I'm really not convinced moderation is the meaningful frame of reference. What we need is to find a way to elevate liberals over authoritarians and leaders over demagogues.
The cornerstone of appealing to broad swaths of heterodox voters has to be authentic, principled commitments to pluralism. Leadership is about demonstrating to the voters that doing what's right for the country is going to benefit all of us.
Matt has talked about Trump's appeal being about "moderating" on issues like social security or abortion, but Trump is no moderate. Trump is a heterodox demagogue. The Dems seem to think "moderation" is responding with their own brands of populist heterodox demagogues. Maybe that's moderation maybe it's not. Maybe it wins closely contested elections. What it doesn't do is produce a functional federal government or a free and successful economy.
We're not going to dig our way out of this by simply optimizing how to tell as many voters as possible the things they like to hear.
The term demagogue implies there is some pristine truth, discoverable by reason, that craven politicians ignore to win grubby votes.
There sort of is- elementary micro and macroeconomics are mature fields, which yield actionable insights which voters usually ignore. But the world is complicated. You can imagine a world in which rent control would benefit a majority of voters and could catalyze a durable majority coalition.
Right. So I think the big dividing questions for dem candidates is going to be about whether you advocate for more a more left wing economic agenda on the merits or because that money was "stolen" from the middle class. This is a big thing on the left. I remember attending very left-wing conference in DC where the main panel was literally "Naming the Villians."
There is a lot of left emphasis on naming the villains that’s a legacy of 60s era activism, but that was solving a different problem in a different time.
I’ve never seen anyone really analyze its efficacy for post-social media electoral politics rather than treat the approach as self evident. Even Mamdani’s appeal has a lot to do with the happy warrior problem solver persona, and it’s not obvious to me he benefitted his cause when he (say) called out Ken Griffin.
People believe in the death penalty. They ignore the merits all the time. Why should a schmoderate put data first for econ rhetoric and not something else? Stories are popular. They don't have to be true to be so.
What does all of this have to do with the death penalty? If a voter believes Ted Bundy deserved to die there's not really anything to say about the merits of that belief
I think the idea is that you’d want to kill Ted Bundy because it’s what he deserved and even if it’s not the optimal deterrent to crime, the same way some want to tax the super-rich because it’s deserved even if it’s not economically optimal.
Not much. For this purpose, I'm alluding to its efficacy at preventing crime. There are a variety of reasons people might want the death penalty and a variety of reasons people might disagree with it. But I think the same is true of Ben's example. Who's to say that the "merits" question is what killers deserve rather than what deters crime? Is the merits question what raises the standard of living broadly or what gives each individual the least affected chance of striking it rich? People are not consistently ideological, but nor are they consistently non-ideological. How do we decide when the "merits" matter and when popularity is enough? I dunno. We still have a legal death penalty despite what I think the merits dictate. We need to define our goals.
"We're not going to dig our way out of this by simply optimizing how to tell as many voters as possible the things they like to hear."
I agree with this because Matt never seems to offer a principled way to determine what is good popular and what is bad popular. Or rather, he doesn't have any guidance on what is sufficiently good or sufficiently bad to hold the line on / drop.
One might say that politics as a practice isn't about that kind of dogma, but we have to unite around something or we will end up, as you say, with post-liberal, wolves and sheep voting for who to eat, majoritarian demagoguery.
I think you're confusing normative MY with positive MY. "Good popular" and "bad popular" are things that individuals believe based on a raft of factors. Sometimes, people subscribe to ideologies or other sets of beliefs that help them understand which public policies are "good" and "bad". MY often makes posts about what he thinks are good and bad, whether or not they're popular.
But a lot of the posting on this blog is just focused on the objective electoral reality in this country and what that implies for winning elections regardless of how you slice "good" and "bad". MY's values are much more aligned with one political party over the other, so he focuses on that party's electoral realities and what he thinks they should do to win elections.
One of the big lessons of this blog is that, regardless of where you sit within your particular coalition, in American democracy, having your party win is the most important thing for moving public policy in the direction of your preferences. So while its tempting to focus on tactical minutia that would help your individual preferences within the coalition, conditional on the Ds winning, it's missing the forest for the trees. Really, you should just do whatever you can to make sure the Ds win.
This comment needs to be a disclaimer at the top of every Matt post.
There is at least “gotcha” one comment for every MY post that says “aha you said we should do popular things but you support XYZ unpopular thing” or some version and you articulated better than I’ve seen others do or done myself.
I know Matt the person has cognizable beliefs. I think Matt the strategist downplays the extent to which people have cognizable beliefs despite constantly reminding people that their opponents do. His starting premise is “You want Dems don't you?” yet he knows how poor of a pitch that is.
That's reasonable as a matter of overall direction but the moderation talk is highly tactical. This person, good. This person, bad. The judgment seems to be pure popularity. Ok, sure, but then we aren't tied to Dems anymore or to any thing. Why are people not too tactical while planks are?
I'm not sure what you mean by "planks". The point is that the difference in policy outcome between a D-controlled government vs. an R-controlled government is dramatically larger than the difference in policy outcome from Adam Centrist (D) being in the house vs. Burt Leftist (D) being in the house, regardless of whether it's D-controlled or R-controlled.
The intra-party fights only matters if you actually win the elections. Factionalists are too comfortable assuming away the "win control of government" piece, but in fact that's really the whole ballgame. The actions of factionalists in intra-party fights actually can have a large baring on the national brand and therefore who ultimately gets to govern beyond the result of a particular intraparty fight, and that's something they should all take into account. If they don't, they're not serious about achieve their stated policy goals.
I really do understand the baseline pitch. Or I think I do. But I also think "Only the individual can decide what tradeoffs they want to make, but they must make these tradeoffs that I favor" is a consistent result of combining the various Takes of MY. He'll say the tradeoffs he presents are based on voter pattern, but he'll also say trans women in female sports has a right answer.
I think you're mixing up two kinds of persuasion, with different goals and different time frames. There's persuasion of what candidates or type of candidates we should try to get to run in elections right now, to maximize our chance of winning. That's very short-term persuasion because the next election is by definition always happening soon. Then there's persuasion of what policies and practices are best on the merits. That's much longer-term persuasion—the idea is that, over time, if this persuasion is successful then that will become the popular position, and politicians will be able to hold that position without spending political capital (or at least not spending as much).
Take gay marriage. To my knowledge Matt has always supported it. But would it have been good advice to tell his readers not to support John Kerry in 04, or 2008 Barack Obama, unless those candidates supported gay marriage? (Actually, I remember Markos at Daily Kos withdrawing his support for Harold Ford in 2006 because Ford said he was against gay marriage, which struck me, a fervent gay marriage supporter, as so short-sighted on Markos's part.) So there would be nothing inconsistent about writing both "legalize gay marriage" and "don't insist on a gay marriage litmus test" articles—the goal is to win elections in the short term, while changing minds so that in the long term gay marriage doesn't cost you votes, which is what actually happened!
It's the right answer in terms of "do you want D- or R-controlled government?", not "what should you care about?"/"what is good?". And whether the government is D- or R-controlled has a wide-ranging impact on issues that people who care a lot about "trans women in female sports" also care about deeply.
So in your swing district, if the thing you care about is "trans women in female sports", you should be willing to support candidates who maximize the likelihood that you get D-controlled government, regardless of that candidate's specific position on "trans women in female sports".
No, it’s context dependent popularity, which is a big difference. Who is the type of candidate this person is going to replace? Joe Manchin in WV = good. More of the Democratic party’s goals will be achieved with him in that seat than anyone else who could win that seat. Joe Manchin in CA = bad. Could get someone who would vote for more Dem agenda items instead of him. Joe Manchin in WV but taking the median WV political stance (the most “popularity maximizing” approach) = bad, because this would essentially be Joe Machin reverting to a median or even far right Republican (not supportive of Dem goals). The point is you want in each case the most morally aligned candidate you can get WHO CAN WIN. Joe Manchin was the furthest left possible candidate who could win in WV so we shouldn’t be asking him to take further left stances that could cause him to lose to someone far more right wing or supporting someone more left wing who wouldn’t have a shot in hell. In a different context the calculation would be different. You’re getting stuck on “well how do you decide if XYZ candidate is good or bad based on popularity” when the overall view is closer to “Dems winning power is good” and so you’re maximizing your Dem power across the heterogeneity of different voter constituencies with different preferences. But it is very much tied to Dem priorities, just which bundle of Dem issues each individual candidate supports may vary based on their constituency (as it should because we’re a democracy?), such that we get an overall population of in power Democrats that can actually pass the broadly supported agenda items. Each individual candidate does not need to be a fractal of the overall party’s platform in order to pass big planks of important Dem legislation.
Note: not trying to get in a Manchin rehash just using him as an example. Substitute “generic moderate Democrat” if you prefer.
>>regardless of where you sit within your particular coalition, in American democracy, having your party win is the most important thing for moving public policy in the direction of your preferences.
I'm not even sure this is true. At least, it doesn't necessarily follow from the points Matt makes about moderation.
After all, thermostatic politics is also a powerful force that swings elections. Probably more powerful than ideological positioning. It's unlikely that moderating/shmoderating is going to end the trend of the president's party losing midterm elections, for example.
So it's entirely possible that for radicals, setting your party's ideology to a more radical place and relying on thermostatic politics to get Bernie and the Squad into power every few election cycles would be a more effective way to make progressive policy than dealing with moderate Democrats.
The problem (and the thing Matt has established to my satisfaction) is that this strategy means you get more years with MAGA in office, and MAGA is so messed up that even hardcore progressives shouldn't view this as a good tradeoff, not even if it helps them get their policy preferences enacted.
The Senate is important context here. The Ds aren't set up to win the Senate very easily even in years when there's a backlash against the other guys! This makes it mechanically more difficult for Ds to claw back and then push forward what the other guys did in their time in office.
Trump is (hopefully?) uniquely terrible. And the Ds are only a toss-up to take the Senate in the mid-terms!
So even if you think radical see-sawing is inevitable (I don't), there's still compelling reasons to moderate if it increases the likelihood that the see-saw will actually saw sufficiently bigly to give you a chance running the ship.
And of course, rather than see-sawing, the way to actually have enduring policy gains is to govern for more than 2 years at a time, and for that, you can't do anything that's too dramatically radical/unpopular.
I would say that the distinction between good popular and bad popular rests on results. If something is popular but is likely to get bad results that voters won’t like, we shouldn’t do it.
Cutting interest rates is popular, but would fuel inflation which wouldn’t be popular. Cutting congressional salaries and enacting term limits are popular, but would make Congress less competent and lower the quality of governance, which voters ultimately would not like. Rent control is popular but discourages new construction and ultimately leads to higher rents, defeating the purpose. So those are all “bad popular”.
Getting rid of affirmative action or prohibiting trans people from competing in women’s sports would be disadvantageous to a small slice of the population and would make some people sad, but wouldn’t make the country as a whole meaningfully worse off and is extremely unlikely to have major unintended consequences that voters would hate. Merit pay for teachers is annoying for average-quality teachers but positive-sum for the country as a whole. So those are fine areas to give the public what it wants, especially if doing so helps us win elections and implement other good policies that we like.
I think there are just two separate goals. Goal (A) is to have good policy. MY believes (and so do I) that there actually are good and bad policies. Trump is bad because he implements policies which make us worse off materially (and probably spiritually). Healthcare for poor people is good and so are carbon taxes.
But next is Goal (B), getting elected so you can implement Goal (A), good policy. Goal (B) requires being popular and not all good policies are popular. Thus, he suggests emphasizing things like healthcare for poor people instead of carbon taxes because even though both are actually good, one is much more popular than the other. This seems like a very cohesive system for identifying what is good popular and what is bad popular.
I think the disagreement between MY and more left leaning people on this system (and I don't consider myself particularly left-leaning, so others will need to tell me if I'm correct) is that MY says opposing transwomen in sports or opposing affirmative action in school admissions or government backed loans is clearly helpful to goal (B), getting elected. But MY and left-leaning people have some disagreement on where these policies fit into Goal (A), i.e. left leaning people seem to think including transwomen in women's sports divisions is good policy whereas MY seems more skeptical this is actually good on the merits. And that is a hard disagreement to work out. But then there is another discussion about Goal (B) which is that, even supposing allowing transwomen in women's sports was the correct policy, is it worth the trade off to avoid Trump getting elected. MY has I think advocated that it is lower stakes than mass deportations and people losing healthcare (although I'm not sure if he actually said that, or if I'm projecting my own opinion).
But if you're mostly wanting to argue Goal (A) about those policies then Goal (B) feels like a trick where people are hiding their true (and bad from your perspective) beliefs behind pragmatism. It is a challenging argument landscape, but at least to me it seems pretty cohesive and well articulated.
