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."
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 see about the merits of that belief
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
I think progressives do understand the need to moderate based on district dynamics. The Bernie PAC, Our Revolution, endorsed Alex Bores. And since it’s a very old wealthy Jewish district, they understand he’s not going to be super left on Israel, yet they still endorsed him. So cheers for pragmatism. Though I do have to say, I don’t really understand how Bores is more left on any issue compared to Micah Lasher and the other contenders. Everyone running in NY 12 seems to have the exact same position on every issue lol
My understanding is that they endorsed because they want to be on the other side of the big AI PAC that is against Bores. FWIW, I also met Bores at a NewDeal conference last year (basically a collection of pragmatic center-left leaders) and he seemed super smart!
Bores supports abolishing ICE, Medicare for all, Mamdani’s push for higher taxes in NYC, doesn’t support extending Waymo testing yet, is at least open to Bernie’s data center moratorium. And so does every other candidate running in that district! Wouldn’t exactly call him a “pragmatic center left leader”, except maybe on Israel issues.
The complete inability or unwillingness to discuss tradeoffs. Like, his whole thing is that we need a UBI because AI-led mass unemployment is just about to happen, but we don’t have to concern ourselves with the labor vs safety tradeoff of driverless cars because Waymos don’t even work perfectly yet.
I have not kept up with the details of the anti-Waymo effort. Is it the same people and same arguments made against Uber/Lift a decade ago, or is it an expression of anti-AI/anti-DataCenter vibes?
For America to avoid descending into the swamp of postliberalism, bipartisanship and compromise will be necessary. Why? Everybody who is a parent knows that both parents have to be consistent in their positions. Meaning you can have one parent who says bedtime is nine o’clock and the other says ten o’clock. Or no, you can’t have a second bowl of Count Chocula, and the other allows it. Bad signals are being sent.
When bot parties compromise, it signals to partisans that a decision has been made and that it is settled. We’ve come to an agreement. Partisan decisions signal that we have not reached an agreement. Absolutists actually harm the country, increasing divides.
Unity of purpose is the only way forward for America. Ultimately their may be some items left unsettled, but settling more problems in a bipartisan fashion will make for a better country, more accepting of each other. Today, we let the hate mongers who run the political industrial complex define who we like, how we feel, and what we say.
The absolutists leave no room for compromise, and their voices need to be drowned out.
Yeah, if you want to copy this Confucian idea of government as parent, at least copy the good parts too—the leading by example, emphasis on benevolent and virtuous behavior, anti-militarism, etc.
“The government is your parent but it’s also a violent psychopath” seems like the worst of both worlds?
And is abusive and erratic, even if it does think it's doing a daddy thing looking out for the long-term security of the family by addressing threats such as Iran and securing our Hemisphere for the future.
Neither party though, is playing that role very well when it comes to domestic security and civil defense, whether that be preparation for pandemics or inland drone attacks or whatever - including protection against the abuses of Daddy ICE.
Your politician may have betrayed you, but last I looked, America had a representative form of government, and we have binary elections. I may have had some differences with Ronald Reagan, but they would have been minor.
If your disagreement with Fetterman is over Israel or Trump’s current operation, he is breaking with Democratic orthodoxy. I understand your sentiment, but if I remember the election, he was always a bit of a Maverick. The GOP has its Maverick, his name is John McCain. I like Mavericks. You decided that Fetterman is more aligned with your thinking than Mehmet Oz. Is that not still the case?
I’m not sure how effective politicians can really claim to be a “problem solver” because voters all have different problems that frequently conflict with each other where solving one voter’s problem makes another voter’s problems worse. Like if you asked me—what would a magical politician who solved all my problems look like? I’d say my top priorities would be for this politician to support: (1) open borders so I don’t have to worry about getting visas for family members or employees (and ideally other countries reciprocate so I can travel more easily too); (2) walkable YIMBY urbanism, because I like living in cities but there are only a few nice walkable neighborhoods where I live and they are all outrageously expensive with poor schools to boot so I’d like to build more neighborhoods like that even though it’s a minority lifestyle choice; (3) massively increasing the number of direct flight options from my airport using government subsidies as those would probably be necessary; (4) massive subsidies for medical research including things like artificial wombs and life extension; (5) reforming IP law to prevent rent-seeking by large corporations and hindering the development of AI; (6) lower taxes on people like me but higher taxes on other types of people to balance the budget and reduce interest rates making it easier for me to buy housing. But this agenda probably wouldn’t be very popular (even though I do think at least points 1, 4, and 5 would be good for the country as a whole).
I’m also not sure you can draw a clean line between what a practical problem someone needs solved is versus a moral problem because moral problems still make people feel bad. There is certainly some pretty large amount of money that I would pay to end imperialism even though that stuff doesn’t impact me as a privileged American in a material sense because it makes me feel bad to read about it.
