A good start to a discussion that needs to happen. BTW, although I fully understand the perspective of those who use words like fascist and coup, I think better messaging would focus on the fact that Trump is acting like a King. That language doesn't require a degree in political science and resonates with the history that we all learned in school. America exists, at least in that history, because people didn't want a King. And that is exactly how Trump is acting.
This is such a superior branding. The trouble with calling him a fascist is 1) people immediately default to Hitler and 2) even if he has fash but less than Hitler tendencies, people think you are being hysterical. If you call him a king, it operates more as an adjective than a noun. People know he is not literally ordained King Donald, and we get escape velocity out of semantics and can focus on the negative aspects of his behavior instead on its own merits.
I think we're now in Year 3 of Burger King's loathsome "whopper whopper whopper whopper - you rule" ad campaign. There is no connotation less positive than that one in my book. I might have to consider authoritarianism if they promised to destroy Burger King as part of the package.
It occurred to me that King works if the intent is to mock him from a position of confidence wrt the democratic institutions of the USA. I think many of us lack that confidence rightly or wrongly.
Ezra can be annoying, but he’s one of the few prominent liberal pundits who pushes himself to pursue objective analysis even when some of what he’s willing to listen to makes him uncomfortable. I.e. he’s actually interested in learning not just pontificating. Thus his readers and listeners are forced, perhaps despite themselves, into a learning vs confirmation-bias mindset as well. This is a very good thing.
I agree that “fascist” is not particularly helpful, but I wonder if a lifetime of Disney narratives have made kings more acceptable? A lot of Americans seem to be enthralled by the British royal family, after all. The idea of living under the rule of an actual, absolute monarch is something most Americans don’t seem to have given much thought to.
I still remember how once in the latter part of grade school, the teacher almost got into an argument with the kids because she was making a point about how monarchy is bad, and the kids were like, "But if it's a good king it's fine, right?" A large chunk of humanity is wired to like absolute monarchs in theory, even if they understand in their rational minds that it isn't a good system of government in practice.
That doesn't look like a proposal for a king at all. That looks like a proposal for an ideological directorate enforcing political orthodoxy. Those aren't the same thing. And more importantly, why do I care what this guy thinks? He doesn't have much political influence.
Your evidence for the far left wanting a king is one paragraph in Politico calling for a constitutional amendment? I guess we don’t have much to worry about.
The vast majority of SB commenters aren't far left and don't support the far left, so my only response is "maybe so, but so what? What has that to do with us?"
SB has two audiences. The first is the general public ... but a skewed segment. The median member is basically Matt, a college educated professional in their late-30s/early-40s with an interest in politics, history and holds views on the moderate left. This group likes hearing about the "underlying causes," and has an interested in political change "in the real world" that can be achieved, rather than ideologically asserted. Comments usually are either trying to flush out nuance in the points, refine the proposals, or project what would happen.
The other segment are folks in policy and Discourse circles. Staffers, wonks, journalists. This group can be way more idealogical than the first. They also get stuck on memeplexes permeating their groupthink, even as there is immense argument all sorts of policy details. SB's main contribution seems to be pushing narrative framing that is within their overton window. And, I think intentionally, MY uses the same prescription he has for Democrats and the electorate. Meet the audience where they are with their own concerns and nudge them your direction by highlighting factors they already care about but otherwise are overlooking.
“The median member is basically Matt, a college educated MALE in their late-30s/early-40s with an interest in politics, history and holds views on the moderate left.”
This was the Whig Party tag on Andrew Jackson, and pretty much why they adopted the Whig name to oppose "King Andrew". Donnie II is already giving Jackson vibes, but looking at the Whig record...idk.
“Look what happened to the Whigs” is a fair caution, but I worry that the Democrats will be drifting in that direction anyway if it cannot coalesce around some core ideas.
That is a good summary. Just could not keep a North/South coalition together. But it took about 20 years until the Republicans emerged, and even that party was pretty shaky until the Union prevailed. Any one who thinks that American history is a straight line, should study 1840 to 1860.
I think something in the same vein of generalissimos. To me he's more SA or africa strong man than Fash also better branding for the reasons you mention.
Maybe voters like Democratic policy outcomes, but not Democratic ideology. I want kids to have fruits and vegetables in daycare, too. If I need to call out a dumb, overreaching government regulation for that, I should be able to do it and remain a Democrat.
Yeah, a policy position that favors bureaucratic red tape and not criticizing bureaucrats over.Getting fruits and vegetables into little kids' hands is just crazy
And it's quite frankly to most peoples lived experience of dealing with government red tape
I'm not sure that your hypothesis (maybe voters like D policy but not D ideology) matches your example. Depriving kids of fruits and vegetables certainly isn't Democratic ideology: it's much more a result of Democratic policy.
I guess I’m part of the problem because I bristle at a statement like this regulation “deprived kids of fruit and vegetables.”
My kid’s daycare served fresh fruits and vegetables and didn’t have a lot of sinks. Food was prepared by a food service company and delivered to the daycare each day. This allowed the facilities to have more space dedicated to playing and learning vs having a full kitchen. It meant the caregivers could watch the kids instead of food prepping.
So while I’m not in that jurisdiction, Im pretty sure no kids are being deprived of healthy food by that regulation.
I guess that makes me a “well, actually” guy but I just really dislike that kind of demagoguery and misrepresentation of policies. It just kind of reeks of “truthiness” in the sense that Mathew says above: it confirms a suspicion people have about regulations. But it’s just not actually true.
Would it be fair to say this congresswoman “opposed common sense regulations that kept kids safe from food poisoning?”
To a large extent, I’d guess, but one of my kids went to an in-home daycare that was amazing. Two others went to a wonderful little hippy preschool with lots of mud and rabbits and not so much cash. Funds definitely matter, but so do parent expectations and involvement (which is highly correlated with education and income, obvs).
This is a fair point, I presumed it was typical for larger daycares. Small, in-home daycares are regulated differently.
That said, I think my own lived experience with my kid’s bougie day care was, on second thought, not a great point to make.
More germane is that the regulation in question didn’t actually prevent daycares from serving fruits and vegetables nor was the regulation necessarily burdensome. It simply required separate sinks (or bowls in the same sink) for handwashing and food prep and a dishwasher or other method for sanitizing utensils.
Many households (most?) would have those things.
Matt handwaves the debunking article but that article was done with some actual journalism. The writer tracked down the regulation in question, got quotes from the department stating the law did not require “six sinks” or whatever Rep Glusenkamp-Perez claimed prevents the serving fresh foods, and she tried unsuccessfully to get Rep’s office to verify her claims.
I can see the point that even what’s in the reg might be overkill and subject to misinterpretation but that doesn’t mean we need to pretend that it was illegal to serve bananas in a daycare with out six sinks (which is what MGP claimed).
I’m for Dems doing what they need to do to get elected now, but I agree with you that it should not require them to actively mislead people.
“Nitpicky” regulations like this are tricky, though, because they always* have a sound intent, but can genuinely be meaninglessly annoying to some individuals.
Like the table saw regulation Robinson mentions in the Current Affairs article (which was a great counterpoint, btw, to this one). I can absolutely see how some small-time carpenters are like, I’m an expert, I’ve been using this saw for decades, and I know I risk cutting off my finger, but that’s a price I, personally, am willing to pay versus buying a new table saw. But the government says “you have no right to make that calculation for yourself.” This case very much differs from requiring business to purchase new saws because employees aren’t free to make the calculation for themselves. But the regulation seems to have applied to everyone - with the same great goal of saving people’s fingers, but by a means that has a different valence - and appropriateness - depending on individual circumstances. A long way of saying, regulations should be as carefully targeted as possible, and the people to whom they apply should be listened to.
“My kid’s daycare served fresh fruits and vegetables and didn’t have a lot of sinks. “
Sure, as long as you’re fine with driving up costs, go ahead and have everything and kitchen sink regulations. And then wonder why affordability is an issue.
Setting that part aside, the truth of the matter is that the regulation did not do what Rep Glusenkamp-Perez claimed.
Assuming outsourcing food prep is a substantial cost (idk if it is), the regulation here did not require multiple sinks to peel a banana or cut up an apple.
If you read the regulations, you need to interpret them very favorably to conclude that food service doesn’t require a food certified caregiver and sinks.
It requires sinks but not an extraordinary amount. A daycare should have a sink.
As MGP herself confirmed, the agency charged with enforcing the regulation did not interpret the rule as requiring multiple sinks. That was her interpretation and that of a single constituent.
And if the issue is that the rule is unclear and some day cares are serving potato chips instead of bananas because of it (itself a ludicrous false choice) then updating the regulation would be an efficient way of fixing the alleged problem.
Of course, addressing the issue that way doesn’t enable grandstanding on social media with exaggerations about how inefficient government regulations are while submitting a “Banana Bill” to the legislature.
Also, why are we defending local level regulations? They're often written with less transparency and provide less of a paper trail then at the federal level, often by bureaucrats who are less skilled.
My conclusion is that voters like competent and reliable service delivery and hate anything that they perceive to be interfering with it. Don't take away my private health insurance because it's perfectly effective for me, although too expensive. Don't lower bail requirements if it means I can't use the subway safely or have access to items on the shelves at my Rite Aid. Don't make my people in the EDD sit through anti-racism training programs when they should be processing my unemployment claim. Don't break up Amazon if it means my prices go up or my deliveries slow down. This is the triumph of the concrete over the abstract and the obvious over the unseen. Skilled politicians like MGP and Jared Golden know how to find and exploit these issues to advantage because they understand what voters prioritize. So does the in-state version of Bernie Sanders of Vermont. But too many Democrats at national level, and in many blue states, have lost this thread
My main issue with "leftwing economic populism" is that it's advocates generally advocate for income transfers to the college educated and interests of the college educated. It isn't about efficacy. Furthermore, "leftwing economic populism" is often intertwined with progressive goals of cultural transformation via "economic/racial/social/environmental justice", devaluing blue collar and resource extraction jobs, permissiveness on crime and social disorder, anti-theism, various forms of moral policing.
Precisely. As currently defined by many “left-wing populism” isn’t popular and is often indifferent to costs borne by the bottom 50% of the population. Climate change fees, increased regulation and licensing, increased “consultation” that delays permitting and construction, decaying infrastructure, increased taxes, indifference to inflation, etc. These are all real costs.
How are increased taxes on the very wealthy a cost to the bottom 50%? The transfer of wealth that I, as a moderate Dem and pragmatist, believe will be required to reset the U.S. to a stable, middle-class democracy, would be attained by taxing the wealthy directly to the benefit of the poor and working class. I’m not in the super wealthy category, but I’m comfortable and willing to be taxed more for the good of our nation as a whole.*
FWIW, I’ve lived in countries with extreme wealth inequality. It’s not fun even for the well off, unless you like barbed wire, guard dogs, private swat teams, and panic buttons.
*that said, I’m more of a direct-transfer than a govt-bureaucracy kind of girl
Making electricity and gasoline more expensive via taxes and scarcity has a direct impact on people. This is policy for many climate change progressives. I’m also skeptical that progressives are focused on reducing taxes. They rarely talk about it, because they need revenue for things like Medicare for All.
Carbon tax proposals that include structured rebates are progressive taxation -- high income households consume more energy and will pay more carbon tax, low income households will receive higher rebates.