I think this is a fair presentation of the MY position. I agree that to the left wing of the party this looks like a trick to get the party to adopt conservative/regressive positions because they are "popular", when in fact they are the actual policy preferences of the right-leaning wing of the party. The thing that is missing from this construct is a theory of political change -- how do you get good policy to be popular policy? The right wing of the party seems content to never advocate for making the left's policy preferences popular because they don't believe in them to begin with, so even when the left makes progress toward popularizing some of their issue positions (it's happening now with things like AI and data center taxes, for example), the right wing of the party reacts with furious anger and tries to shut it down in the name of not being the "popular" position and thus ruining "our" electoral prospects. So to the left this looks like a very one-sided coalition that defaults to the Yglesian right-wing position on most policy positions most of the time, no matter what is happening in the messy, heterogeneous world of actual voter opinion. The right wing of the party invests enormous energy in making the left wing's policy agenda unpopular, then turns around and says "sorry left -- we can't use these ideas because they're unpopular". But the right wing never seems to want to chase a left wing idea that is actually gaining electoral popularity because they simply don't like the idea, even when and where it would be advantageous to pursue.
I think it's hard to see the compromise at the individual level. For example, I was a registered Republican in 2015. My biggest concern is the rule of law and rising authoritarianism so I switched to supporting democrats electorally once Trump was nominated. There are specific issues I agree with democrats on, but I'm just broadly skeptical of the entire package. That includes opposition to AI and data centers for example, that just seems like bad policy to me. Nonetheless, if there's a democrat running on that platform against a Republican, I'd almost always still vote for them. The opposition to Trump's mass deportations, executive overreach, and judicial appointments seems like a much bigger deal.
That doesn't mean on Twitter I won't both mention that data center opposition doesn't make much sense, and also Trump started a strategically deleterious dumb war that is raising the price of everything. So on Twitter probably a really progressive person would just see me as always opposing them, but electorally I'm holding my nose and supporting the same candidates.
Au contraire, there's an easy principle you can apply here. If it's popular and leftist, it's bad popular and we should be principled and reject it. If it's popular and schmoderate, it's good popular.
Conveniently, this leads to the inevitable conclusion that we should adopt schmoderate positions on everything.
I don't think Matt would say that AOC is wrong not to try to be Jared Golden in her district. He really is focused on swing districts/states and national elections, and he's right about that.
Where's he wrong is saying that the Democratic party needs to change its brand when there is no party that can present its brand outside of the presidential race, just tons of different actors following their own rational courses. I mean, you can tell Rashida Tlaib to be more moderate on Palestinian issues, but why should she?
Do you remember the episode? I don't really listen to the Politix podcast, but I'd be curious to check it out.
My understanding was that Yglesias wants people in very left wing districts to moderate their message enough to allow for moderates in the party. Not that they shouldn't advocate for significantly more progressive policies than a swing state moderate. But maybe he's gone as far as saying we should only elect moderates everywhere.
I don't think it's true that there is nothing the Democratic party can do to change their brand outside of the presidential race. If a good chunk of elite Democratic party actors changed the way they communicated, changed the policies they supported etc. then that would have an impact on how the party is perceived.
There is no mechanism to do this, it's just another version of "if enough people voted for the third party candidate they'd win", and even if that came into play you'd hope that the media people actually consume would reflect that new consensus (which is another heavy lift).
Certainly not easy, but the mechanism is that you pursuade people. Similar to how the ideas behind yimbyism, effective altruism, woke stuff etc. spread. In this case you'd specifically start with pursuading Democratic party elites, pundits, aligned journalists, donors etc.
If you went back to 1995 and told people that Donald Trump tried to violently overturn an election and somehow came back to power, while the Democrats were about to nominate a guy with a fascist tattoo and a history of red-brown comments for a Senate seat over a boring governor, nobody would think this moment would be a triumph of moderation. As we've gotten to be a sloppier society since 2015 or so, the definition of "moderation" keeps on having to shift to fit actual voter behavior. While there are some clear issues where the Democrats need to shift in what would be a more traditional moderate behavior, the definition of what the median voter finds acceptable vs. un-acceptable keeps moving around all over the place. To put it another way: two of the biggest cranks among Democrats (RFK Jr. and Gabbard) representing two of the worst tendencies of the far left (anti-vaxxer and deference to Russia) are now in this Republican cabinet, but not out of an impulse of bipartisan moderation, but an embrace of crankdom.
It is possible to mostly avoid telling voters things they don’t want to hear without being a demagogue or a dangerous crank. MGP, Golden, and Peltola all manage to be popularist, authentic, and pro-democratic-norms-and-good-governance.
There are different aspects to moderation, which is why it’s not a great term.
Trump moderated on policy in a couple of key areas, but didn’t in other policy areas, and his temperament, headship style, and personality are far from moderate. So he isn’t moderate in my book when looking at the whole picture.
"Elections and democracy" is sort of the centrist version of climate change. It's an issue that is very important to highly-educated people, particularly residents of the District of Columbia metro area, but that holds absolutely no weight for average swing voters. Average people care about stuff like the economy and immigration, things that they perceive as having a material impact on their lives.
The way to protect democracy is to figure out what will help you win elections, and then do that. Then as a byproduct, assuming a Democrat wins, they will not try to become a personalist dictator, because that's not what Democrats do. "Not being authoritarian" doesn't trade off with other issues--if you want to spend money on climate, then you have to borrow it, or spend less on other priorities, or what have you--but if you want to not be a dictator, you don't have to do anything, you just let the electoral process play out normally.
100%: The way to protect democracy is to figure out what will help you win elections, and then do that
(I would say that while I like your point on "version of climate change" I think rather than "centrist" it's the sort of Democrats (Lefty and Center) professional class extra version of claimte change: ""Elections and democracy" is sort of the centrist version of climate change. It's an issue that is very important to highly-educated people, particularly residents of the District of Columbia metro area,"
Selling to the already sold rather than adjusting one's focus and winning over new markets
(as how the Lefty Green on renewables [my actual space])
Eh, just because it didn't work in that instance doesn't mean it isn't a valid strategy. Kamala lost not because she was too liberal, but because she didn't differentiate herself from Biden, didn't distance herself enough from her 2020 primary stances, didn't make the meaningful public appearances required for a social media-era candidate, didn't win an actual primary, and didn't particularly have much charisma.
I would say you somewhat make the point for him in part (depending on what one means by "commitments to pluralism"
If one means as I would understand it in normal Englihs to mean "campaign on it [pretty much as Harris did in 2nd part of campaign] then indeed it was a contributor to loss - not from people hating per se but not addressing "common man" concerns (i.e. bread and butter) - of course that ties back to her not throwing Biden under the bus like on inflation or other items (her inability to say she'd have done things different - and her weak charisma of course)
So.... you want eggheaded positioning like Ms Harris in 2nd half of campaeign positioning to appeal to the urbane urbanites sensibilities ("principled commitments to pluralism...") -
Selling more to the pre-sold.
"simply optimizing how to tell as many voters as possible the things they like to hear.'
Actually that is exactly what you have to do, for the specific geography you're competing in - Not eggheadery intellectual abstractionism
You don’t need to make liberalism the central message of your campaign to be a committed liberal. Gallego’s pitch of a “Big ass trucks” in every driveway isn’t in conflict with a pluralistic society or individualism, for example, and doesn’t commit him to a destructive populist economics.
I don't know man. I feel like this article is just saying, "I'm right in my intra-party social media feuds". I get that Matt is hopelessly obsessed with the people he argues with on Twitter all day but I don't see why any of us should care about that. These feuds seem to occupy his mind day and night. It's sort of pathetic.
"What did you do during Trump's reign grandpa? When they were putting people in camps and shooting protestors in the street?" "Well child, I spent 10 hours a day arguing with the same 5 people on Twitter about neobrandeisim and moderation. But sometimes I called it 'schmoderation' to own them."
>Matt is hopelessly obsessed with the people he argues with on Twitter all day but I don't see why any of us should care about that...It's sort of pathetic.<
I think you're being more than a bit uncharitable with your characterization, but that aside: if you *really* want to defeat MAGA and save the country, you need to defeat them as often as possible in elections. It really is that simple.
Apparently Matt feels a necessary part of doing this is to nominate candidates who are maximally competitive in places Democrats currently find challenging to win in (they don't have much trouble winning in NYC!).
The people Matt argues with seem to think it would be fine to nominate a Mamdani clone for the Senate in Michigan, or that a hard leftist candidate would romp to a 42 state Electoral College landslide in 2028.
YMMV, but to me it is they, not Yglesias, who are the pathetic ones.
Winning more elections may be boring to some, but it's the thing upon which everything now depends.
If you think Matt isn't unhealthily obsessed with Matt stoller and Tim Wu I invite you to listen to the politix podcast. It's very very clear. He also tacitly admitted it in a column at the beginning of the year.
This is a bit too armchair psychologizing, but also hear him referring to himself in third person more and more on the podcast, never a good sign in my experience.
You’re right that they are pathetic ones. But there’s a difference between actually nominating maximally competitive candidates in swing districts and writing essays about schmoderation. The latter *might* help with the former. But in some cases it’s just a continuation of twitter feuds by other means.
What you call "feuds" I call debates. The people Matt debates this issue with have significant followings. No doubt it's an uphill climb (anything worth doing is hard), but if, via dogged advocacy, he can convince enough people that the DSA strategy helps MAGA—or at least get them to question said strategy—some good may be accomplished.
I definitely agree with you on the “if”. And I probably think it’s more plausible that it might work than the person a couple comments up-thread does who I was supporting. But it might not.
I don't think this article is /just/ about electability and defeating Trump, it also indicates that schmoderates should be preferred on policy grounds fully separate from that. I also do think some of this is online prog bashing in an inter-party fight separate from electoralism.
For example, MattY criticizes progressives for not supporting Matt Mahan as a young, anti-establishment figure, but just as you noted in NYC, there is no need to moderate in the California gubernatorial election. California is more conservative than some think, but if the top two includes any democrat, the democrat is winning, whether that is Mahan, or Steyer, or Porter, or Becerra. I read that portion as more of a gotcha against internet progressives for some form of hypocrisy in not supporting Mahan, who MattY genuinely supports on policy grounds and thinks would be an improvement for California, which is fully separate from defeating Republicans
>I don't think this article is /just/ about electability and defeating Trump<
Agreed. I was responding to a specific comment bashing M.Y. for his propensity to debate hard leftists who oppose nominating moderates. Those leftists (from what I can tell via social media) constantly argue that nominating DSA-types will benefit Democrats *politically*–which seems nuts. But they all seem sure—after all these years of being proven wrong—that purist lefty candidates will juice turnout for Democrats. Frankly it's drearily boring at this point.
There are obviously places (eg NYC) where going with the DSA-style candidate doesn't hurt Democrats' chances in the general election, but it usually doesn't help them, either (eg Elizabeth Warren's underperformance). And of course, prominent DSA voices might well harm the party's national brand. So there's that, too.
Re: Mahan: I agree with Matt that Mahan's vision of governance makes a lot of sense for a state like California, which, in similar fashion to NYC, suffers from a serious case of stationary banditry. Democratic governance in general isn't insane like the MAGA version. It's much, much, much better in myriad ways. But nonetheless Democrats do shovel a lot more cash than they ought to favored rent-seekers. This hurts Democratic-governed areas, and (by extension) in turn hurts the party's competitiveness nationally.
I feel like you're misconstruing Yglesias here a bit. In that section he's pointing out that the "the only thing that matters is breaking with the establishment and bringing fresh ideas" crowd never supports the moderate version of that. At the end of the day it's still just ideology to them.
Obviously Yglesias likes Mahan and would prefer he won, but it's only a "gotcha" for someone saying ideology isn't important.
I mostly wasn't that impressed with Douthat's The Age of Decadence but he is definitely onto something about how many people want to see the same thing every day.
They want Matt Y to rail emotionally against Trump five days a week in the same way that they rewatch the same Scrubs episodes for 25 years.
Matt never rails emotionally against Trump. He rails 5 days a week against people slightly to his left. And agree most readers want to read that every day
Railing against Trump is preaching to the choir. MY has a vision of how Democrats can win and get and use power and that vision is at odds with the left wing of the D coalition.
One thing I would say in defense of Matt is he came through the American Prospect, Slate and Vox, none of which are natural venues for hippie-punching. To the extent he has an audience for that, it's because he carved it out himself.
The problem is that the people picking fights with Matt sincerely want more far left candidates who will undoubtedly lose elections in swing states, bringing us closer to the camps.
Picking fights with them is incredibly un persuasive because he makes no attempt to argue from their perspective. Thats hard, but stopping with all the fucking around with moderates vs liberals and just focus on specific things is a good start. Persuade somebody on the details and don’t worry how they define themselves
I do not follow Matt’s Twitter escapades but I agree he could probably do a better job of working to persuade the Democratic establishment. That said, Matt has extensively documented policy-level and campaign-level tactical and strategic recommendations for people to adopt should they want to, so it’s not like he’s light on the details of “how to win elections” or “how to appeal to more people by having less extreme views”.
I think this gets it backwards. Matt actually cares about winning elections and stopping Trump (hence boosting people like Johnny Garcia), it's people like Morris who take positions that: "...reflects the convictions of groups who believed that it is somehow immoral for a political party to pay attention to public opinion. It reflects the interests of those who would rather be the majority in a minority party than risk being the minority in a majority party." https://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Politics_of_Evasion.pdf
Spending time on Twitter arguing is always dumb, but everyone has a vice. So I agree that most of that effort is wasted. But that’s not all he does. It seems MY talks to many influential D people offline and lays out his cases better in columns than on the mind cancer platform, aka Twitter/X.