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.
We say "heterodox" but there are schmodrrate planks that seem to be chosen entirely by popularity. Laken Riley Act for one, disapproval of trans women in women's sports another. Abortion rights, higher taxes for the rich. Am I just describing popular things? Sure, but that's not a political platform for someone who believes in anything in particular. It's a political platform for someone who believes in power and would have voted against the Laken Riley Act if it has been expeditent or would disapprove of abortion pills access if more people in the county happened to be pro-life.
This piece would have been improved with some more reflection on why someone wouldn't like a politician like Tom Suozzi besides being a doctrinaire leftist. If the moderate Democrats typically looked like Dan Osborn instead, then their reputation would be quite different.
"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.
The moderation debate is downstream of something simpler that the take slingers can't say out loud.
Once a politician is well-known, their approval rating is the best predictor of electoral performance. Democrats were stupid to run Hillary Clinton when her disapproval was persistently high, and a lot of motivated reasoning has gone into rationalizing that sort of unforced error.
Pre-recognition is where there's actually something to argue about. You have to infer which segment of the electorate was first to form an opinion and adjust for that. Charisma, biographical fit, whether the candidate comes across as a freak on tape — this is where those reads earn their keep.
But it's still a narrow problem. "AOC has negatives of X% versus plus Y% for Beshear" isn't a compelling article. "Here's my theory of the American electorate, and why we need shmoderates, or authentic progressives, or problem-solvers" sells much better.
So we get bespoke frameworks and special pleading. The simple version is too inconvenient for the people whose job is having takes
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.
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."
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 see about the merits of that belief
"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.
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.
Where are the unpopular technocrats?
I would like to see pro-nuclear YIMBYs who are tough on crime and want accountability in education.
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.
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.
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.
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 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."
Don’t underrate the difficulty of writing 4+ opinion pieces a week.
This is stupid.
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
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.
I think progressives do understand the need to moderate based on district dynamics. The Bernie PAC, Our Revolution, endorsed Alex Bores. And since it’s a very old wealthy Jewish district, they understand he’s not going to be super left on Israel, yet they still endorsed him. So cheers for pragmatism. Though I do have to say, I don’t really understand how Bores is more left on any issue compared to Micah Lasher and the other contenders. Everyone running in NY 12 seems to have the exact same position on every issue lol
My understanding is that they endorsed because they want to be on the other side of the big AI PAC that is against Bores. FWIW, I also met Bores at a NewDeal conference last year (basically a collection of pragmatic center-left leaders) and he seemed super smart!
Bores supports abolishing ICE, Medicare for all, Mamdani’s push for higher taxes in NYC, doesn’t support extending Waymo testing yet, is at least open to Bernie’s data center moratorium. And so does every other candidate running in that district! Wouldn’t exactly call him a “pragmatic center left leader”, except maybe on Israel issues.
Tangential but I listened to Bores on the Ezra Klein show and wow he came off as thoroughly unimpressive.
I had exactly the same experience. I was really primed to like him based on what I'd heard, but he just seemed like an incredibly shallow thinker.
Really? What exactly did you find unimpressive about him?
The complete inability or unwillingness to discuss tradeoffs. Like, his whole thing is that we need a UBI because AI-led mass unemployment is just about to happen, but we don’t have to concern ourselves with the labor vs safety tradeoff of driverless cars because Waymos don’t even work perfectly yet.
We tried UBI during Covid and oooooffff
Covid gave us an effective UBI and wage compression/lower inequality and people absolutely revolted.
And deaths from overdoses, alcohol, homicide and traffic accidents also shot up by double digit percentages
I have not kept up with the details of the anti-Waymo effort. Is it the same people and same arguments made against Uber/Lift a decade ago, or is it an expression of anti-AI/anti-DataCenter vibes?
Exactly it’s an IQ test. The people who now think it’s important to protect Uber jobs were vehemently opposed to Uber a decade ago.
For America to avoid descending into the swamp of postliberalism, bipartisanship and compromise will be necessary. Why? Everybody who is a parent knows that both parents have to be consistent in their positions. Meaning you can have one parent who says bedtime is nine o’clock and the other says ten o’clock. Or no, you can’t have a second bowl of Count Chocula, and the other allows it. Bad signals are being sent.
When bot parties compromise, it signals to partisans that a decision has been made and that it is settled. We’ve come to an agreement. Partisan decisions signal that we have not reached an agreement. Absolutists actually harm the country, increasing divides.
Unity of purpose is the only way forward for America. Ultimately their may be some items left unsettled, but settling more problems in a bipartisan fashion will make for a better country, more accepting of each other. Today, we let the hate mongers who run the political industrial complex define who we like, how we feel, and what we say.
