folks who think it’s “scary” to freaking act like it. Stop embracing weird niche ideological bug-a-boos that piss off 60-80% of the electorate, vote in every election down to dog-catcher, and move to places where your vote will carry disproportionate impact if you’re able, which most of the rESisT crowd is.
I mean, many of us are! Although the “move” suggestion is just absurd—people want to be able to make a difference in their community. Isn’t it like telling people who are concerned about sex ed or CRT or whatever else in schools, “just move to another school district then”?
I would think the exact opposite logic applies, no? The point is to have impact. You can do that locally by staying and voting and running for office, but nationally you might need to go elsewhere to do it.
Yeah. I really try to avoid the hyperbolic, but sometimes outrageous seeming threats are real.
I believe there's pretty solid evidence that between election day and the inauguration, Trump, several of his advisors and friends, and several legislators were active participants or at least complicit witnesses in a conspiracy to overthrow the US election.
I'd love for someone to make a convincing argument as to why this is hyperbolic, but I haven't heard it yet.
Trump's go to move has always been to instigate chaos. Systems that have been thrown into chaos allow a much wider range of possible outcomes compared to systems operating normally and comfortably within the constraints of their design.
The integrity of our system was hanging on a handful of individuals. Any one of them could have thrown the election to the Supreme Court, whose decision would have been received by a large segment of the population as illegitimate regardless of which way it went.
Despite the fact that it didn't succeed, I think this was easily the most serious threat to the republic in the last 50 years, maybe 75 years.
If you don't agree with that, what would you say ranks higher?
"Any one of them could have thrown the election to the Supreme Court, whose decision would have been received by a large segment of the population as illegitimate regardless of which way it went."
For me, the threat really isn't about Trump per se.
It's more about how the current Republican party culture soundly places "loyalty to power" over "loyalty to doing what's right" and how successful they've been at punishing anyone who even tries to push back against this mantra, often drumming them out of politics.
Parties have always played hardball and punished members who push back against the party consensus, but imo the current crop of Republicans has taken this to a new level that I've never seen in my life. This has resulted in a willingness on the part of individuals to either do very bad things themselves, or sit by and watch while others do very bad things.
A good example of this was Mark Meadows allowing a dozen or so people to be exposed to COVID by Trump during debate prep sessions, putting Chris Christie in an ICU and at death's door.
Think about the type of system you have to have in place for Mark Meadows to make the decision not to warn Chris Christie of the threat to his life.
I'm curious what would happen in a world where Trump goes to meet his Maker in the next year or so, De Santis wins the nomination and there's another one of those damn razor-thin elections in '24 with the Democrat narrowly but clearly winning. Do the state legislatures pull out all the stops to throw the election to De Santis, including overruling all democratic norms?
Maybe. Or maybe it's Trump who is the X factor in all this.
That is the question. My contention is that this isn't about Trump at all. The culture allowed Trump to get where he got and it'll support the next Trump after he's gone.
Do you think this is limited just to loyalty to Trump? My contention is that the threat doesn't revolve around Trump at all. That there's been a shift in Republican party culture that demands loyalty to the party and its causes (mostly as dictated by the base) no matter how unhinged they are. There's no room for conscientious objectors whatsoever. They'll be soundly drummed out of the halls of power.
Sure, back in the day, McCain was derided as as RINO, but he was still part of the party power structure, despite his differences on some issues. Now, in order to have any influence at all, you have be fully onboard with even the most extreme positions.
To me, this is not just an amping up of how things have always worked. It's different and much more dangerous.
I think Trump was extremely effective at sidelining people that didn't stand behind him. I believe both a) that belief - even within the GOP is probably exaggerated and b) post 1/6 isn't likely to be true any longer.
Part of the issue is that progressives have been using "conservatives ushering in fascism" scare tactic for my entire political adult life (2001 and on, then), and they want to point to the fact that they may be (probably are?) correct about it now as a way to prove that they have always been right about it. Even as a young progressive I was never really concerned that Bush, McCain, or Romney was gonna turn the US into the theocracy that some of my fellow liberals seemed to think was always just on the cusp of happening.
And then during the Trump administration you had large contingents of Republican elected officials bending the knee and rolling over in ways that would have been unimaginable to most people even 10 years ago.
The thing that scares me the most (and I am hardly the first person to lay this out) is that the lessons that Republicans have learned, over and over, is that they are better off having no agenda and focusing on grabbing hold of these relatively obscure little electoral choke points in a few key states instead of presenting an agenda to the American voting public and letting them decide whether they want that or not.
How are Republicans "grabbing hold of these relatively obscure little electoral choke points in a few key states". The few times I've been able to get someone to point to actually changes in law that purportedly do this - the actually legislative language doesn't actually support this assertion.
The Constitution is pretty clear that states may pick electors based on almost any criteria they choose, and not necessarily who won a plurality in their state. Article 2, Clause 2, emphasis obviously mine:
"Each State shall appoint, *in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct*, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress"
I mean feel free to read the whole article- I didn't see anything about the plurality vote winner in there. So if a Dem wins Wisconsin, Georgia or Arizona fairly, the legislature can apparently say 'well there was fraud so we're choosing to send electors for Trump instead'
Well by definition the US Constitution trumps all of them- that's the whole point of having a constitution :) A law that purports to overrule a constitution is a law that will be struck down in court
according to my twitter feed it seems like the most existentially important issue of our times is canceling the student loan debt of upper middle class knowledge workers
and pretending its a civil rights issue that would mostly benefit latinx and BIPOC
I have said this before, but I would be very happy with a 10k loan forgiveness. Despite who gets airtime in the media, most of the actual loan defaults occur with people with low loan balances but no degree, and it will wipe out the debt for most of those people + a lot of people who took out loans to attend a public college.
But I would rather they did something to get tuition under control instead.
How could they even do so?
Turn off (or at least turn down) the free money spigot. No loans without strict conditions on the universities receiving them, e.g., minimum average salary upon graduation.
We could hope that this would lead to the administrations reducing their size, but since the administrations themselves would be deciding how to allocate the reduced funds I have my doubts they would unemploy themselves. After all, previous rounds of budget cuts haven’t done so.
You're right - the administrations would remain unchanged; they'd simply eliminate or phase out more full-time teaching positions and replace them with adjuncts. Problem solved!
Oh, right, fair point. But I hope it would at least slow the growth. Still, they would probably start slashing costs in other places, like hiring even more adjuncts to teach.
One thing that may be worth noting, which I think is rarely understood: an R1 university already brings in a lot more from federal research dollars than it does from tuition. So you can't just get rid of all the professors, who obtain those dollars and the massive indirects that come along with them, either. If tuition is limited, the administration may try to grow more on the research side.
What might be interesting is to see a greater separation between the research and teaching parts of universities, but now I'm just daydreaming.
Fire 25% of all non teaching university employees at random?
Make it 60-80%, and you have a deal.
EDIT: Exempt the custodial, maintenance, and cafeteria staff, and maybe staff health practitioners so long as they are free for students.
I assumed by "they" and "Dems" we meant the government—do you think the government has hiring and firing power at universities (let alone the ability to eliminate entire job positions)? It seems like that would be pretty remarkable government overreach and not something I'd expect them to be able to do efficiently.
Regarding reducing guarantees, as I said in another comment I have no idea how this would result in smaller university administrations—that isn't what previous rounds of budget cuts have accomplished.