This is the problem with siloed Substacks. Back in the days of the original blogs, you could actually get into extended debates with people holding different views. That was illuminating and fun! Now, it's pretty much you're talking to a captured audience and there's little true exchange of views. So we're stuck with braindead Twitter.
Couldn't agree with this more. I miss the old blog glory days! While Podcasts and Substacks are more useful compared to Twitter, blogs were still the best.
Yeah, I'm usually a pretty generous grader, but this article wasn't sending its best. If you're gonna pound the table, it has to be done with gusto and enthusiasm, not this sort of low-energy gimmicky rehash built out of the penumbras and enumerations of prior (actually substantive) posts.
Part of what I like about Freddie is that on his own blog, he also gets into beefs with internet randos constantly - but is upfront about doing so, and often admitting he Has A Problem when it comes to social media addiction generally. If you make the subtext clear, that This Viral Thing Is Actually A Synecdoche For A Broader Trend, then I appreciate it even if the argumentative chain ultimately doesn't hold up. These sorts of SB posts mostly just hide the ball, vis...we sittin here, I spose to be franchise pundit, but we in here talkin bout factions. How the hell can I make my Team D better by factions, man? I mean, how silly is that? (The conclusion of which is not, as you gesture at, for schmoderation to win by debate judge default.)
This seems incredibly hostile to me! Matt wants to hear Trump he thinks you need to win elections to do it. He further thinks that being a Democrat who reads kind of Republican on crime and immigration and trans stuff is a great way to win elections.
Is he wrong? Do you have a better idea? Should we post about firebombing a wallmart?
Matt has written this article 85 times. Which of his paid subscribers is confused about the need to moderate in elections? Which of them disagrees? He's just doing his social media arguments.
There’s a difference between moderates who want timid incremental policy tweaks and moderates who want bold, transformational policy that just come from an ideologically middle-of-the-road perspective.
Agreed. I think voters don’t have time for moderates who have no agenda or pitch for how their policies will make their lives better. It often comes off as corrupt or weak rather than authentically moderate. Look at Kyrsten Sinema for an extreme example.
Golden is a great example of a moderate who still took clear populist stands.
What would an example of bold transformational policy from the middle of the road be? And would it be any more popular than bold transformational policy from the extremes—it seems like a lot of voters really just do not like big changes of any kind.
Fixing our national data systems in a way that isn't "give it all to Palantir" or whatever the DOGE folks were doing. This would mean combining everything from social security to passports to state-issued driver's licenses would be based on the same systems and use the same IDs, which would also be used for Federal programs. It'd be easy to piggyback off of this to build a national ID card necessary for voting and national debit accounts both for delivery of federal funds and also to give folks a default bank account.
Yeah, you have to tie them to outcomes voters care about.
"It's time to simplify the tax code and stop the race to the bottom of tax breaks for tips/seniors/teachers/veterans/cops" is hard to proactively argue for.
"It's time to simplify the tax code - on April 15th the government will send you either a check or a bill" lets you accomplish the same priority, but with the cover that you're actually improving the way people interact with the government.
I’d say the Affordable Care Act. It wasn’t single payer. It maintained the private insurance market. It was done in a way that was deficit neutral, and reduced Medicare payments. It was based off of a Republican plan in MA. But it greatly expanded healthcare coverage, and expanded Medicaid and subsidies.
ACA was passed on a party line vote and now it's extremely popular and the cuts to it are part of why the GOP is on their ass and hell, it's popularity is partly why the party of Repeal and Replace became the party of "let's get rid of these subsidies and that's it."
A GOP example is a giant chunk of the Bush, Trump I, and Trump II tax cuts will not be reversed even if AOC becomes POTUS
The ACA was paid for by cuts to Medicare and tax increases.
Also, even though the GOP ended up opposing it, the ACA was actually modeled after a Republican plan and included several "conservative" aspects to its design.
Contributing to this massive debt are the coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Over the last 10 years, federal costs for these provisions have exceeded $1.5 trillion – a combination of the exchange subsidies, the Basic Health Plan (BHP), and Medicaid expansion
To this end, I strongly support Matt's idea of calling them something else.
Someone who is federal minimum wage curious and suspicious of trans sports participation and someone who is strongly for the first and strongly against the second can both be called "moderate" but they are doing wildly different things.
Agreed, not all policy or politics is on a line between two right and left poles. The binary thinking inherent in our system misleads people into believing that moderation is the mid point between the two current extremes.
I just don't understand what the extremely vague & handwavey word 'moderation' is doing for you, when you could just use the word 'popular' instead:
1. Moderation is a relational state between properties, not a specific bundle of policies. You're just using a very vague word over and over over without defining it, which drives me sort of nuts
2. There's a long history of political scientists trying to build metrics that measure how centrist a politician is, but there's an equally long history of other scientists disagreeing with them about what exactly is being measured. Stuff like DW-NOMINATE, etc.
3. 'Popular' is less handwavey because you can actually measure what's popular or not via public opinion polling. It's not perfect, but it's something
4. Moderation has a moralizing tone, and also assumes that the voters themselves are moderate. What if they're not? The policies you need to win office in say rural Alabama may be relatively extreme by national or international standards
5. Popular acknowledges differences between districts in the US- the world's third largest country! You probably shouldn't run on gun control in a rural district. But you also probably shouldn't run on gun rights in an urban district. These policy platforms contradict each other, so they can't both be moderate at the same time. If you just use the word popular, you acknowledge the differences
Using words correctly is just a basic mental hygiene practice, and the mark of a relatively educated person. Someone running for office in Maine should probably advocate for the economic interests of lobstermen- in Iowa for ethanol, in Florida for citrus growers, in Michigan for the auto industry, in Alaska for oil. What's the moderate position on lobsters? The extreme one? Who's an extremist on citrus? In philosophical terms moderation is an 'empty universal'- a phrase so broad that it's meaningless. I think we should use words precisely as opposed to extreme handwaving. Just say popular!
My guess is because everyone misreads his takes on this to mean Matt is advocating being entirely rudderless across the full ideological spectrum and we should support any candidate who will put a D next to their name if they can win regardless of what stances they take on any issue (there are several comments on this post to that effect). Using popular would further this. He’s saying Democrats should move towards the median voter in a given constituency (hence tendency to use “moderation” or “centrism” despite the flaws with those words, not that they should mirror the median voter in every district which is what “popular” sounds like). To make it concrete: in some districts the median voter is MAGA and thinks the 2020 election was stolen. I don’t think Matt is saying Dems should therefore run the “popular” playbook in those districts but rather we should try to moderate on certain issues etc.
I know you specifically weren’t missing the distinction but I think a lot of others already do
Should we support anyone who puts a D next to their name? Let's say there's a Democrat in deepest red Alabama who is strongly MAGA and believes the election was stolen but if elected would otherwise support the Democrats 80% of the time. And let's say by some incredible miracle that person wins. Should the Democrats try to kick that person out of the caucus? Um, no?
That’s not the point I was making. I was saying they have to be willing to support Democrats on Democratic issues (in your example, the 80% of the time) - if they do, then great. Other commenters are getting hung up thinking Matt is saying we should support a hypothetical “Democrat” who takes every popular issue in deepest red Alabama (aka they’re a far right MAGA candidate across the board) which is explicitly not what he’s saying.
This is where it's important to have a real sense of prioritization.
That way it's very easy to distinguish a candidate that agrees with you on your top 3 issues but is squishy on the 4th vs a candidate that disagrees with your top issue but agrees with the next 3.
But if you don't have good set of priorities, it's very easy to get tripped up.
AOC is very popular in her district. Jared Golden is very popular (for a Democrat) in his district.
I don't like "moderation" or "popular"; I like "fittedness." Do you fit the population you're trying to represent? That can be ideology or culture or charisma (or when it comes to someone like Jack Schlossberg, mindless celebrity).
Of course, it's a lot easier to do this in a House district than when trying to become President.
Or trying to win majorities in the House or Senate. What is the "fittedness" of the Democrats' image and agenda to the country? What would make Democrats' image and agenda more "fitted" so that they weren't structurally at a disadvantage in the Senate?
I think a big problem that has given rise to populism not only here, but in many peer countries, is a political elite that is in a bubble pursuing priorities that our out of step with normie eclectic voters.
Instead of hand-wavy moderation or centrism, or technocratic or ideological policies, focusing on what is not only popular but also a priority seems obvious.
I mean, by absolutely no definition of the word is the rural American policy on guns 'moderate'. We are a gigantic global outlier. But again- everyone understands you're not going to win a rural district with a gun control policy. It's a great example of where 'popular' diverges from moderate. You'd have to have relatively extreme gun policies to win out in the country, which is fine- but that's not moderate!
Yes, but that points to another problem with “moderate” - it’s subjective to location and scale. In the US gun rights are a moderate position in many places. And yes, if the scope is peer countries, it is not moderate. But then a lot of stuff Europe does would be radical here. So, agree that popular is better than moderate.
In other places he’s used the term popularism. The same crew of people that are against moderation are also against popularism. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, which is kind of the point of the article.
There is an aspect of 5 that is missing compared to moderate which is Matt wants less progressive fits in deep blue areas in order to move the party to be closer to the marginal house/senate candidate. Because people are smarter and politics is more nationalized voters correctly understand that electing a Manchin or Tester means supporting Schumer so the party needs to do something "shmoderate" to bring Schumer in line with the front line members.
"Moderate" can mean "holds lots of middle-ground views" or it can mean "holds extreme views, but not along the left/right orthodoxy."
"Moderate" can also mean "tolerates a wide divergence of viewpoints to get stuff done" or it can mean "rigidly demands adherence to left/right orthodoxy."
I think both are important, but my critique of the current Democratic party is that the second definition of moderation is not recognized as a virtue.
I would update your second definition a bit to say “holds a variety of views from across the political spectrum.”
And my critique of this article is that Matt really doesn’t clarify which he means!
I think the one Matt seems to like is the heterodox person, vs the person who is just middle ground or incrementalist on everything — I think! But Suozzi seems to be much more the middle ground type so I’m not really sure why he’s being held up as the platonic example.
Matt has also advocated for Henry Cueller, who is just an empty suit, deeply corrupt, machine politican. That kind of thing does him no favors with his detractors.
Cuellar is very well-liked in his district. I think interrogating why that is, is quite valuable. Especially since his constituents (rural Hispanics) are undercovered by the mainstream media.
You won't hear a dissent from me on that (I live in TX and have family in the RGV). Any competitive candidate in exurban or rural TX should be hawkish on immigration and court the support of the oil and gas industry.
The problem is the blatant corruption simply fuels the arguments from the left that moderate candidates are merely bought and paid for.
I'm not here to provide a defense of corruption. It's obviously bad.
But if moderates prefer a moderate Dem who is corrupt over a progressive who is clean, that says even more about ideology and how much it matters: voters would rather have a corrupt guy who is on their side than someone who is not.
I often rail against "Econ 101 brain", where people take the simplified models they learned in Econ 101 and use them to build a full mental worldview. Matt's befuddlement of why people don't like private equity companies is a version of this ("Why would people not like maximizing economic surplus?" Uh, the goal of the companies is to convert excess consumer surplus to producer/investor surplus. Why would consumers like that.)
This moderation debate seems like a version, "PoliSci 101 brain", where people learn about Black's Median Voter Theorem and convince themselves that the easiest way to win elections is to take the median voter +1's positions wholesale and they're guaranteed to win. But there's no one-dimensional median voter! Different voters could be the median depending on which candidates map to the electorate's bucket of semi-related political opinions.
Ok with "the easiest way to win elections is to take the median voter +1's positions wholesale". But cut out the "guaranteed to win" part--that's creating a straw man that sounds ridiculous, as nothing *guarantees* a win (e.g., there can be a wave election, an outside event scrambles voters' electoral priorities, etc.). The question is: does a certain issue position make a win *more likely*.
I think it’s instructive. One should be able to differentiate what they think is good for the country (i.e. their ideology) vs what they think voters prefer. If you can’t differentiate these, or if you just so happen to believe the best electoral strategy is for politicians to adopt positions that match your own, then you’re just a partisan hack like G. Elliott Morris.
“Good for the country” and “popular with the median voter” are distinct categories in my mind. However, I might be a better political activist if I conflated them more.
Bloomberg's 2020 primary campaign was so weird. All it did was open him up to mockery and let a lot more people find out about his sexual harassment problem who otherwise wouldn't have known.
"pro-nuclear YIMBYs who are tough on crime and want accountability in education"
Straight into my veins. I would clarify that "tough on crime" mostly means moar police and catching more crime, not just longer sentences. In addition to pro-nuclear I would just say green energy abundance in general. I want to see nuclear plants, solar fields, wind farms, battery storage, and transmission lines from sea to shining sea. We should have a goal of 5¢ per kWh electricity.
