Partly I think there's a social-bubble element to this. Because of the way we're all segregated, a lot of left people I known genuinely don't believe anyone could be disagreeing with them in good faith – there must be some nefarious underlying reason. So they think 'well if everyone agrees with me, how can we be losing elections?' Mobilisation – 'we're just not enthusiastic enough' – is a way less threatening answer than 'actually people don't agree with me.'
It's similar how my grandmother didn't believe in atheists. People might SAY they don't believe in God to be rebellious, or contrarian, or evil, but the idea that the belief was sincerely held seemed literally incomprehensible to her.
Relatedly, most very politically-engaged people are segregated from politically-disengaged people. I bet many of the young activists mostly do not know people who just don't care about politics, and the people they DO know who don't vote are the people saying stuff like "both parties are just corporate stooges, why would i vote to sustain the capitalist oligarchy, etc. etc."
That's just because they don't know the vast majority of non-voters, who mostly have very idiosyncratic views and have little exposure to politics beyond whatever breaks through onto their social media feeds.
They know people who disagree with them. They just bully those people into hiding it. If you react to anyone who mildly disagrees with you by calling them racist, then you stop hearing disagreement. Not because you're segregated or because of social bubbles, because you've worked to not hear disagreement directly.
John, you know me better than that. I was merely pointing out that his blanket accusation that liberals political bubbles were caused because they, "accuse others of racism" had an equally reprehensible parallel.
In my view, the issue is that people view and define "racism" differently. My more conservative friends see racism as limited to personal and intentional animus. Liberals view "racism" quite differently with the more progressive ones adopting the Kendi-esque view that outcomes are everything.
So the problem is that there isn't a common understanding of what racism is or what it means.
I certainly think that is an issue. I also think that a huge issue is that conservatives tend to speak ill of poor people independent of their race and liberals (who generally don't) frequently misread this as racist.
This is captured really well in the following paper/study (including that conservatives appear to think worse of same-race poor than other race):
I've never lived in a majority-conservative community or run in majority-conservative social circle, so I have a bit of epistemic modesty of what the social dynamics of such communities/subcultures are like. I could certainly imagine a similar dynamic being in play, but I could also imagine that their dynamics are different.
People are basically all the same, but conservatives and liberals tell somewhat different myths to themselves about themselves, and the communities of conservatives exist in a different place in the national culture, so they might not be the same? I don't know.
Its bears mentioning that majority conservative congressional districts tend to have more liberals than majority liberal congressional districts have conservatives by like 10-30 points usually IIRC. A big part of this is gerrymandering, but to a larger degree, it's a consistent dynamic of American urban-rural polarization.
In my personal experience. these communities often seem more conservative then they actually are, in part due to the fact that the conservative base is larger then their democratic counterparts and much more prone to put their beliefs on their lawns, T-shirts and in back of their cars, then their democratic counterparts who favor social media.
You can get get away with being liberal, you just got to be real quiet about it when dealing with certain neighbors.
I'm don't think its true though. The number of places where its more okay to severely ostracize racism is much higher than the number where its okay to engage in racism.
<On the other hand, its also kinda funny to see "both siderism" happening from this angle>
I think the point is that "accuse others of racism" implies that liberals are doing this to others who are not in fact racist. I am certain this occurs far more often that it should. However, it is still unreasonable to blanket declare that every liberal individual's assumption(and declaration) of racism about the non-liberals who would otherwise share their views is the cause of political bubbles.
Anecdotally, several of my once-closer friends who are highly #engaged on Twitter, etc. have started to name-drop terms and abbreviations that I don't even recognize. I used to be politically allied with these folks. Probably I still am to some degree, but how do you even have a conversation?
I'm just reading this article and your comment two years later. I lost track of the number of people who thought I was "angry at God." They couldn't understand that I couldn't be angry at something I thought didn't exist.
Didn't mean to imply it was social media! Meant social literally – progressives have mostly progressive friends, etc., like the Pauline Kael quote about Nixon.
It doesn't depend on social media, but the trend of the more extreme people being more engaged is amplified on social media. When a multitude of people can pile on somebody who pushes back on an extreme social justice post, moderates are even less likely to disagree on social media than IRL.
The amount of pushback that Matt has gotten on this from other pundits (Jamelle Bouie, among others) has been interesting to see. People really hate thinking that their preferred political outcomes and the optimal strategy to achieve those outcomes don't line up neatly.
It's frustrating how little his critics have to say about how they think Democrats can win more elections. Matt will point out highly race conscious messaging is ineffective *among racial minorities* (as well as whites) and it seems they still won't budge from "if you don't centre race, you're a racist"
and they're usually the first to suggest that America is a very racist place full of racist people. It's like it's important to state that point but not let it affect your strategy.
And maybe that's legitimate! Maybe it's worth losing some elections on the margins if it means not pandering to racists (whatever that means in practice). But no one actually says this.
We don’t discuss the potential consequences of how we talk about race. At all. Certainly not any potential negative consequences. This has the effect of ceding that task to conservatives.
What do we hope to gain by speaking more often of Whiteness as an identity (just as a random example)? What are the possible negative consequences? It feels like that conversation barely exists, even in terms of potential electoral impact.
Deontology is the last defense of the incompetent, ie If your strategy doesn’t actually help, say it’s the only moral strategy, whether or not it works
Jamelle Bouie is an NYT columnist (among other things). Mehdi Hassan has his own show on Peacock. I think they have way too much power to need to pander to donors. It's something stronger than that.
I think their ideas are something like this (this is of course, not my personal opinion, but as long as we're going to talk about how not all Trump supporters are irredeemable racists, we might as well extend the same good faith to progressives as well) --
1. Messaging is set by institutions like Fox News and CNN, not by Democrats. No matter what they do, they'll be labeled the party of Socialism and Illegal Immigrants, so you won't see any additional political downside by moving to the left on those issues.
2. People, and politicians in particular, will often use the electorate as a smokescreen for their own beliefs. We see this all the time with moderates saying "well, people don't want a big spending increase right now". From this perspective, it's not hard to see tactical considerations being used as cover for genuine policy preferences. And in some cases, that's really what's happening!
3. Many of these columnists are in a position where prejudice among progressives are uniquely salient. We genuinely do see some extremely online Bernie-adjacent types that will use leftist rhetoric to justify being dismissive black people or women.
From that perspective, you can see why someone would be suspicious of attempts to move back to a more Obama-style, post-racism rhetoric.
"Messaging is set by institutions like Fox News and CNN, not by Democrats."
This is true and false. Media sells what the audience buys. If they don't have a product that the audience wants, the audience will go somewhere else. Democrats (Progressives) are the audience for 70% of media.
I'm in 90% agreement. But I would disagree that it is an enemy.
They know the math of the country and that the Dems can't win if WWC votes like African Americans. What they want is for a remant of the WWC, roughly 1/3 - 40% to remain as Democrats, but as silent partners.
The WWC as silent partners would get the universal benefits the Democrats propose from the country but nothing more. While the minority and professional class get the universal benefits along with symbolic representation & social status elevation.
I'm reminded a bit of working on Democratic campaigns back in 2012 and going through the process of figuring out what polled well. We had to be careful because even with Paul Ryan as the Republican VP, the public refused to believe just how bad the Ryan Budget was in terms of cutting Medicare. It seemed too bad to be plausible.
In contrast without a shred of evidence, voters were willing to believe that a Republican candidate supported privatization of Social Security. Eight years after Bush and it still lingered in the public's mind.
The more vocal the progressive left is, and the more Fox News picks up stories that aren't even true (banning airlines?), the harder it gets for even a moderate Democrat to distinguish themselves because I think the public is becoming more and more credulous that Democrats are all far left.
And the longer Republicans shut up about their unpopular ideas, the more it fades from the public's memory.
This is in line with other research I've read that Americans don't actually believe the GOP economic platform because it seems so ludicrous.
I continue to think that the GOP failing to overturn ACA in Congress is one of the best things to ever happen to their party; it would have been like the dog who caught the car. What they discovered is that packing the courts is much better as A) it's out of public view and B) they can just claim its just the courts following the law.
Also, I do suspect that if the courts really did overturn Roe vs. Wade, it would backfire politically. One reason I suspect GOP has been able to make this a winning issue is most of the chipping away at Roe vs Wade has been just that; chipping away. And most of the controversies are over things like the Hyde amendment or partial birth abortion. But not about banning outright. The Mississippi case I suspect might help sway at least a few swing voters that the GOP really is interested in complete roll back and not just trimming the areas that Americans are most apt to find icky.
No, in that it seemed to disbelieve that Dobbs would happen. Yes, in that it rightfully imagines that the GOP will face a blowback for Dobbs, but perhaps not as bad as one might have imagined.
Progressives are on The Right Side of History. Winning elections, governing, and solving problems isn't what matters. It's about being right.
Progressives don't need to change anything that they are doing, because demographics are destiny. Opponents of progressivism are all deplorable racists and fascists. Why would progressives want to win the vote of deplorable racists?
I think gay marriage (which to be clear I support) turbocharged this view. Here’s this issue that went from being almost laughable to pretty high levels of national support in an incredibly short period of time. I think a lot of progressives patted themselves on the back (in this case justifiably) for being on the right side of history. But the assumption that all the other issues they care about will break in the same way seems dubious.
"...the assumption that all the other issues they care about..."
Yeah, there are fairly few other kinds of oppression that affect so many white, male, right-wing millionaires and billionaires. Thanks, Peter Thiel!
Changing "the culture" when some of the rich white men also suffer the oppression turns out to be a lot easier than when the oppression affects only, I dunno, women, or people of color, or the poors.
I think you’re overestimating Thiel’s influence on popular opinion. And while there have always been rich, white, gay men, gay marriage still didn’t happen here until ten years ago.
I included Thiel's name just as an example, and I agree that he personally is not well-known to the broader public.. There are lots of other rich white right-wing gay men -- I could also have said Andy Sullivan, or hundreds of other guys. Combined, they move a lot of money, and sit on a lot of boards and law-firms, and threaten a lot of boycotts.
It's true that marriage didn't happen for a long time. But if we want to ask, "why did gay rights proceed from zero to full equality in 30 years, when the fights against misogyny and racism move at a glacial pace?", then I think we need to look at who benefits from the liberation, and who benefits from the oppression.
Rich white men decided that allowing other rich white men to screw each other did not really upset their own grip on power to any great extent, so they had little to lose by allowing that particular liberation movement to succeed. But upsetting the racial or gender hierarchies is still a step too far for those in power, so they continue to fight it tooth and nail.
Hmm.. I think you're overestimating there. Remember, public opinion _also_ dramatically changed during this time - not just elite opinion.
I think it's more to do with the fact that lots of people could see a friend/relative of theirs denied marriage equality directly, or when someone comes out, see that hey, gay people aren't that different.
And they could be born into any family anywhere.
(My own parents were somewhat upset when I came out many years ago, but are big fans of my husband now).
That's different for the poor/minorities - especially poor+minority. People in your family/friend circle are likely to be around your socioeconomic status.
It _also_ didn't cost anyone anything. Didn't MLK say that the part of the Civil Rights Act that did pass was the easy part because that didn't really cost anyone anything? (At least it didn't cost anyone $$)
Climate change has lots of rich white men supporting fighting it, but individuals don't want to pay $100/year to fight it - marriage equality costs them $0 /year.
"I think it's more to do with the fact that lots of people could see a friend/relative of theirs denied marriage equality directly..."
Lots of people can see women being oppressed, even within their own household. But that does not persuade them to support rights for women, because they *benefit* from that oppression, and would have to give up a lot if they recognized women's equality.
"...the part of the Civil Rights Act that did pass...didn't really cost anyone anything?" Yup. You're agreeing with me. Rich white men looked at gay marriage, and decided that it didn't cost them anything (or that it gave them advantages, were they rich white gay men). But rich white men don't want to give up misogyny and racism, because that would reduce their power.
I'm glad that your parents came around on your husband. Seriously. The improvement in rights for gay people is a good thing. It's just a bit galling when the pace of change is so slow in other areas.
You are way overestimating the power of rich billionaires. It is typical vulgar marxism
Public support for same sex marriage changed dramatically while opinions on abortion (55%-65% support) have barely budged in decades. It isn't opposition of billionaires fueling the pro-life movement.
The pro-life movement has almost no foothold in major instituions outside religion and is scorned in entertainment. The pro-life is also disproportinatly female. Yet it hasn't gone away and won important victories over last decade.
I think the gay marriage issue won because of the rationality of the issue. Two dudes getting married is none of my business. Once most people had a gay person in their life and started to accept the concept of homosexuality as a personal right, the hostility to it mostly disappeared.
Nowadays, basically no one is against gay marriage except for religious conservatives and full-on antigay bigots, which is a minority within a minority.
But on other issues the rationality is less clear cut.
Reminds me though, I am curious to see how long these young folks stay progressive, or if as usual many age into moderation. Did you know the Boomers were once radical hippies? George McGovern and all that fun... And now you see how that turned out...
I'm not very old (late-30s) and I've actually been moving gradually to the left as I get older. The last time I voted GOP in a national race was Romney in 2012. I voted Obama in 2008 because of Sarah Palin (who imo was the first warning sign that the crazies had captured the GOP). I voted for Romney primarily because I was deployed to Afghanistan at the time and thought the Obama FP team didn't know what they were doing (I was basically a single-issue voter, electing to throw them out). I will continue to vote for a sane Dem party over the current crazy town GOP. In an alternate reality, I'd vote for a sane GOP over crazy town progressives.
If, as I fear, we are headed to a world of crazy town GOP vs crazy town progressives, then God help us all. We will become an ungovernable nation even more than we already are.
I am basically with you. I wonder if we should organize as a block of moderate swing voters promising to throw the general election for the less bonkers candidate!!!
I feel like that was the magic holding presidential elections together for a few decades, then 2016 turned into a game of chicken with no obvious moderate. (Because Clinton brought that Clinton baggage, more so than being immoderate in her policies.)
I live in a swing district (IA-03). Iowa is trending red and Cindy Axne will be lucky to hold this seat next year. Progressives are absolutely delusional if they think they can win this district by moving left.
There is a play in middle America for the socially conservative/fiscally liberal swing voter. We probably need more regional parties to allow that to happen (Matt wrote about this a while ago).