The most tweeted priority. The “real” priority is actually getting the SALT deduction… even more than child poverty and the child tax credit.
We are all Republicans now.
what would economic impact of cancelling student debt be? would more people in 30s start to buy homes?
Remember only 1/3 of home buyers went to college.
I thinkbit would probably be a good idea on balance, to cancel student loan debt, although I'm concerned about the immediate inflatin implications. However, it strikes me as off how important people make this out to be. Student load debt can be rough, but most people whobhave student loan debt are better off than if they hadn't gone to college.
I mean I don't blame people for supporting a bad policy that would result in them personally getting tens of thousands of dollars. I'd do the same (but that doesn't mean it's not bad policy).
Maybe if students declared themselves as LLC’s it would get cancelled faster, like the PPP program.
The comparison to PPP is kind of disingenuous. PPP was designed with a provision that it would be cancelled if employers didn't lay off workers during COVID. It was called a loan but (insofar as it is cancellable) it was effectively a grant intended to subsidize payrolls.
As someone who actually works in commercial lending I can assure you it actually didn’t play out that way.
The rules are pretty clear that you had to maintain employment/compensation and use most of the money directly on payroll (of course, money is fungible). Are people cheating/gaming the system? Wouldn't surprise me. But it doesn't change the fact that the expectation and intent of these loans was that they would function more as grants and that the intended beneficiary were really workers who would otherwise have been laid off.
Was there a better way to design the program or accomplish this goal? ¯\_( )_/¯. My recollection was that it was designed this way because it was necessary to allow them to shovel as much money out the door as quickly as possible to limit the impacts of a national emergency. "Waste fraud and abuse" is a cost you pay to ensure that you are getting the program to everyone who you want to get it to as fast as you can.
But ultimately saying "we forgave this loan to businesses that was designed to be forgiven if it was used to benefit workers, so we should also forgive this other loan that was expressly not designed to be forgiven which was intended to benefit (and typically did benefit) the borrowers" is a bit of a non sequitur.
They weren’t that strict. Nobody is even really monitoring it.
Just anecdotal, but I know (1) a couple and (2) a sole proprietorship who both got PPP loans wiped away for their businesses. What payroll they were protecting, I have no idea.
To me, the subtext of your first comment is something along the lines of "establishment cares about giving businesses money but not regular people".
But to make that subtext accurate you have to argue that was the *intent* of PPP, not what actually happened with it.
First off, my comment was clearly sarcastic, but yes I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the establishment cares more about giving money to businesses then it does to people. I wasn’t party to the PPP discussions, but as far as how the program was structured: unsecured loans accruing interest at 1% with no payments due for a year, of which most were even forgiven before that date…you don’t have to be a genius to figure it out. Oh and I bet you didn’t know that if you should negative book income in 2019 than you weren’t even eligible. Only businesses that reported positive income the prior year were eligible for funds.
Hell, TARP funds were immensely more punitive than this and yet the level of complaining about the program is completely different: those assholes at least paid it back. PPP was the largest permanent monetary expansion since I don’t even know when.
so many people forgiven that should not have
How did it turn out?
Look at the loan to deposit ratio in the banking system. Some of that is partially distorted by the fed, but most of it ramps up at the same time the C&I call code ramps down ie a ppp loan disappeared and what was left was just a bank deposit.
Think of student loans as the opposite of inheritance taxes - a poor tax on people that have don't family money. It may not be the most important issue, but student financial aid reform is a clear-cut equal opportunity issue that should be addressed to create a more fair society, instead of one where intergenerational wealth disparities are compounded.
The challenge, of course, is doing it in a way that doesn't lead to inefficiency and cost inflation. Whether it's healthcare or education, adding a third party payor to the mix creates bad incentives for providers that need to be countered with structural reforms to reward efficiency rather than bloat.
Except the people advocating for it never actually talk about reform in the future, only giving themselves a one time get out of jail free card. Kids were in high school get shit out of it. It’s pure selfishness on their part. They are not serious people.
Ha!
The mechanism by which progressives got to this conclusion is interesting. They convinced themselves that there was a secret cache of voters, that actually aggressively's progressive legislation was _necessary_ to win.
"The way to get one thing I want is actually to get two things I want" is always dangerous reasoning.
They really do believe they’re so blindingly correct they can’t even imagine a good faith counter argument. That’s why they’re insufferable to talk to.
To be fair, that’s true of plenty of people across the political spectrum. It’s just that there’s no risk of me talking to people at most points on the political spectrum.
Wait, now there’s a Mark Robbins AND a Marc Robbins?? And Mark has a cat while Marc has a dog?
I was hoping the other one wouldn't renew his subscription. Sigh.
The "secret cache of voters" was the explicit theory behind the Bernie Sanders campaign (2020 edition). Not only did they not want to reach out to never-Trump Republicans, but they wanted to also take the "PMC" wing of the existing Democratic coalition and throw it overboard in order to attract and make room for the secret non-voters.
And for many on the progressive left, that this is such an obvious reality that Democrats must be actively trying to lose elections 🙄
Yeah, I think Matt is under-estimating, here, the ability of prog college activists to talk themselves into the idea that the reason the youth vote is so chronically depressed is because young voters are waiting for the socialist of their dreams to inspire them to come out, as opposed to simply being more interested in their jobs and social lives.
Just mechanically on the numbers, if you could somehow cause the existing youth vote to expand to the rate of the senior vote, while the partisan tilt within it stayed the same, you would suddenly have overwhelming progressive victories all over purple states. I'm actually not sure that there are that many prog young people, though -- young people who vote are generally more partisan, in either direction, than their non-voting peers. The non-voters are squishier on both economic issues, and on some of the cutting edge social issues. (Although I would expect young people _very_ broadly to understand the housing shortage as a crisis, just due to their lived experience, in a way that older voters don't.)
I think many millennial progs, who were just coming of age around 2008, saw Obama win in 2008 with huge youth vote enthusiasm and high turnout, saw Democrats passing a watered-down agenda that disappointed them, and then saw Democrats get destroyed in 2010 as turnout cratered, and used these data point to conclude that Democrats lost in 2010 because the youth vote didn't show up and that they didn't show up because they were disappointed by the Democrat's agenda not going far enough.
This set of assumptions, of course, ignores a ton of other more important factors pertaining to how Democrats won in 2008 and then lost in 2010.
I'd say in particular it ignores the question of _why_ the bills passed in '09-'10 were watered down relative to what Obama supporters might have hoped for. Like, even before Ted Kennedy died, we never had sixty votes for, say, single payer healthcare. Hell, we never had _fifty_ votes for single payer healthcare. You could've had President Sanders, and unless we also elected enough Democratic Senators who wanted to play ball, we wouldn't get the Sanders agenda.