I think it is because that by “very wealthy” Democrats usually mean people in the top 1-2% who are disproportionately local business owners, not the top 15-20% who are mostly college educated professionals.
They are very careful to exclude themselves from “The Rich.”
“The Rich” to Democrats is the uneducated millionaire who owns the local car dealership (like, ew) and not the local millionaire doctor and his doctor wife (cool, smart people).
I’ll never forget that “American Gentry” article in the Atlantic; as someone who grew up in a family that owned a local manufacturing company in Michigan it just gave me an absolutely visceral disgust for the “professional class left” - and I have two graduate degrees and a professional license.
My family worked hard and contributed enormously to our local community, both in job creation and anonymous donations, without fanfare or expectations in return. To get branded by some dilettante humanities professor as a socially toxic “gentry”, a problem that needs to be solved, really has made it impossible for me to vote Dem recently. I didn’t vote for Trump, but I really do not want to empower our Educated Betters to set the parameters of the discourse anymore.
You’re correct that many Dems underestimate the importance of the top 20% threshhold, and that their perspective can be biased by their membership in that category.
However, I don’t think the focus on the top 1-2% is necessarily a deliberate effort to direct attention away from themselves.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I think most Democrats are more interested in number threshholds rather than distinctions between millionaire car dealers and millionaire doctors (except to say that the car dealer is less likely to come to mind when people think of high earners). Economic left Democrats are not alone in seeing terms like “millionaire” and “billionaire” as some culturally meaningful threshhold. Even when people speak of the terms positively, as in “I want to be a millionaire,” they’re imagining a higher echelon in society where you can escape the burdens that most people have. Maybe that’s naïve, but it’s a very common idea of what “-aire” status is. The difference is that left wing populists are more likely to think of “-aire” status in terms of in terms of taxes owed.
Another idea that crossed my mind is that much of the Democratic coalition’s impression of “business owners” may be influenced by megacorporations more so than localized businesses.
Especially since the financial crisis and the big tech boom, we’ve heard a lot about the types of owners who have massive cultural power, lobby politicians, dump sludge in rivers, create addictive and toxic social media platforms, bust unions, etc. These owners are associated with the breakdown of community, especially on the left. Some of biggest targets of economic left zeitgeist are big tech CEOs. In a recent NYT interview with Mark Andreesen, he said that many of his left-wing employees wanted to radically reshape big tech companies from the inside because they believed that these companies were using their great powers irresponsibly.
On the other hand, in your orbit, many people see owners as closely linked with community. As a liberal Democrat myself, I think it would do us good to get more nuanced about these middle zones where you find people who are neither the poor nor the uber rich, and may be successful business owners without being the CEO of Walmart or Goldman Sachs.
To be fair, It could be that I’m too charitable to my own side here.
This to me is why I never intend to get into politics. I look at the opinions of voters and think it's an illogical mess. I DO want to tell lumber workers in Maine to embrace free trade because it's in their best interests! I'm running on this platform not because I'm a centrist shill, or any other dumb reason: I support it because it's good! I want to convince you that you're wrong, and you know what? Convincing someone that they're wrong is basically the most difficult thing to do in politics which is why we wind up just pandering, and I get it: meet people where they are not where you want them to be. But where the American voter is on the issues is dumb. The American voter wants:
-Lower taxes (except on the uber wealthy, and certain companies)
-Lower government spending overall
-But HIGHER government spending on certain social services, border security, and security in general
-So finance the lower overall government spending with cutting foreign aid
-Fix the climate issue without increasing spending
-Make the world safer, but without the US getting too involved
-Get rid of free trade, but ensure the US doesn't pay any economic price for it
This isn't a logical wishlist, it's a grab bag of contradictory hopes of baking your cake and eating it too. You simply cannot accomplish what the average American voter wants without either just giving up and doing nothing (which is why Republicans are happy) or trying to tell them they're wrong, in which case you're an egotistical elitist jerk.
And then the press digs into your personal life and hangs it out to dry for all to see. No thank you, I'll stay in the private sector.
I largely agree, but even within your listed examples, I think we can find disagreement among self-labeled pragmatists here in the SB comments. Let’s focus simply on “Fix the climate issue without increasing spending.”
Here, the IRA could be framed as accomplishing this because it roughly decreases the deficit over 10 years while primarily being a “fix climate issues” bill. We could easily get into a 100+ comment discussion about the fairness of that framing, and there certainly are nuances, including reconciliation budget math.
So instead, let’s imagine a hypothetical bill designed toward the aim of “Fix the climate issue without increasing spending.” Obviously, SB subscribers would focus on: a) deregulating land use and b) technological improvements. We could even structure this bill as revenue-raising if we add leasing federal land to solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and other non-carbon-emitting energy sources—accelerated by our deregulation. Add in natural gas as a carbon-decreasing alternative to coal, and we’re fixing climate change, lowering energy prices, and even raising federal revenue.
Yet what will ultimately matter is how voters receive both our proposed legislation and its ultimate impact. We could easily imagine such a bill being framed as “big government overreach” or a “sellout to massive corporations.” Maybe Joe Rogan is pissed that the pristine view from his hunting lands will now be sullied by power cables.
Hence, I think there is some “connecting to voters” angle that entails not just policy but also language choices, framing, and fighting for eyeballs in an ever more saturated media environment.
Well, everybody loves deregulating land use for other people, but when the field they played ball in as a kid turns into a natural gas storage facility, suddenly the principles change a bit.
Politicing to Americans is a tough game i'd probably lose- i can't really do the bullshit it'd require.
But is it really bullshit if we're practicing the popularism discipline of talking about what voters like about our policies and accomplishments? Not everything needs a fair and balanced treatment. Particularly when voters have such limited attention. We could always refer them to a 172-page analysis by Brookings, but we'll be lucky if we capture 30 seconds in their TikTok or Instagram Reels feeds. For that brief glimpse of their eyeballs, we should use it productively.
Moreover, this will increasingly entail truly personalized media with AI generated content (and ads) created for each individual digital media consumer, aligned with their interest at that moment in time. See Meta's Oc 2023 announcement of "Generative AI features for ads coming to all advertisers", https://www.facebook.com/business/news/generative-ai-features-for-ads-coming-to-all-advertisers . There's probably something newer, and less publicized, from Meta and all other tech-enabled digital media platforms.
The thing I’m starting to wonder about is ads designed to trick Gemini/ChatGPT/whatever into doing certain things supposedly on behalf of their client. Make your site look useful to a robot and the robot who’s trying to be helpful will serve it to the human. No need to make the ad look good to a human directly.
States are too big and municipalities too small. We don't have a effective way to govern "metro areas" in the US. In some places regional bodies (like transit authorities) or county governments address this gap, but we don't have a great answer. Municipal annexation is probably the easy way to go, but you also have a problem of what power the municipality has. It probably needs more delegation from the state if it really is operating as a regional body, a mini city-state within the republic.
It'd have to be state, and i don't think that solves it, unless it can be done in secret or something, because stripping zoning/land use authority from localities would likely be incredibly unpopular at a visceral level.
The fundamental problem is that localities aren't really responsive to people who could be there but aren't because of land use policy- it's a very difficult problem to manage in delegated governance.
It seems like an intractable problem. To me, it’s obvious that the best way to divide government responsibilities that really make sense are metro areas, rural areas, small towns within rural areas, and the federal level, where metro areas and large swaths of rural area are state-equivalents.
I’d love to see something in the federal constitution that said something like “when a built-up area (as defined by algorithm) reaches X population it becomes its own state.” In the constitution it would be insulated from change the first time a city didn’t like what was happening.
Problem is, it would incentivize exurban development with wide greenbelts for people wanting greater autonomy. So you’d want the system to be flexible and nimble so that you could iterate and tweak the parameters to prevent manipulation of the system, within reason (get far enough out and your exurban development is really a greenfield city!) I think it would be a stroke of dumb luck if we were able to get the parameters close to right the first try.
But the need to iterate is in profound tension with the absolute need to shelter the rule from public accountability, because it pisses people off to be annexed against their will. You need to make it so their only option is to move a ridiculous commute out or leave the area if they don’t want to be part of the city.
Being from Memphis, a metro area with profound racial and economic disparities that is handicapped by being right across two state borders, and now living in Seattle, blessed to be far from all state borders, really helps illuminate this topic for me.
I like solutions like this because they can technically be described as *not* stripping zoning authority from municipalities. The municipalities still get to have a zoning board. It's just that state law now gives them a specific menu of options when they choose zoning categories. There are ways to do this that fall short of outlawing SFH zoning in its entirety. For example, you could continue to allow SFH zoning, but say SFH zoning now by definition does not include lot size minimums, or does not exclude rowhomes, or whatever. State legislation could things like this in a very dry, minutiae-oriented way that makes it harder for NIMBYs to mobilize opposition.
And Mayor Harrell has been chipping and chipping away at that to make it less effective! Ugh. I wish that we Seattle voters weren’t cross-pressured between public safety and YIMBY so much. (Not that we haven’t done quite a lot of YIMBY already, but I’m pissed my neighborhood is unaffected by the upzone)
I think if we’re going to do worthwhile things with government then we have to prove that we *can* do worthwhile things with government and that’s going to mean challenging people who are seen as allies. I frankly wonder if Democrats have the stomach for it.
What Trump is doing in terms of just shutting down agencies is dumb, but I see a story like this:
I gave you 7.5 billion dollars and you gave me 7 chargers in two years?? Does everyone here feel like they’re doing good work? Because I feel like some people want to build things and some people don’t, and we need to go in, find the people who don’t and help them find another way to make a living.
Democrats talk about “reforming” these institutions and I know they’ll spend a year producing a report and maybe they’ll find a way to get me 30 charging stations the year after that.
I’m just going to go ahead and unleash the relatively conservative (for here) jerk who compares government to the private sector, apologies in advance.
If you have the will and want to do it, if you ignore the committees and “allies”, there are people who can go into these organizations, clear roadblocks and improve things in a matter of weeks. I promise it’s true. Fire some deadweight (and everyone in the organization knows who they are), put everyone else on notice: there are people who want to build things and people who don’t, and going forward the people who want to build things are the people who will remain here.
And speaking of populism, I want to come in like Huey Long stand-in Willie Stark from All The King’s Men, “hand me that meat-axe!” What Trump is doing is just stupid and harmful, but someone really does need to go in and clean house to some extent, and not spend a year or two doing it. As awful as it may seem, it happens out here in the private sector every day and if people can’t find a job in a full employment economy then I don’t know what to tell you.
Oh snap. For others, I mistook Randall's point as being about money being wasted instead of about delays in implementation. I realized my mistake and added a correction to my comment. Then I deleted it. Sorry for the confusion.
Anyhow, I totally agree about the delays. A lot of the potential benefit of the IRA was lost because dems had to be clever and create rube Goldberg machines to disburse the funds.
I was waiting for my state to deploy IRA's heat pump rebates that would have covered 50-100% of the cost up to $8k. Now it's unlikely to ever happen. If they had just increased the cap on the 30% federal tax credit to maybe $5k or $10k, I would have done the project back in 2022.
I think the using conservative values to sell liberal policies is about as close to a cheat code as there is. Obama and Clinton were both very good at it. The trick is to get through the primary.