Moderation and compromise may be boring but its the only way to hold this country together. Yes, the GOP doesn't play nice, but their ideological goals are always more geared towards playing defense (i.e. stand athwart history and yell stop) and in politics, as in war, the defense is always naturally stronger. They also have big structural advantages at the national level due to urban/rural ideological sorting that aren't going away no matter how many think pieces are written about abolishing the Senate or Electoral College.
I don't really know what "pro-democracy" means. I'm pro-constitution, and a fan of federalism. I don't have the same objections to some of the minoritarian things in the constitution (bill of rights, senate, and electoral college specifically) that many on the left do. I would like to see the filibuster go away, or at least require the filibusters to actually be carried out on the floor. I think adding a couple of states would be fine and fair at the national level.
I'm personally very socially conservative. I also don't want right-wing busybodies regulating their own version of morality. Where I have moved left is on economics. I think we need more checks on corporate power, big infrastructure investments, and a better social safety net.
I meant "pro-democracy" only in the sense of supporting free and fair elections within the current system --- in particular, not throwing out elections because you don't like the result. (Is "pro-democracy" really such a loaded term these days? It wouldn't even occur to me to use it in the ways you suggested.)
The three economic points you mentioned are currently viewed as left-wing, but I'm curious how they'll be viewed in the future. There are Republicans who at least pay lip service to those points, so they may become less of a left-right issue. (Of course, lip service and genuine support are different things.)
(I'll also add that being pro-constitution says very little about what you think of presidential election shenanigans. The constitution is pretty much mum on how such elections should work. The constitution as written would allow state legislatures to simply assign the delegates as they please and not run an election at all. Would you be ok with such a thing since it's allowed by the constitution?)
(I guess that I should know the answer to my question. I recently got into an argument in the slowboring comments by maintaining that the CA recall election was, by definition, not undemocratic. I guess that I should update my definition.)
Don't forget that crazies or not, the one value that holds current-office-holders-or-their-possible-next-in-liners ( s well as the entire lobby industry) is to get and remain in office (power). That's why the laws are stacked against formation of third parties. It's one thing for corporations or individuals with big money to take a stand w Democrats or Republicans, but it would be a whole other matter if that money/prestige/etc. was put behind third-party candidates. Those in power would be frightened and react accordingly.
The idea that people inevitably grow more conservative as they age is a myth.
The vast majority of Boomers were not hippies. Saying that Boomers were super progressive because some were hippies is like saying that Zoomers and younger Millenials are hardcore conservatives because of Gamergate.
In reality people usually settle into a political identity in their late teens and early 20’s and stay with that general worldview for the rest of their lives.
I think people are misinformed about it because popular culture focuses on the people who are *exceptions*.
The boomers who participated in civil rights protests and anti-war protests were a minority of the overall generation. But those people are more interesting than the rest of the generation that disapproved of what those progressives were doing, so they get the attention.
I wouldn’t be shocked if in a couple decades there is some cultural myth that Millennials and Zoomers were pro-MAGA in the 2010’s based on Q-Anon developing on sites like 4chan and 8chan, and based on Gamergate being a cultural flash point for young people.
A couple ideas are getting mixed together here. One idea is how common is it for individual people, particularly young leftists, to become more conservative as they age? But another way to read "boomers became more conservative" is to look at the voting patterns of the cohort overall. Even if no one changes their party alignment, the cohort can shift because of new voters entering (and long-time voters leaving, mostly through death I suppose).
The other thing is that while I agree it's not inevitable that voters lean farther right as they age, it was the observed trend over most the last decade or two.
The Boomers who were politically engaged in 1972 (ie in their 20s) were radical, but that just goes along with the trend that young engaged people are more ideological.
As someone who knows quite a few working-class and/or military Hispanics, the idea that they would be a reliable progressive voting bloc makes no sense to me. This observation is admittedly anecdotal but I think it holds with how the numbers are trending.
Also from Pew: 39% of US Born Hispanics marry outside of their ethnicity, which to me is a strong signal that assimilation is happening within a generation or two.
Yea for Hispanics your probably right 20-50 years. In 1918 the German American identity was so strong the US considered joining the central powers. That was not an issue during ww2.
Another way to think of it is as an ethnicity. We don't really have labels for our biggest ethnic groups in the way that most of the rest of the world does. Instead race has sort of become an overloaded term that sometimes substitutes for ethnicity and sometimes is used to mean ancestry.
Using race as ethnicity worked well enough in the Jim Crow South, but it's confusing as hell in 2021 America.
Yup. Only thing I'd add here is that a lot of these delusions came out of Bernie's overperformance in the 2016 primary (which we've relitigated in this space many times already), which was almost entirely due to Hillary's weakness as a candidate and not a mass constituency for progressive politics. This was followed up by the 2018 AOC/Squad House victories -- and good for them, realizing they should try to knock out moderate Dems in left-leaning seats. But those lessons certainly don't apply across the country.
Speaking as one of them, Bernie had a real swing voter appeal in 16, both personally and as an alternative to Hillary. He wasn't just speaking to the extreme progressives. In 2020 that appeal was pretty much gone.
Mildly pro-gun, moderate-on-immigration Bernie v.16 provides the path forward for the Democrats if they want to get anything done, IMO.
I'm curious to see if Fetterman proves or disproves that theory in PA next year. I hope he can make it through the primary electorate, which he can't... ugh.
I find the whole "swing voters don't exist" sub-debate important, and interesting. It's obviously bullshit (always was) but the trend that got people talking this way is real enough, and clearly folks with a propensity to vote either party are a much smaller slice of the electorate than they used to be.
My sense is, in a closely divided country, the importance of swing voters might actually be bigger than ever. We've seen numerous examples over the last few cycles where positively microscopic vote shifts have made a difference. I wonder just how big (or small) a portion of the electorate they are. Five percent? Eight? Ten? Also, are they more common in highly competitive states like Michigan and Pennsylvania than elsewhere? (This could be the case, but the competitiveness of such states may be entirely because of a closely divided electorate, and might not imply any variance at all from the nation wrt swing voter numbers).
Swing voters: A little more than 10% of voters switched party presidential vote from 2016 to 2020 (source: CNN exit polls). Roughly 2/3 of those switched from a 3rd party to R or D. Age-wise, millennials moved 6 points toward Trump, Gen X went 3 points rightward, Baby Boomers went 1 point to the left and the silent generation moved 3 points to Biden.
Mobilization: About 14% of the electorate had never voted in a presidential election before. About 1/3 of those turned 18 in the prior 4 years, and new voters are much more common at younger ages than older ones. Other voters (can't find an exact number here, but might be 10%) voted in prior elections but not 2016.
Other Impacts: Also about 10% of Americans move each year, which also knocks local vote margins around. And about 7% of voters die over a 4 year period, too.
Edit: It's probably more like 5% of voters die. I had taken deaths per year (x4) and divided by total votes cast, forgetting that not every one who dies is a voter.
“Also about 10% of Americans move each year”. Strictly curious: is this the percentage of people who change districts? Change states? Or just the sheer number who move, even if it’s just down the street?
I just googled "How many Americans move each year?" and it came back with 31 million or about 10%. Your guess is as good as mine on how often that's a change of state or congressional district.
The Catalist link has numbers on "other new voters" which was a weird aggregate combo of people who had changed state + people who voted in previous even-year-elections, but NOT 2016. That number was about 15%.
So maybe it's 5% of voters change their state over a 4 year period, and 10% of voters have voted in some other cycle, but not the previous presidential election? That's just my own rough guess.
Swing voters are significantly more likely to be non-college-educated (another important fact that would have been good for Matt to put in his recent post about the median voter being over 50 and not college educated!) and significantly less likely to be college-educated (of course), evangelical, or Black.
So while I don't have *evidence* of it per se, it seems quite logical that the Midwestern swing states have more swing voters.
Nate Silver did publish an "elasticity index" although it's a few years out of date.
He shows the states with the most swing voters as Alaska, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts and the states with the least as Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Note however that the difference between the most and least elastic is relatively small.
Doesn't Trump's turnout success indicate that infrequent voters on the right are more likely to turn out in response to extreme right-wing messages than infrequent voters on the left are to turn out in response to extreme left-wing messages? Democrats banked on increasing turnout after Obama, but Trump was more effective.
This is distinct from swing voters who regularly vote.
Maybe. Hillary's popular vote increase over Obama's (2012) was miniscule, only a few hundred thousand. But Trump's increase over Romney's (about 3 million) wasn't any historically major accomplishment, either. I think the two candidates' respective popular vote totals were in line with what we've seen in the past when a party is trying to secure a third consecutive White House term. The incumbency party's vote invariably weakens compared to the previous election. In terms of sheer vote totals, to my eyes the story of that race is the clear jump in third party voting. That appears to have hurt Hillary Clinton.
A lot of this does depend on context, and there are elections where swing voters are significantly less important than marginal voters.
If we remain in the high turnout electoral environment of 2020 then marginal voters really won't matter, as there aren't that many gettable marginal voters left. Instead the swing voters are by far the most important factor in these high turnout elections.
Campaigns think of getting a swing voter as +2, as they take away a vote from their opponent and get a vote for themselves. Turning out a marginal voter who supports them is a +1.
But in midterms, and especially in odd year elections, marginal voters can be far more important. Turnout is a lot lower, and there are clearly a lot of gettable voters who can be convinced to vote (as they voted in previous presidential elections).
I think the most interesting thing about swing voters is that as long as they are believed to exist, each party can make a good argument that there is no need to change the platform even in the face of a loss. This leads me to believe we might be better off without swing voters...
Good point about Hispanics and immigration. I've always thought that Democratic fixation on immigration policy (especially as it relates to illegal migration) to try and draw support from Hispanic voters was silly.
My definition Hispanic voters are US Citizens, so they were either born here, or followed the legal process and got naturalized here. Why would people who followed the rules have sympathy for those who didn't?
Note: the above point doesn't necessarily represent my personal thinking on immigration policy. My theory is we just adopt a policy like New Zealand, Australia or Canada. A points system combined with harsh and comprehensive enforcement of employment laws. I work in Canada sometimes.... companies won't even let me on site until I have absolutely proven that I have my work permit and registered.... apparently the fines are pretty hefty.
Anyway, I digress.
My life time voting record:
1992 (George Bush) L
1996 (Clinton) W
2000 (Abstatined)... would of voted Bush, but I will never vote for family of recent President. Am against political dynasties.
2004 (Kerry).... I actually supported Wesley Clark in Primary. Went to rallies.
2008 McCain
2012 Romney (Fuck he would of been a good President)
2016 Abstained. Dislike Trump. Won't vote for Clinton. Same reason as above for Bush.
2020 No Vote *would of voted for Biden, but I was traveling, and didnt get absentee. So passed.
2024 I'm totally open.
Note: I didn't vote for Obama, but would of if he had ran against Trump.
On immigration, an example on how you can alienate more than current Hispanic voters is the following: "NEWS: Key Democrat Sen. Menendez says he won’t support efforts to streamline legal immigration unless lawmakers also pursue a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented..." (from here: https://twitter.com/ellengilmer/status/1443309570831654919)
I'm an immigrant from Europe who is spending a lot of time making sure that I follow your immigration laws (and that involves stupid stuff like trying really hard to not get parking tickets, because I would have to declare them on my green card application etc). What I read here is that a key Democrat doesn't want to make my life easier unless he can first prioritize over me the people who don't try following the law that hard. That tweet really made me angry, and it also made every other immigrant I shared it with very angry (including people already on green cards who just remember what they had to do to reach that point). I'm also one of the lucky ones, because I'm neither Chinese nor Indian, which are the two nationalities for which the legal immigration system is absolutely brutal (because of per country quotas). I can't imagine how being from one of these countries might actually feel.
Your point is well-taken, however, there exist very large numbers of people, many of them living in countries close to the United States, who realistically don't have *any* opportunity to "follow the law" to enter the country to work for a willing American employer. Like a lot of Americans who think about the issue, I'd like to see US immigration policy simplified, streamlined and rationalized using a "increase quotas but do so with a nod the skills the economy needs" approach. But I hope if we some day do so, we don't throw our hemispheric neighbors under the bus. Quite apart from the moral vacuity of such an approach, the US economy under this scenario would continue to attract large number of unauthorized immigrants. Get angry all you want, but that's just reality.
I'm not against changing the law to allowing literally anyone on Earth to enter actually*. What I don't like is prioritizing people who don't follow the law over people that follow the law. Right now, you have people that are in the country for more than a decade, have followed every law, and don't get a pathway to citizenship. I would argue that if you want to open a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, you should also open one for legal immigrants.
*Part of it is because my skills are relatively rare. I expect most opposition to something like that would come from like bus drivers. Many people who know how to drive a bus around the Earth don't earn the salaries of American bus drivers.
My brother and sister are both immigrants. More specifically, they were adopted as babies while we lived in New Zealand. They had to get naturalized in the US. Actually, only my brother did. My sister hasn't bothered yet.
But yes, that Menendez quote is a prime example of a pandering fail.
Yea, a rational center-left position on immigration would be, "We will not enforce our immigration laws by cosplaying Gestapo across the country, rather we'll fine exploitative employers who employ illegal immigrants in modern-day slavery conditions to within an inch of their lives." coupled with "We're going to make immigration a straightforward process and continue to allow the best and brightest from across the world to make their homes here."
Then slip in a hefty refugee quota along with the "best and brightest" policy, tell the immigration activists to learn from the anti-tax ones (you've gotten what you wanted, now shut up about it), and move on.
I think National ID was proposed in the 1990s, and a left-right coalition killed it on a combination of states rights and privacy concerns. I think it should have been a no brainer but the fact that no one is proposing it as a compromise on voter ID suggests it is totally dead.
They can be exploitative only because of our enforcement of immigration laws. Were they not threatened by deportation, then competition would, as usual, improve working conditions and pay. Second, once we find out that an employee has been hiring illegal immigrants, surely we’ll then be compelled to do something about the immigrants - we can hardly hope to get away simply with token fines on the employers and nothing more. That is to say, I think our only options are non enforcement or enforcement, and there’s no real way to stay in between.
It’s also hard to shut up, btw, when immigration restrictions are literally apartheid. It is very difficult indeed.
"They can be exploitative only because of our enforcement of immigration laws. Were they not threatened by deportation, then competition would, as usual, improve working conditions and pay."
