All that you have made clear is that protecting democracy (and Democrats!) doesn't matter to Manchin or Sinema. If the 2020 Senate races had broken more favorably giving us one or two more Democratic Senators I'm reasonably confident that we would have passed voting rights legislation at least,plus passing a reconciliation bill with a lot of Democratic priorities.
I think the issue here is the same as always: People are good at convincing themselves of what they want to believe. As long as progressives get everything they want, voters will love them for it and all the democrats will be reelected. Crisis averted.
I agree completely with the headline of this piece which, broadened out a bit, boils down to:
Look at what people do, not what they say.
Jonah Goldberg has a good phrase related this which goes something like (paraphrasing) - Don't look at what people claim to believe, look at what they actually prioritize.
And yeah, especially in the last five-six years, there's been a lot of talk that isn't backed up by action.
But I think Matt misses something fundamental here:
"Viktor Orbán’s opponents in Hungary are hoping to pull off something similar.
Democrats aren’t. And critically, nobody is really urging them to. It’s not as if Elizabeth Warren won the 2020 nomination — Biden was the standard-bearer for moderation and electability, and he rejected this approach."
Parties in Europe are fundamentally different than what passes for parties in America. Here the GoP and Democrats are more like brands. There is no central control over anything. Parties here have even given up the ability to choose who represents them politically.
In Europe it's much different. Parties have leadership and authority over the party and its members. Parties can kick people out of the party and have mechanisms to police compliance with the party goals. None of that is true in the US. Switching from Republican to Democrat is about as easy as switching from Coke to Pepsi.
So the examples MY cites in Europe of parties with opposite agendas banding together to stop a greater evil simply can't happen here because our parties are weak and have no structure or ability to make such deals because factionalism within parties reigns.
Similarly:
"Do party platforms matter? Not really. But they are an interesting window into where party leaders’ heads are."
Yes, party platforms don't matter because US parties have no ability to actually implement platforms. There's no committee or leadership that can compel a politician representing the party to adhere to the platform. Again, this is very unlike political parties virtually everyone else in the world.
And my view is that this is primary cause of our current political dysfunction. As bad as the smoke-filled rooms were, they served a purpose in promoting a unified party message and action, and were a mechanism that allowed factions within parties to get along enough to work toward common ends. None of that exists anymore.
The democratization of primaries and the removal of all the other tools that enabled parties to be coherent entities are gone, mostly sacrificed on the altar of well-meaning but naive attempts to get money and "corruption" out of politics. Politicians have, like much of society, become atomized. The incentives drive them to care most about their donor base and the median primary voter. The party can't protect incumbents and therefore can't ask them to make an unpopular vote for the good of the party. So most politicians work hard to avoid having to take votes that are lose-lose.
And all this is exactly what we've seen with Democrats and the BBB. Manchin is an island - the party has no ability to get him to play ball. Predictably, the attempts to bully him on social media and elsewhere have only helped him politically where it matters - his WV constituents. Progressives somehow expect Manchin to commit political seppuku and vote for a bill that's unpopular with his constituents because...reasons. The result was entirely foreseeable.
And that collective sigh of relief you may hear are all the moderate Democrats who studiously avoided taking any firm position on BBB and did about everything they could to avoide talking about it - this result is the best case for them as they avoided having to take a no-win vote and can now say how disappointed they were that an agreement couldn't be reached....
I don't understand this post. So because some people most of us agree don't always act strictly rationally aren't behaving the way you think they should given their professed beliefs, we shouldn't be worried about what is clearly an authoritarian trend on the right? That argument seems...weak.
This faintly ridiculous hypothetical presupposes that progressives wouldn't take this deal because they aren't serious about the dangers posed to democracy. An alternate theory would be that progressives wouldn't take this deal because they don't trust any GOPers, even the never Trumpers, to keep up their ends. I know I don't. The Never Trumpers aren't interested in the kind of democracy reforms proposed by the Democratic Party. They're just annoyed that Trump, rather than they, is benefitting from the attacks on democratic process. They'd be making the same moves if they were still in control of the GOP.
I don’t think we’ll get serious electoral reform in this country, if we ever do, until we’ve been through a period of autocratic hell. It mostly takes a crisis to force meaningful change. Or visionary leadership, which we absolutely do not have at this time.
It has occurred to me on a few occasions now whether Manchin is obstructing out of a good faith belief that holding the center is good for our democratic system in this particular climate. I’m glad to see someone else articulate it.