I think we're one step further back than that. We don't even all agree that people should vote for what they think is good for the country, rather than just to pwn the libs.
that's absurd. every single one of them would say that pwning lib ideology is best for the country -- just like blue voters would and do say about pwning MAGA (that's the whole point of the "fighter" frame)
Here's an underrated difference between the a 'shmoderate' like Brian Fitzpatrick and a 'shmoderate' like Suozzi, Golden, etc. The former doesn't go on TV every week and slam the party he's part of. You never see Fitzpatrick on MSNBC complaining about the insane MAGA people in his party. At most, he might say something to the local news affiliates.
Now, I think it'd be likely good for the country if he did, but he actually understands his job as a Republican Congressperson isn't to do that.
The reason ironically why some Republican 'moderates' don't get the pushback Democratic moderates do outside of the general differences in the coalition is the Republican moderates don't seemingly spend most of their waking life complaining to reporters from Politico or Axios about how crazzzzzyyyyy their voters have gotten and being annoyed it's not 2005 anymore.
So, a MAGA voter in Fitzpatrick's district might be annoyed at his votes, but he doesn't seem like somebody working against Trump like a lot of moderates seem like they're working against what Democratic voters actually want.
Yeah, I've always seen this as an unfortunate result of the ideological breakdown in the US: a lot more people self identify as conservative than as liberal, so Dems have to win a higher share of self-identifying moderates (they can't split them 50-50) which means much more overt statements distancing themselves from the left partisan extreme.
I agree that there is some obfuscation going on here, so let's call a spade a spade: the reason I do not want people like Suozzi, Perez, Gonzalez, Golden, etc. valorized is because I think they are substantively bad people with bad views about politics, whom I am begrudgingly forced to work with due to a combination of the idiocies of the American political system (in a legitimate multiparty democracy they would not be in my party) and the dynamics of the electorate. If more Democrats talked and acted like them it would put the country in a much worse place.
And what's worse, shmoderates are constantly trying to infiltrate and take over seats held by people I actually agree with. Currently one of the shmoderates' favorite politicians is trying to drum up support for her campaign for governor of Minnesota by promising to surrender in advance to undemocratic Republican House of Representatives control in exchange for getting her own state fiefdom. What about that am I supposed to respect, or even condone?
In general the shmoderates do better the worse the Democratic Party as a whole does, because that gives them greater leverage. So they are persistently traitorous-- constantly selling me and my actual party out for personal and factional gain. They oppose actual reform of failed institutions like the Senate and the Supreme Court, because their position astride those institutions gives them greater leverage.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that actual shmoderate governance, as seen in the UK, is so unpopular that exposure to it acts as a kind of voter repellent so strong that it is causing a collapse of the shmoderate party. Until the shmoderates can figure out how to govern in a way that doesn't make the electorate prefer actual Hitler, I think they should mostly shut up, take a seat, and vote for harm reduction in the form of Democratic candidates.
Yeah, if the Problem Solvers were actually any good at solving problems, we'd have seen it from now. Instead we see Tom Suozzi, who wrote a really poorly considered article, made votes that got him nothing. For the article to be correct, everything Trump did would have to be universally popular and then the opposition would look bad for opposing it, but in fact, this was never the case, and he should have known this.
If compromise were getting a for b and they could point to the fact that they were getting something, it'd be one thing, but voting for the Laken Riley act accomplished nothing.
The truth of the matter about congress is, the game-theory correct move is to act as a party whole and prevent all opponent actions and resist maximally so that your opponents are more likely to lose elections. Resistance makes opponent policies less popular and less effective than trying to bang out compromises.
If you have the filibuster, use it all the time, every time, let nothing through.
>whom I am begrudgingly forced to work with due to a combination of the idiocies of the American political system (in a legitimate multiparty democracy they would not be in my party)
In a multiparty system you would just have to be in a coalition with them! Spend like, 2 seconds thinking about this man. If your party doesn't have 50%+1 of the legislature, what does that imply......? Either you have to form a coalition with the shmoderates, or they coalition with the center-right party and are in charge that way
Yes, and at that point blame can be apportioned properly to the schmoderates when they block good legislation, at which point they will likely fall out of Congress (as the FDP, which engaged in similar antics with the last German government, did). As it is, there's no accountability.
Well I think the 'Suozzi, Perez, Gonzalez, Golden, etc.' crowd would get more of the vote than the FDP ever got (10ish% on average IIRC). Also the FDP had a pretty amazing track record of being in government since WW2. But-
You haven't really addressed the issue of, how would you form a coalition of 50%+1 of the vote without them, or another similar group? How would this work under PR?
Zagarna how would you form a government without them, or compromising with another similar group? Do you know how coalition governments work? Your grouping of Self Righteous Far Leftists isn't going to win 51% of the legislature!
Setting aside the rather obvious problem that a party with no seats can't form a government with anyone, the basic proposition here is simple enough-- coalition governments form through adversarial negotiations among distinct parties, in which those parties make binding commitments and typically share power in rough proportion to their share of the electorate. Then, if the agreement fails, voters know where to apportion the blame-- as they did with the FDP in driving it out of the Bundestag.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm afraid I have better things to do than respond to additional gibes on yesterday's thread.
I think the hard task is deciding what are the problem issues to deal with and which require holding the line. Which is just to say, the exact problem of general politics, but within the coalition.
I'm coming to the view that the big problem is with people with "coherent ideologies" is that they have coherent ideologies. I think holding One Theory That Explains Everything is vain, un-humble. I, like Matt's ordinary voters, have a "mish-mash" of views--and I try hard hard to be consistent!
When I was a teenager (in the dark ages of the late '60s ;-) I fell into a group of folks who had a highly coherent and articulated "Marxist-Leninist" (actually Maoist) ideology. It explained EVERYTHING! It was awesome. But I kept coming up with but's, and eventually (fairly quickly) I was out of it.
My point--which I can't make as elegantly as Matt--is that it isn't voters who are wrong (tho' they can individually be inconsistent) but the activists on either side who punish deviance from a "coherent ideology".
I also think presentation/affect is important, tho' not critical. As a Canadian I can see right up front that Mark Carney's affect saves him from a lot of criticism on specific policies; by both the commentariat and most voters* he's given credit for doing the best that can be done in the circumstances.
* Canada still has a lot of swing voters, so this is important.
I think it's a sign of intellectual immaturity to hold tightly to a "coherent ideology." As we get older our perspectives on issues should grow in complexity and nuance.
We should see that just about every policy decision involves real trade-offs, and that there are rarely cases of all upside, no downside. Loosening regulations on housing is as close as I've found to such an issue, but even that involves some short-term drawbacks that the locals might not enjoy.
It's funny to see Amanda Litman say that most voters don't have "cohesive ideologies," by which I assume she means they don't agree with all of the bullet points of a party's platform? But the internal policies of both parties are wildly incoherent. What sense does it make that one party opposes the death penalty and supports abortion, while the other party holds the opposite views? A cohesive ideology would casual about life or reverent about life.
What sense does it make to support very high levels of immigration, while pretending to speak for the downtrodden worker?
How is it coherent to spend the last five decades advocating for women's rights only to abandon them in favor of trans rights?
Maybe Amanda Litman should consider if her party's views (or the other party's views) cohere around actual priniciples or whether the average voter's philosophies really makes more sense.
Your suggested responses don't seem perfectly reasonable to me (advocacy for "early stage" abortions is not the position of progressives) and "oh please" is not a response at all.
But I didn't mean these as "gotcha questions." These examples are -- to me-- diametrically opposed philosophies that make no sense to hold together. (I personally am pro-choice and pro-death penalty.) Political parties have evolved to hold these weird, contradictory positions, and many people espouse them without thought. And then feel superior about it.
I have to interject here and say that I snorted a little after reading your comment hand-waving every real philosophical contradiction the parent comment identified. It’s perfect, in a way.
"What sense does it make that one party opposes the death penalty and supports abortion, while the other party holds the opposite views?"
A friend of mine and I noted this issue back in high school while agreeing that we supported both abortion and the death penalty. We discussed starting a third party with the motto, "Get 'em coming *and* going!"
I have (archly, but not without some truth to it) referred to myself as pro-death in opposition to soi-disant "pro-lifers" before. I'm also for physician-assisted suicide (within reason, anyway)!
There are many Catholics who support a “consistent life ethic,” which means being pro-life in the sense of opposing abortion and the death penalty. I’ve always thought that to be interesting and admirable in a way.
I think his point is more than the word itself doesn't matter as much as the willingness to accept heterodox ideology into the tent.
I'd point out that he does not seem to give us the grounds to build the tent poles under this schema. What makes a Dem? Someone who will vote with Dems on the "most important" things. What are those things? Apparently, the things people (who are not necessarily Dems) agree with.
1. Persuasion is for friends. Stuff is for enemies.
A caucus member is someone you can convince e of something. Opposition is everyone else. You talk to friends. You make concessions to opposition.
2. Ideals are outside the realm of politics.
Wanting a Dem or GOP to hold an office is outside of, beyond, and prior to politics. Any given belief about what is good to do in the world is even further out of bounds. It is the role of politics to enact existing beliefs by all legal means. The practice of politics is making sure they are your beliefs.
3. The only belief that matters in US politics is GOP or Dem. Higher standards are the luxury of angels, and more precision is the cloak of people who want Stuff for them rather than for opposition. Until we are ruled by angels, we have to deal with the reality that a single label is all-consunint and sufficient.
4. When in doubt about multiple people sharing a label, choose the one the opposition likes.
Again, persuasion is for your friends. Giving stuff without question is for the opposition.
I think that's good faith. It is, to me, unacceptably amoral. I don't think it's monstrous, but I think it's unrealistic. On its own terms, it doesn't recognize the lure power point that people like ideals. But more foundationally, it provides no firewall against Bad except the party label.
That’s a $10 word that most people probably don’t know, or if they do, they clock it as the kind of word that someone who went to grad school would use.
I'm really not convinced moderation is the meaningful frame of reference. What we need is to find a way to elevate liberals over authoritarians and leaders over demagogues.
The cornerstone of appealing to broad swaths of heterodox voters has to be authentic, principled commitments to pluralism. Leadership is about demonstrating to the voters that doing what's right for the country is going to benefit all of us.
Matt has talked about Trump's appeal being about "moderating" on issues like social security or abortion, but Trump is no moderate. Trump is a heterodox demagogue. The Dems seem to think "moderation" is responding with their own brands of populist heterodox demagogues. Maybe that's moderation maybe it's not. Maybe it wins closely contested elections. What it doesn't do is produce a functional federal government or a free and successful economy.
We're not going to dig our way out of this by simply optimizing how to tell as many voters as possible the things they like to hear.
What counts as demagoguing to you? I don’t think the Platner’s of the world are the answer at all.
But the next Dem candidate, whether it’s mod or left, will certainly be running on wealth redistribution and higher taxes on the rich.
The term demagogue implies there is some pristine truth, discoverable by reason, that craven politicians ignore to win grubby votes.
There sort of is- elementary micro and macroeconomics are mature fields, which yield actionable insights which voters usually ignore. But the world is complicated. You can imagine a world in which rent control would benefit a majority of voters and could catalyze a durable majority coalition.
The term doesn’t imply there is a truth - just that there are other ways to come to positions than trying to move the masses.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1888952798471165
Right. So I think the big dividing questions for dem candidates is going to be about whether you advocate for more a more left wing economic agenda on the merits or because that money was "stolen" from the middle class. This is a big thing on the left. I remember attending very left-wing conference in DC where the main panel was literally "Naming the Villians."
There is a lot of left emphasis on naming the villains that’s a legacy of 60s era activism, but that was solving a different problem in a different time.
I’ve never seen anyone really analyze its efficacy for post-social media electoral politics rather than treat the approach as self evident. Even Mamdani’s appeal has a lot to do with the happy warrior problem solver persona, and it’s not obvious to me he benefitted his cause when he (say) called out Ken Griffin.
People believe in the death penalty. They ignore the merits all the time. Why should a schmoderate put data first for econ rhetoric and not something else? Stories are popular. They don't have to be true to be so.
What does all of this have to do with the death penalty? If a voter believes Ted Bundy deserved to die there's not really anything to say about the merits of that belief
I think the idea is that you’d want to kill Ted Bundy because it’s what he deserved and even if it’s not the optimal deterrent to crime, the same way some want to tax the super-rich because it’s deserved even if it’s not economically optimal.
Not much. For this purpose, I'm alluding to its efficacy at preventing crime. There are a variety of reasons people might want the death penalty and a variety of reasons people might disagree with it. But I think the same is true of Ben's example. Who's to say that the "merits" question is what killers deserve rather than what deters crime? Is the merits question what raises the standard of living broadly or what gives each individual the least affected chance of striking it rich? People are not consistently ideological, but nor are they consistently non-ideological. How do we decide when the "merits" matter and when popularity is enough? I dunno. We still have a legal death penalty despite what I think the merits dictate. We need to define our goals.
It is important to know who the enemy is
"We're not going to dig our way out of this by simply optimizing how to tell as many voters as possible the things they like to hear."
I agree with this because Matt never seems to offer a principled way to determine what is good popular and what is bad popular. Or rather, he doesn't have any guidance on what is sufficiently good or sufficiently bad to hold the line on / drop.