That's a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly. And also fundamentally a dodge. If you try to give these folks access to the programs that file the rough edges off of capitalism for citizens, that will provoke an uproar. If you don't, their lives are still going to be damningly hard for residents of a developed nation. Non-enforcement doesn't actually solve any problems for anyone; it just makes the status quo marginally less painful.
"Second, once we find out that an employee has been hiring illegal immigrants, surely we’ll then be compelled to do something about the immigrants - we can hardly hope to get away simply with token fines on the employers and nothing more."
This is just deliberately disingenuous. If I set the fines in a way that the employment of illegal immigrants is simply not profitable, then they will no longer be employed by almost anyone, and they will have little choice in the matter even if ICE is not grabbing and deporting people. Given the limitations of enforcement, I'd be inclined to say something in the vicinity of $15,000 per person per day of illegal employment. Make it ruinously expensive, and focus on large employers.
The point is to get to a point where the law is being effectively enforced, not by beating people in detention centers or shooting them at the border, or asking for papers everywhere, but by destroying the economic motivations behind illegal immigration.
Your problem is that you think the process just stops there. I'm not in this for senseless cruelty, and I don't think these folks are dispensable at all. Our economy cannot function without these folks and that will be very apparent, very quickly if we actually enforce the law. That will cause pain, lots of it, and that pain is going to lead to actual legislation on the topic, from the non-ideological and selfish premise that the status quo is broken for everyone.
No one will be required to buy into your or my conception of morality, no one has to admit that cruelty in enforcement was always pointless, no one has to talk about human rights, and we can maybe get a decent legislative package rammed through to deal with the problem effectively and with less controversy than usual.
"That is to say, I think our only options are non enforcement or enforcement, and there’s no real way to stay in between."
Obviously I disagree, but more importantly, if that dichotomy is the only option, what in Christ's name makes you think the US electorate is going to opt for non-enforcement? It's simply a matter of how effectively you wish to enforce the notion of a border, and how cruelly.
This is part and parcel of the very problem this article is aimed at, that you can sit here and boldly claim that this is even a choice. It's not politically possible, and you're deeply deluded if you think it is. But pretending that the option of
non-enforcement even exists allows you to avoid grappling with genuinely hard decisions about how to make policy, shape public opinion, and reach a legislative outcome.
"It’s also hard to shut up, btw, when immigration restrictions are literally apartheid."
And finally, I get to the sentence that proves this whole attempt at discourse will be fruitless. What? What the fuck is this shambling perversion of logic and reason masquerading as a sentence?
People are paid according to their marginal productivity, in the absence of government intervention. Immigration enforcement allows capitalists to pay less than they would have otherwise. Sure it would be "marginal" improvement - any increase would always be marginal.
Finding out who is employing illegal immigrants inextricably requires finding out who is an illegal immigrant. It would require a big change in our laws to not enforce our laws upon the immigrant at all. Second, I do not see how it is better to force people into poverty - wasn't our goal to make peoples' lives better?
Anyway, to not deport once we have identified people would be seen as non enforcement, I should think.
Yes, it really is apartheid today (no matter how we rationalize it now). The most important feature of apartheid was not petty restrictions on people living mostly in the same area - it was the restrictions on movement, preventing Africans from moving to more productive areas. Fine, it doesn't match up exactly - but they're uncomfortably similar.
I will accept any compromise on immigration as an improvement, but our end goal must always remain the free movement of people without fetter or restriction.
I'm not even going to bother with the rest of this, given the last sentence proves it's a waste of my time, but I will address the last sentence directly:
"but our end goal must always remain the free movement of people without fetter or restriction."
[BURSTS OUT LAUGHING]
No.
Big pile of no, followed by a hefty dollop of nope, with a side of nuh-uh and another of nah.
Hard truth: Borders and nationalities have *objective* value in political discourse.
It is impossible to get people to care about people because they're human. Not difficult, not challenging, but absolutely impossible. 99% of the people I've known to make the claim that they do are lying through their teeth.
The closest we can come is getting people to care about others because they're also "American" or "Italian" or "Japanese."
At its best, patriotism is the glue that causes a white, upper-middle class person in suburban NYC to care about a dirt-poor black kid in Alabama, or an Asian immigrant made good in Houston to care about a poor Hispanic kid in LA.
At its worst, it is truly terrible... but there's just nothing else out there.
Open borders and free movement of people will be nothing but an excuse for America's wealthy and powerful to care about folks in the US as little as they care about people in Central Africa or Sri Lanka, and for the American electorate to let them get away with it. It will *never* be anything else.
If you want to find a pretext to dismantle what few social services we have successfully fought for, shred the meager safety net citizens and permanent residents enjoy, and make the US into an even less fettered plutocracy than is already the case, then go ahead and don't enforce immigration laws at all.
I will pass, and thank God you're on the lunatic fringe.
It is not compassion that causes production, but self interest. I do not care in the slightest *why* people do something - only about what is done. We do not need theft for people to do well - only to stop the ongoing thefts (tariffs! Zoning! Immigration restrictions! Licenses! All the myriads of ways we prevent people from doing what others want!) I support welfare for children and the disabled - things which would have support independent of whether or not there are foreigners comings.
Second, this really isn’t so radical. I propose only what is found between our states today, or in the EU. If immigration restriction truly were so beneficial, why does no one propose it between our states?
As I said, I will support every compromise on the road to freedom, because it would be an improvement. Let us not forget, however, just how wonderful it would be, for people not to be doomed by their birthplace.
In the meantime, we must resist. It is our duty to do what we can to hire illegal immigrants, smuggle them into the nation, enter into sham marriages for green cards, donate directly to people overseas, never cooperate with ice, and indeed, try to foil and divert their resources with false leads, misinformation and various shenanigans.
I'm confused about your definition of apartheid. I don't recall millions of Black South Africans having equal civil rights throughout apartheid the way millions of Mexican immigrants do in the US.
'Why would people who followed the rules have sympathy for those who didn't?"
I've always assumed [insert caveats about assuming] the idea flowed from centering race in identity. That centering automatically creates sympathy for people of the same race who come from the same place (Central/South America). Obviously this is a uniquely broad definition of "people like me."
I would note here that Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration as he was aware it was used to undercut legal workers advocating for better wages and benefits/unionization.
I know. We might get snarky, but its usually policy related. Why police my grammar.... especially when its something that doesn't affect understanding of whatever bad point I am making.
I "policed" your grammar because well-written arguments generally carry more credibility and I thought you'd appreciate having the issue brought to your attention since it was clearly persistent and not just a one-off typo. There are articles, blog posts, etc. (including pieces by Matt) that I will not recommend to anyone because of typos, grammatical errors, etc. that just lower the integrity of the entire piece.
I noticed the grammar error, but also thought Rory’s contribution was worthwhile and didn’t feel the need to point out the error. I expect that a significant part of Matt’s audience feels the same way.
Forward-looking reactions (and the crowing about 'demographic' shifts) from activists almost always has the stench of perfecting the art of fighting the last war just in time for the next one. This is not news to anyone who pays a modicum of attention to national and regional politics, and I'm hardly blowing anyone's hair back by saying it, but there seems to be a lot of untapped potential for conservative politicians in younger, male, black and latino men. My brother-in-law is a 29-year-old latino guy raised in the suburbs, and his Facebook posts are basically indistiguishable from my 60-something white uncle who is pretty widely considered a bigot by the majority of the family.
I agree, though in my situation with my BIL it's not even racism, really. There's some of that, but I mostly mean the sorts of things that are traditionally equated with conservatism in the US; memes telling the homeless to get jobs, or about how no one wants to work any more, or (much less importantly) posts mocking kids for their bad taste in music, clothing, or preferred athletes. Just general boomer-isms.
Exactly. Put “racism” aside. Classically conservative tendencies are equally distributed across races. The Dems have owned the black vote despite this for a number of idiosyncratic historical reasons, but even that is subject to change, and the notion that Hispanics will forever loyally vote D is a farce.
Of course, nobody actually thinks that only white people are racist. People are, however, aware that white people are in the majority and white people are dramatically in the wealth and power majority and thus racism by white people is more concerning than racism by non-white people.
1. I don't know what to tell you - I personally know many people who think only white folks are racist. Off the top of my head, check out a book called "White Fragility," which has been used in defense of the idea that only white folks can be racist.
2. To the extent that white people are dramatically in the wealth and power majority, they have no special claim to abusing that wealth and power at the expense of the poor and weak. As a brown dude with, ah, plenty of exposure to wealthy and powerful brown folks, I can assure you that the amount of racism baked into the system would NOT dramatically decrease if brown folks were in the power and wealth majority. If you don't believe this, I will wager that you haven't spent years dealing as equals with working class POC.
So, you and I agree that, "not only white people are racist." But there exists a book that (maybe) says, "only white people are racist." And based on that I should revise my opinion that most people are well aware that racism is a virtually universal human attribute?
If your opinion is "that most people are well aware that racism is a virtually universal human attribute," then my disagreement is minor and not worth discussing. But if your opinion is "of course, nobody actually thinks only white people are racist," then my disagreement is less minor and worth a couple of sentences in response.
The more interesting point in your post, though, is around whether some group's racism is more or less concerning than another's. Given that we agree that racism is, as you put it, a virtually universal human attribute, it seems like focusing on the racism of one group vs another is not going to buy you much. Even if we somehow manage to make white people less racist, wouldn't that just shift more wealth and power to still-racist PoC?
My point was that I racism of a powerful group seems to have more serious consequences than that of a powerless group. It is not obvious to me that primary impact of reducing racism among those in power (still largely white) is to increase wealth among PoC. I would think it would however level the playing field and this might eventually result in a increase in wealth.
Racism is a poorly defined word. In the case of unequal treatment by police(powerful vs. powerless), it seems reasonable to be more concerned about the racism of the guys with the guns. In the case of hiring and firing by large corporations, I am more inclined to just be in favor of the little guy independent of country of origin or skin color.
It’s all exacerbated by social media, of course. Millennials and Gen Z, having grown up with it, can’t see that it’s made everyone skew way more individualistic and performative in their POVs and much less willing to compromise or lay low. Young people were always more extreme, but they didn’t have the opportunity to break into 50 different small but loud factions damaging the broader liberal goals. Tangentially, the constant negative messaging about the US (we are bad and always have been bad!) and politics of victimization is destroying chances in many places…much of the population in the country takes pride in “enduring” life, and feeling like a victim or whiner isn’t appealing.
most of the people who post about politics on social media already have their minds made up and often block those who disagree. i don’t see much persuasion on social media, it’s just salient so people overrate its importance
agree re no minds changed, but the social media echo chamber leads people to think their views are more widely held than they actually are, which is dangerous. I think THAT is why young progressives often believe they just need to push to overcome some shadowy minority that is thwarting their widely-held goals.
That’s a good point, but much like disinformation or “Fake News”, extreme positions are not meant to convince others, it’s meant to entrench current believers in that belief making it harder to dislodge over time. It works against unity and consensus.
That's what makes it more frustrating to me. He clearly is intelligent and knowledgeable about the subject matter. But every piece he writes falls essentially into three categories:
1) Republican appointed justice did something I disagree with me therefore they are bad, have no real principles, are bad, aren't following stare decisis like they're supposed to, are bad, are probably corrupt illegitimate hacks, do you understand just how bad they are?
2) Republican appointed justice did something I like - its either a ruse to slip by something more nefarious, or they're holding on the barest edge of sanity and keep the other crazies from ruining our country
3) Democratic appointed judge is heroically standing against the horrible, terrible bad things the majority is doing and demonstrating what true justice is.
I might even agree with him on the subject, but after the third or fourth time of the same formula it becomes apparent that there is little to not attempt to wrestle with the issues - its just a matter of reminding everyone of who is good and who is bad.
To be fair, this is basically what all left-leaning legal commentary (Slate, Salon, LGM, etc.) sounds like these days. My favorite is the long list of defendants' rights that "aren't really important" in the opinion of such commentators because the writers have to rationalize away Scalia, Thomas, etc. joining with the Democratic appointees on those decisions.
Is it that the relevant people don't grasp this, or is that too much of the messaging is an effort to raise money rather than win votes? Also, the media incentives are to elevate controversial voices, right? So instead there's lots of noise about less electorally significant issues - not because people are morons, but because they have mixed incentives. Maybe?
Electoral money incentives, twitter incentives, activist incentives… there’s a whole bunch of reasons we got here. But just as with veganism, it is possible for people to realize what makes good strategy and overcome the underlying incentives to scream at the top of your lungs.
I think this true. Just as the Republican entertainment/news sphere has different incentives than elected Republicans, like Larry Elder out in California, for example. But, a key part of the dodge is getting the political press to play along and convincing ideological primary voters that they can vote their heart's desire with no downside risk .
They seem to be losing the discipline to accomplish this much longer. The Democrats have never run a tight ship in the first place, it's always been impossible. The Republicans, now that the lunatics are running the asylum, are losing the ability to run a tight ship.
I'm curious how that will play out. It did ok under Trump, who legitimately has a good ear for what he should and shouldn't say, what would offend the margins of the party too much vs. what would turn out the base. None of his potential successors seem so able to channel the Party-wide id so effectively.
So eat your spinach, all you dreamy-eyed leftists. There's no constituency for your pet projects.
Where this message gets difficult is when you realize that there is also no constituency, left right or center, for eating spinach. Sure, there's a segment of the electorate that wants to make *other* people eat their spinach (esp. *those* people) but it also wants to ensure that deserving people (*our* people) are never required to eat spinach. So, "eat your spinach" will lose voters at least as fast as "fix climate change," "go vegan," or "destroy the safety net."
It might seem paradoxical for Matt to pitch a vote-losing position about not taking vote-losing positions.
But then you have to remember that Matt is not trying to appeal to voters. He is trying to appeal to people who are trying to appeal to voters: politicians, activists, donors, and extremely on-line politics-talkers. And the message to them is: voters are never going to eat their spinach. So, you have to do it for them if you want their votes.
Good news: the spinach comes in a gorgeous silver bowl, hand-chased.
One thing that drives me bananas about the (so-called) activist left is that even though they implicitly endorse the mobilization theory of victory, they aren't doing any mobilization. Nothing the extremely online people say or do is designed to appeal to low-income blacks: possibly the one demographic group who *could* shift American politics to the left by raising their voter turnout. Instead they're just tweeting at each other.