I don't think that's what Manchin is doing, nor do I think that's what Matt is articulating. Manchin's objections to BBB are incoherent more or less boil down to "I don't wanna," as opposed to some deeply felt beliefs about the importance of preserving our democratic system.
Could well be true—I took some liberties here. That Matt started off talking about the threat to democracy seemed vitally important, as did the way he went on to talk about how a radically progressive agenda involving real change would be, even if good in many ways, destabilizing in the current climate.
Sure. I don’t think that changes my argument. It would appear more moderate and modest if the balance worked out that way—he is, in effect, holding the center.
Progressive activists don't think that passing sweeping legislation is worth sacrificing electoral victories. They think that passing sweeping legislation will help them win elections. Calling them hypocrites isn't the answer, you have to convince them that they're wrong about the popularity of their agenda. Of course that's difficult because there's some kind of cognitive bias towards believing your preferred policies are also savvy politics (if only Yglesias had thought of a catchy term for this), but that's the case for everyone across the ideological spectrum. Manchin probably thinks shrinking the deficit is the key to 2022.
Manchin wants to continue representing West Virginia is where his calculations lie. Perhaps if enough fires burn away at the Democratic Party the Progressive side will become a rump remnant rather than being ideologically in control and the party will come back to him, but I don’t think that’s his grand strategy.
I find the counterfactual annoying because while yes, the progressives would have complained about it, they also would have gone for it. They voted to separate BIF from BBB, after all, even though it was pretty obvious that Manchin's vote for BBB couldn't be guaranteed.
It's pretty obvious at this point Dems in Congress need to focus on Electoral Count Act and the post facto threat of State legislatures nullifying a states popular vote.
Democrats also need to show that they recognize or care about the fact that in some places their basic electoral coalition is bad at winning elections that has little to nothing to do with gerrymandering or voter suppression
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.
IMO it's worse. Because the Dems are acting to make the situation worse.
For example, if the Dems passed HR1 (aka the invitation to fraud act) that would ensure that the right would never trust elections again.
Instead, people on both sides of the aisle should be coming together to stop further erosion of trust in voting.
this would include things like required voter ID, no ballot harvesting, etc and probably mainly in person voting (barring valid excuse of coursE), along with several weeks of early voting to ensure
ballot access.
But partisans on both sides seem content to further inflame passions.
Matt, I think you might be overlooking an alternate explanation, other than “people don’t really fear for democracy,” for why there hasn’t been more calls for Dems to moderate (something that I feel they should do, to be clear). I haven’t looked it up but am I right in assuming that the issue in Israel and Czech Republic and Hungary is getting a majority coalition? You need to get more votes for the pro-democracy side than the anti-democracy side. Well, in the US, we have that coalition already! Trump didn’t get a majority in 2016 or 2020 and not even the people most bullish on him think he would get a majority in 2024. But he won 2016, almost won 2020, and could win 2024 under those conditions. House Republicans haven’t gotten a majority of votes since 2016; in 2012 the Dems got a plurality of House votes but stayed in the minority. The system is the system and we have to adapt to it, including moderating stances as needed, but you can see how people would be frustrated that, having built a coalition that routinely gets a plurality, they have to bend further still.
House Republicans won a majority of the total votes cast in 2010, 2014 and 2016- they got around 51% in each of those elections. And 2016 was obviously not a midterm! I think a lot of people are in denial about how many people vote Republican in the US- it's a minimum of 47% and up to 51% in every election
This post gets at a question I've been mulling over for the past couple of weeks... that is: how in danger is democracy exactly? Based on media coverage I can't really get a grasp on what the answer might be, and it does seem telling that Democratic party leaders are making noise but aren't really doing anything. Every week I hear a story about how Trump is out there trying to install loyalists at the state/local level so that he can eventually pull off what he tried to do in 2020... but how is that effort progressing? Is the GOP going to have the machinery to overturn the will of the people?
Resources welcome, and if @Matt has anything to say about it I'm all ears.
The article Tom linked to points out the 2024 specific legal stuff, but I'm more worried about the structural issues like gerrymandering, the senate, and the electoral college leading to a minority of voters electing people who control all three branches of government. The structural issues have always existed but rural/urban polarization along party lines makes them important.
If you'd have asked me about this last year I would have said the same, but a hypothetical future where Arizona / Georgia / pick your swing state sends a different slate of electors to overturn the will of the people would be a dangerous escalation of the status quo where Republicans work to entrench minority rule. The details of how this might be done are highly technical so most voter's eyes glaze over when you start to explain that America is fucked without a Brad Raffensperger in every red state.