True my point though was that politics is rarely about actually addressing issues but instead it’s about pandering to voters to gain power. Then you can do stuff with that but it generally angers people then you lose it, and instead of running on what you believe you run on what the voters think they want.
It’s just a very frustrating game, and frequently even if you succeed you get punished for things outside of your control. I think most of Biden’s unpopularity stems from stuff he couldn’t control, is that fair? Sure because that’s true of everyone, but it’s left us far worse off.
This is a fantastic point, and expresses the limits of climate change as a moral crusade we must all sacrifice for. There are options that do not require sacrifice.
Unfortunately those are rejected by voters too as we’re seeing in Canada where politicians cannot run fast enough away from the revenue neutral consumer carbon tax. The cheapest most nudgiest of nudges to decarbonize economies.
It actually engenders some sympathy for politicians from me.
Can you say more? There are winners and losers for every policy but this one was designed such that most people ended up with more money rather than less.
Yeah this is literally no.1 reason I try not to get too involved in the politics (and struggle to do so lol) tbh
If I intentionally choose a very harsh word, voters on average are selfish and dumb ppl who are convinced that they are the other way around.
In a sense, I really admire politicians bc the skills required here is a lot - be cool headed and strategic about the political goal while dancing around not to alienate voters (plus these days, you also have to disseminate the data to pick the right mix of policy to push while deprioritizing others I think).
This is a LOT and this leads to a very unpopular opinion that we should raise the salary of politicians (and congress staffs tbh) to attract ppl with those skills instead of attention seeking clowns (on the right) or numerically illiterate ideologues(on the left)
IDK. This reads like a very abstracted wish list combining the worst elements of both parties into a single row. Just take climate change ... We have one party that wants to fix climate change and is willing to spend to fix it (e.g., BBB) and the other party that doesn't want to fix it at all. Neither party has a position of "Fix the climate issue without increasing spending".
Ezra's last pod was awesome. The guest made the point that the big problem with our current party structure is BOTH parties are minority parties. That's very rare historically and one of them will figure out the coalition to break > 60%. Personally, I think Polis is showing us the way with a new fight for tax cuts because if if if Democrats can figure out a way to take the fiscal responsibility high ground (NOTE: which is deserved because all the GOP does is increase our debt levels every chance they get) ... then I think it's a race a super-majority.
I think the more salient point there is that it’s unnatural for any faction to get to 60% popularity and that coalition will have massive contradictions. Trump’s coalition has plenty and it isn’t even 50% of the voting public.
Yes. But I don't understand the very narrow point you're trying to make. The fact is we've had long periods for both parties with super-majorities and that will return. Our current state structure is the exception.
Take the 1930s and the New Deal coalition. It was made up of liberals and conservatives. Liberals who wanted to expand the government and make the country more equal and conservatives who voted for it so they could reap the rewards using their political power (seniority). The coalition itself was quite heterodox. FDR got 60% but it wasn’t because he found a magic formula, it was horse trading.
For me: I am not against horse trading but I do find it tasteless that convincing people is less important than pandering.
The message is secondary to the messenger. Democrats need to do a better job of selecting candidates who aren't off-putting to the working class and populace in general.
Harris tried to do working class populism, but lets face it... she was never believable. Ironically Fetterman who was a trust fund baby is believable (its the hoodies).
Find candidates who were enlisted in the military, that are from working class backgrounds, guys or girls without a college degree (or who paid for it themselves).
Agree 100%. The message is important but the messenger is even moreso. People may not trust a party or a message, but they will trust a person.
There's no magic bullet: Manchin, Tester, and Brown all eventually hit the limit. But they were able to somewhat carve out a local brand apart from the national brand.
There's a Senate race in Idaho next year. I know you're not a Democrat per se but I'd still vote for you if I lived in Idaho and you ran an Osborn-style independent candidacy,
Look to Washington 3's Gluesenkamp Perez as someone who is practical. Don't agree with her position on guns, but able to win in a solidly Republican district.
No Democrat has credibility on guns unless they are simultaneously tough on crime as far as the general public goes.
Reasoning.... 100s of millions of guns in country, very few used in crimes. So you can't say... lets crack down on guns while simultaneously advocating for light sentences for criminals who use guns in crimes.
Now a candidate who is hard as nails on crime... and other social issues would be able to effectively make inroads on gun control... especially background checks.
Especially since one of the most bang for your buck ways to be tough on crime is to use pretext stops to search people for illegal weapons and actually prosecute it.
Rory, I like you and I like how you bring a more working-class outlook to the SB commentariat, which is full of privileged, highly educated upper-middle-class professionals.
So please forgive me, but I just couldn't resist:
"Find candidates who were enlisted in the military"
Like Trump, who dodged the draft on (bone) spurious pretext and bragged about how "Avoiding STIs was my Vietnam."
"that are from working class backgrounds"
Like Mr. New York Real Estate Developer whose daddy gifted him a half a million bucks and who never did a blue-collar job in his life.
"guys or girls without a college degree (or who paid for it themselves)"
Like Mr. "I was the smartest at Wharton." Did he pay for it himself or did daddy pay for it? I sincerely don't know.
"Be likeable"
Typical Trump Xeet: "Happy holidays to everyone including the ANTI-AMERICAN SCUM AND VERMIN who spread VICIOUS LIES ABOUT ME it's SO UNFAIR just WAIT UNTIL I'M REELECTED you'll GET YOURS"
"or at least respectable."
I... just... with Trump, where do I even start? Ughhh... I give up. 😵💫
The enlisted in the military was just one example of somthing that provides street cred... a former welder or some dude who worked in the factory would do the same thing.
Trump derives his street cred from his dumbed down speech and by railing against media and institutions. Its lame, but it is what it is.
Good point, although re: military service, this seems to be kind of evenly matched between the parties? I don't know the exact numbers, but it's not like only Republicans run veterans for public office. Both Vance and Walz have served in the military.
On that topic, Admiral McRaven for POTUS: Bad idea or so-crazy-it-might-work idea?
Personally I hate Generals. Admiral McRaven though has special operations credibility. Being Chancellor of a University is an against (just another academic). I'm just not sure he has that relatable trait.
Perception is everything. He has an academic position... he talks like an academic. It is the University of Texas though which is a whole lot better than University of California as far as perception.
We have to be something other than Trump haters. Yes he’s awful, but we have to. We have to get better at winning elections and I never got better at anything by pointing out how awful someone else is. We should have been having these conversations after 2016, but we didn’t and that’s part of how we got here.
"We have to be something other than Trump haters."
I absolutely agree, 100%! I want to be for something, not just against Trump! I'm pretty much for the Common Sense Democratic Platform (let's not call it a Manifesto, that's pinko commie) with some small tweaks. I think that would be good for America!
Just, every single goddamn time I see "Democrats would win if they were more xyz," I think "but Trump won by being the 180-degree opposite of xyz" and I'm like #MakeItMakeSense
Yeah, I know it seems unfair but Trump is sui generis and we don’t get to use his methods. We claim to be the adults. If either one of these parties could figure out how to be normal, they’d run the table. Though I think Ben cited some good examples of candidates who pulled it off and it’s worthwhile to analyze their approach.
The Democrats handed the nomination to Biden as a reaction to a Sanders nomination. Well to me that is not very friendly to the rank and file Democrats. No primary in 24, so what has changed? Schumer is still Minority Leader and the plan is to watch Trump and the Republican majority crumble. Not much of a plan.
Also... I don't necessarily associate the commentariat with upper middle class as much as I as people with a certain personality that craves to discuss things that the majority of people just find dreary... also ADHD. Everyone has to be ADHD right?
>But it’s worth asking if the lawyer and two-term Senator from Connecticut has the profile to authentically deploy the populist message that can win back the working-class.<
I can answer that. He doesn't. LOL. If we're going to go with a New Englander, I'd strongly prefer Jared Golden over Murphy.
Some of this just comes down to judgment, and political smarts. It's great to get people worked up about "fighting corporate power." But casting it in concrete terms—"The greedy bastards at John Deere don't want you to be able to repair your own tractor and that's not fair!"—seems cleverer. (Like Golden, MGP is a big time political talent.)
The ironic thing is that Murphy *is* very well suited to be the Senator from Connecticut, and has actually done some good things in office, like the immigration deal that Trump blew up. He's also one of Congress's better communicators on social media and is generally good at being a standard white-collar Democrat without veering off into weird culture war stuff. Instead of searching for a new persona, he should stick to his old one (and never think about running for President).
Yep. I don't dislike Murphy in the least. I just don't think he reads SlowBoring enough. lol. Every time I read something he's said I quiver in fear at the prospect he could become the nominee. Who knows what'll transpire in 2028? And in fairness, conditions could be super optimal for Democrats. So a less-than-optimal nominee could win. But you always want to put your best foot forward, and downticket races are a critical consideration, as well.
I believe—and cannot for the life of me dredge up the political science papers I vaguely remember to support it—that a key challenge here is that *modern democracy doesn't fit our minds*.
Our minds evolved to maintain social bonds among a few dozen of our tribe-mates, whose perspective on the world overlapped with ours almost perfectly. Projecting our own perspective onto others is accurate and effective.
Modern democracy requires joining a faction orders of magnitude larger than the largest group our ancestors would have seen, and then passively watching our faction manage coalition dynamics with other factions whose members' perspective on the world is wildly different from ours. Projecting our own perspective onto them no longer works. Think of an evangelical retiree and a Musk/crypto acolyte in Trump's coalition, or a Nevada hotel industry union official, a Queer humanities grad student, and an employment-side labor attorney in the Dems'.
Bernie believers get that big insight very right and very wrong at the same time. They get the *importance* of sharing the perspective of the common person right, while (as you lay out precisely in this column) getting the substance of that perspective wrong precisely because they protect their own identity by projecting their leftism onto the common person. They also refuse to accept the need to integrate non-populist perspectives into their coalition (or, per Matt's regular comments on post-2016 Bernie, by mistaking the identity-centering Groups for actual electoral factions).
yeah I remember reading some article by some Japanese researcher that the number of people an average person can empthasize/relate is 150 or so (aka a comfortable social circle size of an average person)?
And it also depends on the number of wrinkles on cerebral cortex accodrding to him - which I think is correlated w the fact that highly educated ppl tend to be more cosmopolitan
It's often called Dunbar's number, after psychologist Robin Dunbar, who hypothesized that primates of the same brain size as humans would have social groups of about 150 individuals. He found support for this in the size of hunter-gatherer communities.
Two things can be true: you are right that we need solutions, and I am right that we won’t get them if we mid frame the problem. More on my hypothetical solutions if I get a chance
No. You just manage society in a way that focus on the building and maintenance of shared infrastructure and broadly supported institutions, including a reasonable transfer of wealth for shared purposes, and leaves people’s lifestyles and both their chosen and natural bonds alone.
Democrats REALLY need to get away from this earnest, millennial undergraduate mindset that it is their job to “change the world.” The Democrats have far too many elite educated narcissists who can’t conceive of doing anything that doesn’t involving imposing their ideological pets on people, usually with the help of their favorite non-profits and NGOs.
But ordinary people don’t want their lives “transformed;” they just want their home insurance to be affordable again and their kids to not learn about sex changes at school.