The absolutists leave no room for compromise, and their voices need to be drowned out.
Political parties are not your parents, especially not the political parties we have now.
These days, the daddy party likes to scratch its id.
Yeah, if you want to copy this Confucian idea of government as parent, at least copy the good parts too—the leading by example, emphasis on benevolent and virtuous behavior, anti-militarism, etc.
“The government is your parent but it’s also a violent psychopath” seems like the worst of both worlds?
And is abusive and erratic, even if it does think it's doing a daddy thing looking out for the long-term security of the family by addressing threats such as Iran and securing our Hemisphere for the future.
Neither party though, is playing that role very well when it comes to domestic security and civil defense, whether that be preparation for pandemics or inland drone attacks or whatever - including protection against the abuses of Daddy ICE.
What's the point of having elections if your politician is going to turn around and betray the people who voted for them like Fetterman often does?
Your politician may have betrayed you, but last I looked, America had a representative form of government, and we have binary elections. I may have had some differences with Ronald Reagan, but they would have been minor.
If your disagreement with Fetterman is over Israel or Trump’s current operation, he is breaking with Democratic orthodoxy. I understand your sentiment, but if I remember the election, he was always a bit of a Maverick. The GOP has its Maverick, his name is John McCain. I like Mavericks. You decided that Fetterman is more aligned with your thinking than Mehmet Oz. Is that not still the case?
Zionists have a special stench all their own.
who exactly are the absolutists? the very allegation is ironically manichean.
I’m not sure how effective politicians can really claim to be a “problem solver” because voters all have different problems that frequently conflict with each other where solving one voter’s problem makes another voter’s problems worse. Like if you asked me—what would a magical politician who solved all my problems look like? I’d say my top priorities would be for this politician to support: (1) open borders so I don’t have to worry about getting visas for family members or employees (and ideally other countries reciprocate so I can travel more easily too); (2) walkable YIMBY urbanism, because I like living in cities but there are only a few nice walkable neighborhoods where I live and they are all outrageously expensive with poor schools to boot so I’d like to build more neighborhoods like that even though it’s a minority lifestyle choice; (3) massively increasing the number of direct flight options from my airport using government subsidies as those would probably be necessary; (4) massive subsidies for medical research including things like artificial wombs and life extension; (5) reforming IP law to prevent rent-seeking by large corporations and hindering the development of AI; (6) lower taxes on people like me but higher taxes on other types of people to balance the budget and reduce interest rates making it easier for me to buy housing. But this agenda probably wouldn’t be very popular (even though I do think at least points 1, 4, and 5 would be good for the country as a whole).
I’m also not sure you can draw a clean line between what a practical problem someone needs solved is versus a moral problem because moral problems still make people feel bad. There is certainly some pretty large amount of money that I would pay to end imperialism even though that stuff doesn’t impact me as a privileged American in a material sense because it makes me feel bad to read about it.
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.
We say "heterodox" but there are schmodrrate planks that seem to be chosen entirely by popularity. Laken Riley Act for one, disapproval of trans women in women's sports another. Abortion rights, higher taxes for the rich. Am I just describing popular things? Sure, but that's not a political platform for someone who believes in anything in particular. It's a political platform for someone who believes in power and would have voted against the Laken Riley Act if it has been expeditent or would disapprove of abortion pills access if more people in the county happened to be pro-life.
In a democracy, the politicians in power are supposed to be doing popular things. The most direct alternative is a dictatorship.
This piece would have been improved with some more reflection on why someone wouldn't like a politician like Tom Suozzi besides being a doctrinaire leftist. If the moderate Democrats typically looked like Dan Osborn instead, then their reputation would be quite different.
why don’t you call schmoderates pragmatists? i think an american named willie even invented the word pragmatism.
"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.
The moderation debate is downstream of something simpler that the take slingers can't say out loud.
Once a politician is well-known, their approval rating is the best predictor of electoral performance. Democrats were stupid to run Hillary Clinton when her disapproval was persistently high, and a lot of motivated reasoning has gone into rationalizing that sort of unforced error.
Pre-recognition is where there's actually something to argue about. You have to infer which segment of the electorate was first to form an opinion and adjust for that. Charisma, biographical fit, whether the candidate comes across as a freak on tape — this is where those reads earn their keep.
But it's still a narrow problem. "AOC has negatives of X% versus plus Y% for Beshear" isn't a compelling article. "Here's my theory of the American electorate, and why we need shmoderates, or authentic progressives, or problem-solvers" sells much better.
So we get bespoke frameworks and special pleading. The simple version is too inconvenient for the people whose job is having takes
When you win the argument but can't declare victory