One might say that politics as a practice isn't about that kind of dogma, but we have to unite around something or we will end up, as you say, with post-liberal, wolves and sheep voting for who to eat, majoritarian demagoguery.
I think you're confusing normative MY with positive MY. "Good popular" and "bad popular" are things that individuals believe based on a raft of factors. Sometimes, people subscribe to ideologies or other sets of beliefs that help them understand which public policies are "good" and "bad". MY often makes posts about what he thinks are good and bad, whether or not they're popular.
But a lot of the posting on this blog is just focused on the objective electoral reality in this country and what that implies for winning elections regardless of how you slice "good" and "bad". MY's values are much more aligned with one political party over the other, so he focuses on that party's electoral realities and what he thinks they should do to win elections.
One of the big lessons of this blog is that, regardless of where you sit within your particular coalition, in American democracy, having your party win is the most important thing for moving public policy in the direction of your preferences. So while its tempting to focus on tactical minutia that would help your individual preferences within the coalition, conditional on the Ds winning, it's missing the forest for the trees. Really, you should just do whatever you can to make sure the Ds win.
This comment needs to be a disclaimer at the top of every Matt post.
There is at least “gotcha” one comment for every MY post that says “aha you said we should do popular things but you support XYZ unpopular thing” or some version and you articulated better than I’ve seen others do or done myself.
I know Matt the person has cognizable beliefs. I think Matt the strategist downplays the extent to which people have cognizable beliefs despite constantly reminding people that their opponents do. His starting premise is “You want Dems don't you?” yet he knows how poor of a pitch that is.
That's reasonable as a matter of overall direction but the moderation talk is highly tactical. This person, good. This person, bad. The judgment seems to be pure popularity. Ok, sure, but then we aren't tied to Dems anymore or to any thing. Why are people not too tactical while planks are?
I'm not sure what you mean by "planks". The point is that the difference in policy outcome between a D-controlled government vs. an R-controlled government is dramatically larger than the difference in policy outcome from Adam Centrist (D) being in the house vs. Burt Leftist (D) being in the house, regardless of whether it's D-controlled or R-controlled.
The intra-party fights only matters if you actually win the elections. Factionalists are too comfortable assuming away the "win control of government" piece, but in fact that's really the whole ballgame. The actions of factionalists in intra-party fights actually can have a large baring on the national brand and therefore who ultimately gets to govern beyond the result of a particular intraparty fight, and that's something they should all take into account. If they don't, they're not serious about achieve their stated policy goals.
I really do understand the baseline pitch. Or I think I do. But I also think "Only the individual can decide what tradeoffs they want to make, but they must make these tradeoffs that I favor" is a consistent result of combining the various Takes of MY. He'll say the tradeoffs he presents are based on voter pattern, but he'll also say trans women in female sports has a right answer.
I think you're mixing up two kinds of persuasion, with different goals and different time frames. There's persuasion of what candidates or type of candidates we should try to get to run in elections right now, to maximize our chance of winning. That's very short-term persuasion because the next election is by definition always happening soon. Then there's persuasion of what policies and practices are best on the merits. That's much longer-term persuasion—the idea is that, over time, if this persuasion is successful then that will become the popular position, and politicians will be able to hold that position without spending political capital (or at least not spending as much).
Take gay marriage. To my knowledge Matt has always supported it. But would it have been good advice to tell his readers not to support John Kerry in 04, or 2008 Barack Obama, unless those candidates supported gay marriage? (Actually, I remember Markos at Daily Kos withdrawing his support for Harold Ford in 2006 because Ford said he was against gay marriage, which struck me, a fervent gay marriage supporter, as so short-sighted on Markos's part.) So there would be nothing inconsistent about writing both "legalize gay marriage" and "don't insist on a gay marriage litmus test" articles—the goal is to win elections in the short term, while changing minds so that in the long term gay marriage doesn't cost you votes, which is what actually happened!
It's the right answer in terms of "do you want D- or R-controlled government?", not "what should you care about?"/"what is good?". And whether the government is D- or R-controlled has a wide-ranging impact on issues that people who care a lot about "trans women in female sports" also care about deeply.
So in your swing district, if the thing you care about is "trans women in female sports", you should be willing to support candidates who maximize the likelihood that you get D-controlled government, regardless of that candidate's specific position on "trans women in female sports".
No, it’s context dependent popularity, which is a big difference. Who is the type of candidate this person is going to replace? Joe Manchin in WV = good. More of the Democratic party’s goals will be achieved with him in that seat than anyone else who could win that seat. Joe Manchin in CA = bad. Could get someone who would vote for more Dem agenda items instead of him. Joe Manchin in WV but taking the median WV political stance (the most “popularity maximizing” approach) = bad, because this would essentially be Joe Machin reverting to a median or even far right Republican (not supportive of Dem goals). The point is you want in each case the most morally aligned candidate you can get WHO CAN WIN. Joe Manchin was the furthest left possible candidate who could win in WV so we shouldn’t be asking him to take further left stances that could cause him to lose to someone far more right wing or supporting someone more left wing who wouldn’t have a shot in hell. In a different context the calculation would be different. You’re getting stuck on “well how do you decide if XYZ candidate is good or bad based on popularity” when the overall view is closer to “Dems winning power is good” and so you’re maximizing your Dem power across the heterogeneity of different voter constituencies with different preferences. But it is very much tied to Dem priorities, just which bundle of Dem issues each individual candidate supports may vary based on their constituency (as it should because we’re a democracy?), such that we get an overall population of in power Democrats that can actually pass the broadly supported agenda items. Each individual candidate does not need to be a fractal of the overall party’s platform in order to pass big planks of important Dem legislation.
Note: not trying to get in a Manchin rehash just using him as an example. Substitute “generic moderate Democrat” if you prefer.
I love this framing
>>regardless of where you sit within your particular coalition, in American democracy, having your party win is the most important thing for moving public policy in the direction of your preferences.
I'm not even sure this is true. At least, it doesn't necessarily follow from the points Matt makes about moderation.
After all, thermostatic politics is also a powerful force that swings elections. Probably more powerful than ideological positioning. It's unlikely that moderating/shmoderating is going to end the trend of the president's party losing midterm elections, for example.
So it's entirely possible that for radicals, setting your party's ideology to a more radical place and relying on thermostatic politics to get Bernie and the Squad into power every few election cycles would be a more effective way to make progressive policy than dealing with moderate Democrats.
The problem (and the thing Matt has established to my satisfaction) is that this strategy means you get more years with MAGA in office, and MAGA is so messed up that even hardcore progressives shouldn't view this as a good tradeoff, not even if it helps them get their policy preferences enacted.
The Senate is important context here. The Ds aren't set up to win the Senate very easily even in years when there's a backlash against the other guys! This makes it mechanically more difficult for Ds to claw back and then push forward what the other guys did in their time in office.
Trump is (hopefully?) uniquely terrible. And the Ds are only a toss-up to take the Senate in the mid-terms!
So even if you think radical see-sawing is inevitable (I don't), there's still compelling reasons to moderate if it increases the likelihood that the see-saw will actually saw sufficiently bigly to give you a chance running the ship.
And of course, rather than see-sawing, the way to actually have enduring policy gains is to govern for more than 2 years at a time, and for that, you can't do anything that's too dramatically radical/unpopular.
Good point, the Senate tilt in favor of conservatives makes a big difference too.
I would say that the distinction between good popular and bad popular rests on results. If something is popular but is likely to get bad results that voters won’t like, we shouldn’t do it.
Cutting interest rates is popular, but would fuel inflation which wouldn’t be popular. Cutting congressional salaries and enacting term limits are popular, but would make Congress less competent and lower the quality of governance, which voters ultimately would not like. Rent control is popular but discourages new construction and ultimately leads to higher rents, defeating the purpose. So those are all “bad popular”.
Getting rid of affirmative action or prohibiting trans people from competing in women’s sports would be disadvantageous to a small slice of the population and would make some people sad, but wouldn’t make the country as a whole meaningfully worse off and is extremely unlikely to have major unintended consequences that voters would hate. Merit pay for teachers is annoying for average-quality teachers but positive-sum for the country as a whole. So those are fine areas to give the public what it wants, especially if doing so helps us win elections and implement other good policies that we like.
I'm not sure I agree with he specifics, but the structure makes sense.
Popular, neutral to minimally harmful? Sure, we can try it.
I think there are just two separate goals. Goal (A) is to have good policy. MY believes (and so do I) that there actually are good and bad policies. Trump is bad because he implements policies which make us worse off materially (and probably spiritually). Healthcare for poor people is good and so are carbon taxes.
But next is Goal (B), getting elected so you can implement Goal (A), good policy. Goal (B) requires being popular and not all good policies are popular. Thus, he suggests emphasizing things like healthcare for poor people instead of carbon taxes because even though both are actually good, one is much more popular than the other. This seems like a very cohesive system for identifying what is good popular and what is bad popular.
I think the disagreement between MY and more left leaning people on this system (and I don't consider myself particularly left-leaning, so others will need to tell me if I'm correct) is that MY says opposing transwomen in sports or opposing affirmative action in school admissions or government backed loans is clearly helpful to goal (B), getting elected. But MY and left-leaning people have some disagreement on where these policies fit into Goal (A), i.e. left leaning people seem to think including transwomen in women's sports divisions is good policy whereas MY seems more skeptical this is actually good on the merits. And that is a hard disagreement to work out. But then there is another discussion about Goal (B) which is that, even supposing allowing transwomen in women's sports was the correct policy, is it worth the trade off to avoid Trump getting elected. MY has I think advocated that it is lower stakes than mass deportations and people losing healthcare (although I'm not sure if he actually said that, or if I'm projecting my own opinion).
But if you're mostly wanting to argue Goal (A) about those policies then Goal (B) feels like a trick where people are hiding their true (and bad from your perspective) beliefs behind pragmatism. It is a challenging argument landscape, but at least to me it seems pretty cohesive and well articulated.
I think this is a fair presentation of the MY position. I agree that to the left wing of the party this looks like a trick to get the party to adopt conservative/regressive positions because they are "popular", when in fact they are the actual policy preferences of the right-leaning wing of the party. The thing that is missing from this construct is a theory of political change -- how do you get good policy to be popular policy? The right wing of the party seems content to never advocate for making the left's policy preferences popular because they don't believe in them to begin with, so even when the left makes progress toward popularizing some of their issue positions (it's happening now with things like AI and data center taxes, for example), the right wing of the party reacts with furious anger and tries to shut it down in the name of not being the "popular" position and thus ruining "our" electoral prospects. So to the left this looks like a very one-sided coalition that defaults to the Yglesian right-wing position on most policy positions most of the time, no matter what is happening in the messy, heterogeneous world of actual voter opinion. The right wing of the party invests enormous energy in making the left wing's policy agenda unpopular, then turns around and says "sorry left -- we can't use these ideas because they're unpopular". But the right wing never seems to want to chase a left wing idea that is actually gaining electoral popularity because they simply don't like the idea, even when and where it would be advantageous to pursue.
I think it's hard to see the compromise at the individual level. For example, I was a registered Republican in 2015. My biggest concern is the rule of law and rising authoritarianism so I switched to supporting democrats electorally once Trump was nominated. There are specific issues I agree with democrats on, but I'm just broadly skeptical of the entire package. That includes opposition to AI and data centers for example, that just seems like bad policy to me. Nonetheless, if there's a democrat running on that platform against a Republican, I'd almost always still vote for them. The opposition to Trump's mass deportations, executive overreach, and judicial appointments seems like a much bigger deal.
That doesn't mean on Twitter I won't both mention that data center opposition doesn't make much sense, and also Trump started a strategically deleterious dumb war that is raising the price of everything. So on Twitter probably a really progressive person would just see me as always opposing them, but electorally I'm holding my nose and supporting the same candidates.
Au contraire, there's an easy principle you can apply here. If it's popular and leftist, it's bad popular and we should be principled and reject it. If it's popular and schmoderate, it's good popular.
Conveniently, this leads to the inevitable conclusion that we should adopt schmoderate positions on everything.
I don't think Matt would say that AOC is wrong not to try to be Jared Golden in her district. He really is focused on swing districts/states and national elections, and he's right about that.
Where's he wrong is saying that the Democratic party needs to change its brand when there is no party that can present its brand outside of the presidential race, just tons of different actors following their own rational courses. I mean, you can tell Rashida Tlaib to be more moderate on Palestinian issues, but why should she?
I mean, Matt has literally said on the Politix podcast all Democrats should moderate, including those in very left-wing districts.
Do you remember the episode? I don't really listen to the Politix podcast, but I'd be curious to check it out.
My understanding was that Yglesias wants people in very left wing districts to moderate their message enough to allow for moderates in the party. Not that they shouldn't advocate for significantly more progressive policies than a swing state moderate. But maybe he's gone as far as saying we should only elect moderates everywhere.
I don't think it's true that there is nothing the Democratic party can do to change their brand outside of the presidential race. If a good chunk of elite Democratic party actors changed the way they communicated, changed the policies they supported etc. then that would have an impact on how the party is perceived.