Ok but that's Sam Penrose's point: "just implement commonsense solutions, dumbass" is easy to say when you're in a band of ~100 people and pretty much everyone agrees on what "commonsense solutions" are; it becomes much harder when you're trying to scale up to a nation of 300 million people with different values and priorities.
Let's break down your comment a bit. "Focus on building shared infrastructure" - libertarians aren't down with that, and many people who support "infrastructure" really support "infrastructure for me and people like me, not for those other people over there." Witness the perennial bitching from some (certainly not all!) childless people about "why do I gotta pay taxes to support public schools, I don't have any children in school."
"A reasonable transfer of wealth" - boy howdy, is that word "reasonable" doing a ton of heavy lifting! What is reasonable? What you, I, Elon Musk, and a card-carrying Communist think is "reasonable" will differ by orders of magnitude. It's not like "agreeing on a reasonable transfer of wealth is super easy, barely an inconvenience!"
"Leave people's lifestyles... alone" ok, what if my lifestyle imposes severe negative externalities on you? What if I'm your next-door neighbor and I like to hold really noisy parties right outside your bedroom window late into the night? And when you object I tell you to leave my lifestyle the f alone!
You don't have to invoke some caricature of a holier-than-thou Democratic do-gooder who's bossily trying to impose their lifestyle on everyone else to recognize that coordinating and coming to an agreement in a society of hundreds of millions is hella hard, and that's what Sam was getting at with his comment.
Definitely true. I think even though public opinion is generally on Trump's side for things like cutting foreign aid, sentiment will shift when people fully grasp the concrete impacts and how much it's hurting the extreme poor.
The Musk poll just shows that people's top concerns when they hear about cutting spending is whether it'll impact their government benefits.
I don't think that sentiment will shift on DOGE cutting foreign aid.
I think the biggest risk factor for cutting USAID for Republicans is that fundamentally it's just not a big part of the federal budget. They've been able to very constructively exploit people's fuzziness in thinking about large numbers, where tens or hundreds of millions of dollars "feels like a big number." But at the end of the day if they full close USAID it won't lower people's taxes much, and then where do they go for "we can make cuts that are painless to you"?
Magically a lot of USAID is buying grain from US farmers. Who knew that? People are going to learn a lot about specifics on all kinds of topics because of secondary effects. And it will get through the media screening. And then it will transform into some aid is good. And then their magic blanket statements will be all kinds of messy caveat filled messages.
Along the same lines - Look for great stories about NRCS causing farmers to go under.
I've been listening to Ray Dalio's press tour for his new book. IMO -- it's a bit too doomer given the strength of the US economy vs. global markets right now but his main points are (1) Fed expenditures are up over $2T vs. 2020, (2) our debt to GDP is tracking back to break above 1, and (3) our interest expense to GDP is now above 3% which is a historic pressure point.
With this context we probably need to cut $1T. I think that's a reasonable target. The USAID budget is $40B. Gotta start somewhere.
I'm sorry, but starting with USAID is like the CEO who is the highest paid person in the company not getting their normal bonus cause its a down year and their first spending cuts are to not participate in the company sponsored food drive.
You can make the claim that you can't afford it anymore, but everyone you tell that to is just going to walk away thinking you're a tool, and they'll be correct.
Sure but so where would you start if you were them? Medicaid cuts? We're in week 2. Musk believes the US is facing an existential debt crisis. He's wrong but he's also been given who knows what power to implement his vision.
EDIT: I thought the whole DOGE thing was going to be a huge joke but it's now clear only the courts will be able to constrain their actions. There's no one inside the Trump administration running with them..
1) Stop most of the tax cuts that Republicans keep pushing.
2) Drop most of the subsidies that Biden just pushed into the IRA.
Realistically, it all comes down to increasing taxes a bit, and finding ways to constrain spending by mandatory programs. That means figuring out how to slow SS and Medicare spending, the exact programs that are the hardest to touch politically. My personal ideas there are
1) SS to switch from wage adjustments to price adjustments, increase the age limits by up to 64/69 instead of 62/67, reduce benefits for high income earners.
2) Medicare - institute a cap on medicare spending and focus spending on his efficiency (QALY) as opposed to low efficiency spending.
One of Trumps tactics is to maintain an arm's length separation from people on his team. That way he can later either claim credit, or toss them under the bus.
Sure. And then the other 96% of the cut is... where?
Like, look, there are good and bad programs in USAID, I'm definitely open to the argument that there are more bad than good and I genuinely don't think that if USAID is just 100% closed that it will be all that huge a deal. But if you're looking to cut $1T, you've done less than 1/20th of the work there.
My point is that there aren't another $960B in cuts that the Republicans can make that will be as popular/non-painful for their voters as USAID. As long as a few fairly minor parts of the budget exist as boogeymen, they can make a lot of political hay about pointing at $50M here, $500M there, and sure, $40B altogether. You can focus way more than 4% of the attention on 4% of your cuts. But once that's gone, what do you do next?
Right. I think that's why they're starting there. These are easy and probably popular cuts. I'm sure Medicaid is next. Then a roll back of Biden's SNAP expansion. They seem very focused on breaking all leases and selling buildings. It'll keep going. My wish would be there's a path to some bipartisan solutions (e.g., 20 year phase in to raise SS age) but Trump is Trump and he's an idiot and unable to drive any legislation.
EDIT: This last part will help us. Ezra was on fire on the Bulwark pod about how the Trump administration is actually working against Congress right now. He had a bunch of examples so that's probably the only limiting factor to how much damage they can cause.
Isn’t the shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. the reason PEPFAR is down now? I don’t think killing a few million people in Africa is a good way to save a few bucks.
Everyone seems to agree that PEPFAR is the best program in USAID and I see no reason to doubt them. Clearly, on some level, we'd like to remove the bad programs and save the good programs.
But... I'm not sure I think that "prune out the bad programs" has a terribly strong track record. I understand why you might say, "Look, the system defends itself by making it illegible what's good and what's bad, by intertwining the bad with the good, etc." DOGE's mandate seems to be hatchetwork, and there is at least potentially a time and a place for hatchetwork.
My point though is whether you think this hatchetwork is the right decision or not, just tactically there is value to the Republicans in having a sort of generally unpopular category of spending around to point at as an example of what you're against, and to allow people to imagine is a more significant amount of spending than it is, and there is NOT much value to actually cutting this spending, in as much as it's a very small chunk of any savings that you might reasonably achieve.
We certainly can and hopefully will in 2028. I don’t think Trump is going to do that and I think Trump is probably going to further increase our deficit because the GOP is generally way more fiscally irresponsible. But just on which side is driving the current deficit … it’s all spending. Biden didn’t cut any taxes and our federal spending has increased by 40% vs. pre-COVID. This isn’t all on Biden. A large chuck of that was the wave 1 COVID stimulus and then inflation. My read though is we need to cut about $1T to minimize the debt risk.
Definitely vs. USAID but still probably not much. A majority of Republican voters view Medicaid as a welfare program. It's not and they're wrong but that's how they would sell it.
If 10% of Republicans shift, that's the Presidency and a Senate majority for the Democrats. If 20% of Republicans shift, that's a filibuster-proof majority.
Like, not that I think that that much of a shift will happen, but whether "a majority" of Republicans care about Medicaid isn't the issue.
I'd be really surprised. Not because I don't wish it wasn't the case but because I don't think the majority of the US even cares about the 10-15% of the US living in extreme poverty. On an issue list I'd be shocked if foreign aid cracks the top 50 issues. Add on top of the that the drip drip drip of legitimately stupid projects and there's just no chance this gets any traction.
And that 10-15% of the country is moving toward the people who don’t want to help them, because liberals have expressed such contempt for them.
My own mother brought up again the “ugh, Trump is the guy who openly says he loves uneducated people” (picture her sneering). I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this, it’s another instance where Trump ends up owning the libs because of the way they react to him.
That 10-15%? Guess what, they’re uneducated. Over 60% of the country lacks a college degree and, given the cost of college, that number is probably going up. If, as a Democratic politician, you don’t at least *like* the uneducated then you should find another line of work. You can’t be the party that claims to want to improve their lives while being so openly contemptuous.
Someone needs to stop reading the room and *lead* this group, bring them back to old school liberalism that is about helping the least among us. Contempt for Americans comes off of us in waves; everyone can see us having a conversation about how to win over “these morons” instead of having conversations about how to create improvements in their lives. All of the lurkers in the country, who never comment, can see us.
I agree with your comment, but the percentage of people with a college degree is going to continue to increase for the time being due to older generations dying off. The percentage of 18-25s enrolled/graduated might drop from poor ROI for the marginal student, but that will take a long time to swamp the death of the less educated generations.
The problem is that the utility of “left-right” political spectrum is dead as hell and we keep using it anyway. (I suppose we would not know what else to say.) Thanks for pointing out some of its limitations.
People on the so-called-right have actually been living in that reality for a decade, we are welcome to join them whenever…
I hate to say it (find myself saying *that* a lot lately), but some Democrat/s are going to have to come in and pull a (hopefully slightly nicer) Trump: point at the other long term Democrats and say “these people are not effective and we have to do something else now”. I’d clean up government agencies that are going to build things or provide services, overtly return to a colorblind politics, which is where you’ll still find most normal people.
If we want to convince people that government needs to do big things, we have to convince them that it can and then follow through. If we really are the party of smart people and The Experts, we need to stop saying it and damn well prove it.
The GAL-TAN scale is marginally better but runs together liberal attitudes on abortion, gay issues etc (which I personally share) with permissive attitudes on crime and border control (which I absolutely do not share). I’d say there is at least three dimensions (economic left vs right, social liberalism vs conservatism, state authority vs anarchy).
I think there is a real underestimation on the left of how viscerally many Americans want the “trans” issue to go away. At this point they just associate the entire movement with violation of some of their deepest held realities, including their loss of trust in their local schools and pediatricians.
I don’t know if the left really realizes how desperately people, especially parents, want this issue to just vanish from the earth so we can feel trust and normalcy in our community institutions again.
If it had just been about being kind to adults with Gender Dysphoria and giving them reasonable accommodations under ADA it would have been fine.
But instead The Groups declared war on the very shared reality of ordinary, middle class Americans in a really violating, personal way that threatened our children, our job security, and divided our communities. A lot of people aren’t going to forgive that for a long time.
Witness the attempts to charge people to use the overcrowded streets of Manhattan! Just common sense, but shriek after shriek after shriek from Cuomo and Hochul and Trump trying to be the one to block common sense.
We believe that the discussion could benefit from being held at deeper psychological realities than we usually see.
Case in point. What if all of these different campaigns were ranked on the psychological variable of "ease of psychological change?"
How much of the Republican wins were because people, instead of not approving, for example, of trans issues, were actually seeing those issues as "too much change in too little time."
How much of peoples anti-immigration stances are because the change was too fast for them to psychologically process?
Look at gay marriage. The issue is still there, but in highly muted form. People have gradually gotten used to it so it carries little psychological weight.
We know that people adapt to change at different rates. What are the "adaptation rates" for Republicans versus Democrats versus Progressives?
There are other, deep, psychological dimensions that we rarely see discussed as being fundamental to what people are reacting to. When asked, they may say things like "immigration," or "the economy," or "men playing in women's sports." But people don't even know how to put some of those psychological dimensions into words.