This is what Article 2 Clause 2 of the Constitution says about elections for President- I put emphasis around the important part:
"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"
That's ALL it says. You'll note there's literally no language requiring those electors to go to the plurality vote winner in the state- that's merely custom.
So if a vote in Wisconsin, Arizona or Georgia is close (as they always are, every single election), the legislature could declare that the 1-5k or however many votes that the Dem won by are fraudulent- and they can exercise their Constitutional authority to send electors for Trump to Congress instead. I'm not even clear that the Court could block or change that
Hey thanks for the response, I'm not a legal scholar... but I've listened to a lot of podcasts! and my understand is that this design was created in part to create a checkpoint that would allow the 'gatekeepers' of elections them to stop a demagogue from taking office (another checkpoint being party primaries).
It seems to me that the current situation is really bad - that is we have a hyper-polarized electorate, the majority of whom are low informations voters, and one side is waging a strategic campaign to exploit this design flaw by installing loyalists into the posts that matter when making these decisions.
So sure, it's part of the design, but if it were to come to pass I think we'd be edging dangerously close to a civil war, in the literal sense. Am I crazy? How close is this to actually happening? When do elections for secretary of state occur in Georgia, Arizona, etc.?
I think there is at least one class of people this is not true of. Many never-Trumpers have jeopardized their careers because they are so concerned about the situation. And I don't think they are the only ones. But the argument may be true on average.
I think the actual situation is somewhat complicated. Certainly, many people are down playing the threat to democracy. But also, it may be that the threat to democracy is not quite as fundamental as it may seem, even to those that perceive the risk. First, Trump is pretty old so a dictatorship seems unlikely. Second, the Republican coalition is not as white as many people make it out to be. We are not going to have a new South situation with an unbreakable white party rule. We are going to have a severe over-representation of rural voters though. Democrats will have to win back state legislatures by competing again in the heavily gerrymandered state districts. If Democrats completely disown their recently adopted platform they may be able to start winning those districts again. That's the real question, in my opinion. But the risk is that if that doesn't work, it will be too late to recover democracy through any other peaceful path. It would be better to avoid trying this experiment.
All that you have made clear is that protecting democracy (and Democrats!) doesn't matter to Manchin or Sinema. If the 2020 Senate races had broken more favorably giving us one or two more Democratic Senators I'm reasonably confident that we would have passed voting rights legislation at least,plus passing a reconciliation bill with a lot of Democratic priorities.
I think the issue here is the same as always: People are good at convincing themselves of what they want to believe. As long as progressives get everything they want, voters will love them for it and all the democrats will be reelected. Crisis averted.
I agree completely with the headline of this piece which, broadened out a bit, boils down to:
Look at what people do, not what they say.
Jonah Goldberg has a good phrase related this which goes something like (paraphrasing) - Don't look at what people claim to believe, look at what they actually prioritize.
And yeah, especially in the last five-six years, there's been a lot of talk that isn't backed up by action.
But I think Matt misses something fundamental here:
"Viktor Orbán’s opponents in Hungary are hoping to pull off something similar.
Democrats aren’t. And critically, nobody is really urging them to. It’s not as if Elizabeth Warren won the 2020 nomination — Biden was the standard-bearer for moderation and electability, and he rejected this approach."
Parties in Europe are fundamentally different than what passes for parties in America. Here the GoP and Democrats are more like brands. There is no central control over anything. Parties here have even given up the ability to choose who represents them politically.
In Europe it's much different. Parties have leadership and authority over the party and its members. Parties can kick people out of the party and have mechanisms to police compliance with the party goals. None of that is true in the US. Switching from Republican to Democrat is about as easy as switching from Coke to Pepsi.
So the examples MY cites in Europe of parties with opposite agendas banding together to stop a greater evil simply can't happen here because our parties are weak and have no structure or ability to make such deals because factionalism within parties reigns.
Similarly:
"Do party platforms matter? Not really. But they are an interesting window into where party leaders’ heads are."
Yes, party platforms don't matter because US parties have no ability to actually implement platforms. There's no committee or leadership that can compel a politician representing the party to adhere to the platform. Again, this is very unlike political parties virtually everyone else in the world.
And my view is that this is primary cause of our current political dysfunction. As bad as the smoke-filled rooms were, they served a purpose in promoting a unified party message and action, and were a mechanism that allowed factions within parties to get along enough to work toward common ends. None of that exists anymore.