I agree the story you're telling here captures what a lot of people seem to think, I just find it frustrating. It seems like an attempt to take the politics out of politics. You have to work to elect the best person you can, given the electorate you're facing. We used to have a Democratic Senator from Wyoming! We still have one from Montana! Those folks have to answer to an electorate that is _much_ more conservative than the median voter of the country, and if you want to pass some big legislative package, you're gonna have to earn their votes. That's just the system we have. Unless we abolish the Senate, or at least admit DC and PR (and get some center-lefty Senators from PR, which would not be a given -- Puerto Ricans have the same kind of social-conservative tilt as a lot of Hispanic ethnicities), we have to campaign within the system we have, not the one we might want or wish to have. :-P
I appreciate you writing this very much, Matt, even though I know you're going to get absolutely torched for it. I've been pointing out for the past several years the bizarre disconnect between the progressive rhetoric of "Trump's a *literal* fascist who's going to declare himself president for life and *literally* re-enslave black people, reduce women to the status of 'The Handmaid's Tale,' and genocide the American LGBTQ population," with the continued progressive-business-as-usual take of, "Federalism is terrible and the states as sovereign entities should be destroyed; as much governing power as possible should be transferred to the central government and administrative agencies should be given maximum discretion to pursue their missions without interference by the courts."
I mean, for about 30 seconds in fall of 2020, progressives dialed down the latter, but it's really stunning to me to witness people in progressive spaces who are unironically talking about the urgent necessity of "blue state secession" flip five minutes later to how Biden should issue executive orders on gun control, overriding whatever DeSantis is doing today on COVID, federalizing the Texas National Guard to protect access to abortion, etc., etc. A world in which the latter is happening is a world in which the former is basically impossible. If someone sincerely thinks a totalitarian dictator is inevitably going to seize the presidency in the near future, then if that person is sane they would want maximum devolution of power *away* from the central government, and the failure to adopt that logical position gives away the game -- either the speaker is deeply insincere about their fears of such a takeover or that speaker is a totalitarian at heart themself and just hopes that someone who favors their views can seize that power in the future.
Option C is also on the table: this person is an idiot.
I tend to discount Option C because if the problem was mainly idiocy you'd expect to see a lot more "born-again federalists," who seem to very much still be the exception rather than the rule.
I tend to think that if a problem is "people are idiots," then that's at least partially resolvable by education.
Progressives often act like they're too righteous to need to worry about reality. Centrists often act like it's 1982 and a couple of drinks with Republicans can fix everything. Journalists often amplify their audience's delusions. A rising tide of Patreon/Substack grifters is telling people that progress is easy and is only not happening due to deliberate betrayals by the leadership.
It's really a very bad system and it's not surprising it's working so poorly.
I absolutely would have taken this deal, and I think progressives would have taken it too. But it was even more of a non-starter for Manchin than BBB. The Democrats didn't make a calculated gamble that BBB was more important than democracy protection - democracy protection was never possible. And it wasn't possible because Manchin (and Sinema) unequivocally refused to entertain any changes that didn't have the imprimatur of the Republican Party. However, Manchin and Sinema expressed various shades of willingness to do reconciliation bills, including BBB.
The reason the Dems didn't run in 2020 on enacting none of the Democratic Party's ideas is not only because they wanted to take advantage of Trump's unpopularity to enact their platform - it's also that there's no viable cross coalition to make. There is no democracy-supportive Republican party (or Republican people) with which to form an alliance, and the Democrats have enough votes to take control of the country themselves. And I'm not saying this because I think Republicans are evil monsters who love fascism - it's just not in their political interest to support ending gerrymandering or reforming the Senate or the Supreme Court.
Which is why the hypothetical doesn't really make sense. These aren't common sense bipartisan procedural reforms - these are perceived by the other side (in some cases, correctly) as substantive advantages for the Democratic Party that are much more dangerous to them than 10 BBBs. There's no viable coalition for political reform outside the democratic party. And even within the Democratic Party you have a handful of veto point holders who strongly believe that these reforms are so substantively favorable to the Democrats that they can't be entertained without 10 Republican senators agreeing to them.
I think the point is that they didn't even try. There would have been some horse trading to get the votes democrat or republican, but no such effort was made.
There's nothing to try. There's no trade to make. DC Statehood, gerrymandering, court reform, these are all red lines for both Manchin and every single Republican. And we know this because Manchin and the Republicans were very explicit about it.
And any time Manchin showed any interest in talking about this, Democrats swiftly moved to give him whatever he wanted. When he came out with his voting rights proposal, Democrats fell over themselves to accept it, even though it created voter ID rules that many Democrats had previously opposed. But there's just no actual movement possible here, as long as Manchin is the 50th vote. Where there was a possibility for horse trading - the infrastructure bill, BBB - the Democrats worked hard on a deal.
The thing that makes us different than the Czechs or the Israelis is that there are only two parties, and one of those parties understands itself to benefit from democracy reforms, while the other regards those reforms as a mortal threat. In Israel or the Czech Republic, the various small parties can imagine themselves benefitting from those reforms. But how could Lisa Murkowski benefit from Biden getting to make Supreme Court picks? How would Romney benefit from Utah not being able to gerrymander? There's no deal to make.
If you immediately demonize the other party and give up, that's not a problem with the other party. Why not a real debate instead of a fantasy debate on MSNBC? If it's important, force the issue.
BBB was a half assed effort by house Democrats. Voting for the bill with the right list of programs was more important than passing a functional bill. If the goal was passing the legislation, we'd have had a reasonably solid bill but now instead of nothing. If we cared about democratic reform we'd be working hard on legislation instead of whining on Twitter. If we cared about climate change, BBB would not be hung up on childcare.
Sure, the House version of BBB was ugly. But if Manchin had said "Here's my version of the $1.75T BBB" my guess is that it would have passed. He could have, but he didn't (so far?) With great power, comes great, well, not responsibility but rather great jerking people around.
Just write the damn bill, Manchin.
Feel like revising this take at all?
Hope springs eternal
It's not a question of demonization. You can be as nice to them as you want - it's just not in their interest. I say this with a complete absence of malice. Just like you can be as nice to the Democrats as you want, they're just not gonna vote in favor of creating electoral colleges for gubernatorial elections or giving each county an equal number of seats in the legislature or giving only presidents who lose the popular vote extra supreme court seats to fill. You cannot expect the Republican Party to agree to weaken their ability to hold power.
I'd rather have $550B in climate change spending than anything on that list.
Though both are soooo hypothetical right now :-(
If you get DC and PR statehood, ban gerrymandering, and give Biden supreme court picks, you could get a trillion in climate change spending.
Doubtful. No DC/PR Senators until 2022 at the earliest; gerrymandering's impact is grossly overstated; the Supreme Court expansion will be slowly phased in. Given that the Democrats would be virtually certain to lose the House in 2022 (especially with no other legislation to their credit), there would be *no* climate change legislation passed in 2023 or 2024.
Nothing prevents DC and PR from seating their delegations immediately. New states don't have to wait until the next elections to fill vacancies, just like old states.
ETA: But yes, assuming Manchin's condition holds, climate would be deferred until at least 2022.
This is the first time either of you mentioned anything about *when* this hypothetical climate change spending would happen.
HR1 wasn't democracy protection. It would have inflamed the right, an destroyed trust in elections and democracy.
A. Matt is not proposing HR1, but something that goes in some ways considerably further.
B. But to the extent HR1 is dead on arrival for all the way you mention, a fortiori Matt's proposal is too.
Thank you for this comment - reading this piece, and especially the comments, was making me feel crazy because nobody seemed to acknowledge that Democrats are focused on relatively normal stuff _because they have no chance of addressing the radically dangerous stuff._
I think there’s an under-appreciated “chicken and the egg” aspect to all of this. Republicans are acting in maniacal, anti-democratic ways because they perceive Democrats to be acting in maniacal, anti-American ways. Is their perception accurate? Personally I think it’s warped by social media and their long-standing right-wing propaganda media universe. But it helps to see that an aggressive push to the left with policy is PART OF the justification the right uses for why they need a power grab to “save America.” It’s impossible to predict if they would perceive your recommended course of action as an aggressive Democratic power grab in order to substantiate their own.