So, are we dealing mostly with surface issues, but not the ones that really drive and matter to people...issues that arose from millions of years of survival of the fittest.
As much as I’d love to focus on political platforms and policy to win elections in this fraught moment, it all seems a little cute and precious right now.
To be blunt, the country is under attack and on fire. Trump’s FEC commissioners, once he finishes his illegal purge of the organization, are likely going to define “free and fair” elections exclusively as ones Democrats lose. Whether or not they follow prudent, moderate, district-specific messaging or not.
More pertinently, you can message prudently and moderately all you want—very little of that is likely going to resonate in 2026, an era of smartphones, AI propaganda, social media, and viral, Internet-addicted rage, especially if Mark Zuckerberg has in fact come to the same conclusion as Musk that Democrats are a dire threat to his precious bodily fluids.
Democrats, if they are to survive and save democracy, are going to have to take those things into account, far more than “moderate messaging” and their platforms.
The focus on that, rather than connection, outrage, and *emotional valence* of the message, is what one does when one is android-brained and trying to make sense of the situation from New York, DC, or some similar city far removed from reality on the ground.
This makes me think of the distinction in parenting between being permissive (the cultural left), authoritarian (MAGA) and an authority (the sane center-left/right). The former two are bad and the last one is good, in politics as in child rearing.
If the Dan Osborn thing stands for anything it's that "left wing" and "populism" are highly separable ideas, but also that the "populist" piece is almost antithetical to any association with the pro-system aesthetics of the Democratic Party.
How do you make "independence from the party" the ethos of the party itself? It's a riddle.
Well, Trump pulled it off. And the Republicans fell in line. They're spineless and unprincipled, but they at least understood early enough that the popular tide was shifting towards Trump, and they went with it.
There's lots of reasons for this. Ironically, if the Republicans were a stronger party, they would've never let Trump get as far as he did in the 2016 primary.
The Democrats, by contrast, have much stronger resistance to upstarts like Trump (or AOC for that matter), keeping power in a relatively closed off circle. But it's clear now that it's preventing necessary reform. Pelosi and Schumer have had their time, but it's inarguable at this point that they're doing their party and the American people harm by refusing to let go of their hold on power. Schumer is a terrible messenger concerning the responsibility of the opposition parry to push back on what's currently happening, and Pelosi has been essentially absent since her book came out, and content to just cash in on the stock market. Her replacement in Jeffries has been totally unimpressive and uninspiring.
We haven't seen any real awakening to the new reality from the Democrats. Beyond a week or so of election post-mortem, no real changes have been made, no new voices are really standing out and standing up for the separation of powers, and actually exerting their authority as members of Congress. The party clearly needs to change, and that change has to come from within, or else they're at risk for becoming irrelevant. They already are seemingly irrelevant, if we're being honest. There is no unified vision, and no real leadership or charisma. We'll have to see what they do when the Republicans actually begin trying to get their tax cut through.
Eh, I think praising any Democrats decision making this election cycle is dubious.
It's telling that, while she's all but made it blatantly clear that she's the reason we got Harris instead of Biden, her refusal to publically come out against his running again and then only act behind closed doors after it was too late, saddling Democrats with a weak candidate, proves that she's a poor steward of the party at this point.
I respect her effectiveness as speaker and admire her political skill, but her actions only contributed to the distrust Americans have towards the Democratic party. There's a reason she was a favorite punching-bag of Trump in his first term. Her name is mud in middle-America, and synonymous with disconnected elitism. The party needs to shed her if they want to shed their toxic branding.
Maybe the Democrats should decide what they stand for, rather than trying to dash back and forth seeking something, anything, that will keep them in power from moment to moment.
If the Dems believe in left wing populism, fine. Be that party.
But if they don't it's going to be obvious, and it's going to be another disaster for them.
Trump took Medicare and SS away from Democrats as political issues, and woke identity politics and infinite bureaucracy are so unpopular that Democrats don't have much remaining to stand on.
It may be helpful to take a step back and think about how people that you disagree with are human beings who also have brains. Do democrats wake up each morning and think "I want more bueracrats for no reason"? Obviously not.
Instead the most common reason is that there are places where privatization delivers good results but there are many other places where you need a model that can think of the public good and managing negative externalities. Those are two things that the "maximize shareholder value" brand of business can't do, so there are some things the government needs to do and if the government needs to do them you need rules and staffing for them. More than that, you need good rules, even people who trust the government more than you do would agree that if a law prevents a child from being fed a healthy meal that it is a bad law.
No, my local Democrats wake up and say "let's close the Greenway because we can't keep the public safe from addicts and vagrants while our mayor tells people to get a reverse mortgage to afford tax increases" (this actually happened this year).
Off-topic, but I find it darkly funny that when I go to the SB main page, under "Most popular" I see the headline: "Why Are Young Liberals So Depressed?" And these days I can point at pretty much any random headline on current events and say "That's why!" (I'm not a *young* liberal anymore, but the point remains.)
I agree with all of this and I’m as contrarian as the day is long. I feel like the last liberal who is a fan of “just asking questions”, and playing devil’s advocate. Ideas are supposed to be critiqued, picked at and ultimately refined.
Kamala just had a lot of other baggage and a few weeks of the politics of joy couldn’t overcome it. Frankly it felt manufactured. We’re going to need fresh faces and a fresh start. The Obama’s of the world (as if they’re everywhere, right?) who still have the opportunity to define themselves and align with with more Americans.
I think there has never been a better time or place to be a human being (no matter what an internet meme tells you), and we should say so. No one wants to follow all these neurotic, depressed people. We need a “happy warrior” mentality, I think, even if it’s difficult to summon sometimes.
Randall, I like you and I agree with you a lot, so sorry for being all contrarian and argumentative, but I'm just gonna say this:
"We need a happy warrior, not a neurotic depressive" has been common wisdom in politics for decades. Ronald "Morning in America" Reagan trounced Jimmy "Malaise" Carter. Makes sense! Being happy and optimistic is better than being miserable and pessimistic! Americans are an optimistic, positive, can-do people!
But, like so much common wisdom, this failed utterly in 2024. Kamala ran on "Joy," she was upbeat and smiling, her memes were cheerful - all those coconuts and brat, Taylor Swift, America's sweetheart and biggest pop star, posting "Childless Cat Ladies for Harris" etc. And Trump? Grumpy, scowling, insulting, Xeeting about how America is going down the tubes and how he's our RETRIBUTION and if we don't elect him America will be destroyed in a godless woke Commie apocalypse. At the debate, Kamala was in control, openly laughing at Trump while he spluttered angrily about "They're EATING THE DOGZ!!!!"
How'd that work out for Kamala?
Ok I'm done. I'm going outside to touch some grass now.
I want to believe this is true, the happy warrior ethos as being effective, but I just don't think it's correct for the political moment.
Trump and the Republicans messaging has been anything but. It's built on hate of their fellow citizens, and fear.
I'm not saying the Democrats should sink to their level at all. But justified anger at all the shitting on the constitution we're currently seeing is necessary. The civil rights movement was powered by compassion, but also by rage at the status-quo. It's an underrated source of momentum.
A good start to a discussion that needs to happen. BTW, although I fully understand the perspective of those who use words like fascist and coup, I think better messaging would focus on the fact that Trump is acting like a King. That language doesn't require a degree in political science and resonates with the history that we all learned in school. America exists, at least in that history, because people didn't want a King. And that is exactly how Trump is acting.
This is such a superior branding. The trouble with calling him a fascist is 1) people immediately default to Hitler and 2) even if he has fash but less than Hitler tendencies, people think you are being hysterical. If you call him a king, it operates more as an adjective than a noun. People know he is not literally ordained King Donald, and we get escape velocity out of semantics and can focus on the negative aspects of his behavior instead on its own merits.
“King” can sound a little too benign to me. Is King Charles a figure that threatens democracy and the rules-based order (such as it is)?
Maybe “Czar” is more evocative? Then again that also has positive connotations in the US as in drug czars and so on.
Mafioso kingpin perhaps?
Mafiosi kingpin? Perhaps even a…Don, if you will?
I already call him the Don.
“King” has an almost positive connotation to me, like a colloquialism for a great person. It also makes me think of Burger King.
Just a vaguely positive word that doesn’t sound as evil as “fascist” and almost makes him sound good
I think we're now in Year 3 of Burger King's loathsome "whopper whopper whopper whopper - you rule" ad campaign. There is no connotation less positive than that one in my book. I might have to consider authoritarianism if they promised to destroy Burger King as part of the package.
Lots of people, especially The Godfather generation, admire the mafia. I'm not sure this would work, although I agree it's accurate.
That occurred to me too.
Another line that I just thought of is this:
“He desperately wants to be King of America but the reality is he is just like any other mediocre petty tyrant the world has seen.”
It would be fun to workshop the different ideas with the public.
Czar is either positive or too niche. If you don't like King perhaps Emperor fits. A term rarely used in American culture outside of bad things.
It occurred to me that King works if the intent is to mock him from a position of confidence wrt the democratic institutions of the USA. I think many of us lack that confidence rightly or wrongly.
Ezra is certainly trying to get this "king" label to stick.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-trump-column-read.html?unlocked_article_code=1.t04._saG.OuRi6Q9AUoDE&smid=url-share
I have sworn off the NYT editorial page. 😎
You should definitely make an exception for Ezra.
Ezra can be annoying, but he’s one of the few prominent liberal pundits who pushes himself to pursue objective analysis even when some of what he’s willing to listen to makes him uncomfortable. I.e. he’s actually interested in learning not just pontificating. Thus his readers and listeners are forced, perhaps despite themselves, into a learning vs confirmation-bias mindset as well. This is a very good thing.
Why?
I agree that “fascist” is not particularly helpful, but I wonder if a lifetime of Disney narratives have made kings more acceptable? A lot of Americans seem to be enthralled by the British royal family, after all. The idea of living under the rule of an actual, absolute monarch is something most Americans don’t seem to have given much thought to.
I still remember how once in the latter part of grade school, the teacher almost got into an argument with the kids because she was making a point about how monarchy is bad, and the kids were like, "But if it's a good king it's fine, right?" A large chunk of humanity is wired to like absolute monarchs in theory, even if they understand in their rational minds that it isn't a good system of government in practice.
You may be right about that.
💯
The far left also wants their own king.
Kind of a non-sequitur, to me. What’s the relevance (or evidence?)
The far-left can't campaign against a king because it ruins their own arguments
Also who is the far-left here, and do they have any overlap with the Democratic Party?
They do, but it’s the thinnest of crescents in the ideological Venn diagram. “The groups,” however, are a different and interesting story.
Evidence please.
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/
That doesn't look like a proposal for a king at all. That looks like a proposal for an ideological directorate enforcing political orthodoxy. Those aren't the same thing. And more importantly, why do I care what this guy thinks? He doesn't have much political influence.
Your evidence for the far left wanting a king is one paragraph in Politico calling for a constitutional amendment? I guess we don’t have much to worry about.
The vast majority of SB commenters aren't far left and don't support the far left, so my only response is "maybe so, but so what? What has that to do with us?"
SB has two audiences. The first is the general public ... but a skewed segment. The median member is basically Matt, a college educated professional in their late-30s/early-40s with an interest in politics, history and holds views on the moderate left. This group likes hearing about the "underlying causes," and has an interested in political change "in the real world" that can be achieved, rather than ideologically asserted. Comments usually are either trying to flush out nuance in the points, refine the proposals, or project what would happen.