Full disclosure: I live outside the US and I try to exercise some influence over what happens by volunteering with Black Voters Matter, a peer-to-peer texting project that does outreach to the black community to increase turnout in key elections. Compared to Twitter it's extremely boring but I'm convinced it actually works
I say this as a wildly, obscenely non-Marxist, market lefty-type.
Unless your campaign/organization is not just doing outreach, but running a constant presence in low-income voters' lives...
Helping them get to the DMV three years from the next presidential election, retaining a lawyer for pro bono tenants' rights cases, maintaining a job search board for ex-cons, checking in on people after disasters, running a food bank, working with health clinics...
Then you're just playing a numbers game come election time, hoping to knock on enough doors to get a few low-propensity voters registered and a fraction of those to the polls.
If the "left" actually wants to mobilize a big chunk of left-leaning votes, they'd have to build organizations that help people first and only incidentally GOTV, just like the Populists and the Socialists did in the early 1900's.
The Progressives didn't do this, but absent Roosevelt's falling into the Presidency and doing the hard work for them, I doubt they would ever have succeeded in enacting fundamental reforms.
I don't think today's "leftists" have even thought of trying it, not for a moment.
I don't know how successful it was and how much he's continued, but after the weather disaster we had here in Texas last February, Beto used his existing phonebank system+volunteers to try and start calling people up and check on them/provide them information.
Currently looks like their focused on the upcoming Texas elections (our constitution seems to require a lot of things to be constitutional amendments rather than standard laws)
I think Democratic Socialists of America do some work along those lines, like auto-repair clinics where you can get your broken signal light repaired for free (reducing your risk of interacting with the cops) and get exposed to some socialist propaganda at the same time. That's absolutely the right strategy, although I think DSA is too weird in other ways to be making a positive contribution to left politics
(I would add that Black Voters Matter has also done SMS outreach to get people vaccinated. I'd like to see textbanking used for other practical purposes, like identifying people who are eligible for food stamps and helping them sign up)
Never mind, they shouldn't do this. It's worse than sitting on their asses.
The folks who should be doing this are center-left candidates and organizations. You have massive warchests, use them for activities that just barely fall within the confines of political campaigning but have a social benefit.
The thing is, I think there's a fairly substantial appetite for, um, spinach in the electorate.
I remember being really disappointed in 2004 when it became really clear the there was a backlash to gay marriage. This made the conclusion that we were going to have to play defense on this issue for awhile fairly obvious -- and this seemed to be the consensus attitude among progressives. The idea that Kerry just wasn't Gay Marrying hard enough was a weird fringe position. And the idea that we should make the issue less salient for the time being was absolutely correct.
The same thing happened in the 2020 primary. The entire circus was defined by the voters saying that they wanted the candidate that would get the most votes in the general election ("electability"), and that they were fairly certain that they'd have to make ideological tradeoffs to ensure that happened.
We saw plenty of African-American voters saying that they voted for Biden not because he was the best fit for their policy positions, but because they thought he was the sort of candidate that could appeal to swing voters and win the election.
I think that most people in the Democratic coalition instinctively recognize that they're going to have to make trade-offs, and behave accordingly.
"We saw plenty of African-American voters saying that they voted for Biden not because he was the best fit for their policy positions, but because they thought he was the sort of candidate that could appeal to swing voters and win the election."
There were people saying this sure - but is there any evidence that another candidate was closer to their actual views? Black voters are typically MORE conservative than the average Democratic voter, so wouldn't they go for the most moderate candidate?
Agreed. I’m sure some high-info black voters talked like this, but the average black voter is more moderate than college-educated white voters, including on cultural issues, so their preference for Biden isn’t hard to understand.
You’re right that ultimately the problem is us. Americans have come to want various specific benefits from government as long as some one else is carrying the costs.
bureaucrats are paid to eat spinach. they should eat it if they want their direct deposits timo continue. rich people can be outvoted and will do just fine if they wash down their spinach with champagne.
This is not a new phenomena. The people on the far left who characterize themselves as progressives have been around awhile. I vividly remember the celebratory comments in the left wing blogs after Obama's rather disastrous first midterm election cycle. Many were quite ecstatic that they had purged so many of those darned blue dogs from the Democrats congressional caucus. I did not believe people could be that dumb about politics but there you are. They can.
The exact same phenomena in the GOP right now with the attempted ongoing purge of Gonzalez, Kinzinger, Cheney, and all the other "communist-democRAT RINOs" who don't bow down before the king.
Ezra Klein mentioned a number of times that the Bernie-sphere had a hard time understanding that there is a large share of the electorate with authentically conservative views across all issues spaces. Many on the left believe that if you could just get the "true" message through to people West Virginia would turn blue.
This is especially tough on immigration where we had 40 years of governing to the left of elite consensus that was to the left of popular opinion. There's no real way to restore that governing by consensus so the liberals/left are stuck between trying to ignore it, losing elections on it, or changing their views none of which is a great option.
What is so interesting to me about this is that Bernie himself absolutely understands that lots of people have conservative views (see his former stances on guns) but somehow was not able to communicate this effectively to the majority of the ideological movement that he became the figure-head for. By 2020 he had just given up and gone full progressive groupthink in his campaign. I honestly don't think it served him well in the primary.
Had Joe Biden won in a popular vote system I don't think we'd be having this specific conversation. People are always jockeying for issue salience, sometimes counterproductively! What else is new? But Because Democrats have a tenuous hold on an unfair map, it's important to actually:
Promote your popular issues over your unpopular issues.
I'm on board! But since a big cause of Democrat's losses is the unfair map, what regionalist appeals should Democrats make based on that unfair map?
I wish politicians would talk more about how changes in agricultural policy can help mitigate climate change (by cutting methane emissions from cattle, sequestering carbon in soil, etc.)
Farmers are an overwhelmingly white, conservative demographic and a lot of them are climate-change skeptics--weirdly, in spite of the fact that they can see their own crop seasons changing. But it would be interesting to see what would happen if a Democratic administration leaned into a climate-targeted policy of *more farm subsidies*. Throw money at them and they might change their minds
The messaging around climate change is dominated by "this is all terrible, the fate of the world is at stake" when the reality is that there will be places that benefit and places that don't. But with mitigation efforts along with adaptation life will likely go on much as it does today.
I think that's a short-term outlook. I don't read articles about new species of animals and plants, just of old ones dying out. If you think "man" can continue to survive by dominating and exploiting the natural world, IHD.
Yes, I've been reading a lot on paleoclimatology lately (e.g., "When Life Nearly Died" by Michael Benton) and while those sorts of books and articles are overwhelming written with a very panicked tone about present day climate change, my main takeaway from the actual objective *science* in those works (as compared to the authors' editorializing) is that even the worst case climate change scenarios are likely going to be survivable by the vast majority of humans with some not-too-extreme mitigation efforts and none of the scenarios is going to actually be "civilization ending" in that the Earth has been substantially warmer than today at a number of points in the past, including within the timeframe where anatomically modern mammals were alive. I mean still favor efforts to mitigate climate change for a variety reasons, but I'm genuinely a lot less concerned than I once was about it.
But climate change is likely to be very, very harmful to billions of people.
And it's almost assuredly less expensive to just head the problem off before it gets any worse than to "mitigate" and "adapt" more and more down the line, even with a reasonable discount rate built in.
Especially because the relevant technologies and techniques to eliminate 75% of emissions are now unabashedly better than their carbon-intensive counterparts, so all that's needed is to prevent state subsidy in the developing world throwing that calculus off, and to subsidize the turn-over of capital in the developed world so that the old assets are depreciated just a bit faster.
agriculture in west kansas was a bad idea in 1890 and remains iffy today. of course it might take long enough to run down the ogallala that you can pay fir the center pivot irrigator and make a profit first.
This was the approach during the Obama years too, there was an agricultural title to the cap and trade bill, and in general it just scared conservative white farmers because now the government was going to do even more to tell them what to do.
Agriculture issues (right to repair, taking on ag monopolies, a better way of dealing with water rights)
Stop calling it "free college" and start calling it "expanding public education"
Break up DC's monopoly on federal offices and spread those jobs and prestige around. And talk it up
Don't pander. Lots of voters in rural states, even progressives like me, have a general feeling of inferiority in the face of "coastal elitism." Pandering just makes it worse.
Second and fourth points are wildly under-addressed.
So much "company town" going on in rural regions, either due to a major employer, or because 3 agricultural businesses have a lock on the whole regional economy (1 seed firm, 1 purchaser/processor, 1 equipment dealer).
As for the DC bureaucracy... DC will be fine, better off even, without any of the alphabet agencies there, as it will pop the housing bubble there.
Meanwhile, scattering 500k-1m well-educated, high-spending federal knowledge workers throughout the country will be a good thing to breathe life back into a bunch of mid-sized cities and the rural regions that they anchor.
This is the part that I don't understand. Matt tweeted his agreement with the Ross Douthat article over the weekend that liberals have won almost every substantive policy point over the last 20 years - and yet are even less satisfied and more impatient now than they were 20 years ago. And impatient to do some fairly dramatic stuff at a time when they have at most a 3-4% advantage in the popular vote and are pretty much dead even in Congress.
I'd presume he means "unfair" in the sense that areas that are more likely to vote Republican are also (coincidentally) disproportionately weighted for purposes of House, Senate, and Electoral College representation.
I wish they would add a way to mute/block people on the comment section. My enjoyment of the comment section would go up like 50% if I didn't see any of the dumb shit Ken posts.
Oh, I have no problem with the Senate issue either -- the Senate represents the states as political entities, not people (like the EU Commission represents the member states of the European Union) -- I just was answering the question.
It is narrowly and darkly funny to me that the word "progressive" directly implies some sort of incremental process, when the notion of the latter would see you blacklisted from many communities and organizations that have regrettably achieved ownership of that word. I hope this ownership is temporary.
Besides the wishful thinking, a lot of pundits and activists lack numeracy skills as well as basic awareness of the scientific process (i.e. how theory and empirics relate), so they should refrain from doing that particular kind of analysis, or else learn some stuff. I'm not even saying you need a phd, you can really go a *long* way just by learning some fundamentals, which every college educated person should be able to.
It's also funny, as someone how also follows Brazilian politics closely, to see lots of these same people idolizing Lula, considering that with more an year before the election Lula was already aggressively courting players in the center and even the center-right. Just like he did when he was President by the way.
This happens all the time with what I call pyramid math: some Wal Mart executive gets a $10 million bonus and the activist class says: “and yet half their employees don’t get health care”. Maybe the bonus wasn’t warranted but giving everyone health care would cost way way more, but they are framed like this is some kind of equivalent trade off.
That’s probably true but my only point is that the numbers aren’t comparable at all. Wal Mart has more than 2 million employees. Redistributing that $10 million to the bottom half (bottom 1 million) means that each of those employees would get… $10.
I understood that. The outrage is misplaced. Sorry I wasn't clearer. My comment was meant in disgust. I continue to marvel at the power CEO's in this country have acquired, and the distance between shareholders and a company's actions because of institutional holdings, conglomerate activities (so that you can't invest in a single portion of a company's activities) is a huge problem in my mind., as who do you think funds the trade associations that hire the lobbyists?
Corps may want to somehow serve the public, but "serve" is in the eye of the beholder, consumer, or gun-buyer, and still only if next quarter's predictions are met. For example, lowering operating costs by cutting down on the number of human beings to drive people to websites which don't solve anything but simple inquiries is not my idea of service..
Partly I think there's a social-bubble element to this. Because of the way we're all segregated, a lot of left people I known genuinely don't believe anyone could be disagreeing with them in good faith – there must be some nefarious underlying reason. So they think 'well if everyone agrees with me, how can we be losing elections?' Mobilisation – 'we're just not enthusiastic enough' – is a way less threatening answer than 'actually people don't agree with me.'
It's similar how my grandmother didn't believe in atheists. People might SAY they don't believe in God to be rebellious, or contrarian, or evil, but the idea that the belief was sincerely held seemed literally incomprehensible to her.
Relatedly, most very politically-engaged people are segregated from politically-disengaged people. I bet many of the young activists mostly do not know people who just don't care about politics, and the people they DO know who don't vote are the people saying stuff like "both parties are just corporate stooges, why would i vote to sustain the capitalist oligarchy, etc. etc."
That's just because they don't know the vast majority of non-voters, who mostly have very idiosyncratic views and have little exposure to politics beyond whatever breaks through onto their social media feeds.
They know people who disagree with them. They just bully those people into hiding it. If you react to anyone who mildly disagrees with you by calling them racist, then you stop hearing disagreement. Not because you're segregated or because of social bubbles, because you've worked to not hear disagreement directly.
Likewise, if you are consistently racist, likely people won't share their less extreme political views with you.
Exhibit A.
John, you know me better than that. I was merely pointing out that his blanket accusation that liberals political bubbles were caused because they, "accuse others of racism" had an equally reprehensible parallel.
In my view, the issue is that people view and define "racism" differently. My more conservative friends see racism as limited to personal and intentional animus. Liberals view "racism" quite differently with the more progressive ones adopting the Kendi-esque view that outcomes are everything.
So the problem is that there isn't a common understanding of what racism is or what it means.
I certainly think that is an issue. I also think that a huge issue is that conservatives tend to speak ill of poor people independent of their race and liberals (who generally don't) frequently misread this as racist.
This is captured really well in the following paper/study (including that conservatives appear to think worse of same-race poor than other race):
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/renos/files/carneyenos.pdf
I've never lived in a majority-conservative community or run in majority-conservative social circle, so I have a bit of epistemic modesty of what the social dynamics of such communities/subcultures are like. I could certainly imagine a similar dynamic being in play, but I could also imagine that their dynamics are different.
People are basically all the same, but conservatives and liberals tell somewhat different myths to themselves about themselves, and the communities of conservatives exist in a different place in the national culture, so they might not be the same? I don't know.
Its bears mentioning that majority conservative congressional districts tend to have more liberals than majority liberal congressional districts have conservatives by like 10-30 points usually IIRC. A big part of this is gerrymandering, but to a larger degree, it's a consistent dynamic of American urban-rural polarization.
In my personal experience. these communities often seem more conservative then they actually are, in part due to the fact that the conservative base is larger then their democratic counterparts and much more prone to put their beliefs on their lawns, T-shirts and in back of their cars, then their democratic counterparts who favor social media.
You can get get away with being liberal, you just got to be real quiet about it when dealing with certain neighbors.