You’re not unscrambling that egg. There is no way to change that perception because it’s literally never been rooted in reality.
Yes, and… I think both sides use the other side’s warped perception of reality as an excuse to grow into it. “Obama’s not a socialist anti-American, that’s ridiculous!” would have been totally true to say in 2009. Eventually you had influential liberals saying, “Well actually, maybe that was the problem, he wasn’t socialist enough! Maybe American democracy is fundamentally rooted in white supremacy and needs to be burned to the ground!” A self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Now, if your point it “Republicans gonna hysteric, and there’s no amount of being sane we on the left can do to stop it,” you might be right. But there are certainly things some people are doing to make it worse.
>> Democratic platforms have gotten more left-wing
Not just that, but at least in the snippets Matt pulled, they've become largely performative documents that "call out" and complain without proposing solutions or promising action.
There's a striking difference in phrasing in the 2008 vs 2020 paragraphs. In 2008, there were a lot of "we will" statements. In 2020, there were none. It's all complaining and posturing with nothing whatsoever about how they will make it better.
Do the 2020 documents get to policy aims later?
Good question. I assumed Matt's snippets captured the gist correctly, but I didn't dig up the full text.
The motives of the extremely progressive part of the left, I think, can be summarized by one unifying theme: they want to feel as if they're living through a time of revolution. Any proposal that would help save democracy in non-revolutionary ways (as opposed to packing the courts, etc.) is unwelcome. Any policy that would help to reduce racial inequality without upending established systems is dismissed. To me, this explains why people of this particular persuasion seem to be steadfastly dedicated to strategies that will almost surely hurt Democrats.
Combo of "the worse the better"-ism with a belief that "the other side is antidemocratic and that's good!" Having the country be permanently dominated by an entrenched minority is the ideal end-state for these people - they just want themselves to be that minority.
Maybe, but I don't think this characterizes the views of anyone in the Democrats' Congressional caucus.
Yeah, I think I agree with this. To me it looks like more of a Twitter/media phenomenon. Congresspeople probably don't hold these views, but those in very blue districts might fear getting primaried if they don't pursue the interests of the Twitter/media crowd.
Personally, I’m getting a bit tired of everything being called a “five-alarm fire”. There’s enough stress going on in our own lives that I’m frankly just starting to ignore stories about what bad things the republicans are going to do next. And if even self described media junkies start tuning out, imagine how it must be for the rest.
We need people like Dave Roberts, Ian Millhiser, etc. to actually like, bet on whether or not democracy is going to fail. There needs to be a way for people to put their money where their mouths are.
Predictit!
I wish predictit were more imaginative with their markets.
https://kalshi.com/ has more interesting markets, but I'm not crazy about their fee structure.
man, reminiscing about the 2008 platform & Obama always warms my heart - and leads me off on a tangent...
Isn't the real problem that Obama could be incredibly reasonable, but the GOP tried to stop him anyhow - and critically, the voters did not punish them for thwarting Obama's moderate agenda? I don't know what to do with that actual history. Like every instinct I have says Dems should try to replay "Obama 08", but really, we tried that and it didn't work out the way I would have hoped...
I think the big problem wasn't policy moderation, but PROCEDURAL moderation. Rerun 2008, but get rid of the filibuster (and be a bit less deficit averse.)
It’s notable that the sticking point then was Joe Lieberman at 60 votes. I suppose the technology of using reconciliation to do big things hadn’t been developed yet.
You don’t remember how the Affordable Care Act got passed in the end? They did try to get it through bipartisan process, when that didn’t work they had to negotiate with themselves (to get Lieberman et Al on board, then Kennedy dies and they were forced to resort to reconciliation. This year, with 50 vote majority and the last 10 years experience of how Republicans operate, reconciliation is the starting point.
Just to nitpick, the ACA was passed in the Senate over the filibuster, 60-39. The House also passed it as written to avoid another Senate vote. Reconciliation was used for a second bill with some minor fixes immediately after.
Even I didn't remember it being two separate bills until I just looked it up.
(just remembered I could edit this comment now!)
The U.S. has never been a democracy. Abolish the Senate, strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction, adopt the national popular vote compact, and the U.S. would still be a republic with huge House districts that only prominent, well-funded candidates could win.
I suspect MY’s true fear is that the US might become a big Wisconsin, where 45% of the voters can assemble legislative majorities because Democratic votes are inefficiently clustered in Milwaukee and Dane counties. This is actually a threat, but Wisconsin is hardly hell.
In the UK, the Tories haven’t polled over 44% since 1970. They have consistently polled less than the combined votes of the parties to their left, yet they’ve often had parliamentary majorities. Sometimes, there has been a Tory government even though 60% of the electorate voted for candidates to the Torys’ left. Britain isn’t hell either. Nor are there many formal safeguards. Nothing other than decency and maybe the queen prevents a Tory parliament from postponing the next election indefinitely.
If Matt wants to say America is at risk of a 4 to 30 year period where legislative majorities are based on a 45% vote share, I don’t disagree. It’s just that prospect is hardly terrifying.
How is this not terrifying? Like I live in Florida which is using the power of the state to target my political views from being expressed. It doesn't care about the teacher who literally says she thinks dinosaurs and men lived together, but that racism still effects people living today in subtle ways is unacceptable.
Then leveled up to a much more powerful government, by a coalition which has a lot of axes to grind with people like me even participating in life.
"but that racism still effects people living today in subtle ways is unacceptable."
People aren't being targeted for saying that.
The pushback is against the "anti-racist/CRT/woke" agenda which says that all white people are oppressors. That says stupid shit like math or being on time is racist. That is trying to re-segregate us by dividing us into affinity groups, and that says the single most important thing you can know about a person is the color of their skin, not the content of their character.
https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/19958/urlt/7-4.pdf
I don't know how you have certainty from the text of these laws. They all contain vague lines that are designed to allow people to be harassed by lunatic parents. And it's only against people with liberal views. The teacher who says she thinks dinosaurs and mankind coexisted is totally safe but there's no way to tell what is safe.
I agree that some of the anti-CRT rules are poorly written.
Ehh, you're all public servants.
Now, if we can just get the *politicians* to acquiesce to their weekly colonoscopy too...
"Wisconsin, where 45% of the voters can assemble legislative majorities because Democratic votes are inefficiently clustered in Milwaukee and Dane counties."
I think the actual number is more like 40%. In 2018, Republicans got 44.75% of the vote but 63/99 of the assembly seats. As wikipedia notes "Based on the 2018 results, the tipping point district was District 29, which the Republicans won by a margin of 12.12%, therefore Democrats would have needed to win the statewide popular vote by a margin of 20.36% to win a majority of seats." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Wisconsin_State_Assembly_election
(Also, clustering certainly plays a role in this imbalance, but there's gerrymandering in there too.)
"In the UK, the Tories haven’t polled over 44% since 1970. They have consistently polled less than the combined votes of the parties to their left, yet they’ve often had parliamentary majorities."