There is no mechanism to do this, it's just another version of "if enough people voted for the third party candidate they'd win", and even if that came into play you'd hope that the media people actually consume would reflect that new consensus (which is another heavy lift).
Certainly not easy, but the mechanism is that you pursuade people. Similar to how the ideas behind yimbyism, effective altruism, woke stuff etc. spread. In this case you'd specifically start with pursuading Democratic party elites, pundits, aligned journalists, donors etc.
If you went back to 1995 and told people that Donald Trump tried to violently overturn an election and somehow came back to power, while the Democrats were about to nominate a guy with a fascist tattoo and a history of red-brown comments for a Senate seat over a boring governor, nobody would think this moment would be a triumph of moderation. As we've gotten to be a sloppier society since 2015 or so, the definition of "moderation" keeps on having to shift to fit actual voter behavior. While there are some clear issues where the Democrats need to shift in what would be a more traditional moderate behavior, the definition of what the median voter finds acceptable vs. un-acceptable keeps moving around all over the place. To put it another way: two of the biggest cranks among Democrats (RFK Jr. and Gabbard) representing two of the worst tendencies of the far left (anti-vaxxer and deference to Russia) are now in this Republican cabinet, but not out of an impulse of bipartisan moderation, but an embrace of crankdom.
“We're not going to dig our way out of this by simply optimizing how to tell as many voters as possible the things they like to hear.”
If you run on things that voters don’t want to hear the voters aren’t going to vote for you.
The plan:
1. Tell voters things they don't want to hear
2. Lose elections
3. ???????
4. Dig our way out of this
It is possible to mostly avoid telling voters things they don’t want to hear without being a demagogue or a dangerous crank. MGP, Golden, and Peltola all manage to be popularist, authentic, and pro-democratic-norms-and-good-governance.
Definitely agree. But part of their success is that they tell their voters what they want to hear, support the policies their voters support etc.
There are different aspects to moderation, which is why it’s not a great term.
Trump moderated on policy in a couple of key areas, but didn’t in other policy areas, and his temperament, headship style, and personality are far from moderate. So he isn’t moderate in my book when looking at the whole picture.
Trump is somewhat moderate but not centrist, I think is the correct distinction.
"Elections and democracy" is sort of the centrist version of climate change. It's an issue that is very important to highly-educated people, particularly residents of the District of Columbia metro area, but that holds absolutely no weight for average swing voters. Average people care about stuff like the economy and immigration, things that they perceive as having a material impact on their lives.
The way to protect democracy is to figure out what will help you win elections, and then do that. Then as a byproduct, assuming a Democrat wins, they will not try to become a personalist dictator, because that's not what Democrats do. "Not being authoritarian" doesn't trade off with other issues--if you want to spend money on climate, then you have to borrow it, or spend less on other priorities, or what have you--but if you want to not be a dictator, you don't have to do anything, you just let the electoral process play out normally.
100%: The way to protect democracy is to figure out what will help you win elections, and then do that
(I would say that while I like your point on "version of climate change" I think rather than "centrist" it's the sort of Democrats (Lefty and Center) professional class extra version of claimte change: ""Elections and democracy" is sort of the centrist version of climate change. It's an issue that is very important to highly-educated people, particularly residents of the District of Columbia metro area,"
Selling to the already sold rather than adjusting one's focus and winning over new markets
(as how the Lefty Green on renewables [my actual space])
The problem with this is that we tried “elevating liberals over authoritarians” and “commitments to pluralism” and it lost us the 204 election…
Eh, just because it didn't work in that instance doesn't mean it isn't a valid strategy. Kamala lost not because she was too liberal, but because she didn't differentiate herself from Biden, didn't distance herself enough from her 2020 primary stances, didn't make the meaningful public appearances required for a social media-era candidate, didn't win an actual primary, and didn't particularly have much charisma.
I would say you somewhat make the point for him in part (depending on what one means by "commitments to pluralism"
If one means as I would understand it in normal Englihs to mean "campaign on it [pretty much as Harris did in 2nd part of campaign] then indeed it was a contributor to loss - not from people hating per se but not addressing "common man" concerns (i.e. bread and butter) - of course that ties back to her not throwing Biden under the bus like on inflation or other items (her inability to say she'd have done things different - and her weak charisma of course)
So.... you want eggheaded positioning like Ms Harris in 2nd half of campaeign positioning to appeal to the urbane urbanites sensibilities ("principled commitments to pluralism...") -
Selling more to the pre-sold.
"simply optimizing how to tell as many voters as possible the things they like to hear.'
Actually that is exactly what you have to do, for the specific geography you're competing in - Not eggheadery intellectual abstractionism
You don’t need to make liberalism the central message of your campaign to be a committed liberal. Gallego’s pitch of a “Big ass trucks” in every driveway isn’t in conflict with a pluralistic society or individualism, for example, and doesn’t commit him to a destructive populist economics.
Well yes - that's non-eggheadism. But that's non-sequitor to what I was replying to.
I would certainly like this style of politics, sadly I do think there's a market out there for demagogues.
I don't know man. I feel like this article is just saying, "I'm right in my intra-party social media feuds". I get that Matt is hopelessly obsessed with the people he argues with on Twitter all day but I don't see why any of us should care about that. These feuds seem to occupy his mind day and night. It's sort of pathetic.
"What did you do during Trump's reign grandpa? When they were putting people in camps and shooting protestors in the street?" "Well child, I spent 10 hours a day arguing with the same 5 people on Twitter about neobrandeisim and moderation. But sometimes I called it 'schmoderation' to own them."
>Matt is hopelessly obsessed with the people he argues with on Twitter all day but I don't see why any of us should care about that...It's sort of pathetic.<
I think you're being more than a bit uncharitable with your characterization, but that aside: if you *really* want to defeat MAGA and save the country, you need to defeat them as often as possible in elections. It really is that simple.
Apparently Matt feels a necessary part of doing this is to nominate candidates who are maximally competitive in places Democrats currently find challenging to win in (they don't have much trouble winning in NYC!).
The people Matt argues with seem to think it would be fine to nominate a Mamdani clone for the Senate in Michigan, or that a hard leftist candidate would romp to a 42 state Electoral College landslide in 2028.
YMMV, but to me it is they, not Yglesias, who are the pathetic ones.
Winning more elections may be boring to some, but it's the thing upon which everything now depends.
If you think Matt isn't unhealthily obsessed with Matt stoller and Tim Wu I invite you to listen to the politix podcast. It's very very clear. He also tacitly admitted it in a column at the beginning of the year.
To add onto what you're saying, the path to reaching the median voter isn't owning C-list progressives on Twitter they've never heard of.
Yeah this is my original point but I shouldn't have added the second part of the comment so it's on me
This is a bit too armchair psychologizing, but also hear him referring to himself in third person more and more on the podcast, never a good sign in my experience.
>If you think Matt isn't unhealthily obsessed with Matt stoller and Tim Wu...<
Your heartfelt concern for Yglesias's mental well-being is duly noted. lol.
You’re right that they are pathetic ones. But there’s a difference between actually nominating maximally competitive candidates in swing districts and writing essays about schmoderation. The latter *might* help with the former. But in some cases it’s just a continuation of twitter feuds by other means.
What you call "feuds" I call debates. The people Matt debates this issue with have significant followings. No doubt it's an uphill climb (anything worth doing is hard), but if, via dogged advocacy, he can convince enough people that the DSA strategy helps MAGA—or at least get them to question said strategy—some good may be accomplished.
I definitely agree with you on the “if”. And I probably think it’s more plausible that it might work than the person a couple comments up-thread does who I was supporting. But it might not.
I don't think this article is /just/ about electability and defeating Trump, it also indicates that schmoderates should be preferred on policy grounds fully separate from that. I also do think some of this is online prog bashing in an inter-party fight separate from electoralism.
For example, MattY criticizes progressives for not supporting Matt Mahan as a young, anti-establishment figure, but just as you noted in NYC, there is no need to moderate in the California gubernatorial election. California is more conservative than some think, but if the top two includes any democrat, the democrat is winning, whether that is Mahan, or Steyer, or Porter, or Becerra. I read that portion as more of a gotcha against internet progressives for some form of hypocrisy in not supporting Mahan, who MattY genuinely supports on policy grounds and thinks would be an improvement for California, which is fully separate from defeating Republicans
>I don't think this article is /just/ about electability and defeating Trump<
Agreed. I was responding to a specific comment bashing M.Y. for his propensity to debate hard leftists who oppose nominating moderates. Those leftists (from what I can tell via social media) constantly argue that nominating DSA-types will benefit Democrats *politically*–which seems nuts. But they all seem sure—after all these years of being proven wrong—that purist lefty candidates will juice turnout for Democrats. Frankly it's drearily boring at this point.
There are obviously places (eg NYC) where going with the DSA-style candidate doesn't hurt Democrats' chances in the general election, but it usually doesn't help them, either (eg Elizabeth Warren's underperformance). And of course, prominent DSA voices might well harm the party's national brand. So there's that, too.
Re: Mahan: I agree with Matt that Mahan's vision of governance makes a lot of sense for a state like California, which, in similar fashion to NYC, suffers from a serious case of stationary banditry. Democratic governance in general isn't insane like the MAGA version. It's much, much, much better in myriad ways. But nonetheless Democrats do shovel a lot more cash than they ought to favored rent-seekers. This hurts Democratic-governed areas, and (by extension) in turn hurts the party's competitiveness nationally.
I feel like you're misconstruing Yglesias here a bit. In that section he's pointing out that the "the only thing that matters is breaking with the establishment and bringing fresh ideas" crowd never supports the moderate version of that. At the end of the day it's still just ideology to them.
Obviously Yglesias likes Mahan and would prefer he won, but it's only a "gotcha" for someone saying ideology isn't important.
Don’t underrate the difficulty of writing 4+ opinion pieces a week.
I mostly wasn't that impressed with Douthat's The Age of Decadence but he is definitely onto something about how many people want to see the same thing every day.
They want Matt Y to rail emotionally against Trump five days a week in the same way that they rewatch the same Scrubs episodes for 25 years.
Matt never rails emotionally against Trump. He rails 5 days a week against people slightly to his left. And agree most readers want to read that every day
I don’t. I value Matt Y and the SB commentariat for other reasons, but left-punching gets tiresome.
Railing against Trump is preaching to the choir. MY has a vision of how Democrats can win and get and use power and that vision is at odds with the left wing of the D coalition.
Lol have a little self awareness. You do realize what Matt is actually doing is preaching to his own choir
One thing I would say in defense of Matt is he came through the American Prospect, Slate and Vox, none of which are natural venues for hippie-punching. To the extent he has an audience for that, it's because he carved it out himself.
This is a chicken-egg question.
In part you’re right, but it seems pretty clear to me he wants to influence the direction of the party more generally.
Doesn’t he have several articles specifically and solely about how terrible Trump is? His position on Trump in incredibly clear!
I am doing a scrubs rewatch now!
Also big bang!
The problem is that the people picking fights with Matt sincerely want more far left candidates who will undoubtedly lose elections in swing states, bringing us closer to the camps.
Picking fights with them is incredibly un persuasive because he makes no attempt to argue from their perspective. Thats hard, but stopping with all the fucking around with moderates vs liberals and just focus on specific things is a good start. Persuade somebody on the details and don’t worry how they define themselves
I do not follow Matt’s Twitter escapades but I agree he could probably do a better job of working to persuade the Democratic establishment. That said, Matt has extensively documented policy-level and campaign-level tactical and strategic recommendations for people to adopt should they want to, so it’s not like he’s light on the details of “how to win elections” or “how to appeal to more people by having less extreme views”.
This is stupid.
I think this gets it backwards. Matt actually cares about winning elections and stopping Trump (hence boosting people like Johnny Garcia), it's people like Morris who take positions that: "...reflects the convictions of groups who believed that it is somehow immoral for a political party to pay attention to public opinion. It reflects the interests of those who would rather be the majority in a minority party than risk being the minority in a majority party." https://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Politics_of_Evasion.pdf
Spending time on Twitter arguing is always dumb, but everyone has a vice. So I agree that most of that effort is wasted. But that’s not all he does. It seems MY talks to many influential D people offline and lays out his cases better in columns than on the mind cancer platform, aka Twitter/X.
This is the problem with siloed Substacks. Back in the days of the original blogs, you could actually get into extended debates with people holding different views. That was illuminating and fun! Now, it's pretty much you're talking to a captured audience and there's little true exchange of views. So we're stuck with braindead Twitter.
Couldn't agree with this more. I miss the old blog glory days! While Podcasts and Substacks are more useful compared to Twitter, blogs were still the best.
I know right?! I can't believe a left of center writer is writing about the best way forward for the left of center party.
Yeah, I'm usually a pretty generous grader, but this article wasn't sending its best. If you're gonna pound the table, it has to be done with gusto and enthusiasm, not this sort of low-energy gimmicky rehash built out of the penumbras and enumerations of prior (actually substantive) posts.