I'm don't think its true though. The number of places where its more okay to severely ostracize racism is much higher than the number where its okay to engage in racism.
<On the other hand, its also kinda funny to see "both siderism" happening from this angle>
“The number of places where its more okay to severely ostracize racism is much higher than the number where its okay to engage in racism.”
If that were true then Donald Trump would have never become the President.
I think the point is that "accuse others of racism" implies that liberals are doing this to others who are not in fact racist. I am certain this occurs far more often that it should. However, it is still unreasonable to blanket declare that every liberal individual's assumption(and declaration) of racism about the non-liberals who would otherwise share their views is the cause of political bubbles.
Anecdotally, several of my once-closer friends who are highly #engaged on Twitter, etc. have started to name-drop terms and abbreviations that I don't even recognize. I used to be politically allied with these folks. Probably I still am to some degree, but how do you even have a conversation?
The I Am The World fallacy.
“I dislike country music. Therefore, country music is unpopular.”
I'm just reading this article and your comment two years later. I lost track of the number of people who thought I was "angry at God." They couldn't understand that I couldn't be angry at something I thought didn't exist.
I make a point of reaching out on Facebook to people I think are NOT politically engaged or engaged on the right.
Didn't mean to imply it was social media! Meant social literally – progressives have mostly progressive friends, etc., like the Pauline Kael quote about Nixon.
It doesn't depend on social media, but the trend of the more extreme people being more engaged is amplified on social media. When a multitude of people can pile on somebody who pushes back on an extreme social justice post, moderates are even less likely to disagree on social media than IRL.
It wasn’t the communists who went to the people. It was the liberal intelligentsia, which was very diverse
The amount of pushback that Matt has gotten on this from other pundits (Jamelle Bouie, among others) has been interesting to see. People really hate thinking that their preferred political outcomes and the optimal strategy to achieve those outcomes don't line up neatly.
It's frustrating how little his critics have to say about how they think Democrats can win more elections. Matt will point out highly race conscious messaging is ineffective *among racial minorities* (as well as whites) and it seems they still won't budge from "if you don't centre race, you're a racist"
and they're usually the first to suggest that America is a very racist place full of racist people. It's like it's important to state that point but not let it affect your strategy.
And maybe that's legitimate! Maybe it's worth losing some elections on the margins if it means not pandering to racists (whatever that means in practice). But no one actually says this.
We don’t discuss the potential consequences of how we talk about race. At all. Certainly not any potential negative consequences. This has the effect of ceding that task to conservatives.
What do we hope to gain by speaking more often of Whiteness as an identity (just as a random example)? What are the possible negative consequences? It feels like that conversation barely exists, even in terms of potential electoral impact.
Deontology is the last defense of the incompetent, ie If your strategy doesn’t actually help, say it’s the only moral strategy, whether or not it works
Jamelle Bouie is an NYT columnist (among other things). Mehdi Hassan has his own show on Peacock. I think they have way too much power to need to pander to donors. It's something stronger than that.
I believe they say that because they believe it.
I think their ideas are something like this (this is of course, not my personal opinion, but as long as we're going to talk about how not all Trump supporters are irredeemable racists, we might as well extend the same good faith to progressives as well) --
1. Messaging is set by institutions like Fox News and CNN, not by Democrats. No matter what they do, they'll be labeled the party of Socialism and Illegal Immigrants, so you won't see any additional political downside by moving to the left on those issues.
2. People, and politicians in particular, will often use the electorate as a smokescreen for their own beliefs. We see this all the time with moderates saying "well, people don't want a big spending increase right now". From this perspective, it's not hard to see tactical considerations being used as cover for genuine policy preferences. And in some cases, that's really what's happening!
3. Many of these columnists are in a position where prejudice among progressives are uniquely salient. We genuinely do see some extremely online Bernie-adjacent types that will use leftist rhetoric to justify being dismissive black people or women.
From that perspective, you can see why someone would be suspicious of attempts to move back to a more Obama-style, post-racism rhetoric.
"Messaging is set by institutions like Fox News and CNN, not by Democrats."
This is true and false. Media sells what the audience buys. If they don't have a product that the audience wants, the audience will go somewhere else. Democrats (Progressives) are the audience for 70% of media.
Quick disclaimer - this was me laying out someone else's perspective, not my own view.
I'm in 90% agreement. But I would disagree that it is an enemy.
They know the math of the country and that the Dems can't win if WWC votes like African Americans. What they want is for a remant of the WWC, roughly 1/3 - 40% to remain as Democrats, but as silent partners.
The WWC as silent partners would get the universal benefits the Democrats propose from the country but nothing more. While the minority and professional class get the universal benefits along with symbolic representation & social status elevation.
At least half of the "Twitter left" and "activist class" are purely in this for tribal kicks, and it shows.
TBF, very few people like to be told difficult truths.
I'm reminded a bit of working on Democratic campaigns back in 2012 and going through the process of figuring out what polled well. We had to be careful because even with Paul Ryan as the Republican VP, the public refused to believe just how bad the Ryan Budget was in terms of cutting Medicare. It seemed too bad to be plausible.
In contrast without a shred of evidence, voters were willing to believe that a Republican candidate supported privatization of Social Security. Eight years after Bush and it still lingered in the public's mind.
The more vocal the progressive left is, and the more Fox News picks up stories that aren't even true (banning airlines?), the harder it gets for even a moderate Democrat to distinguish themselves because I think the public is becoming more and more credulous that Democrats are all far left.
And the longer Republicans shut up about their unpopular ideas, the more it fades from the public's memory.
This is in line with other research I've read that Americans don't actually believe the GOP economic platform because it seems so ludicrous.
I continue to think that the GOP failing to overturn ACA in Congress is one of the best things to ever happen to their party; it would have been like the dog who caught the car. What they discovered is that packing the courts is much better as A) it's out of public view and B) they can just claim its just the courts following the law.
Also, I do suspect that if the courts really did overturn Roe vs. Wade, it would backfire politically. One reason I suspect GOP has been able to make this a winning issue is most of the chipping away at Roe vs Wade has been just that; chipping away. And most of the controversies are over things like the Hyde amendment or partial birth abortion. But not about banning outright. The Mississippi case I suspect might help sway at least a few swing voters that the GOP really is interested in complete roll back and not just trimming the areas that Americans are most apt to find icky.
Did this comment age well? Yes and no.
No, in that it seemed to disbelieve that Dobbs would happen. Yes, in that it rightfully imagines that the GOP will face a blowback for Dobbs, but perhaps not as bad as one might have imagined.
Progressives are on The Right Side of History. Winning elections, governing, and solving problems isn't what matters. It's about being right.
Progressives don't need to change anything that they are doing, because demographics are destiny. Opponents of progressivism are all deplorable racists and fascists. Why would progressives want to win the vote of deplorable racists?
I think gay marriage (which to be clear I support) turbocharged this view. Here’s this issue that went from being almost laughable to pretty high levels of national support in an incredibly short period of time. I think a lot of progressives patted themselves on the back (in this case justifiably) for being on the right side of history. But the assumption that all the other issues they care about will break in the same way seems dubious.
"...the assumption that all the other issues they care about..."
Yeah, there are fairly few other kinds of oppression that affect so many white, male, right-wing millionaires and billionaires. Thanks, Peter Thiel!
Changing "the culture" when some of the rich white men also suffer the oppression turns out to be a lot easier than when the oppression affects only, I dunno, women, or people of color, or the poors.
I think you’re overestimating Thiel’s influence on popular opinion. And while there have always been rich, white, gay men, gay marriage still didn’t happen here until ten years ago.
I included Thiel's name just as an example, and I agree that he personally is not well-known to the broader public.. There are lots of other rich white right-wing gay men -- I could also have said Andy Sullivan, or hundreds of other guys. Combined, they move a lot of money, and sit on a lot of boards and law-firms, and threaten a lot of boycotts.
It's true that marriage didn't happen for a long time. But if we want to ask, "why did gay rights proceed from zero to full equality in 30 years, when the fights against misogyny and racism move at a glacial pace?", then I think we need to look at who benefits from the liberation, and who benefits from the oppression.
Rich white men decided that allowing other rich white men to screw each other did not really upset their own grip on power to any great extent, so they had little to lose by allowing that particular liberation movement to succeed. But upsetting the racial or gender hierarchies is still a step too far for those in power, so they continue to fight it tooth and nail.
Hmm.. I think you're overestimating there. Remember, public opinion _also_ dramatically changed during this time - not just elite opinion.
I think it's more to do with the fact that lots of people could see a friend/relative of theirs denied marriage equality directly, or when someone comes out, see that hey, gay people aren't that different.
And they could be born into any family anywhere.
(My own parents were somewhat upset when I came out many years ago, but are big fans of my husband now).
That's different for the poor/minorities - especially poor+minority. People in your family/friend circle are likely to be around your socioeconomic status.
It _also_ didn't cost anyone anything. Didn't MLK say that the part of the Civil Rights Act that did pass was the easy part because that didn't really cost anyone anything? (At least it didn't cost anyone $$)
Climate change has lots of rich white men supporting fighting it, but individuals don't want to pay $100/year to fight it - marriage equality costs them $0 /year.
"I think it's more to do with the fact that lots of people could see a friend/relative of theirs denied marriage equality directly..."
Lots of people can see women being oppressed, even within their own household. But that does not persuade them to support rights for women, because they *benefit* from that oppression, and would have to give up a lot if they recognized women's equality.
"...the part of the Civil Rights Act that did pass...didn't really cost anyone anything?" Yup. You're agreeing with me. Rich white men looked at gay marriage, and decided that it didn't cost them anything (or that it gave them advantages, were they rich white gay men). But rich white men don't want to give up misogyny and racism, because that would reduce their power.
I'm glad that your parents came around on your husband. Seriously. The improvement in rights for gay people is a good thing. It's just a bit galling when the pace of change is so slow in other areas.
This probably explains some of the why now: https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/
You are way overestimating the power of rich billionaires. It is typical vulgar marxism
Public support for same sex marriage changed dramatically while opinions on abortion (55%-65% support) have barely budged in decades. It isn't opposition of billionaires fueling the pro-life movement.
The pro-life movement has almost no foothold in major instituions outside religion and is scorned in entertainment. The pro-life is also disproportinatly female. Yet it hasn't gone away and won important victories over last decade.
I think the gay marriage issue won because of the rationality of the issue. Two dudes getting married is none of my business. Once most people had a gay person in their life and started to accept the concept of homosexuality as a personal right, the hostility to it mostly disappeared.
Nowadays, basically no one is against gay marriage except for religious conservatives and full-on antigay bigots, which is a minority within a minority.
But on other issues the rationality is less clear cut.
heh, good trollbait!
Reminds me though, I am curious to see how long these young folks stay progressive, or if as usual many age into moderation. Did you know the Boomers were once radical hippies? George McGovern and all that fun... And now you see how that turned out...
I'm not very old (late-30s) and I've actually been moving gradually to the left as I get older. The last time I voted GOP in a national race was Romney in 2012. I voted Obama in 2008 because of Sarah Palin (who imo was the first warning sign that the crazies had captured the GOP). I voted for Romney primarily because I was deployed to Afghanistan at the time and thought the Obama FP team didn't know what they were doing (I was basically a single-issue voter, electing to throw them out). I will continue to vote for a sane Dem party over the current crazy town GOP. In an alternate reality, I'd vote for a sane GOP over crazy town progressives.
If, as I fear, we are headed to a world of crazy town GOP vs crazy town progressives, then God help us all. We will become an ungovernable nation even more than we already are.
I had the same reaction to Palin and made the same decision.
I am basically with you. I wonder if we should organize as a block of moderate swing voters promising to throw the general election for the less bonkers candidate!!!
I feel like that was the magic holding presidential elections together for a few decades, then 2016 turned into a game of chicken with no obvious moderate. (Because Clinton brought that Clinton baggage, more so than being immoderate in her policies.)
I live in a swing district (IA-03). Iowa is trending red and Cindy Axne will be lucky to hold this seat next year. Progressives are absolutely delusional if they think they can win this district by moving left.
There is a play in middle America for the socially conservative/fiscally liberal swing voter. We probably need more regional parties to allow that to happen (Matt wrote about this a while ago).
Moderation and compromise may be boring but its the only way to hold this country together. Yes, the GOP doesn't play nice, but their ideological goals are always more geared towards playing defense (i.e. stand athwart history and yell stop) and in politics, as in war, the defense is always naturally stronger. They also have big structural advantages at the national level due to urban/rural ideological sorting that aren't going away no matter how many think pieces are written about abolishing the Senate or Electoral College.
Does voting for Dems really mean you're moving to the left or simply that you're pro-democracy?
I don't really know what "pro-democracy" means. I'm pro-constitution, and a fan of federalism. I don't have the same objections to some of the minoritarian things in the constitution (bill of rights, senate, and electoral college specifically) that many on the left do. I would like to see the filibuster go away, or at least require the filibusters to actually be carried out on the floor. I think adding a couple of states would be fine and fair at the national level.
I'm personally very socially conservative. I also don't want right-wing busybodies regulating their own version of morality. Where I have moved left is on economics. I think we need more checks on corporate power, big infrastructure investments, and a better social safety net.
I'll vote for you.
I meant "pro-democracy" only in the sense of supporting free and fair elections within the current system --- in particular, not throwing out elections because you don't like the result. (Is "pro-democracy" really such a loaded term these days? It wouldn't even occur to me to use it in the ways you suggested.)
The three economic points you mentioned are currently viewed as left-wing, but I'm curious how they'll be viewed in the future. There are Republicans who at least pay lip service to those points, so they may become less of a left-right issue. (Of course, lip service and genuine support are different things.)
(I'll also add that being pro-constitution says very little about what you think of presidential election shenanigans. The constitution is pretty much mum on how such elections should work. The constitution as written would allow state legislatures to simply assign the delegates as they please and not run an election at all. Would you be ok with such a thing since it's allowed by the constitution?)
(I guess that I should know the answer to my question. I recently got into an argument in the slowboring comments by maintaining that the CA recall election was, by definition, not undemocratic. I guess that I should update my definition.)
Don't forget that crazies or not, the one value that holds current-office-holders-or-their-possible-next-in-liners ( s well as the entire lobby industry) is to get and remain in office (power). That's why the laws are stacked against formation of third parties. It's one thing for corporations or individuals with big money to take a stand w Democrats or Republicans, but it would be a whole other matter if that money/prestige/etc. was put behind third-party candidates. Those in power would be frightened and react accordingly.