This is an unfair comparison. *No party* has polled over 44% since 1970 (in no small part because of third parties), but this cuts both ways: Sometimes the conservative party wins a majority with ~40%, and sometimes the Labour party wins with ~40%. If it cut both ways in WI, I'd be less concerned about it. However, it doesn't; the Democrats will never win in WI with 40%. They won't even win with 55%.
I’m more concerned than David because the WI status quo is insane and unsustainable, but less concerned than you because it cannot be replicated nationwide.
"because it cannot be replicated nationwide"
Could you explain what you mean by this? Not all states can be put into a WI-like situation? (No surprise there; most states aren't swingy.) The congress can't be put into a WI-like state?
Couple of points:
First, most states don't have an electoral geography that lends itself to this quite so well, aside from the old rust belt states. WI, MI, OH, PA, and IN are about it. PA is somewhat protected by the makeup of the state Supreme Court, MI now has a non-partisan redistricting commission, and OH/IN/WI are already lost causes.
The West Coast and New England are so blue that you'd have to gerrymander *to avoid* disproportionately blue maps.
The New South and Mountain West are growing too fast in urban areas to do anything except play defense.
Second, to pull a Wisconsin everywhere would require you to control every state's redistricting at every ten-year interval, which is somewhere between astronomically unlikely and outright impossible.
Third, all of the more extreme alternatives (tossing of votes, etc) will provoke a hell of a lot worse problem than a period of herrenvolk democracy.
I mostly agree, but I'd argue that some of the new south states are probably already in that situation (and others may well grow into it).
Take the 2018 NC state house of representatives election. Democrats win the popular vote by 2.36 pp, but only win 55/120 seats. It looks like the tipping point seat had a margin of 5.6 pp, so roughly speaking, democrats would need to win the popular vote by a margin of 2.36+5.6=7.96 pp to win the chamber --- and that was 8 years after the last census! I'm sure the legislature is going to shore things up.
I'm guessing that GA and TX are in similar positions; it has just been a moot point so far because democrats haven't won a majority of the popular vote.
Also, ME and NH would like to have a word with you over your New England comments...
TX and GA could easily turn into dummymanders in a bad year, but yes, the New South is still going to be a challenge.
As for ME and NH, they're 4 of New England's 21 districts. Broadly speaking, the point stands.
Also, point #4: CA, WA, and NJ have Democratic enough electorates that they could, if this were perceived to be necessary, backtrack on their redistricting commissions via referendum. The former two could easily drown *every* GOP district in the state very safely.
Again, though, the current coalitions are not, IMO, durable. They're going to break faster than gerrymandering can hold back the tide
You're literally describing the status quo, in which we need a smaller majority of the vote to win in the House than the Presidency, let alone the Senate!
Again, gerrymandering is bad. It's anti-democratic, results in incentives that polarize the hell out of politics, and ends in bad policy.
But it's just not *DOOM*.
The Democrats are going to lose in 2022 because they've mismanaged a great many policy issues, COVID wasn't as amenable to being forcibly retired by vaccination as we hoped, and they've failed to silence or marginalize the loud and obnoxious voices that cost them the last few Senate and House seats in 2020. But they're virtually guaranteed to lose the popular vote for the House as well, which is the core reason they'll lose.
That sucks, because it will take decades, if ever, for the GOP to become a reasonable voice on policy. But it's hardly the end of American democracy; the GOP will eventually screw up, badly, because it can't govern. And when it does, another wave year will come along in which the Democrats seize control of both houses of Congress. It's likely that CA and WA will rescind or otherwise coopt their existing non-partisan redistricting process at some point, if things go far enough off the rails.
And this is all assuming that the current coalitions remain broadly intact, which I think is a very unwarranted assumption, given how much has changed just since 2000.
The future is hard to predict, but I simply don't see the GOP being *able* to create the conditions for a violent revolution.
"However, it doesn't; the Democrats will never win in WI with 40%. They won't even win with 55%."
The Republican share in Wisconsin isn't ordained. Dems can choose to start living in a more efficient voting manner. Instead of clumped up where it doesn't do any good.
IE stop the great sort where Dems move to Cities, and Republicans dominate the rural areas
Lol. Also, gerrymanders can be easily defeated. All that has to happen is for enough people to move. Brilliant!
Or register as republicans and vote in the primary.
if i were the hive mind controlling all democrats i would simply ensure they all live in areas that are politically maximally advantageous regardless of how that might affect their individual lives
Re vote efficiency, the worst that will happen for Dems is that purple states like WI, MI and OH will have Republican gerrymanders, but NY, CA, WA, MD and MA will have Democratic gerrymanders. Republicans might win with 45% of the two party vote, but even that is pushing it.
"Republicans might win with 45% of the two party vote, but even that is pushing it."
Just to clarify, you're talking about at the national level now?
Truth be told, I get more worked up about gerrymandering for state legislatures* than for congress. Gerrymandering congressional districts is bad, but like you point out, some of its effects can be partly cancelled out. The same doesn't happen within a state.
* Especially for states without a ballot initiative system (e.g. WI). MI has an independent redistricting process (thanks to a ballot initiative), so I'm not worried about an R gerrymander there. OH has a ballot initiative system, so they could change things if they wanted to (they tried a few years ago).
the 45% figure is a national figure. Wisconsin is about the limit of what gerrymandering can do, and republicans will never get an ideal gerrymander in every state
Re the UK, it is true that Labour hasn’t gotten north of 45% either *but* the lib dems are much more like labour than the tories.
If the tories ever showed their fangs, the lib dems would collapse. the snp might survive because it’s vote is concentrated very efficiently and they could govern in a coalition with labour
I'm not knowledgeable enough about UK politics to directly argue, but there must be meaningful daylight between lib dems and labour, or else the lib dems wouldn't get votes.
I understand that the lib dem/conservative tie-up was considered weird, but likewise, there must have been some overlap or it wouldn't have happened.
I'm not quite sure how to interpret your "fangs" comment. The lib dems effectively pressure the conservatives to moderate? And if they stopped moderating, the lib dems would join labour? If so, it sounds like the lib dems are basically getting what they want.
It’s pretty bad, because the GOP ain’t the Tories.
They’re an absolute policy disaster at a time when we have urgent needs pressing down.
Was the CARES Act worse than Brexit? The biggest unforced error in recent American politics was Iraq, and all that had very little to do with Congress.
I know you don’t believe in or give a flying fuck about climate change, which *will* get into existential threat territory if we let it fester for 40 years… but just looking at things you care about:
The healthcare system will continue to erode, physical infrastructure will be under-invested, regulation will systematically tilt away from labor and towards capital, no major reforms to housing supply will take place…
Also, if climate change is so threatening to you, you ought to want less democracy, not more. People hate gas taxes and carbon taxes and like their cars and furnaces. I like burning wood on my fireplace. I will give up my purely aesthetic carbon spewing when private jets and first class air travel are outlawed.
Or we could, you know… roll over the grid to green generation faster than depreciation dictates, create a closed-cycle system for aviation fuel and other necessary carbon-intensive applications, scale EV production, and live otherwise as we do now.
Amusing how the horseshoe wraps between climate change denier nuts and the deep green nuts…
EDIT: Your wood-burning fireplace is, by definition, carbon-neutral.