The democratization of primaries and the removal of all the other tools that enabled parties to be coherent entities are gone, mostly sacrificed on the altar of well-meaning but naive attempts to get money and "corruption" out of politics. Politicians have, like much of society, become atomized. The incentives drive them to care most about their donor base and the median primary voter. The party can't protect incumbents and therefore can't ask them to make an unpopular vote for the good of the party. So most politicians work hard to avoid having to take votes that are lose-lose.
And all this is exactly what we've seen with Democrats and the BBB. Manchin is an island - the party has no ability to get him to play ball. Predictably, the attempts to bully him on social media and elsewhere have only helped him politically where it matters - his WV constituents. Progressives somehow expect Manchin to commit political seppuku and vote for a bill that's unpopular with his constituents because...reasons. The result was entirely foreseeable.
And that collective sigh of relief you may hear are all the moderate Democrats who studiously avoided taking any firm position on BBB and did about everything they could to avoide talking about it - this result is the best case for them as they avoided having to take a no-win vote and can now say how disappointed they were that an agreement couldn't be reached....
I don't understand this post. So because some people most of us agree don't always act strictly rationally aren't behaving the way you think they should given their professed beliefs, we shouldn't be worried about what is clearly an authoritarian trend on the right? That argument seems...weak.
It is hard setting up a policy contrast with a party whose only intent is coddling rich people. Seems worthwhile.
This faintly ridiculous hypothetical presupposes that progressives wouldn't take this deal because they aren't serious about the dangers posed to democracy. An alternate theory would be that progressives wouldn't take this deal because they don't trust any GOPers, even the never Trumpers, to keep up their ends. I know I don't. The Never Trumpers aren't interested in the kind of democracy reforms proposed by the Democratic Party. They're just annoyed that Trump, rather than they, is benefitting from the attacks on democratic process. They'd be making the same moves if they were still in control of the GOP.
I don’t think we’ll get serious electoral reform in this country, if we ever do, until we’ve been through a period of autocratic hell. It mostly takes a crisis to force meaningful change. Or visionary leadership, which we absolutely do not have at this time.
It has occurred to me on a few occasions now whether Manchin is obstructing out of a good faith belief that holding the center is good for our democratic system in this particular climate. I’m glad to see someone else articulate it.
I don't think that's what Manchin is doing, nor do I think that's what Matt is articulating. Manchin's objections to BBB are incoherent more or less boil down to "I don't wanna," as opposed to some deeply felt beliefs about the importance of preserving our democratic system.
Could well be true—I took some liberties here. That Matt started off talking about the threat to democracy seemed vitally important, as did the way he went on to talk about how a radically progressive agenda involving real change would be, even if good in many ways, destabilizing in the current climate.
Sure. I don’t think that changes my argument. It would appear more moderate and modest if the balance worked out that way—he is, in effect, holding the center.
Progressive activists don't think that passing sweeping legislation is worth sacrificing electoral victories. They think that passing sweeping legislation will help them win elections. Calling them hypocrites isn't the answer, you have to convince them that they're wrong about the popularity of their agenda. Of course that's difficult because there's some kind of cognitive bias towards believing your preferred policies are also savvy politics (if only Yglesias had thought of a catchy term for this), but that's the case for everyone across the ideological spectrum. Manchin probably thinks shrinking the deficit is the key to 2022.
Manchin wants to continue representing West Virginia is where his calculations lie. Perhaps if enough fires burn away at the Democratic Party the Progressive side will become a rump remnant rather than being ideologically in control and the party will come back to him, but I don’t think that’s his grand strategy.
I find the counterfactual annoying because while yes, the progressives would have complained about it, they also would have gone for it. They voted to separate BIF from BBB, after all, even though it was pretty obvious that Manchin's vote for BBB couldn't be guaranteed.
It's pretty obvious at this point Dems in Congress need to focus on Electoral Count Act and the post facto threat of State legislatures nullifying a states popular vote.
Democrats also need to show that they recognize or care about the fact that in some places their basic electoral coalition is bad at winning elections that has little to nothing to do with gerrymandering or voter suppression
Dems should focus on something that Manchin doesn’t support? Really?
Has Manchin already commented on Electoral Count Act or said he doesn't want to do anything about it?
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.
IMO it's worse. Because the Dems are acting to make the situation worse.
For example, if the Dems passed HR1 (aka the invitation to fraud act) that would ensure that the right would never trust elections again.
Instead, people on both sides of the aisle should be coming together to stop further erosion of trust in voting.
this would include things like required voter ID, no ballot harvesting, etc and probably mainly in person voting (barring valid excuse of coursE), along with several weeks of early voting to ensure
ballot access.