The idea that people inevitably grow more conservative as they age is a myth.
The vast majority of Boomers were not hippies. Saying that Boomers were super progressive because some were hippies is like saying that Zoomers and younger Millenials are hardcore conservatives because of Gamergate.
In reality people usually settle into a political identity in their late teens and early 20’s and stay with that general worldview for the rest of their lives.
I did a search to prove you wrong but my apologies - it appears you are correct.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/181325/baby-boomers-likely-identify-conservative.aspx
I did not know this. Fascinating.
I think people are misinformed about it because popular culture focuses on the people who are *exceptions*.
The boomers who participated in civil rights protests and anti-war protests were a minority of the overall generation. But those people are more interesting than the rest of the generation that disapproved of what those progressives were doing, so they get the attention.
I wouldn’t be shocked if in a couple decades there is some cultural myth that Millennials and Zoomers were pro-MAGA in the 2010’s based on Q-Anon developing on sites like 4chan and 8chan, and based on Gamergate being a cultural flash point for young people.
McGovern won the youth vote against Nixon. That strongly implies that many McGovern voters went on to be Reagan voters in 8 years.
A couple ideas are getting mixed together here. One idea is how common is it for individual people, particularly young leftists, to become more conservative as they age? But another way to read "boomers became more conservative" is to look at the voting patterns of the cohort overall. Even if no one changes their party alignment, the cohort can shift because of new voters entering (and long-time voters leaving, mostly through death I suppose).
The other thing is that while I agree it's not inevitable that voters lean farther right as they age, it was the observed trend over most the last decade or two.
From Pew Research on the 2020 election:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/
Baby Boomers moved 1 point to Biden, Gen X moved 3 points to the right and Millennials moved 6 points towards Trump.
At those rates today's young people will vote exactly like today's Boomers when they reach those ages.
The Boomers who were politically engaged in 1972 (ie in their 20s) were radical, but that just goes along with the trend that young engaged people are more ideological.
I am not sure Hispanics and Muslim Americans are part of the melting pot and in 100 years they may be considered white and vote accordingly.
As someone who knows quite a few working-class and/or military Hispanics, the idea that they would be a reliable progressive voting bloc makes no sense to me. This observation is admittedly anecdotal but I think it holds with how the numbers are trending.
Same same. 100 percent.
What does voting White mean?
Fair enough white is as absurd a racial identity as as Asian is. I guess I mean vote by class and other issues.
Full assimilation will happen much faster than 100 years. Pew has some good survey research on this wrt Hispanics:
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2017/12/20/hispanic-identity-fades-across-generations-as-immigrant-connections-fall-away/
Also from Pew: 39% of US Born Hispanics marry outside of their ethnicity, which to me is a strong signal that assimilation is happening within a generation or two.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/1-trends-and-patterns-in-intermarriage/
Yea for Hispanics your probably right 20-50 years. In 1918 the German American identity was so strong the US considered joining the central powers. That was not an issue during ww2.
Another way to think of it is as an ethnicity. We don't really have labels for our biggest ethnic groups in the way that most of the rest of the world does. Instead race has sort of become an overloaded term that sometimes substitutes for ethnicity and sometimes is used to mean ancestry.
Using race as ethnicity worked well enough in the Jim Crow South, but it's confusing as hell in 2021 America.
Or: white=first class citizen, regardless of actual skin color or ethnicity.
Yup. Only thing I'd add here is that a lot of these delusions came out of Bernie's overperformance in the 2016 primary (which we've relitigated in this space many times already), which was almost entirely due to Hillary's weakness as a candidate and not a mass constituency for progressive politics. This was followed up by the 2018 AOC/Squad House victories -- and good for them, realizing they should try to knock out moderate Dems in left-leaning seats. But those lessons certainly don't apply across the country.
Speaking as one of them, Bernie had a real swing voter appeal in 16, both personally and as an alternative to Hillary. He wasn't just speaking to the extreme progressives. In 2020 that appeal was pretty much gone.
Mildly pro-gun, moderate-on-immigration Bernie v.16 provides the path forward for the Democrats if they want to get anything done, IMO.
I'm curious to see if Fetterman proves or disproves that theory in PA next year. I hope he can make it through the primary electorate, which he can't... ugh.
“It’s the economy stupid!” Bernie was best bernie
I find the whole "swing voters don't exist" sub-debate important, and interesting. It's obviously bullshit (always was) but the trend that got people talking this way is real enough, and clearly folks with a propensity to vote either party are a much smaller slice of the electorate than they used to be.
My sense is, in a closely divided country, the importance of swing voters might actually be bigger than ever. We've seen numerous examples over the last few cycles where positively microscopic vote shifts have made a difference. I wonder just how big (or small) a portion of the electorate they are. Five percent? Eight? Ten? Also, are they more common in highly competitive states like Michigan and Pennsylvania than elsewhere? (This could be the case, but the competitiveness of such states may be entirely because of a closely divided electorate, and might not imply any variance at all from the nation wrt swing voter numbers).
Swing voters: A little more than 10% of voters switched party presidential vote from 2016 to 2020 (source: CNN exit polls). Roughly 2/3 of those switched from a 3rd party to R or D. Age-wise, millennials moved 6 points toward Trump, Gen X went 3 points rightward, Baby Boomers went 1 point to the left and the silent generation moved 3 points to Biden.
Mobilization: About 14% of the electorate had never voted in a presidential election before. About 1/3 of those turned 18 in the prior 4 years, and new voters are much more common at younger ages than older ones. Other voters (can't find an exact number here, but might be 10%) voted in prior elections but not 2016.
Other Impacts: Also about 10% of Americans move each year, which also knocks local vote margins around. And about 7% of voters die over a 4 year period, too.
Sources:
https://catalist.us/wh-national/
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results
Edit: It's probably more like 5% of voters die. I had taken deaths per year (x4) and divided by total votes cast, forgetting that not every one who dies is a voter.
“Also about 10% of Americans move each year”. Strictly curious: is this the percentage of people who change districts? Change states? Or just the sheer number who move, even if it’s just down the street?
I just googled "How many Americans move each year?" and it came back with 31 million or about 10%. Your guess is as good as mine on how often that's a change of state or congressional district.
The Catalist link has numbers on "other new voters" which was a weird aggregate combo of people who had changed state + people who voted in previous even-year-elections, but NOT 2016. That number was about 15%.
So maybe it's 5% of voters change their state over a 4 year period, and 10% of voters have voted in some other cycle, but not the previous presidential election? That's just my own rough guess.
Swing voters are significantly more likely to be non-college-educated (another important fact that would have been good for Matt to put in his recent post about the median voter being over 50 and not college educated!) and significantly less likely to be college-educated (of course), evangelical, or Black.
So while I don't have *evidence* of it per se, it seems quite logical that the Midwestern swing states have more swing voters.
Nate Silver did publish an "elasticity index" although it's a few years out of date.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-the-house-districts-that-swing-the-most-and-least-with-the-national-mood/
He shows the states with the most swing voters as Alaska, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts and the states with the least as Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Note however that the difference between the most and least elastic is relatively small.
Doesn't Trump's turnout success indicate that infrequent voters on the right are more likely to turn out in response to extreme right-wing messages than infrequent voters on the left are to turn out in response to extreme left-wing messages? Democrats banked on increasing turnout after Obama, but Trump was more effective.
This is distinct from swing voters who regularly vote.
Maybe. Hillary's popular vote increase over Obama's (2012) was miniscule, only a few hundred thousand. But Trump's increase over Romney's (about 3 million) wasn't any historically major accomplishment, either. I think the two candidates' respective popular vote totals were in line with what we've seen in the past when a party is trying to secure a third consecutive White House term. The incumbency party's vote invariably weakens compared to the previous election. In terms of sheer vote totals, to my eyes the story of that race is the clear jump in third party voting. That appears to have hurt Hillary Clinton.
A lot of this does depend on context, and there are elections where swing voters are significantly less important than marginal voters.
If we remain in the high turnout electoral environment of 2020 then marginal voters really won't matter, as there aren't that many gettable marginal voters left. Instead the swing voters are by far the most important factor in these high turnout elections.
Campaigns think of getting a swing voter as +2, as they take away a vote from their opponent and get a vote for themselves. Turning out a marginal voter who supports them is a +1.
But in midterms, and especially in odd year elections, marginal voters can be far more important. Turnout is a lot lower, and there are clearly a lot of gettable voters who can be convinced to vote (as they voted in previous presidential elections).
I think the most interesting thing about swing voters is that as long as they are believed to exist, each party can make a good argument that there is no need to change the platform even in the face of a loss. This leads me to believe we might be better off without swing voters...
I'm a swing voter. I exist, I swear I do.
Good point about Hispanics and immigration. I've always thought that Democratic fixation on immigration policy (especially as it relates to illegal migration) to try and draw support from Hispanic voters was silly.
My definition Hispanic voters are US Citizens, so they were either born here, or followed the legal process and got naturalized here. Why would people who followed the rules have sympathy for those who didn't?
Note: the above point doesn't necessarily represent my personal thinking on immigration policy. My theory is we just adopt a policy like New Zealand, Australia or Canada. A points system combined with harsh and comprehensive enforcement of employment laws. I work in Canada sometimes.... companies won't even let me on site until I have absolutely proven that I have my work permit and registered.... apparently the fines are pretty hefty.
Anyway, I digress.
My life time voting record:
1992 (George Bush) L
1996 (Clinton) W
2000 (Abstatined)... would of voted Bush, but I will never vote for family of recent President. Am against political dynasties.
2004 (Kerry).... I actually supported Wesley Clark in Primary. Went to rallies.
2008 McCain
2012 Romney (Fuck he would of been a good President)
2016 Abstained. Dislike Trump. Won't vote for Clinton. Same reason as above for Bush.
2020 No Vote *would of voted for Biden, but I was traveling, and didnt get absentee. So passed.
2024 I'm totally open.
Note: I didn't vote for Obama, but would of if he had ran against Trump.
On immigration, an example on how you can alienate more than current Hispanic voters is the following: "NEWS: Key Democrat Sen. Menendez says he won’t support efforts to streamline legal immigration unless lawmakers also pursue a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented..." (from here: https://twitter.com/ellengilmer/status/1443309570831654919)
I'm an immigrant from Europe who is spending a lot of time making sure that I follow your immigration laws (and that involves stupid stuff like trying really hard to not get parking tickets, because I would have to declare them on my green card application etc). What I read here is that a key Democrat doesn't want to make my life easier unless he can first prioritize over me the people who don't try following the law that hard. That tweet really made me angry, and it also made every other immigrant I shared it with very angry (including people already on green cards who just remember what they had to do to reach that point). I'm also one of the lucky ones, because I'm neither Chinese nor Indian, which are the two nationalities for which the legal immigration system is absolutely brutal (because of per country quotas). I can't imagine how being from one of these countries might actually feel.
Your point is well-taken, however, there exist very large numbers of people, many of them living in countries close to the United States, who realistically don't have *any* opportunity to "follow the law" to enter the country to work for a willing American employer. Like a lot of Americans who think about the issue, I'd like to see US immigration policy simplified, streamlined and rationalized using a "increase quotas but do so with a nod the skills the economy needs" approach. But I hope if we some day do so, we don't throw our hemispheric neighbors under the bus. Quite apart from the moral vacuity of such an approach, the US economy under this scenario would continue to attract large number of unauthorized immigrants. Get angry all you want, but that's just reality.
I'm not against changing the law to allowing literally anyone on Earth to enter actually*. What I don't like is prioritizing people who don't follow the law over people that follow the law. Right now, you have people that are in the country for more than a decade, have followed every law, and don't get a pathway to citizenship. I would argue that if you want to open a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, you should also open one for legal immigrants.
*Part of it is because my skills are relatively rare. I expect most opposition to something like that would come from like bus drivers. Many people who know how to drive a bus around the Earth don't earn the salaries of American bus drivers.
My brother and sister are both immigrants. More specifically, they were adopted as babies while we lived in New Zealand. They had to get naturalized in the US. Actually, only my brother did. My sister hasn't bothered yet.
But yes, that Menendez quote is a prime example of a pandering fail.
Yea, a rational center-left position on immigration would be, "We will not enforce our immigration laws by cosplaying Gestapo across the country, rather we'll fine exploitative employers who employ illegal immigrants in modern-day slavery conditions to within an inch of their lives." coupled with "We're going to make immigration a straightforward process and continue to allow the best and brightest from across the world to make their homes here."
Then slip in a hefty refugee quota along with the "best and brightest" policy, tell the immigration activists to learn from the anti-tax ones (you've gotten what you wanted, now shut up about it), and move on.
It such common sense. Get a National ID, and solve the immigration work issue and the voting identification issue all at one time.
I think National ID was proposed in the 1990s, and a left-right coalition killed it on a combination of states rights and privacy concerns. I think it should have been a no brainer but the fact that no one is proposing it as a compromise on voter ID suggests it is totally dead.
A national ID draws a lot silly opposition - a combination of good faith paranoia and bad faith objections - but it's a no-brainer good idea.
Why on earth shouldn't the federal government issue every US citizen what would effectively be a wallet-sized passport? No good reason.
They can be exploitative only because of our enforcement of immigration laws. Were they not threatened by deportation, then competition would, as usual, improve working conditions and pay. Second, once we find out that an employee has been hiring illegal immigrants, surely we’ll then be compelled to do something about the immigrants - we can hardly hope to get away simply with token fines on the employers and nothing more. That is to say, I think our only options are non enforcement or enforcement, and there’s no real way to stay in between.
It’s also hard to shut up, btw, when immigration restrictions are literally apartheid. It is very difficult indeed.
"They can be exploitative only because of our enforcement of immigration laws. Were they not threatened by deportation, then competition would, as usual, improve working conditions and pay."
That's a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly. And also fundamentally a dodge. If you try to give these folks access to the programs that file the rough edges off of capitalism for citizens, that will provoke an uproar. If you don't, their lives are still going to be damningly hard for residents of a developed nation. Non-enforcement doesn't actually solve any problems for anyone; it just makes the status quo marginally less painful.
"Second, once we find out that an employee has been hiring illegal immigrants, surely we’ll then be compelled to do something about the immigrants - we can hardly hope to get away simply with token fines on the employers and nothing more."