This article could just as easily be applied to Climate Change as it is to democracy. Democrats act like they think Climate Change is a pressing issue, but then it turns out that its less important than 5 years of matching grants for state Pre-K programs so...
If you think something is an A-1 important issue, you should compromise on the other issues to focus solely on that one. When you refuse to compromise on the rest, people don't believe you care about the first thing.
I would rather Democrats control Congress. One of the best things about going to Canada is knowing the waitresses have access to quality health care. It bothers me whenever a person willing to work a shit job doesn’t. Canadian waitresses also have better teeth and smile more, which creates a good vibe.
Still, tying my personal happiness to acts of Congress seems masochistic. Realistically, my prosperity depends upon the success of my law practice, the size of my wife’s bonus, the complexities of my grandfather’s estate, and whether my mother needs extended care before she dies. Other than allowing a depression to languish or making me a federal judge (pleeeeeeaase!!!) Congress won’t do much to affect my prosperity.
My happiness depends more upon my ability to win pickleball games and lose weight than anything else. My lifestyle isn’t that expensive. Owning our house and stocks gives us a decent cushion agsinst inflation.
Still, I’d really like the waitresses to have quality health care and better teeth.
Except Canadian public health insurance doesn't cover dental, so maybe its just genetics.
Agreed on the rest though.
Then why do Demsdo so much giveaways to the upper middle class. SALT, EV credits which poor folk can’t afford.
Dems have become the party of the coastal professional class.
The SALT deduction doesn’t affect anyone that much. Anyone who is rich enough to benefit much from it is rich enough to not desperately need the deduction.
Put another way, SALT beneficiaries would benefit more from a promotion than from keeping the deduction and would be hurt more by losing their fancy job or business than by the SALT cap
The 13 colonies were hardly hell either, except for slaves, but a lot of people were willing to revolt, fight, and die to change the system. Preserving democracy isn’t really a matter of living conditions.
"It could be terrifying to people that might be targeted by Republicans."
Where's that list? The only people I could think of might be deporting illegal aliens.
As for the federal government, maybe we should be focused on making it less powerful then, so the thought of our opponent getting all that power isn't so scary
Well, “targeted” isn’t the right word here, but the people harmed by Trump’s undoing of environmental standards would have an interest in him not coming back. And of course reducing the government’s power wouldn’t help with that, since that’s exactly the harmful thing Trump did in that instance.
But then likewise the people helped by his getting rid of burdensome job killing regulation would want him to come back.
Always two sides to every coin
Your comment is very reminiscent of this classic https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762
Where's the evidence that any of this stuff was good for jobs? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html
I don't want to exactly defend any of this, but I will say that I think it's more complex than them being just a bunch of Captain Planet villains. A couple years ago, when the mercury rules were being revised, I dug into the EPA's report justifying such a stringent standard as they wanted. Basically, through a long causal chain involving trace amounts of mercury getting into freshwater fish, being eaten by pregnant women, and causing IQ drops of a small fraction of a point, they were able to then aggregate these drops into a claimed significant economic impact on society (there are even more suppositions with weakly supported statistics in that chain that I know I'm forgetting now). Thus, this justified imposing costs on the order of tens of millions on companies to prevent the release of a small amount of mercury. It was hardly the most convincing argument in my opinion, and it made me realize that these are very complex decisions with myriad tradeoffs, not all-or-nothing propositions.
Every rule has a cost. Maybe you think the benefits of the rule outweigh those costs. I might even agree with you depending on the rule. But that doesn't mean the costs aren't there.
Trump did talk a good game. And he did shine a spotlight on some legitimate problems (China especially). Other than that he claimed a lot of "beautiful" victories and accomplished very little.
Yes, "illegal aliens" (read: mothers and father and sons and daughters who are typically more law-abiding than naturalized citizens) would be on that list, as would women who want abortions and the doctors that provide them, transgender people and probably gay people, Black people who seem a little too edgy (better shoot 'em, just to be on the safe side), and -- the biggest targets of all -- the poor.
But yeah, if you're a well-off straight cis White guy, Wisconsin's no biggie!
"Yes, "illegal aliens" (read: mothers and father and sons and daughters who are typically more law-abiding than naturalized citizens)"
Being related to a law abiding doesn't change your own status.
And women are no more being targeted, then the babies are being targeted for killing by Democrats. Save your hyperbole
"the biggest targets of all -- the poor"
Wanting to live within our fiscal means, does not equal to targeting the poor. Neither does questioning the efficacy of our anti-poverty programs
I'm a safe legal and rare kind of guy, so it's not like I have zero sympathy for the fetus. But if you can't think of one policy conservatives support that targets women who get abortions (or criminalizes poverty, for Christ's sake!) then I'm not sure we share enough premises to have a productive argument.
The feds can (and do) do very little on social issues like abortion and trans rights, and with the built-in direction of SCOTUS that won’t change. Same with criminal justice—the federal criminal system is very small compared to state ones and has very different issues (the FBI is nothing like the CPD or NYPD, and its sentencing regime is strange and bad in a very different way from state regimes). This is a very weak case for federal elections mattering. Climate, defense, and health policy are federal-dominated on the other hand.
Also, Britain has no real judicial, bicameralism, or federalism constraints, so complete Tory dominance is more complete.
2) I’m 44. And yes, so despair of political progress before I’m an old fart. My evolution since the Obama coalition spent its energy circa 2010 has been to focus more on private prosperity and happiness and less on politics. The poorer commenters on this blog might be happier if they devoted some of the energy they put into politics/commentary to their careers.
1) American progress has been more organic than political. We’ve consistently developed better technologies that have made workers more productive and politics have given us enough stability for trade to flourish, unlike Europe where war has often disrupted commerce and trade barriers didn’t help. When political progress has occurred in this country, it has usually happened in response to a crises (succession, the great depression, pearl harbor, maybe the pandemic) rather than through a coalition winning an election and legislating progress. Lincoln didn’t run on abolishing slavery in 1860 nor did FDR run on the New Deal. No one ever ran on “let’s have an industrial revolution” it’s just that the federal government was 4% of gdp, and markets functioned.
Your “what is your line” question is interesting. A lot of my friends talked about emigrating when Trump was elected. A few had the scratch to do it and stay upper middle class. No one left.
I used to admire Canada. My wife and I thought about emigrating, but they are experiencing a real estate bubble and professional salaries there are lower, so we would take a life style hit. We could probably get a visa because my wife is an accountant and we could scrape together $500k to get sn investment based visa if we had to, but that would tie up a lot of our liquidity and I’d really only do that if the Republicans were out for me. They aren’t. Worse case I have to pay to keep my son in private school to avoid forced prayer. An administration that drove people like me to emigrate couldn’t poll 45% and wouldn’t last
Could most people, if they didn't read the news, tell when the presidency changed hands? Other than a tax cut, what was the *material* impact of Trump being president for the lives of the vast majority of people?
I may be overlooking something obvious, but it doesn't immediately come to me. I'm not saying he wasn't terrible in a lot of ways, but at least not in ones affecting our everyday lives, at least on the timescale of just a few years.
A lot of environmental regulations were undone, which led to more people getting sick from pollutions of various sorts. And while this may open a can of worms, I think a more competent administration would have given us much better Covid results.
