SARS-CoV-Mailbag

Cost-benefit, Long Covid, and building more parks

I’ve been down with Covid-19 this week and not feeling too bad but also not my best, so apologies if the answers are totally incoherent!

Ed: You recently attended the Heterodox Academy Conference in Denver. Is there space for heterodox liberals to take a more prominent and explicit role in the Democratic Party? What policies do you think a heterodox liberal should pursue to gain support?

I don’t really think there are “heterodox policies” that one could pursue.

What I do think is that Democrats would benefit from narrowing the list of “here are the things you need to accept to be a mainstream Democrat in good standing” and try to operate as a looser, bigger-tent coalition. Some of that is just good practice for a party in a two-party system, but some relates to the specifics of Senate geography. You need some people to run and win in states that are way to the right of the median voter, which means you need to run a pretty loose coalition. I think a party like that would, among other th…