But partisans on both sides seem content to further inflame passions.
Matt, I think you might be overlooking an alternate explanation, other than “people don’t really fear for democracy,” for why there hasn’t been more calls for Dems to moderate (something that I feel they should do, to be clear). I haven’t looked it up but am I right in assuming that the issue in Israel and Czech Republic and Hungary is getting a majority coalition? You need to get more votes for the pro-democracy side than the anti-democracy side. Well, in the US, we have that coalition already! Trump didn’t get a majority in 2016 or 2020 and not even the people most bullish on him think he would get a majority in 2024. But he won 2016, almost won 2020, and could win 2024 under those conditions. House Republicans haven’t gotten a majority of votes since 2016; in 2012 the Dems got a plurality of House votes but stayed in the minority. The system is the system and we have to adapt to it, including moderating stances as needed, but you can see how people would be frustrated that, having built a coalition that routinely gets a plurality, they have to bend further still.
House Republicans won a majority of the total votes cast in 2010, 2014 and 2016- they got around 51% in each of those elections. And 2016 was obviously not a midterm! I think a lot of people are in denial about how many people vote Republican in the US- it's a minimum of 47% and up to 51% in every election
This post gets at a question I've been mulling over for the past couple of weeks... that is: how in danger is democracy exactly? Based on media coverage I can't really get a grasp on what the answer might be, and it does seem telling that Democratic party leaders are making noise but aren't really doing anything. Every week I hear a story about how Trump is out there trying to install loyalists at the state/local level so that he can eventually pull off what he tried to do in 2020... but how is that effort progressing? Is the GOP going to have the machinery to overturn the will of the people?
Resources welcome, and if @Matt has anything to say about it I'm all ears.
The article Tom linked to points out the 2024 specific legal stuff, but I'm more worried about the structural issues like gerrymandering, the senate, and the electoral college leading to a minority of voters electing people who control all three branches of government. The structural issues have always existed but rural/urban polarization along party lines makes them important.
If you'd have asked me about this last year I would have said the same, but a hypothetical future where Arizona / Georgia / pick your swing state sends a different slate of electors to overturn the will of the people would be a dangerous escalation of the status quo where Republicans work to entrench minority rule. The details of how this might be done are highly technical so most voter's eyes glaze over when you start to explain that America is fucked without a Brad Raffensperger in every red state.
This is what Article 2 Clause 2 of the Constitution says about elections for President- I put emphasis around the important part:
"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"
That's ALL it says. You'll note there's literally no language requiring those electors to go to the plurality vote winner in the state- that's merely custom.
So if a vote in Wisconsin, Arizona or Georgia is close (as they always are, every single election), the legislature could declare that the 1-5k or however many votes that the Dem won by are fraudulent- and they can exercise their Constitutional authority to send electors for Trump to Congress instead. I'm not even clear that the Court could block or change that
Hey thanks for the response, I'm not a legal scholar... but I've listened to a lot of podcasts! and my understand is that this design was created in part to create a checkpoint that would allow the 'gatekeepers' of elections them to stop a demagogue from taking office (another checkpoint being party primaries).
It seems to me that the current situation is really bad - that is we have a hyper-polarized electorate, the majority of whom are low informations voters, and one side is waging a strategic campaign to exploit this design flaw by installing loyalists into the posts that matter when making these decisions.
So sure, it's part of the design, but if it were to come to pass I think we'd be edging dangerously close to a civil war, in the literal sense. Am I crazy? How close is this to actually happening? When do elections for secretary of state occur in Georgia, Arizona, etc.?
As far as I can tell it’s going gangbusters. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/
I think there is at least one class of people this is not true of. Many never-Trumpers have jeopardized their careers because they are so concerned about the situation. And I don't think they are the only ones. But the argument may be true on average.
I think the actual situation is somewhat complicated. Certainly, many people are down playing the threat to democracy. But also, it may be that the threat to democracy is not quite as fundamental as it may seem, even to those that perceive the risk. First, Trump is pretty old so a dictatorship seems unlikely. Second, the Republican coalition is not as white as many people make it out to be. We are not going to have a new South situation with an unbreakable white party rule. We are going to have a severe over-representation of rural voters though. Democrats will have to win back state legislatures by competing again in the heavily gerrymandered state districts. If Democrats completely disown their recently adopted platform they may be able to start winning those districts again. That's the real question, in my opinion. But the risk is that if that doesn't work, it will be too late to recover democracy through any other peaceful path. It would be better to avoid trying this experiment.