But as I said in a comment above, material conditions are kind of beside the point. There weren't many everyday life effects of the American Revolution, as far as I know, at least not in the short term. But philosophically the change was seismic.
I'm pretty liberal(you may have noticed already). All my friends and family are liberal. The idea of running away to a foreign country because your side lost an election seems completely bonkers to me. Hunter S. did 'off' himself over Bush and he was definitely bonkers.
I did, on the other hand, give a fair amount of money to numerous 2020 Democratic candidates and probably read too many political blogs.
Monetary policy was definitely on the ballot throughout the the Gilded Age. That doesn’t mean industrial policy was. Did Bryant run on nationalizing the railroads? Deindustrislizing? A wealth tax? No, and he was the most radical nominee before 1936.
Monetary policy was on the ballot because the government controlled the money supply. But industrial policy wasn’t really on the ballot because all the mainstream politicians were pro capitalist
What do you think tariffs and internal improvements *were*?
That’s your industrial policy, right there.
The only reason the US is a continent-spanning, developed nation instead of an agrarian backwater clinging tenuously to the Atlantic seaboard is that every generation has seen at least one sitting government with the balls to update national industrial policy for the then-modern era, until Reagan.
I don’t know where we’ll head without one, but “Chile” seems a good guess.
"filibuster has ensured that the minority can indefinitely stop progress."
Many people disagree with your version of progress.
To pass big change, you should need to do it in a bi-partisan manner.
Why not just a majority manner, constrained by the Constitution?
Because I don't think big changes should be forced through like that. I don't want Democrats passing big bills then the Republicans reversing those big bills 4 years later.
I do—if the Dems pass unpopular legislation, the Republicans should be able to undo it with a majority. Of course, it’s not always so simple—their failure to repeal the ACA shows that it’s easy to underestimate the popularity of social safety net legislation and overestimate the popularity of undoing it.
"the reality is that we've been having a growing demand for progress for several decades now, and barely anything has happened."
This is the part I don't get. The public generally hates change unless there is a genuine emergency and there have been two in the last 30+ years (9/11 and Covid). Exactly what changed do you think the masses are crying out for that isn't happening? If anything, I think that the challenge Progressives have is that they are pushing for social changes faster than the public is willing to accept and getting a lot of blow back because of it.
I think the problem with all the items you mention is that change is desired, but often in competing directions. To take the most obvious example - immigration reform in the Bush era was elite driven and the majority of the population is generally pretty antagonistic to significant immigration.
The other major problem is there isn't an easy solution to most of these without major trade offs. The cost disease issue is the prime example of this - if there was a simple solution just waiting to be implemented, then why hasn't a single state gone out and done it?
Which is my major contention - there are very few issues with 60% of the public strongly on one side of an issue that doesn't get resolved pretty quickly.
If people wanted big change they could have voted the big change party in, and given them huge majorities.
Instead, they tend to vote the other party in, to stop those big changes.
Most big changes, close to 50% of the country doesn't want to see.
A big change should require big bi-partisan buy in.
The filibuster is supposed to stop that big change without the required buy in. It's possible to over come it. In fact the Democrats just did so with the infrastructure bill.
Failure to pass partisan BS like the BBB, HR1, or court packing is a sign the system is working as intended.
"...eventually the unsatiated demand for progress ends up with people lined up against a wall."
Last time we saw an unsatiated demand for progress was January 6, 2021.
Wow. This is a doozy even by the standards of your normal brainless trolling.
Yet you are unable to explain why.
Huh.
You mistake unconcern for inability.
You’re worth the occasional post mocking your trolling, not an iota more of thought or effort.
Your mockery is flaccid.
"...your copartisans..."
Clearly you have mistaken me for someone else.
I am certain I have never written anything that should give the impression that I support the riot and storming of the capitol.
I hope they all rot in prison.
A lot of the hypothetical "save democracy" agenda looks to me like continuing the cycle of partisan procedural escalation. Ending the filibuster is a procedural escalation both parties have contemplated when they are in power but no one has done yet. Voting reforms would be difficult to do in a neutral way - there is some fundamental disagreement on what a fair voting system looks like - and at minimum would take some kind of bipartisan commission. A single-party voting reform bill would end up partisan even if they tried not to be, and I don't think they'd try very hard. Court-packing? STATE-packing? Come on.
That agenda sounds far *more* partisan than just trying to pass favored policies under the existing system. If you want to de-escalate our spiral away from democratic norms, burning down big parts of the current institutional structure doesn't sound like the most obvious place to start?
Well, why *not* a bipartisan commission? That could hardly be seen as escalation or burning anything down.
Well, because that wasn't the hypothetical Matt gave.
But yes, I do think there are plenty of potential procedural improvements out there. A federal anti-gerrymandering law seems like a good idea. I have no great love for the filibuster in the abstract - it's a key cause of "vetocracy" and gridlock. The Supreme Court as an institution would clearly benefit from term limits, as lifetime tenure incentivizes the appointment of the youngest plausible candidates and disincentivizes retirement even when clearly appropriate.
It's just that you can't do any of those things on a one-party basis in a way that would end up being fair or neutral. Let alone being *perceived* as fair and neutral, even if you thought you got close on substance. And we probably would need to cool down the overheated partisan cultural atmosphere before we'd have any chance of doing them on a bipartisan basis. Respectfully playing by the current institutional rules would be a good way to start cooling down IMO.
(I'm much less enthusiastic than Matt about court-packing or state-packing even in the abstract - those are just fundamentally partisan-driven proposals in my view)
I think what really happened is progressives convinced themselves that moderation / persuasion is for suckers- after all, the right rejected the 2012 “autopsy” report and swung to great electoral success in 2016. The problem is, as Matt has pointed out, that Trump really did moderate (at least in his campaign) - promising no entitlement cuts, and to get out of foreign wars. But it was hard to see given all the cultural red meat he was throwing.
I think a number of progressives really believe that there is a huge number of non-voters sitting on the sidelines who are discouraged by moderate timidity and just waiting to be excited by true progressive policies. I think this is also driving a lot of the anger towards Manchin and Sinema. It isn’t JUST that they are thwarting policy goals, in the progressive view they are also committing political malpractice.
If all this stuff is intrinsically popular, then there isn’t any need to prioritize. With the ACA (Obamacare) at some point most Democratic politicians realized it was electoral poison but the policy was important enough to do it anyway. If you really thought you were sending everyone down the plank, then you’d ficus on a handful of good, well designed programs that you could get by Manchin, and will stand the test of time (and Republican efforts to repeal), like the ACA But a lot of the BBB is a hot mess with a bunch of stuff done in a half assed way.
When they guy who thinks ACA is well designed (the gov is using its size to buy insurance at private rates) thinks BBB is half assed, you know it’s bad.
I don't think this is quite right. I think most partisan Democrats are deep enough in their echo chambers to think that a more left-wing agenda would be more popular with voters. Because that agenda is popular among their friends and online acquaintances. Many also have a cartoonish model of Republican voters where anyone who would consider voting for Trump is obviously a bigot and a moron so there's no point in trying to moderate to try to win their votes. So conveniently, the key to electoral victory is always to pass legislation that they think is good on the merits.
The GOP can, as David Abbott says below, tilt the playing field. I’m not sure that 45% is possible, but they can make it so a legislative trifecta requires them to get 48% of the vote, and preventing the Democrats from getting one requires just 46-7%.