The other segment are folks in policy and Discourse circles. Staffers, wonks, journalists. This group can be way more idealogical than the first. They also get stuck on memeplexes permeating their groupthink, even as there is immense argument all sorts of policy details. SB's main contribution seems to be pushing narrative framing that is within their overton window. And, I think intentionally, MY uses the same prescription he has for Democrats and the electorate. Meet the audience where they are with their own concerns and nudge them your direction by highlighting factors they already care about but otherwise are overlooking.
Very insightful framing, thank you!
I wonder which staffers/Congresspeople regularly read SB?
Which of them comment here under a pseudonym? Hi! Hello! (Secretary Buttigieg, if you're reading this, please run in 28, I'll vote for you!)
“The median member is basically Matt, a college educated MALE in their late-30s/early-40s with an interest in politics, history and holds views on the moderate left.”
FIFY :)
Is it possible to talk about *anything* any more without centering gender?
Technically, it’s probably illegal to center gender when talking in the United States any more.
Ben's article was about whether Democrats should adopt more far-left policies and messaging.
I believe they prefer the term “General Secretary”
Fair
This was the Whig Party tag on Andrew Jackson, and pretty much why they adopted the Whig name to oppose "King Andrew". Donnie II is already giving Jackson vibes, but looking at the Whig record...idk.
“Look what happened to the Whigs” is a fair caution, but I worry that the Democrats will be drifting in that direction anyway if it cannot coalesce around some core ideas.
When the most salient debate changed from pro-Jackson/anti-Jackson to pro-slavery/anti-slavery, the Whigs became hopelessly divided and imploded.
That is a good summary. Just could not keep a North/South coalition together. But it took about 20 years until the Republicans emerged, and even that party was pretty shaky until the Union prevailed. Any one who thinks that American history is a straight line, should study 1840 to 1860.
🚫👑! Bring back that old doomtree logo
I think something in the same vein of generalissimos. To me he's more SA or africa strong man than Fash also better branding for the reasons you mention.
I wonder how many voters know Schoolhouse Rock? I definitely remember it from my childhood (on VHS, in my case): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R1tZ6l876Q
Maybe voters like Democratic policy outcomes, but not Democratic ideology. I want kids to have fruits and vegetables in daycare, too. If I need to call out a dumb, overreaching government regulation for that, I should be able to do it and remain a Democrat.
Yeah, a policy position that favors bureaucratic red tape and not criticizing bureaucrats over.Getting fruits and vegetables into little kids' hands is just crazy
And it's quite frankly to most peoples lived experience of dealing with government red tape
I'm not sure that your hypothesis (maybe voters like D policy but not D ideology) matches your example. Depriving kids of fruits and vegetables certainly isn't Democratic ideology: it's much more a result of Democratic policy.
I guess I’m part of the problem because I bristle at a statement like this regulation “deprived kids of fruit and vegetables.”
My kid’s daycare served fresh fruits and vegetables and didn’t have a lot of sinks. Food was prepared by a food service company and delivered to the daycare each day. This allowed the facilities to have more space dedicated to playing and learning vs having a full kitchen. It meant the caregivers could watch the kids instead of food prepping.
So while I’m not in that jurisdiction, Im pretty sure no kids are being deprived of healthy food by that regulation.
I guess that makes me a “well, actually” guy but I just really dislike that kind of demagoguery and misrepresentation of policies. It just kind of reeks of “truthiness” in the sense that Mathew says above: it confirms a suspicion people have about regulations. But it’s just not actually true.
Would it be fair to say this congresswoman “opposed common sense regulations that kept kids safe from food poisoning?”
I’m curious if all daycares can afford to contract with food service companies. I’m guessing not by a long shot.
There’s such huge variability in day care quality, but I imagine it’s positively correlated with price when adjusted for metro area.
To a large extent, I’d guess, but one of my kids went to an in-home daycare that was amazing. Two others went to a wonderful little hippy preschool with lots of mud and rabbits and not so much cash. Funds definitely matter, but so do parent expectations and involvement (which is highly correlated with education and income, obvs).
This is a fair point, I presumed it was typical for larger daycares. Small, in-home daycares are regulated differently.
That said, I think my own lived experience with my kid’s bougie day care was, on second thought, not a great point to make.
More germane is that the regulation in question didn’t actually prevent daycares from serving fruits and vegetables nor was the regulation necessarily burdensome. It simply required separate sinks (or bowls in the same sink) for handwashing and food prep and a dishwasher or other method for sanitizing utensils.
Many households (most?) would have those things.
Matt handwaves the debunking article but that article was done with some actual journalism. The writer tracked down the regulation in question, got quotes from the department stating the law did not require “six sinks” or whatever Rep Glusenkamp-Perez claimed prevents the serving fresh foods, and she tried unsuccessfully to get Rep’s office to verify her claims.
I can see the point that even what’s in the reg might be overkill and subject to misinterpretation but that doesn’t mean we need to pretend that it was illegal to serve bananas in a daycare with out six sinks (which is what MGP claimed).
I’m for Dems doing what they need to do to get elected now, but I agree with you that it should not require them to actively mislead people.
“Nitpicky” regulations like this are tricky, though, because they always* have a sound intent, but can genuinely be meaninglessly annoying to some individuals.
Like the table saw regulation Robinson mentions in the Current Affairs article (which was a great counterpoint, btw, to this one). I can absolutely see how some small-time carpenters are like, I’m an expert, I’ve been using this saw for decades, and I know I risk cutting off my finger, but that’s a price I, personally, am willing to pay versus buying a new table saw. But the government says “you have no right to make that calculation for yourself.” This case very much differs from requiring business to purchase new saws because employees aren’t free to make the calculation for themselves. But the regulation seems to have applied to everyone - with the same great goal of saving people’s fingers, but by a means that has a different valence - and appropriateness - depending on individual circumstances. A long way of saying, regulations should be as carefully targeted as possible, and the people to whom they apply should be listened to.
*possibly almost always
“My kid’s daycare served fresh fruits and vegetables and didn’t have a lot of sinks. “
Sure, as long as you’re fine with driving up costs, go ahead and have everything and kitchen sink regulations. And then wonder why affordability is an issue.
Setting that part aside, the truth of the matter is that the regulation did not do what Rep Glusenkamp-Perez claimed.
Assuming outsourcing food prep is a substantial cost (idk if it is), the regulation here did not require multiple sinks to peel a banana or cut up an apple.
If you read the regulations, you need to interpret them very favorably to conclude that food service doesn’t require a food certified caregiver and sinks.
It requires sinks but not an extraordinary amount. A daycare should have a sink.
As MGP herself confirmed, the agency charged with enforcing the regulation did not interpret the rule as requiring multiple sinks. That was her interpretation and that of a single constituent.
And if the issue is that the rule is unclear and some day cares are serving potato chips instead of bananas because of it (itself a ludicrous false choice) then updating the regulation would be an efficient way of fixing the alleged problem.
Of course, addressing the issue that way doesn’t enable grandstanding on social media with exaggerations about how inefficient government regulations are while submitting a “Banana Bill” to the legislature.
No, it seems the democratic ideology was not to criticize bureaucrats or red tape
Didn’t Kamala come out against overregulation, just too little too late
In fairness, her candidacy started a little too late.
Also, why are we defending local level regulations? They're often written with less transparency and provide less of a paper trail then at the federal level, often by bureaucrats who are less skilled.
I believe these were federal regulations
No. It was a Washington state statute. If you’re talking about the daycare fruit/veg/sink reg.
My conclusion is that voters like competent and reliable service delivery and hate anything that they perceive to be interfering with it. Don't take away my private health insurance because it's perfectly effective for me, although too expensive. Don't lower bail requirements if it means I can't use the subway safely or have access to items on the shelves at my Rite Aid. Don't make my people in the EDD sit through anti-racism training programs when they should be processing my unemployment claim. Don't break up Amazon if it means my prices go up or my deliveries slow down. This is the triumph of the concrete over the abstract and the obvious over the unseen. Skilled politicians like MGP and Jared Golden know how to find and exploit these issues to advantage because they understand what voters prioritize. So does the in-state version of Bernie Sanders of Vermont. But too many Democrats at national level, and in many blue states, have lost this thread
My main issue with "leftwing economic populism" is that it's advocates generally advocate for income transfers to the college educated and interests of the college educated. It isn't about efficacy. Furthermore, "leftwing economic populism" is often intertwined with progressive goals of cultural transformation via "economic/racial/social/environmental justice", devaluing blue collar and resource extraction jobs, permissiveness on crime and social disorder, anti-theism, various forms of moral policing.
Precisely. As currently defined by many “left-wing populism” isn’t popular and is often indifferent to costs borne by the bottom 50% of the population. Climate change fees, increased regulation and licensing, increased “consultation” that delays permitting and construction, decaying infrastructure, increased taxes, indifference to inflation, etc. These are all real costs.
How are increased taxes on the very wealthy a cost to the bottom 50%? The transfer of wealth that I, as a moderate Dem and pragmatist, believe will be required to reset the U.S. to a stable, middle-class democracy, would be attained by taxing the wealthy directly to the benefit of the poor and working class. I’m not in the super wealthy category, but I’m comfortable and willing to be taxed more for the good of our nation as a whole.*
FWIW, I’ve lived in countries with extreme wealth inequality. It’s not fun even for the well off, unless you like barbed wire, guard dogs, private swat teams, and panic buttons.
*that said, I’m more of a direct-transfer than a govt-bureaucracy kind of girl
Making electricity and gasoline more expensive via taxes and scarcity has a direct impact on people. This is policy for many climate change progressives. I’m also skeptical that progressives are focused on reducing taxes. They rarely talk about it, because they need revenue for things like Medicare for All.
Carbon tax proposals that include structured rebates are progressive taxation -- high income households consume more energy and will pay more carbon tax, low income households will receive higher rebates.
I think it is because that by “very wealthy” Democrats usually mean people in the top 1-2% who are disproportionately local business owners, not the top 15-20% who are mostly college educated professionals.
They are very careful to exclude themselves from “The Rich.”
“The Rich” to Democrats is the uneducated millionaire who owns the local car dealership (like, ew) and not the local millionaire doctor and his doctor wife (cool, smart people).
I’ll never forget that “American Gentry” article in the Atlantic; as someone who grew up in a family that owned a local manufacturing company in Michigan it just gave me an absolutely visceral disgust for the “professional class left” - and I have two graduate degrees and a professional license.
My family worked hard and contributed enormously to our local community, both in job creation and anonymous donations, without fanfare or expectations in return. To get branded by some dilettante humanities professor as a socially toxic “gentry”, a problem that needs to be solved, really has made it impossible for me to vote Dem recently. I didn’t vote for Trump, but I really do not want to empower our Educated Betters to set the parameters of the discourse anymore.
You’re correct that many Dems underestimate the importance of the top 20% threshhold, and that their perspective can be biased by their membership in that category.