This is just deliberately disingenuous. If I set the fines in a way that the employment of illegal immigrants is simply not profitable, then they will no longer be employed by almost anyone, and they will have little choice in the matter even if ICE is not grabbing and deporting people. Given the limitations of enforcement, I'd be inclined to say something in the vicinity of $15,000 per person per day of illegal employment. Make it ruinously expensive, and focus on large employers.
The point is to get to a point where the law is being effectively enforced, not by beating people in detention centers or shooting them at the border, or asking for papers everywhere, but by destroying the economic motivations behind illegal immigration.
Your problem is that you think the process just stops there. I'm not in this for senseless cruelty, and I don't think these folks are dispensable at all. Our economy cannot function without these folks and that will be very apparent, very quickly if we actually enforce the law. That will cause pain, lots of it, and that pain is going to lead to actual legislation on the topic, from the non-ideological and selfish premise that the status quo is broken for everyone.
No one will be required to buy into your or my conception of morality, no one has to admit that cruelty in enforcement was always pointless, no one has to talk about human rights, and we can maybe get a decent legislative package rammed through to deal with the problem effectively and with less controversy than usual.
"That is to say, I think our only options are non enforcement or enforcement, and there’s no real way to stay in between."
Obviously I disagree, but more importantly, if that dichotomy is the only option, what in Christ's name makes you think the US electorate is going to opt for non-enforcement? It's simply a matter of how effectively you wish to enforce the notion of a border, and how cruelly.
This is part and parcel of the very problem this article is aimed at, that you can sit here and boldly claim that this is even a choice. It's not politically possible, and you're deeply deluded if you think it is. But pretending that the option of
non-enforcement even exists allows you to avoid grappling with genuinely hard decisions about how to make policy, shape public opinion, and reach a legislative outcome.
"It’s also hard to shut up, btw, when immigration restrictions are literally apartheid."
And finally, I get to the sentence that proves this whole attempt at discourse will be fruitless. What? What the fuck is this shambling perversion of logic and reason masquerading as a sentence?
People are paid according to their marginal productivity, in the absence of government intervention. Immigration enforcement allows capitalists to pay less than they would have otherwise. Sure it would be "marginal" improvement - any increase would always be marginal.
Finding out who is employing illegal immigrants inextricably requires finding out who is an illegal immigrant. It would require a big change in our laws to not enforce our laws upon the immigrant at all. Second, I do not see how it is better to force people into poverty - wasn't our goal to make peoples' lives better?
Anyway, to not deport once we have identified people would be seen as non enforcement, I should think.
Yes, it really is apartheid today (no matter how we rationalize it now). The most important feature of apartheid was not petty restrictions on people living mostly in the same area - it was the restrictions on movement, preventing Africans from moving to more productive areas. Fine, it doesn't match up exactly - but they're uncomfortably similar.
I will accept any compromise on immigration as an improvement, but our end goal must always remain the free movement of people without fetter or restriction.
I'm not even going to bother with the rest of this, given the last sentence proves it's a waste of my time, but I will address the last sentence directly:
"but our end goal must always remain the free movement of people without fetter or restriction."
[BURSTS OUT LAUGHING]
No.
Big pile of no, followed by a hefty dollop of nope, with a side of nuh-uh and another of nah.
Hard truth: Borders and nationalities have *objective* value in political discourse.
It is impossible to get people to care about people because they're human. Not difficult, not challenging, but absolutely impossible. 99% of the people I've known to make the claim that they do are lying through their teeth.
The closest we can come is getting people to care about others because they're also "American" or "Italian" or "Japanese."
At its best, patriotism is the glue that causes a white, upper-middle class person in suburban NYC to care about a dirt-poor black kid in Alabama, or an Asian immigrant made good in Houston to care about a poor Hispanic kid in LA.
At its worst, it is truly terrible... but there's just nothing else out there.
Open borders and free movement of people will be nothing but an excuse for America's wealthy and powerful to care about folks in the US as little as they care about people in Central Africa or Sri Lanka, and for the American electorate to let them get away with it. It will *never* be anything else.
If you want to find a pretext to dismantle what few social services we have successfully fought for, shred the meager safety net citizens and permanent residents enjoy, and make the US into an even less fettered plutocracy than is already the case, then go ahead and don't enforce immigration laws at all.
I will pass, and thank God you're on the lunatic fringe.
It is not compassion that causes production, but self interest. I do not care in the slightest *why* people do something - only about what is done. We do not need theft for people to do well - only to stop the ongoing thefts (tariffs! Zoning! Immigration restrictions! Licenses! All the myriads of ways we prevent people from doing what others want!) I support welfare for children and the disabled - things which would have support independent of whether or not there are foreigners comings.
Second, this really isn’t so radical. I propose only what is found between our states today, or in the EU. If immigration restriction truly were so beneficial, why does no one propose it between our states?
As I said, I will support every compromise on the road to freedom, because it would be an improvement. Let us not forget, however, just how wonderful it would be, for people not to be doomed by their birthplace.
In the meantime, we must resist. It is our duty to do what we can to hire illegal immigrants, smuggle them into the nation, enter into sham marriages for green cards, donate directly to people overseas, never cooperate with ice, and indeed, try to foil and divert their resources with false leads, misinformation and various shenanigans.
I'm confused about your definition of apartheid. I don't recall millions of Black South Africans having equal civil rights throughout apartheid the way millions of Mexican immigrants do in the US.
He means, that the border preventing anyone from moving to the US is apartheid.
Horseshoe theory at work, the only people who wish this are socialists and right-libertarians.
Right libertarian nutjob it is, haha.
It’s still amazing to me neither party has that as a platform. Actually that neither party has an immigration policy at all.
Just realized, I absolutely conform to apathetic voters tend to be moderate swing voter thing.
'Why would people who followed the rules have sympathy for those who didn't?"
I've always assumed [insert caveats about assuming] the idea flowed from centering race in identity. That centering automatically creates sympathy for people of the same race who come from the same place (Central/South America). Obviously this is a uniquely broad definition of "people like me."
I would note here that Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration as he was aware it was used to undercut legal workers advocating for better wages and benefits/unionization.
Sorry, but it has to be said: "would've," not "would of."
If you expect correct grammar, definitely don't read my posts. Then again, I have OCD about weird things too.
and I swear I was just extolling this blog to my wife because there is so little of this.
I know. We might get snarky, but its usually policy related. Why police my grammar.... especially when its something that doesn't affect understanding of whatever bad point I am making.
I "policed" your grammar because well-written arguments generally carry more credibility and I thought you'd appreciate having the issue brought to your attention since it was clearly persistent and not just a one-off typo. There are articles, blog posts, etc. (including pieces by Matt) that I will not recommend to anyone because of typos, grammatical errors, etc. that just lower the integrity of the entire piece.
I noticed the grammar error, but also thought Rory’s contribution was worthwhile and didn’t feel the need to point out the error. I expect that a significant part of Matt’s audience feels the same way.
Damn. To think, if I would of typed "would have", I might of gotten your recommendation. I know I should of, but I remembered, I didn't care.
Yep. As I age, I have a hard enough time staying on... ooh, a bird!
Forward-looking reactions (and the crowing about 'demographic' shifts) from activists almost always has the stench of perfecting the art of fighting the last war just in time for the next one. This is not news to anyone who pays a modicum of attention to national and regional politics, and I'm hardly blowing anyone's hair back by saying it, but there seems to be a lot of untapped potential for conservative politicians in younger, male, black and latino men. My brother-in-law is a 29-year-old latino guy raised in the suburbs, and his Facebook posts are basically indistiguishable from my 60-something white uncle who is pretty widely considered a bigot by the majority of the family.
Indeed. Like I often tell my lefty friends, it's pretty racist to think white folks have a monopoly on racism.
I agree, though in my situation with my BIL it's not even racism, really. There's some of that, but I mostly mean the sorts of things that are traditionally equated with conservatism in the US; memes telling the homeless to get jobs, or about how no one wants to work any more, or (much less importantly) posts mocking kids for their bad taste in music, clothing, or preferred athletes. Just general boomer-isms.
Exactly. Put “racism” aside. Classically conservative tendencies are equally distributed across races. The Dems have owned the black vote despite this for a number of idiosyncratic historical reasons, but even that is subject to change, and the notion that Hispanics will forever loyally vote D is a farce.
If you hang around with black and hispanic working class adults, the social conservatism is palpable.
Of course, nobody actually thinks that only white people are racist. People are, however, aware that white people are in the majority and white people are dramatically in the wealth and power majority and thus racism by white people is more concerning than racism by non-white people.
1. I don't know what to tell you - I personally know many people who think only white folks are racist. Off the top of my head, check out a book called "White Fragility," which has been used in defense of the idea that only white folks can be racist.
2. To the extent that white people are dramatically in the wealth and power majority, they have no special claim to abusing that wealth and power at the expense of the poor and weak. As a brown dude with, ah, plenty of exposure to wealthy and powerful brown folks, I can assure you that the amount of racism baked into the system would NOT dramatically decrease if brown folks were in the power and wealth majority. If you don't believe this, I will wager that you haven't spent years dealing as equals with working class POC.
So, you and I agree that, "not only white people are racist." But there exists a book that (maybe) says, "only white people are racist." And based on that I should revise my opinion that most people are well aware that racism is a virtually universal human attribute?
Just trying to understand your position here.
If your opinion is "that most people are well aware that racism is a virtually universal human attribute," then my disagreement is minor and not worth discussing. But if your opinion is "of course, nobody actually thinks only white people are racist," then my disagreement is less minor and worth a couple of sentences in response.
The more interesting point in your post, though, is around whether some group's racism is more or less concerning than another's. Given that we agree that racism is, as you put it, a virtually universal human attribute, it seems like focusing on the racism of one group vs another is not going to buy you much. Even if we somehow manage to make white people less racist, wouldn't that just shift more wealth and power to still-racist PoC?
My point was that I racism of a powerful group seems to have more serious consequences than that of a powerless group. It is not obvious to me that primary impact of reducing racism among those in power (still largely white) is to increase wealth among PoC. I would think it would however level the playing field and this might eventually result in a increase in wealth.
Racism is a poorly defined word. In the case of unequal treatment by police(powerful vs. powerless), it seems reasonable to be more concerned about the racism of the guys with the guns. In the case of hiring and firing by large corporations, I am more inclined to just be in favor of the little guy independent of country of origin or skin color.
It’s all exacerbated by social media, of course. Millennials and Gen Z, having grown up with it, can’t see that it’s made everyone skew way more individualistic and performative in their POVs and much less willing to compromise or lay low. Young people were always more extreme, but they didn’t have the opportunity to break into 50 different small but loud factions damaging the broader liberal goals. Tangentially, the constant negative messaging about the US (we are bad and always have been bad!) and politics of victimization is destroying chances in many places…much of the population in the country takes pride in “enduring” life, and feeling like a victim or whiner isn’t appealing.
most of the people who post about politics on social media already have their minds made up and often block those who disagree. i don’t see much persuasion on social media, it’s just salient so people overrate its importance
agree re no minds changed, but the social media echo chamber leads people to think their views are more widely held than they actually are, which is dangerous. I think THAT is why young progressives often believe they just need to push to overcome some shadowy minority that is thwarting their widely-held goals.
That’s a good point, but much like disinformation or “Fake News”, extreme positions are not meant to convince others, it’s meant to entrench current believers in that belief making it harder to dislodge over time. It works against unity and consensus.
I find it hard to read Vox now - the Ian Millhiser pieces on the courts are especially grating.
Mostly true but Jerusalem Demsas is doing great stuff on housing policy.
That's what makes it more frustrating to me. He clearly is intelligent and knowledgeable about the subject matter. But every piece he writes falls essentially into three categories:
1) Republican appointed justice did something I disagree with me therefore they are bad, have no real principles, are bad, aren't following stare decisis like they're supposed to, are bad, are probably corrupt illegitimate hacks, do you understand just how bad they are?
2) Republican appointed justice did something I like - its either a ruse to slip by something more nefarious, or they're holding on the barest edge of sanity and keep the other crazies from ruining our country
3) Democratic appointed judge is heroically standing against the horrible, terrible bad things the majority is doing and demonstrating what true justice is.
I might even agree with him on the subject, but after the third or fourth time of the same formula it becomes apparent that there is little to not attempt to wrestle with the issues - its just a matter of reminding everyone of who is good and who is bad.
To be fair, this is basically what all left-leaning legal commentary (Slate, Salon, LGM, etc.) sounds like these days. My favorite is the long list of defendants' rights that "aren't really important" in the opinion of such commentators because the writers have to rationalize away Scalia, Thomas, etc. joining with the Democratic appointees on those decisions.
Is it that the relevant people don't grasp this, or is that too much of the messaging is an effort to raise money rather than win votes? Also, the media incentives are to elevate controversial voices, right? So instead there's lots of noise about less electorally significant issues - not because people are morons, but because they have mixed incentives. Maybe?
Electoral money incentives, twitter incentives, activist incentives… there’s a whole bunch of reasons we got here. But just as with veganism, it is possible for people to realize what makes good strategy and overcome the underlying incentives to scream at the top of your lungs.
I think this true. Just as the Republican entertainment/news sphere has different incentives than elected Republicans, like Larry Elder out in California, for example. But, a key part of the dodge is getting the political press to play along and convincing ideological primary voters that they can vote their heart's desire with no downside risk .
They seem to be losing the discipline to accomplish this much longer. The Democrats have never run a tight ship in the first place, it's always been impossible. The Republicans, now that the lunatics are running the asylum, are losing the ability to run a tight ship.
I'm curious how that will play out. It did ok under Trump, who legitimately has a good ear for what he should and shouldn't say, what would offend the margins of the party too much vs. what would turn out the base. None of his potential successors seem so able to channel the Party-wide id so effectively.
So eat your spinach, all you dreamy-eyed leftists. There's no constituency for your pet projects.
Where this message gets difficult is when you realize that there is also no constituency, left right or center, for eating spinach. Sure, there's a segment of the electorate that wants to make *other* people eat their spinach (esp. *those* people) but it also wants to ensure that deserving people (*our* people) are never required to eat spinach. So, "eat your spinach" will lose voters at least as fast as "fix climate change," "go vegan," or "destroy the safety net."
It might seem paradoxical for Matt to pitch a vote-losing position about not taking vote-losing positions.