Part of what I like about Freddie is that on his own blog, he also gets into beefs with internet randos constantly - but is upfront about doing so, and often admitting he Has A Problem when it comes to social media addiction generally. If you make the subtext clear, that This Viral Thing Is Actually A Synecdoche For A Broader Trend, then I appreciate it even if the argumentative chain ultimately doesn't hold up. These sorts of SB posts mostly just hide the ball, vis...we sittin here, I spose to be franchise pundit, but we in here talkin bout factions. How the hell can I make my Team D better by factions, man? I mean, how silly is that? (The conclusion of which is not, as you gesture at, for schmoderation to win by debate judge default.)
This seems incredibly hostile to me! Matt wants to hear Trump he thinks you need to win elections to do it. He further thinks that being a Democrat who reads kind of Republican on crime and immigration and trans stuff is a great way to win elections.
Is he wrong? Do you have a better idea? Should we post about firebombing a wallmart?
Matt has written this article 85 times. Which of his paid subscribers is confused about the need to moderate in elections? Which of them disagrees? He's just doing his social media arguments.
I guess you disagree?
In fact I very much do not disagree
There’s a difference between moderates who want timid incremental policy tweaks and moderates who want bold, transformational policy that just come from an ideologically middle-of-the-road perspective.
Agreed. I think voters don’t have time for moderates who have no agenda or pitch for how their policies will make their lives better. It often comes off as corrupt or weak rather than authentically moderate. Look at Kyrsten Sinema for an extreme example.
Golden is a great example of a moderate who still took clear populist stands.
What would an example of bold transformational policy from the middle of the road be? And would it be any more popular than bold transformational policy from the extremes—it seems like a lot of voters really just do not like big changes of any kind.
The most workable ones would probably be focused on state capacity or other good governance-type reforms:
Radically reforming the civil service by empowering "faceless bureaucrats" on everything from hire/fire to budgeting rules and red tape.
Overhauling how we structure our democracy, such as "Giant Congress" (see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/last-rights) and abolishing the filibuster
Fixing our national data systems in a way that isn't "give it all to Palantir" or whatever the DOGE folks were doing. This would mean combining everything from social security to passports to state-issued driver's licenses would be based on the same systems and use the same IDs, which would also be used for Federal programs. It'd be easy to piggyback off of this to build a national ID card necessary for voting and national debit accounts both for delivery of federal funds and also to give folks a default bank account.
Voters don’t care about these things though
Yeah, you have to tie them to outcomes voters care about.
"It's time to simplify the tax code and stop the race to the bottom of tax breaks for tips/seniors/teachers/veterans/cops" is hard to proactively argue for.
"It's time to simplify the tax code - on April 15th the government will send you either a check or a bill" lets you accomplish the same priority, but with the cover that you're actually improving the way people interact with the government.
Agreed with most of this, except I like the filibuster
Make people compromise
It doesn't make people compromise, it prevents anything from getting passed unless they use an exception to the filibuster.
Which are worse bills, because it’s really hard to make every line item budget related
Really? Just recently, I seem to remember bipartisan infrastructure, CHIPS act, and gun control all passing under Biden.
Take every Republican not named Romney out of Congress and you can have your filibuster
I’d say the Affordable Care Act. It wasn’t single payer. It maintained the private insurance market. It was done in a way that was deficit neutral, and reduced Medicare payments. It was based off of a Republican plan in MA. But it greatly expanded healthcare coverage, and expanded Medicaid and subsidies.
And it killed the large Democratic majorities of 2008 permanently.
I think voters are much more likely to accept big changes.If they are bipartisan.
Also I think bipartisan bills tend to be better because you have people from both sides, pointing out flaws and coming to a compromise
This works for most things, except for budgets where both sides tend to come together and just spend more money
ACA was passed on a party line vote and now it's extremely popular and the cuts to it are part of why the GOP is on their ass and hell, it's popularity is partly why the party of Repeal and Replace became the party of "let's get rid of these subsidies and that's it."
A GOP example is a giant chunk of the Bush, Trump I, and Trump II tax cuts will not be reversed even if AOC becomes POTUS
Yes programs that give people a bunch of money or benefits they don't need to pay for are almost always popular.
rainbows and unicorns for everyone!
The ACA was paid for by cuts to Medicare and tax increases.
Also, even though the GOP ended up opposing it, the ACA was actually modeled after a Republican plan and included several "conservative" aspects to its design.
They said it would be paid for, but it wasn't
"
Contributing to this massive debt are the coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Over the last 10 years, federal costs for these provisions have exceeded $1.5 trillion – a combination of the exchange subsidies, the Basic Health Plan (BHP), and Medicaid expansion
"
https://paragoninstitute.org/paragon-prognosis/obamacare-overbudget-and-underdelivering/
Parental leave
To this end, I strongly support Matt's idea of calling them something else.
Someone who is federal minimum wage curious and suspicious of trans sports participation and someone who is strongly for the first and strongly against the second can both be called "moderate" but they are doing wildly different things.
Agreed, not all policy or politics is on a line between two right and left poles. The binary thinking inherent in our system misleads people into believing that moderation is the mid point between the two current extremes.
Or someone who just likes calling other politicians idiots.
I just don't understand what the extremely vague & handwavey word 'moderation' is doing for you, when you could just use the word 'popular' instead:
1. Moderation is a relational state between properties, not a specific bundle of policies. You're just using a very vague word over and over over without defining it, which drives me sort of nuts
2. There's a long history of political scientists trying to build metrics that measure how centrist a politician is, but there's an equally long history of other scientists disagreeing with them about what exactly is being measured. Stuff like DW-NOMINATE, etc.
3. 'Popular' is less handwavey because you can actually measure what's popular or not via public opinion polling. It's not perfect, but it's something
4. Moderation has a moralizing tone, and also assumes that the voters themselves are moderate. What if they're not? The policies you need to win office in say rural Alabama may be relatively extreme by national or international standards
5. Popular acknowledges differences between districts in the US- the world's third largest country! You probably shouldn't run on gun control in a rural district. But you also probably shouldn't run on gun rights in an urban district. These policy platforms contradict each other, so they can't both be moderate at the same time. If you just use the word popular, you acknowledge the differences
Using words correctly is just a basic mental hygiene practice, and the mark of a relatively educated person. Someone running for office in Maine should probably advocate for the economic interests of lobstermen- in Iowa for ethanol, in Florida for citrus growers, in Michigan for the auto industry, in Alaska for oil. What's the moderate position on lobsters? The extreme one? Who's an extremist on citrus? In philosophical terms moderation is an 'empty universal'- a phrase so broad that it's meaningless. I think we should use words precisely as opposed to extreme handwaving. Just say popular!
> Who's an extremist on citrus?
It is easy to forget in these busy times. But all I'm going to say is Cosa Nostra.
My guess is because everyone misreads his takes on this to mean Matt is advocating being entirely rudderless across the full ideological spectrum and we should support any candidate who will put a D next to their name if they can win regardless of what stances they take on any issue (there are several comments on this post to that effect). Using popular would further this. He’s saying Democrats should move towards the median voter in a given constituency (hence tendency to use “moderation” or “centrism” despite the flaws with those words, not that they should mirror the median voter in every district which is what “popular” sounds like). To make it concrete: in some districts the median voter is MAGA and thinks the 2020 election was stolen. I don’t think Matt is saying Dems should therefore run the “popular” playbook in those districts but rather we should try to moderate on certain issues etc.
I know you specifically weren’t missing the distinction but I think a lot of others already do
Should we support anyone who puts a D next to their name? Let's say there's a Democrat in deepest red Alabama who is strongly MAGA and believes the election was stolen but if elected would otherwise support the Democrats 80% of the time. And let's say by some incredible miracle that person wins. Should the Democrats try to kick that person out of the caucus? Um, no?
That’s not the point I was making. I was saying they have to be willing to support Democrats on Democratic issues (in your example, the 80% of the time) - if they do, then great. Other commenters are getting hung up thinking Matt is saying we should support a hypothetical “Democrat” who takes every popular issue in deepest red Alabama (aka they’re a far right MAGA candidate across the board) which is explicitly not what he’s saying.
This is where it's important to have a real sense of prioritization.
That way it's very easy to distinguish a candidate that agrees with you on your top 3 issues but is squishy on the 4th vs a candidate that disagrees with your top issue but agrees with the next 3.
But if you don't have good set of priorities, it's very easy to get tripped up.
AOC is very popular in her district. Jared Golden is very popular (for a Democrat) in his district.
I don't like "moderation" or "popular"; I like "fittedness." Do you fit the population you're trying to represent? That can be ideology or culture or charisma (or when it comes to someone like Jack Schlossberg, mindless celebrity).
Of course, it's a lot easier to do this in a House district than when trying to become President.
Or trying to win majorities in the House or Senate. What is the "fittedness" of the Democrats' image and agenda to the country? What would make Democrats' image and agenda more "fitted" so that they weren't structurally at a disadvantage in the Senate?
This is better than the comment I made.
I think a big problem that has given rise to populism not only here, but in many peer countries, is a political elite that is in a bubble pursuing priorities that our out of step with normie eclectic voters.
Instead of hand-wavy moderation or centrism, or technocratic or ideological policies, focusing on what is not only popular but also a priority seems obvious.
I mean, by absolutely no definition of the word is the rural American policy on guns 'moderate'. We are a gigantic global outlier. But again- everyone understands you're not going to win a rural district with a gun control policy. It's a great example of where 'popular' diverges from moderate. You'd have to have relatively extreme gun policies to win out in the country, which is fine- but that's not moderate!
Yes, but that points to another problem with “moderate” - it’s subjective to location and scale. In the US gun rights are a moderate position in many places. And yes, if the scope is peer countries, it is not moderate. But then a lot of stuff Europe does would be radical here. So, agree that popular is better than moderate.
In other places he’s used the term popularism. The same crew of people that are against moderation are also against popularism. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, which is kind of the point of the article.
There is an aspect of 5 that is missing compared to moderate which is Matt wants less progressive fits in deep blue areas in order to move the party to be closer to the marginal house/senate candidate. Because people are smarter and politics is more nationalized voters correctly understand that electing a Manchin or Tester means supporting Schumer so the party needs to do something "shmoderate" to bring Schumer in line with the front line members.
"Moderate" can mean "holds lots of middle-ground views" or it can mean "holds extreme views, but not along the left/right orthodoxy."
"Moderate" can also mean "tolerates a wide divergence of viewpoints to get stuff done" or it can mean "rigidly demands adherence to left/right orthodoxy."
I think both are important, but my critique of the current Democratic party is that the second definition of moderation is not recognized as a virtue.
Bingo.
I would update your second definition a bit to say “holds a variety of views from across the political spectrum.”
And my critique of this article is that Matt really doesn’t clarify which he means!
I think the one Matt seems to like is the heterodox person, vs the person who is just middle ground or incrementalist on everything — I think! But Suozzi seems to be much more the middle ground type so I’m not really sure why he’s being held up as the platonic example.
Matt has also advocated for Henry Cueller, who is just an empty suit, deeply corrupt, machine politican. That kind of thing does him no favors with his detractors.
Cuellar is very well-liked in his district. I think interrogating why that is, is quite valuable. Especially since his constituents (rural Hispanics) are undercovered by the mainstream media.
You won't hear a dissent from me on that (I live in TX and have family in the RGV). Any competitive candidate in exurban or rural TX should be hawkish on immigration and court the support of the oil and gas industry.
The problem is the blatant corruption simply fuels the arguments from the left that moderate candidates are merely bought and paid for.
I'm not here to provide a defense of corruption. It's obviously bad.
But if moderates prefer a moderate Dem who is corrupt over a progressive who is clean, that says even more about ideology and how much it matters: voters would rather have a corrupt guy who is on their side than someone who is not.
I often rail against "Econ 101 brain", where people take the simplified models they learned in Econ 101 and use them to build a full mental worldview. Matt's befuddlement of why people don't like private equity companies is a version of this ("Why would people not like maximizing economic surplus?" Uh, the goal of the companies is to convert excess consumer surplus to producer/investor surplus. Why would consumers like that.)
This moderation debate seems like a version, "PoliSci 101 brain", where people learn about Black's Median Voter Theorem and convince themselves that the easiest way to win elections is to take the median voter +1's positions wholesale and they're guaranteed to win. But there's no one-dimensional median voter! Different voters could be the median depending on which candidates map to the electorate's bucket of semi-related political opinions.
I regret I have but 1 like to give this comment.
I'm definitely going to steal that 2nd paragraph
Ok with "the easiest way to win elections is to take the median voter +1's positions wholesale". But cut out the "guaranteed to win" part--that's creating a straw man that sounds ridiculous, as nothing *guarantees* a win (e.g., there can be a wave election, an outside event scrambles voters' electoral priorities, etc.). The question is: does a certain issue position make a win *more likely*.
Can't we worry even just a teeny weeny bit about what's good for the country instead of how to elect slightly less bad people to Congress?
I don't think these are unrelated issues
I think it’s instructive. One should be able to differentiate what they think is good for the country (i.e. their ideology) vs what they think voters prefer. If you can’t differentiate these, or if you just so happen to believe the best electoral strategy is for politicians to adopt positions that match your own, then you’re just a partisan hack like G. Elliott Morris.