That’s clearly and obviously bad.
But one of two things will happen: the Democrats will spend their time in the wilderness well until the GOP fucks up completely and they sweep to power prepared to make necessary changes… or the GOP will change on its own.
The contours of the current party system aren't some immutable law of nature, it will evolve out from under any attempt to lock it in permanently.
The more severe predictions of tossing election results are just going to result in an Avignon Presidency and all but the stupidest GOP leaders know it.
Matt and most of the commenters here are way too sanguine about democracy. Yes, Trump isn’t a fascist and American democracy won’t be transformed into dictatorship, but a world where Republicans further tilt the system in their favor is very imaginable. We are seeing a movement of Republicans at the state and local level that is laying the groundwork to give electors to Trump on the basis of BS claims of fraud, even if Biden actually won the state narrowly. We are also seeing Republicans further entrench their disproportionate gerrymandering advantage in the states they control. And, there’s a real risk the Supreme Court will start neutering democratically enacted laws by stripping Congress’ ability to delegate policy making to agencies like the EPA.
Plus, we have the fact that 70% of Republicans believe the election was stolen, and January 6.
Republicans are making it so that the system is stacked in their favor, and then signaling that they may refuse to accept a narrow Democratic victory, and possibly even take to the streets. It’s not the rise of facism, but it’s still scary.
The onus is on the folks who think it’s “scary” to freaking act like it. Stop embracing weird niche ideological bug-a-boos that piss off 60-80% of the electorate, vote in every election down to dog-catcher, and move to places where your vote will carry disproportionate impact if you’re able, which most of the rESisT crowd is.
I mean, many of us are! Although the “move” suggestion is just absurd—people want to be able to make a difference in their community. Isn’t it like telling people who are concerned about sex ed or CRT or whatever else in schools, “just move to another school district then”?
I would think the exact opposite logic applies, no? The point is to have impact. You can do that locally by staying and voting and running for office, but nationally you might need to go elsewhere to do it.
Yeah. I really try to avoid the hyperbolic, but sometimes outrageous seeming threats are real.
I believe there's pretty solid evidence that between election day and the inauguration, Trump, several of his advisors and friends, and several legislators were active participants or at least complicit witnesses in a conspiracy to overthrow the US election.
I'd love for someone to make a convincing argument as to why this is hyperbolic, but I haven't heard it yet.
What's hyperbolic is the suggestion that they could have succeeded.
What do you think would have stopped them?
Trump's go to move has always been to instigate chaos. Systems that have been thrown into chaos allow a much wider range of possible outcomes compared to systems operating normally and comfortably within the constraints of their design.
They were stopped. The riot, the arm-twisting, the lawsuits? None of it worked. Not a single bit of it.
The integrity of our system was hanging on a handful of individuals. Any one of them could have thrown the election to the Supreme Court, whose decision would have been received by a large segment of the population as illegitimate regardless of which way it went.
Despite the fact that it didn't succeed, I think this was easily the most serious threat to the republic in the last 50 years, maybe 75 years.
If you don't agree with that, what would you say ranks higher?
"Any one of them could have thrown the election to the Supreme Court, whose decision would have been received by a large segment of the population as illegitimate regardless of which way it went."
As with Bush v. Gore.
Trump actively tried to game the system to stay in power. He went something like 0-100+ which doesn't feel like a real threat.
For me, the threat really isn't about Trump per se.
It's more about how the current Republican party culture soundly places "loyalty to power" over "loyalty to doing what's right" and how successful they've been at punishing anyone who even tries to push back against this mantra, often drumming them out of politics.
Parties have always played hardball and punished members who push back against the party consensus, but imo the current crop of Republicans has taken this to a new level that I've never seen in my life. This has resulted in a willingness on the part of individuals to either do very bad things themselves, or sit by and watch while others do very bad things.
A good example of this was Mark Meadows allowing a dozen or so people to be exposed to COVID by Trump during debate prep sessions, putting Chris Christie in an ICU and at death's door.
Think about the type of system you have to have in place for Mark Meadows to make the decision not to warn Chris Christie of the threat to his life.
I'm skeptical that loyalty to Trump will survive into the midterms and am downright certain it won't outlive Trump at all.
I'm curious what would happen in a world where Trump goes to meet his Maker in the next year or so, De Santis wins the nomination and there's another one of those damn razor-thin elections in '24 with the Democrat narrowly but clearly winning. Do the state legislatures pull out all the stops to throw the election to De Santis, including overruling all democratic norms?
Maybe. Or maybe it's Trump who is the X factor in all this.
I don't think there is any evidence that state legislatures would 'pull out all the stops' for Trump. Nevermind anyone else.
That is the question. My contention is that this isn't about Trump at all. The culture allowed Trump to get where he got and it'll support the next Trump after he's gone.
Do you think this is limited just to loyalty to Trump? My contention is that the threat doesn't revolve around Trump at all. That there's been a shift in Republican party culture that demands loyalty to the party and its causes (mostly as dictated by the base) no matter how unhinged they are. There's no room for conscientious objectors whatsoever. They'll be soundly drummed out of the halls of power.
Sure, back in the day, McCain was derided as as RINO, but he was still part of the party power structure, despite his differences on some issues. Now, in order to have any influence at all, you have be fully onboard with even the most extreme positions.
To me, this is not just an amping up of how things have always worked. It's different and much more dangerous.
I think Trump was extremely effective at sidelining people that didn't stand behind him. I believe both a) that belief - even within the GOP is probably exaggerated and b) post 1/6 isn't likely to be true any longer.
Part of the issue is that progressives have been using "conservatives ushering in fascism" scare tactic for my entire political adult life (2001 and on, then), and they want to point to the fact that they may be (probably are?) correct about it now as a way to prove that they have always been right about it. Even as a young progressive I was never really concerned that Bush, McCain, or Romney was gonna turn the US into the theocracy that some of my fellow liberals seemed to think was always just on the cusp of happening.
And then during the Trump administration you had large contingents of Republican elected officials bending the knee and rolling over in ways that would have been unimaginable to most people even 10 years ago.
The thing that scares me the most (and I am hardly the first person to lay this out) is that the lessons that Republicans have learned, over and over, is that they are better off having no agenda and focusing on grabbing hold of these relatively obscure little electoral choke points in a few key states instead of presenting an agenda to the American voting public and letting them decide whether they want that or not.
How are Republicans "grabbing hold of these relatively obscure little electoral choke points in a few key states". The few times I've been able to get someone to point to actually changes in law that purportedly do this - the actually legislative language doesn't actually support this assertion.
The Constitution is pretty clear that states may pick electors based on almost any criteria they choose, and not necessarily who won a plurality in their state. Article 2, Clause 2, emphasis obviously mine:
"Each State shall appoint, *in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct*, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress"
I mean feel free to read the whole article- I didn't see anything about the plurality vote winner in there. So if a Dem wins Wisconsin, Georgia or Arizona fairly, the legislature can apparently say 'well there was fraud so we're choosing to send electors for Trump instead'
You know all of the states have laws and Constitutions, right?
Well by definition the US Constitution trumps all of them- that's the whole point of having a constitution :) A law that purports to overrule a constitution is a law that will be struck down in court
No. That’s not how that works.
His point is that if Congressional Dems actually believed this they would be acting very, very differently.