But then you have to remember that Matt is not trying to appeal to voters. He is trying to appeal to people who are trying to appeal to voters: politicians, activists, donors, and extremely on-line politics-talkers. And the message to them is: voters are never going to eat their spinach. So, you have to do it for them if you want their votes.
Good news: the spinach comes in a gorgeous silver bowl, hand-chased.
One thing that drives me bananas about the (so-called) activist left is that even though they implicitly endorse the mobilization theory of victory, they aren't doing any mobilization. Nothing the extremely online people say or do is designed to appeal to low-income blacks: possibly the one demographic group who *could* shift American politics to the left by raising their voter turnout. Instead they're just tweeting at each other.
Full disclosure: I live outside the US and I try to exercise some influence over what happens by volunteering with Black Voters Matter, a peer-to-peer texting project that does outreach to the black community to increase turnout in key elections. Compared to Twitter it's extremely boring but I'm convinced it actually works
Actual mobilization requires solidarity.
I say this as a wildly, obscenely non-Marxist, market lefty-type.
Unless your campaign/organization is not just doing outreach, but running a constant presence in low-income voters' lives...
Helping them get to the DMV three years from the next presidential election, retaining a lawyer for pro bono tenants' rights cases, maintaining a job search board for ex-cons, checking in on people after disasters, running a food bank, working with health clinics...
Then you're just playing a numbers game come election time, hoping to knock on enough doors to get a few low-propensity voters registered and a fraction of those to the polls.
If the "left" actually wants to mobilize a big chunk of left-leaning votes, they'd have to build organizations that help people first and only incidentally GOTV, just like the Populists and the Socialists did in the early 1900's.
The Progressives didn't do this, but absent Roosevelt's falling into the Presidency and doing the hard work for them, I doubt they would ever have succeeded in enacting fundamental reforms.
I don't think today's "leftists" have even thought of trying it, not for a moment.
I don't know how successful it was and how much he's continued, but after the weather disaster we had here in Texas last February, Beto used his existing phonebank system+volunteers to try and start calling people up and check on them/provide them information.
businessinsider.com/o-rourke-aoc-focus-on-texas-welfare-efforts-2021-2
This can't just be when disasters strike, but it seems like the kind of thing you're talking about.
Is Beto interested in getting more eligible people signed up for SNAP? The participation rate in Texas is only 75 percent:
https://www.fns.usda.gov/usamap/2018
I've been encouraging Movement Labs and Open Progress to think about doing this, but having a politician involved would be even better
Dunno, that seems like a good idea though.
https://events.poweredxpeople.org/
Currently looks like their focused on the upcoming Texas elections (our constitution seems to require a lot of things to be constitutional amendments rather than standard laws)
*they're
(wishing for edit)
I think Democratic Socialists of America do some work along those lines, like auto-repair clinics where you can get your broken signal light repaired for free (reducing your risk of interacting with the cops) and get exposed to some socialist propaganda at the same time. That's absolutely the right strategy, although I think DSA is too weird in other ways to be making a positive contribution to left politics
(I would add that Black Voters Matter has also done SMS outreach to get people vaccinated. I'd like to see textbanking used for other practical purposes, like identifying people who are eligible for food stamps and helping them sign up)
Dear Christ.
Never mind, they shouldn't do this. It's worse than sitting on their asses.
The folks who should be doing this are center-left candidates and organizations. You have massive warchests, use them for activities that just barely fall within the confines of political campaigning but have a social benefit.
I mean, don't Stacy Abrams & crew deserve *some* credit?
The thing is, I think there's a fairly substantial appetite for, um, spinach in the electorate.
I remember being really disappointed in 2004 when it became really clear the there was a backlash to gay marriage. This made the conclusion that we were going to have to play defense on this issue for awhile fairly obvious -- and this seemed to be the consensus attitude among progressives. The idea that Kerry just wasn't Gay Marrying hard enough was a weird fringe position. And the idea that we should make the issue less salient for the time being was absolutely correct.
The same thing happened in the 2020 primary. The entire circus was defined by the voters saying that they wanted the candidate that would get the most votes in the general election ("electability"), and that they were fairly certain that they'd have to make ideological tradeoffs to ensure that happened.
We saw plenty of African-American voters saying that they voted for Biden not because he was the best fit for their policy positions, but because they thought he was the sort of candidate that could appeal to swing voters and win the election.
I think that most people in the Democratic coalition instinctively recognize that they're going to have to make trade-offs, and behave accordingly.
"We saw plenty of African-American voters saying that they voted for Biden not because he was the best fit for their policy positions, but because they thought he was the sort of candidate that could appeal to swing voters and win the election."
There were people saying this sure - but is there any evidence that another candidate was closer to their actual views? Black voters are typically MORE conservative than the average Democratic voter, so wouldn't they go for the most moderate candidate?
Agreed. I’m sure some high-info black voters talked like this, but the average black voter is more moderate than college-educated white voters, including on cultural issues, so their preference for Biden isn’t hard to understand.
You’re right that ultimately the problem is us. Americans have come to want various specific benefits from government as long as some one else is carrying the costs.
bureaucrats are paid to eat spinach. they should eat it if they want their direct deposits timo continue. rich people can be outvoted and will do just fine if they wash down their spinach with champagne.
This is not a new phenomena. The people on the far left who characterize themselves as progressives have been around awhile. I vividly remember the celebratory comments in the left wing blogs after Obama's rather disastrous first midterm election cycle. Many were quite ecstatic that they had purged so many of those darned blue dogs from the Democrats congressional caucus. I did not believe people could be that dumb about politics but there you are. They can.
The exact same phenomena in the GOP right now with the attempted ongoing purge of Gonzalez, Kinzinger, Cheney, and all the other "communist-democRAT RINOs" who don't bow down before the king.
Ezra Klein mentioned a number of times that the Bernie-sphere had a hard time understanding that there is a large share of the electorate with authentically conservative views across all issues spaces. Many on the left believe that if you could just get the "true" message through to people West Virginia would turn blue.
This is especially tough on immigration where we had 40 years of governing to the left of elite consensus that was to the left of popular opinion. There's no real way to restore that governing by consensus so the liberals/left are stuck between trying to ignore it, losing elections on it, or changing their views none of which is a great option.
What is so interesting to me about this is that Bernie himself absolutely understands that lots of people have conservative views (see his former stances on guns) but somehow was not able to communicate this effectively to the majority of the ideological movement that he became the figure-head for. By 2020 he had just given up and gone full progressive groupthink in his campaign. I honestly don't think it served him well in the primary.
Even in 2016, there was no trace of his former (and apparently heartfelt) stance on immigration,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0
by the time of his March debate with Hillary in Miami:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/10/jorge-ramos-pressed-clinton-and-sanders-very-hard-on-not-deporting-children-and-thats-okay/
"Democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others"
Had Joe Biden won in a popular vote system I don't think we'd be having this specific conversation. People are always jockeying for issue salience, sometimes counterproductively! What else is new? But Because Democrats have a tenuous hold on an unfair map, it's important to actually:
Promote your popular issues over your unpopular issues.
I'm on board! But since a big cause of Democrat's losses is the unfair map, what regionalist appeals should Democrats make based on that unfair map?
I wish politicians would talk more about how changes in agricultural policy can help mitigate climate change (by cutting methane emissions from cattle, sequestering carbon in soil, etc.)
Farmers are an overwhelmingly white, conservative demographic and a lot of them are climate-change skeptics--weirdly, in spite of the fact that they can see their own crop seasons changing. But it would be interesting to see what would happen if a Democratic administration leaned into a climate-targeted policy of *more farm subsidies*. Throw money at them and they might change their minds
if you are a farmer in the upper midwest, you’d want a growing season. frosts are worse than 95 degree days
The messaging around climate change is dominated by "this is all terrible, the fate of the world is at stake" when the reality is that there will be places that benefit and places that don't. But with mitigation efforts along with adaptation life will likely go on much as it does today.
That's true in the "after the plague, Europe went back to living as it did before" sense.
I hope you're right, but then I read more papers and go back to DOOMing.
It does not look good for the business as usual case, at the moment.
I think that's a short-term outlook. I don't read articles about new species of animals and plants, just of old ones dying out. If you think "man" can continue to survive by dominating and exploiting the natural world, IHD.
Yes, I've been reading a lot on paleoclimatology lately (e.g., "When Life Nearly Died" by Michael Benton) and while those sorts of books and articles are overwhelming written with a very panicked tone about present day climate change, my main takeaway from the actual objective *science* in those works (as compared to the authors' editorializing) is that even the worst case climate change scenarios are likely going to be survivable by the vast majority of humans with some not-too-extreme mitigation efforts and none of the scenarios is going to actually be "civilization ending" in that the Earth has been substantially warmer than today at a number of points in the past, including within the timeframe where anatomically modern mammals were alive. I mean still favor efforts to mitigate climate change for a variety reasons, but I'm genuinely a lot less concerned than I once was about it.
Basically nothing is "civilization-ending."
But climate change is likely to be very, very harmful to billions of people.
And it's almost assuredly less expensive to just head the problem off before it gets any worse than to "mitigate" and "adapt" more and more down the line, even with a reasonable discount rate built in.
Especially because the relevant technologies and techniques to eliminate 75% of emissions are now unabashedly better than their carbon-intensive counterparts, so all that's needed is to prevent state subsidy in the developing world throwing that calculus off, and to subsidize the turn-over of capital in the developed world so that the old assets are depreciated just a bit faster.
I hope the Floridians start feeling enough pain to alert, well, everyone, before too many other countries suffer outrageously.
And running down the local aquifer due to low rainfall, with no possibility of replenishment-level precipitation, is "game over".
Temperatures are not the problem in temperate zones, precipitation is, whether it's too much, too little, or too concentrated.
agriculture in west kansas was a bad idea in 1890 and remains iffy today. of course it might take long enough to run down the ogallala that you can pay fir the center pivot irrigator and make a profit first.
And when the upper reaches of the Mississippi and Missouri River Basins look like West Kansas due to rainfall patterns shifting?
This was the approach during the Obama years too, there was an agricultural title to the cap and trade bill, and in general it just scared conservative white farmers because now the government was going to do even more to tell them what to do.
👏 MOAR 👏 SUBSIDIES 👏
Legal weed.
Agriculture issues (right to repair, taking on ag monopolies, a better way of dealing with water rights)
Stop calling it "free college" and start calling it "expanding public education"
Break up DC's monopoly on federal offices and spread those jobs and prestige around. And talk it up
Don't pander. Lots of voters in rural states, even progressives like me, have a general feeling of inferiority in the face of "coastal elitism." Pandering just makes it worse.
Second and fourth points are wildly under-addressed.
So much "company town" going on in rural regions, either due to a major employer, or because 3 agricultural businesses have a lock on the whole regional economy (1 seed firm, 1 purchaser/processor, 1 equipment dealer).
As for the DC bureaucracy... DC will be fine, better off even, without any of the alphabet agencies there, as it will pop the housing bubble there.
Meanwhile, scattering 500k-1m well-educated, high-spending federal knowledge workers throughout the country will be a good thing to breathe life back into a bunch of mid-sized cities and the rural regions that they anchor.
At a first glance:
Agriculture to Des Moines
Labor to Morgantown
EPA to Toledo
Energy to Cheyenne
Transportation to St. Louis
NSF to Durham
SSA to Pittsburgh
VA to Nashville
HUD to Philadelphia
HHS to Birmingham
DOI to Denver
Cut down on costs in the long run as well.
This is the part that I don't understand. Matt tweeted his agreement with the Ross Douthat article over the weekend that liberals have won almost every substantive policy point over the last 20 years - and yet are even less satisfied and more impatient now than they were 20 years ago. And impatient to do some fairly dramatic stuff at a time when they have at most a 3-4% advantage in the popular vote and are pretty much dead even in Congress.
In what sense is the map “unfair”?
I'd presume he means "unfair" in the sense that areas that are more likely to vote Republican are also (coincidentally) disproportionately weighted for purposes of House, Senate, and Electoral College representation.
So unfair in the sense that reality is inconvenient.
I wish they would add a way to mute/block people on the comment section. My enjoyment of the comment section would go up like 50% if I didn't see any of the dumb shit Ken posts.
Oh, I have no problem with the Senate issue either -- the Senate represents the states as political entities, not people (like the EU Commission represents the member states of the European Union) -- I just was answering the question.
It is narrowly and darkly funny to me that the word "progressive" directly implies some sort of incremental process, when the notion of the latter would see you blacklisted from many communities and organizations that have regrettably achieved ownership of that word. I hope this ownership is temporary.
Besides the wishful thinking, a lot of pundits and activists lack numeracy skills as well as basic awareness of the scientific process (i.e. how theory and empirics relate), so they should refrain from doing that particular kind of analysis, or else learn some stuff. I'm not even saying you need a phd, you can really go a *long* way just by learning some fundamentals, which every college educated person should be able to.
It's also funny, as someone how also follows Brazilian politics closely, to see lots of these same people idolizing Lula, considering that with more an year before the election Lula was already aggressively courting players in the center and even the center-right. Just like he did when he was President by the way.
This happens all the time with what I call pyramid math: some Wal Mart executive gets a $10 million bonus and the activist class says: “and yet half their employees don’t get health care”. Maybe the bonus wasn’t warranted but giving everyone health care would cost way way more, but they are framed like this is some kind of equivalent trade off.
And part of the reason for the bonus is the profit that comes from keeping the benefits low.
That’s probably true but my only point is that the numbers aren’t comparable at all. Wal Mart has more than 2 million employees. Redistributing that $10 million to the bottom half (bottom 1 million) means that each of those employees would get… $10.
I understood that. The outrage is misplaced. Sorry I wasn't clearer. My comment was meant in disgust. I continue to marvel at the power CEO's in this country have acquired, and the distance between shareholders and a company's actions because of institutional holdings, conglomerate activities (so that you can't invest in a single portion of a company's activities) is a huge problem in my mind., as who do you think funds the trade associations that hire the lobbyists?
“I continue to marvel at the power CEO's in this country have acquired…”
It’s generally the case that such power is proportional to the extent a firm is serving the public.
Corps may want to somehow serve the public, but "serve" is in the eye of the beholder, consumer, or gun-buyer, and still only if next quarter's predictions are met. For example, lowering operating costs by cutting down on the number of human beings to drive people to websites which don't solve anything but simple inquiries is not my idea of service..