“Good for the country” and “popular with the median voter” are distinct categories in my mind. However, I might be a better political activist if I conflated them more.
depends on how you measure being good at political activism
Where are the unpopular technocrats?
I would like to see pro-nuclear YIMBYs who are tough on crime and want accountability in education.
Based on the results of the 2020 primary, Bloomberg was not a popular technocrat.
Fair point, but he won in NYC three times and 2020 was weird. He was also ancient and an ex-Republican.
Bloomberg's 2020 primary campaign was so weird. All it did was open him up to mockery and let a lot more people find out about his sexual harassment problem who otherwise wouldn't have known.
"pro-nuclear YIMBYs who are tough on crime and want accountability in education"
Straight into my veins. I would clarify that "tough on crime" mostly means moar police and catching more crime, not just longer sentences. In addition to pro-nuclear I would just say green energy abundance in general. I want to see nuclear plants, solar fields, wind farms, battery storage, and transmission lines from sea to shining sea. We should have a goal of 5¢ per kWh electricity.
Think it's hard for the technocratic pitch to excite a lot of highly-ideological primary voters.
The pitch doesn't have be technocratic. Ro Khanna is obnoxiously partisan while remaining quite technocratic.
They all subsribe to Radical Centrist® https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/ :)
If we all agreed on what good for the country meant then we wouldn't need elections
I think we're one step further back than that. We don't even all agree that people should vote for what they think is good for the country, rather than just to pwn the libs.
that's absurd. every single one of them would say that pwning lib ideology is best for the country -- just like blue voters would and do say about pwning MAGA (that's the whole point of the "fighter" frame)
This.
Unfortunately, unless we can elect slightly less bad people, we can’t achieve what’s good for the country.
The problem is that you have to win elections first
Here's an underrated difference between the a 'shmoderate' like Brian Fitzpatrick and a 'shmoderate' like Suozzi, Golden, etc. The former doesn't go on TV every week and slam the party he's part of. You never see Fitzpatrick on MSNBC complaining about the insane MAGA people in his party. At most, he might say something to the local news affiliates.
Now, I think it'd be likely good for the country if he did, but he actually understands his job as a Republican Congressperson isn't to do that.
The reason ironically why some Republican 'moderates' don't get the pushback Democratic moderates do outside of the general differences in the coalition is the Republican moderates don't seemingly spend most of their waking life complaining to reporters from Politico or Axios about how crazzzzzyyyyy their voters have gotten and being annoyed it's not 2005 anymore.
So, a MAGA voter in Fitzpatrick's district might be annoyed at his votes, but he doesn't seem like somebody working against Trump like a lot of moderates seem like they're working against what Democratic voters actually want.
Yeah, I've always seen this as an unfortunate result of the ideological breakdown in the US: a lot more people self identify as conservative than as liberal, so Dems have to win a higher share of self-identifying moderates (they can't split them 50-50) which means much more overt statements distancing themselves from the left partisan extreme.
I agree that there is some obfuscation going on here, so let's call a spade a spade: the reason I do not want people like Suozzi, Perez, Gonzalez, Golden, etc. valorized is because I think they are substantively bad people with bad views about politics, whom I am begrudgingly forced to work with due to a combination of the idiocies of the American political system (in a legitimate multiparty democracy they would not be in my party) and the dynamics of the electorate. If more Democrats talked and acted like them it would put the country in a much worse place.
And what's worse, shmoderates are constantly trying to infiltrate and take over seats held by people I actually agree with. Currently one of the shmoderates' favorite politicians is trying to drum up support for her campaign for governor of Minnesota by promising to surrender in advance to undemocratic Republican House of Representatives control in exchange for getting her own state fiefdom. What about that am I supposed to respect, or even condone?
In general the shmoderates do better the worse the Democratic Party as a whole does, because that gives them greater leverage. So they are persistently traitorous-- constantly selling me and my actual party out for personal and factional gain. They oppose actual reform of failed institutions like the Senate and the Supreme Court, because their position astride those institutions gives them greater leverage.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that actual shmoderate governance, as seen in the UK, is so unpopular that exposure to it acts as a kind of voter repellent so strong that it is causing a collapse of the shmoderate party. Until the shmoderates can figure out how to govern in a way that doesn't make the electorate prefer actual Hitler, I think they should mostly shut up, take a seat, and vote for harm reduction in the form of Democratic candidates.
Yeah, if the Problem Solvers were actually any good at solving problems, we'd have seen it from now. Instead we see Tom Suozzi, who wrote a really poorly considered article, made votes that got him nothing. For the article to be correct, everything Trump did would have to be universally popular and then the opposition would look bad for opposing it, but in fact, this was never the case, and he should have known this.
If compromise were getting a for b and they could point to the fact that they were getting something, it'd be one thing, but voting for the Laken Riley act accomplished nothing.
The truth of the matter about congress is, the game-theory correct move is to act as a party whole and prevent all opponent actions and resist maximally so that your opponents are more likely to lose elections. Resistance makes opponent policies less popular and less effective than trying to bang out compromises.
If you have the filibuster, use it all the time, every time, let nothing through.
>whom I am begrudgingly forced to work with due to a combination of the idiocies of the American political system (in a legitimate multiparty democracy they would not be in my party)
In a multiparty system you would just have to be in a coalition with them! Spend like, 2 seconds thinking about this man. If your party doesn't have 50%+1 of the legislature, what does that imply......? Either you have to form a coalition with the shmoderates, or they coalition with the center-right party and are in charge that way
Yes, and at that point blame can be apportioned properly to the schmoderates when they block good legislation, at which point they will likely fall out of Congress (as the FDP, which engaged in similar antics with the last German government, did). As it is, there's no accountability.
Well I think the 'Suozzi, Perez, Gonzalez, Golden, etc.' crowd would get more of the vote than the FDP ever got (10ish% on average IIRC). Also the FDP had a pretty amazing track record of being in government since WW2. But-
You haven't really addressed the issue of, how would you form a coalition of 50%+1 of the vote without them, or another similar group? How would this work under PR?
Confirming that I remembered correctly and that you are quite wrong here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_German_federal_election
Zagarna how would you form a government without them, or compromising with another similar group? Do you know how coalition governments work? Your grouping of Self Righteous Far Leftists isn't going to win 51% of the legislature!
Setting aside the rather obvious problem that a party with no seats can't form a government with anyone, the basic proposition here is simple enough-- coalition governments form through adversarial negotiations among distinct parties, in which those parties make binding commitments and typically share power in rough proportion to their share of the electorate. Then, if the agreement fails, voters know where to apportion the blame-- as they did with the FDP in driving it out of the Bundestag.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm afraid I have better things to do than respond to additional gibes on yesterday's thread.
I think moderation is sometimes the wrong framing, the problem is massive negatives around a few issues, not where the average view of a candidate is.
I think the hard task is deciding what are the problem issues to deal with and which require holding the line. Which is just to say, the exact problem of general politics, but within the coalition.
“There’s almost nobody who wants to ban abortion but is fine letting trans women self-identify into women’s sports leagues”
Except Gorsuch!
If not embracing the idea of being in coalition with more heterodox politicians and voters, what is the path out of minority?
Waiting for Republicans to overplay their hand and then Democrats taking advantage of two years in power to overplay their hand.
I'm coming to the view that the big problem is with people with "coherent ideologies" is that they have coherent ideologies. I think holding One Theory That Explains Everything is vain, un-humble. I, like Matt's ordinary voters, have a "mish-mash" of views--and I try hard hard to be consistent!
When I was a teenager (in the dark ages of the late '60s ;-) I fell into a group of folks who had a highly coherent and articulated "Marxist-Leninist" (actually Maoist) ideology. It explained EVERYTHING! It was awesome. But I kept coming up with but's, and eventually (fairly quickly) I was out of it.
My point--which I can't make as elegantly as Matt--is that it isn't voters who are wrong (tho' they can individually be inconsistent) but the activists on either side who punish deviance from a "coherent ideology".
I also think presentation/affect is important, tho' not critical. As a Canadian I can see right up front that Mark Carney's affect saves him from a lot of criticism on specific policies; by both the commentariat and most voters* he's given credit for doing the best that can be done in the circumstances.
* Canada still has a lot of swing voters, so this is important.
I think it's a sign of intellectual immaturity to hold tightly to a "coherent ideology." As we get older our perspectives on issues should grow in complexity and nuance.
We should see that just about every policy decision involves real trade-offs, and that there are rarely cases of all upside, no downside. Loosening regulations on housing is as close as I've found to such an issue, but even that involves some short-term drawbacks that the locals might not enjoy.
Ideology is a crutch for those who are uninterested in answers.
It's funny to see Amanda Litman say that most voters don't have "cohesive ideologies," by which I assume she means they don't agree with all of the bullet points of a party's platform? But the internal policies of both parties are wildly incoherent. What sense does it make that one party opposes the death penalty and supports abortion, while the other party holds the opposite views? A cohesive ideology would casual about life or reverent about life.
What sense does it make to support very high levels of immigration, while pretending to speak for the downtrodden worker?
How is it coherent to spend the last five decades advocating for women's rights only to abandon them in favor of trans rights?
Maybe Amanda Litman should consider if her party's views (or the other party's views) cohere around actual priniciples or whether the average voter's philosophies really makes more sense.
I hope you know there are perfectly reasonable responses to all these gotcha questions you propose.
E.g., in early stages of a pregnancy we're not talking about sentient human beings whereas with the death penalty we are.
As for the "abandoning women's rights" the perfectly reasonable response is "oh please."
Your suggested responses don't seem perfectly reasonable to me (advocacy for "early stage" abortions is not the position of progressives) and "oh please" is not a response at all.
But I didn't mean these as "gotcha questions." These examples are -- to me-- diametrically opposed philosophies that make no sense to hold together. (I personally am pro-choice and pro-death penalty.) Political parties have evolved to hold these weird, contradictory positions, and many people espouse them without thought. And then feel superior about it.
I have to interject here and say that I snorted a little after reading your comment hand-waving every real philosophical contradiction the parent comment identified. It’s perfect, in a way.
Ha, same.
Matt Yglesias: If only we could understand these voters with their weird opinions.
Me: I’m a voter. Let me tell you about my opinions, which don’t seem weird to me. Maybe that will help you understand.
Marc Robbins: you’re stupid.
"What sense does it make that one party opposes the death penalty and supports abortion, while the other party holds the opposite views?"
A friend of mine and I noted this issue back in high school while agreeing that we supported both abortion and the death penalty. We discussed starting a third party with the motto, "Get 'em coming *and* going!"
I have (archly, but not without some truth to it) referred to myself as pro-death in opposition to soi-disant "pro-lifers" before. I'm also for physician-assisted suicide (within reason, anyway)!
There are many Catholics who support a “consistent life ethic,” which means being pro-life in the sense of opposing abortion and the death penalty. I’ve always thought that to be interesting and admirable in a way.
I have a suspicion that MattY wanted to use his Yiddish play word and then wrote an article around that.
I don't really see 'shmoderation' resonating with the voters so much.
Voters are schmucks
If anything, it sounds like mocking the idea of moderation.
I think his point is more than the word itself doesn't matter as much as the willingness to accept heterodox ideology into the tent.
I'd point out that he does not seem to give us the grounds to build the tent poles under this schema. What makes a Dem? Someone who will vote with Dems on the "most important" things. What are those things? Apparently, the things people (who are not necessarily Dems) agree with.
no, he's quite explicit that what makes a Dem is someone who caucuses with the Dems. He's asking what makes successful ones.
As I said elsewhere, I think I get it.
1. Persuasion is for friends. Stuff is for enemies.
A caucus member is someone you can convince e of something. Opposition is everyone else. You talk to friends. You make concessions to opposition.
2. Ideals are outside the realm of politics.
Wanting a Dem or GOP to hold an office is outside of, beyond, and prior to politics. Any given belief about what is good to do in the world is even further out of bounds. It is the role of politics to enact existing beliefs by all legal means. The practice of politics is making sure they are your beliefs.
3. The only belief that matters in US politics is GOP or Dem. Higher standards are the luxury of angels, and more precision is the cloak of people who want Stuff for them rather than for opposition. Until we are ruled by angels, we have to deal with the reality that a single label is all-consunint and sufficient.
4. When in doubt about multiple people sharing a label, choose the one the opposition likes.
Again, persuasion is for your friends. Giving stuff without question is for the opposition.
I think that's good faith. It is, to me, unacceptably amoral. I don't think it's monstrous, but I think it's unrealistic. On its own terms, it doesn't recognize the lure power point that people like ideals. But more foundationally, it provides no firewall against Bad except the party label.
In Yiddish putting "sh" in front of the word means you're mocking it. So I guess Matt is mocking moderation.
Given his philosophy background, I figured MY was referencing Enoch's "Shmagent".
why don’t you call schmoderates pragmatists? i think an american named willie even invented the word pragmatism.
Doesn't "pragmatism" have a pejorative connotation in present usage? It's almost always used in scare quotes as an insult these days, it seems to me.
Just need better marketing.
PRAGA -- people returning America to greatness again
That’s a $10 word that most people probably don’t know, or if they do, they clock it as the kind of word that someone who went to grad school would use.