However, I don’t think the focus on the top 1-2% is necessarily a deliberate effort to direct attention away from themselves.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I think most Democrats are more interested in number threshholds rather than distinctions between millionaire car dealers and millionaire doctors (except to say that the car dealer is less likely to come to mind when people think of high earners). Economic left Democrats are not alone in seeing terms like “millionaire” and “billionaire” as some culturally meaningful threshhold. Even when people speak of the terms positively, as in “I want to be a millionaire,” they’re imagining a higher echelon in society where you can escape the burdens that most people have. Maybe that’s naïve, but it’s a very common idea of what “-aire” status is. The difference is that left wing populists are more likely to think of “-aire” status in terms of in terms of taxes owed.
Another idea that crossed my mind is that much of the Democratic coalition’s impression of “business owners” may be influenced by megacorporations more so than localized businesses.
Especially since the financial crisis and the big tech boom, we’ve heard a lot about the types of owners who have massive cultural power, lobby politicians, dump sludge in rivers, create addictive and toxic social media platforms, bust unions, etc. These owners are associated with the breakdown of community, especially on the left. Some of biggest targets of economic left zeitgeist are big tech CEOs. In a recent NYT interview with Mark Andreesen, he said that many of his left-wing employees wanted to radically reshape big tech companies from the inside because they believed that these companies were using their great powers irresponsibly.
On the other hand, in your orbit, many people see owners as closely linked with community. As a liberal Democrat myself, I think it would do us good to get more nuanced about these middle zones where you find people who are neither the poor nor the uber rich, and may be successful business owners without being the CEO of Walmart or Goldman Sachs.
To be fair, It could be that I’m too charitable to my own side here.
Yes a lot of what gets associated with the left these days has little to do with the traditional left. The Roosevelts should be our North Star
Maybe not Kermit...
This reads more like a grievance list against a caricature of the left
This to me is why I never intend to get into politics. I look at the opinions of voters and think it's an illogical mess. I DO want to tell lumber workers in Maine to embrace free trade because it's in their best interests! I'm running on this platform not because I'm a centrist shill, or any other dumb reason: I support it because it's good! I want to convince you that you're wrong, and you know what? Convincing someone that they're wrong is basically the most difficult thing to do in politics which is why we wind up just pandering, and I get it: meet people where they are not where you want them to be. But where the American voter is on the issues is dumb. The American voter wants:
-Lower taxes (except on the uber wealthy, and certain companies)
-Lower government spending overall
-But HIGHER government spending on certain social services, border security, and security in general
-So finance the lower overall government spending with cutting foreign aid
-Fix the climate issue without increasing spending
-Make the world safer, but without the US getting too involved
-Get rid of free trade, but ensure the US doesn't pay any economic price for it
This isn't a logical wishlist, it's a grab bag of contradictory hopes of baking your cake and eating it too. You simply cannot accomplish what the average American voter wants without either just giving up and doing nothing (which is why Republicans are happy) or trying to tell them they're wrong, in which case you're an egotistical elitist jerk.
And then the press digs into your personal life and hangs it out to dry for all to see. No thank you, I'll stay in the private sector.
I largely agree, but even within your listed examples, I think we can find disagreement among self-labeled pragmatists here in the SB comments. Let’s focus simply on “Fix the climate issue without increasing spending.”
Here, the IRA could be framed as accomplishing this because it roughly decreases the deficit over 10 years while primarily being a “fix climate issues” bill. We could easily get into a 100+ comment discussion about the fairness of that framing, and there certainly are nuances, including reconciliation budget math.
So instead, let’s imagine a hypothetical bill designed toward the aim of “Fix the climate issue without increasing spending.” Obviously, SB subscribers would focus on: a) deregulating land use and b) technological improvements. We could even structure this bill as revenue-raising if we add leasing federal land to solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and other non-carbon-emitting energy sources—accelerated by our deregulation. Add in natural gas as a carbon-decreasing alternative to coal, and we’re fixing climate change, lowering energy prices, and even raising federal revenue.
Yet what will ultimately matter is how voters receive both our proposed legislation and its ultimate impact. We could easily imagine such a bill being framed as “big government overreach” or a “sellout to massive corporations.” Maybe Joe Rogan is pissed that the pristine view from his hunting lands will now be sullied by power cables.
Hence, I think there is some “connecting to voters” angle that entails not just policy but also language choices, framing, and fighting for eyeballs in an ever more saturated media environment.
Well, everybody loves deregulating land use for other people, but when the field they played ball in as a kid turns into a natural gas storage facility, suddenly the principles change a bit.
Politicing to Americans is a tough game i'd probably lose- i can't really do the bullshit it'd require.
But is it really bullshit if we're practicing the popularism discipline of talking about what voters like about our policies and accomplishments? Not everything needs a fair and balanced treatment. Particularly when voters have such limited attention. We could always refer them to a 172-page analysis by Brookings, but we'll be lucky if we capture 30 seconds in their TikTok or Instagram Reels feeds. For that brief glimpse of their eyeballs, we should use it productively.
Moreover, this will increasingly entail truly personalized media with AI generated content (and ads) created for each individual digital media consumer, aligned with their interest at that moment in time. See Meta's Oc 2023 announcement of "Generative AI features for ads coming to all advertisers", https://www.facebook.com/business/news/generative-ai-features-for-ads-coming-to-all-advertisers . There's probably something newer, and less publicized, from Meta and all other tech-enabled digital media platforms.
Oh goody! 😢
The thing I’m starting to wonder about is ads designed to trick Gemini/ChatGPT/whatever into doing certain things supposedly on behalf of their client. Make your site look useful to a robot and the robot who’s trying to be helpful will serve it to the human. No need to make the ad look good to a human directly.
Isn't that why land use deregulation needs to happen at a higher level state or federal
That way, the benefits are broad based and harms are narrow
States are too big and municipalities too small. We don't have a effective way to govern "metro areas" in the US. In some places regional bodies (like transit authorities) or county governments address this gap, but we don't have a great answer. Municipal annexation is probably the easy way to go, but you also have a problem of what power the municipality has. It probably needs more delegation from the state if it really is operating as a regional body, a mini city-state within the republic.
It'd have to be state, and i don't think that solves it, unless it can be done in secret or something, because stripping zoning/land use authority from localities would likely be incredibly unpopular at a visceral level.
The fundamental problem is that localities aren't really responsive to people who could be there but aren't because of land use policy- it's a very difficult problem to manage in delegated governance.
It seems like an intractable problem. To me, it’s obvious that the best way to divide government responsibilities that really make sense are metro areas, rural areas, small towns within rural areas, and the federal level, where metro areas and large swaths of rural area are state-equivalents.
I’d love to see something in the federal constitution that said something like “when a built-up area (as defined by algorithm) reaches X population it becomes its own state.” In the constitution it would be insulated from change the first time a city didn’t like what was happening.
Problem is, it would incentivize exurban development with wide greenbelts for people wanting greater autonomy. So you’d want the system to be flexible and nimble so that you could iterate and tweak the parameters to prevent manipulation of the system, within reason (get far enough out and your exurban development is really a greenfield city!) I think it would be a stroke of dumb luck if we were able to get the parameters close to right the first try.
But the need to iterate is in profound tension with the absolute need to shelter the rule from public accountability, because it pisses people off to be annexed against their will. You need to make it so their only option is to move a ridiculous commute out or leave the area if they don’t want to be part of the city.
Being from Memphis, a metro area with profound racial and economic disparities that is handicapped by being right across two state borders, and now living in Seattle, blessed to be far from all state borders, really helps illuminate this topic for me.
Washington state did it - outlawed sf zoning. Everyone has to comply.
I like solutions like this because they can technically be described as *not* stripping zoning authority from municipalities. The municipalities still get to have a zoning board. It's just that state law now gives them a specific menu of options when they choose zoning categories. There are ways to do this that fall short of outlawing SFH zoning in its entirety. For example, you could continue to allow SFH zoning, but say SFH zoning now by definition does not include lot size minimums, or does not exclude rowhomes, or whatever. State legislation could things like this in a very dry, minutiae-oriented way that makes it harder for NIMBYs to mobilize opposition.
And Mayor Harrell has been chipping and chipping away at that to make it less effective! Ugh. I wish that we Seattle voters weren’t cross-pressured between public safety and YIMBY so much. (Not that we haven’t done quite a lot of YIMBY already, but I’m pissed my neighborhood is unaffected by the upzone)
This is great.
I think if we’re going to do worthwhile things with government then we have to prove that we *can* do worthwhile things with government and that’s going to mean challenging people who are seen as allies. I frankly wonder if Democrats have the stomach for it.
What Trump is doing in terms of just shutting down agencies is dumb, but I see a story like this:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-s-75-billion-investment-in-ev-charging-has-only-produced-7-stations-in-two-years/ar-BB1kI8y7
I gave you 7.5 billion dollars and you gave me 7 chargers in two years?? Does everyone here feel like they’re doing good work? Because I feel like some people want to build things and some people don’t, and we need to go in, find the people who don’t and help them find another way to make a living.
Democrats talk about “reforming” these institutions and I know they’ll spend a year producing a report and maybe they’ll find a way to get me 30 charging stations the year after that.
I’m just going to go ahead and unleash the relatively conservative (for here) jerk who compares government to the private sector, apologies in advance.
If you have the will and want to do it, if you ignore the committees and “allies”, there are people who can go into these organizations, clear roadblocks and improve things in a matter of weeks. I promise it’s true. Fire some deadweight (and everyone in the organization knows who they are), put everyone else on notice: there are people who want to build things and people who don’t, and going forward the people who want to build things are the people who will remain here.
And speaking of populism, I want to come in like Huey Long stand-in Willie Stark from All The King’s Men, “hand me that meat-axe!” What Trump is doing is just stupid and harmful, but someone really does need to go in and clean house to some extent, and not spend a year or two doing it. As awful as it may seem, it happens out here in the private sector every day and if people can’t find a job in a full employment economy then I don’t know what to tell you.
Yeah, the original story I saw was in the WP. I just think that even the originally proposed timing seems very slow for this kind of work.
Oh snap. For others, I mistook Randall's point as being about money being wasted instead of about delays in implementation. I realized my mistake and added a correction to my comment. Then I deleted it. Sorry for the confusion.
Anyhow, I totally agree about the delays. A lot of the potential benefit of the IRA was lost because dems had to be clever and create rube Goldberg machines to disburse the funds.
I was waiting for my state to deploy IRA's heat pump rebates that would have covered 50-100% of the cost up to $8k. Now it's unlikely to ever happen. If they had just increased the cap on the 30% federal tax credit to maybe $5k or $10k, I would have done the project back in 2022.
I think the using conservative values to sell liberal policies is about as close to a cheat code as there is. Obama and Clinton were both very good at it. The trick is to get through the primary.
True my point though was that politics is rarely about actually addressing issues but instead it’s about pandering to voters to gain power. Then you can do stuff with that but it generally angers people then you lose it, and instead of running on what you believe you run on what the voters think they want.
It’s just a very frustrating game, and frequently even if you succeed you get punished for things outside of your control. I think most of Biden’s unpopularity stems from stuff he couldn’t control, is that fair? Sure because that’s true of everyone, but it’s left us far worse off.
That assumes that there are no positions that are both the correct ones and popular.I don't think that's true.
There are some positions that are both popular and legitimately useful. But there are a lot which are one or the other
This is a fantastic point, and expresses the limits of climate change as a moral crusade we must all sacrifice for. There are options that do not require sacrifice.
Unfortunately those are rejected by voters too as we’re seeing in Canada where politicians cannot run fast enough away from the revenue neutral consumer carbon tax. The cheapest most nudgiest of nudges to decarbonize economies.
It actually engenders some sympathy for politicians from me.
Revenue neutral taxes still require some sacrifice from someone. This is something that economist man fails to comprehend.
Can you say more? There are winners and losers for every policy but this one was designed such that most people ended up with more money rather than less.
I suspect that the voters didn't believe that this would be the case here. Something similar happened in Washington state.
Yeah this is literally no.1 reason I try not to get too involved in the politics (and struggle to do so lol) tbh
If I intentionally choose a very harsh word, voters on average are selfish and dumb ppl who are convinced that they are the other way around.
In a sense, I really admire politicians bc the skills required here is a lot - be cool headed and strategic about the political goal while dancing around not to alienate voters (plus these days, you also have to disseminate the data to pick the right mix of policy to push while deprioritizing others I think).
This is a LOT and this leads to a very unpopular opinion that we should raise the salary of politicians (and congress staffs tbh) to attract ppl with those skills instead of attention seeking clowns (on the right) or numerically illiterate ideologues(on the left)
IDK. This reads like a very abstracted wish list combining the worst elements of both parties into a single row. Just take climate change ... We have one party that wants to fix climate change and is willing to spend to fix it (e.g., BBB) and the other party that doesn't want to fix it at all. Neither party has a position of "Fix the climate issue without increasing spending".
Ezra's last pod was awesome. The guest made the point that the big problem with our current party structure is BOTH parties are minority parties. That's very rare historically and one of them will figure out the coalition to break > 60%. Personally, I think Polis is showing us the way with a new fight for tax cuts because if if if Democrats can figure out a way to take the fiscal responsibility high ground (NOTE: which is deserved because all the GOP does is increase our debt levels every chance they get) ... then I think it's a race a super-majority.
I think the more salient point there is that it’s unnatural for any faction to get to 60% popularity and that coalition will have massive contradictions. Trump’s coalition has plenty and it isn’t even 50% of the voting public.
That's actually the opposite historically, per Ezra and this guest. The norm is for oscillating waves of party super-majorities.
Except those parties were never uniform they were themselves coalitions
Yes. But I don't understand the very narrow point you're trying to make. The fact is we've had long periods for both parties with super-majorities and that will return. Our current state structure is the exception.
I think the current state structure might be less an aberration and more the inevitable result of changing communication and social dynamics.
Take the 1930s and the New Deal coalition. It was made up of liberals and conservatives. Liberals who wanted to expand the government and make the country more equal and conservatives who voted for it so they could reap the rewards using their political power (seniority). The coalition itself was quite heterodox. FDR got 60% but it wasn’t because he found a magic formula, it was horse trading.
For me: I am not against horse trading but I do find it tasteless that convincing people is less important than pandering.
indeed. i often think of this simpsons scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGsHq-mZI8U
+eleventy gigazillion to all this.
Benjamin, you sound like my kind of person! There’s a reason why I’ll never go into politics (also, I’m an introverted nerd).
The message is secondary to the messenger. Democrats need to do a better job of selecting candidates who aren't off-putting to the working class and populace in general.
Harris tried to do working class populism, but lets face it... she was never believable. Ironically Fetterman who was a trust fund baby is believable (its the hoodies).
Find candidates who were enlisted in the military, that are from working class backgrounds, guys or girls without a college degree (or who paid for it themselves).
Be likeable or at least respectable.
This is antithetical to Yglesias thought. But, it's not wrong.
Even more than working class chops or whatever, I think plain charisma has somehow become underrated.
For sure... 100%.
Agree 100%. The message is important but the messenger is even moreso. People may not trust a party or a message, but they will trust a person.
There's no magic bullet: Manchin, Tester, and Brown all eventually hit the limit. But they were able to somewhat carve out a local brand apart from the national brand.
For Democrats especially, they need candidates who you can picture hanging out at your BBQ or watching a game with at a bar.
There's a Senate race in Idaho next year. I know you're not a Democrat per se but I'd still vote for you if I lived in Idaho and you ran an Osborn-style independent candidacy,
Look to Washington 3's Gluesenkamp Perez as someone who is practical. Don't agree with her position on guns, but able to win in a solidly Republican district.
No Democrat has credibility on guns unless they are simultaneously tough on crime as far as the general public goes.
Reasoning.... 100s of millions of guns in country, very few used in crimes. So you can't say... lets crack down on guns while simultaneously advocating for light sentences for criminals who use guns in crimes.
Now a candidate who is hard as nails on crime... and other social issues would be able to effectively make inroads on gun control... especially background checks.
Especially since one of the most bang for your buck ways to be tough on crime is to use pretext stops to search people for illegal weapons and actually prosecute it.
Her position on guns is one of the reasons she can win in a republican district
Rory, I like you and I like how you bring a more working-class outlook to the SB commentariat, which is full of privileged, highly educated upper-middle-class professionals.
So please forgive me, but I just couldn't resist:
"Find candidates who were enlisted in the military"
Like Trump, who dodged the draft on (bone) spurious pretext and bragged about how "Avoiding STIs was my Vietnam."
"that are from working class backgrounds"
Like Mr. New York Real Estate Developer whose daddy gifted him a half a million bucks and who never did a blue-collar job in his life.
"guys or girls without a college degree (or who paid for it themselves)"
Like Mr. "I was the smartest at Wharton." Did he pay for it himself or did daddy pay for it? I sincerely don't know.
"Be likeable"
Typical Trump Xeet: "Happy holidays to everyone including the ANTI-AMERICAN SCUM AND VERMIN who spread VICIOUS LIES ABOUT ME it's SO UNFAIR just WAIT UNTIL I'M REELECTED you'll GET YOURS"
"or at least respectable."
I... just... with Trump, where do I even start? Ughhh... I give up. 😵💫
The enlisted in the military was just one example of somthing that provides street cred... a former welder or some dude who worked in the factory would do the same thing.
Trump derives his street cred from his dumbed down speech and by railing against media and institutions. Its lame, but it is what it is.
Good point, although re: military service, this seems to be kind of evenly matched between the parties? I don't know the exact numbers, but it's not like only Republicans run veterans for public office. Both Vance and Walz have served in the military.
On that topic, Admiral McRaven for POTUS: Bad idea or so-crazy-it-might-work idea?
Personally I hate Generals. Admiral McRaven though has special operations credibility. Being Chancellor of a University is an against (just another academic). I'm just not sure he has that relatable trait.
University chancellor isn’t really academic, just one of those grifty positions important people get to cash in on
Perception is everything. He has an academic position... he talks like an academic. It is the University of Texas though which is a whole lot better than University of California as far as perception.
We have to be something other than Trump haters. Yes he’s awful, but we have to. We have to get better at winning elections and I never got better at anything by pointing out how awful someone else is. We should have been having these conversations after 2016, but we didn’t and that’s part of how we got here.
"We have to be something other than Trump haters."
I absolutely agree, 100%! I want to be for something, not just against Trump! I'm pretty much for the Common Sense Democratic Platform (let's not call it a Manifesto, that's pinko commie) with some small tweaks. I think that would be good for America!
Just, every single goddamn time I see "Democrats would win if they were more xyz," I think "but Trump won by being the 180-degree opposite of xyz" and I'm like #MakeItMakeSense
Yeah, I know it seems unfair but Trump is sui generis and we don’t get to use his methods. We claim to be the adults. If either one of these parties could figure out how to be normal, they’d run the table. Though I think Ben cited some good examples of candidates who pulled it off and it’s worthwhile to analyze their approach.
The Democrats handed the nomination to Biden as a reaction to a Sanders nomination. Well to me that is not very friendly to the rank and file Democrats. No primary in 24, so what has changed? Schumer is still Minority Leader and the plan is to watch Trump and the Republican majority crumble. Not much of a plan.
Also... I don't necessarily associate the commentariat with upper middle class as much as I as people with a certain personality that craves to discuss things that the majority of people just find dreary... also ADHD. Everyone has to be ADHD right?
Yes Trump is a notoriously bad candidate who performs below fundamentals. Maybe the democrats should strive to do better than that?
*half a billion*
You need both. good message and believable messengers.
If you have a good speaker, repeating the same tired, old far.Left nonsense.They're not gonna get anywhere
I still say Mark Kelly is underrated
>But it’s worth asking if the lawyer and two-term Senator from Connecticut has the profile to authentically deploy the populist message that can win back the working-class.<
I can answer that. He doesn't. LOL. If we're going to go with a New Englander, I'd strongly prefer Jared Golden over Murphy.
Some of this just comes down to judgment, and political smarts. It's great to get people worked up about "fighting corporate power." But casting it in concrete terms—"The greedy bastards at John Deere don't want you to be able to repair your own tractor and that's not fair!"—seems cleverer. (Like Golden, MGP is a big time political talent.)
Great piece, Ben.
The ironic thing is that Murphy *is* very well suited to be the Senator from Connecticut, and has actually done some good things in office, like the immigration deal that Trump blew up. He's also one of Congress's better communicators on social media and is generally good at being a standard white-collar Democrat without veering off into weird culture war stuff. Instead of searching for a new persona, he should stick to his old one (and never think about running for President).
Yep. I don't dislike Murphy in the least. I just don't think he reads SlowBoring enough. lol. Every time I read something he's said I quiver in fear at the prospect he could become the nominee. Who knows what'll transpire in 2028? And in fairness, conditions could be super optimal for Democrats. So a less-than-optimal nominee could win. But you always want to put your best foot forward, and downticket races are a critical consideration, as well.
Nice piece Ben, thank you.
I believe—and cannot for the life of me dredge up the political science papers I vaguely remember to support it—that a key challenge here is that *modern democracy doesn't fit our minds*.
Our minds evolved to maintain social bonds among a few dozen of our tribe-mates, whose perspective on the world overlapped with ours almost perfectly. Projecting our own perspective onto others is accurate and effective.
Modern democracy requires joining a faction orders of magnitude larger than the largest group our ancestors would have seen, and then passively watching our faction manage coalition dynamics with other factions whose members' perspective on the world is wildly different from ours. Projecting our own perspective onto them no longer works. Think of an evangelical retiree and a Musk/crypto acolyte in Trump's coalition, or a Nevada hotel industry union official, a Queer humanities grad student, and an employment-side labor attorney in the Dems'.
Bernie believers get that big insight very right and very wrong at the same time. They get the *importance* of sharing the perspective of the common person right, while (as you lay out precisely in this column) getting the substance of that perspective wrong precisely because they protect their own identity by projecting their leftism onto the common person. They also refuse to accept the need to integrate non-populist perspectives into their coalition (or, per Matt's regular comments on post-2016 Bernie, by mistaking the identity-centering Groups for actual electoral factions).
Keep up the good work!
yeah I remember reading some article by some Japanese researcher that the number of people an average person can empthasize/relate is 150 or so (aka a comfortable social circle size of an average person)?
And it also depends on the number of wrinkles on cerebral cortex accodrding to him - which I think is correlated w the fact that highly educated ppl tend to be more cosmopolitan
It's often called Dunbar's number, after psychologist Robin Dunbar, who hypothesized that primates of the same brain size as humans would have social groups of about 150 individuals. He found support for this in the size of hunter-gatherer communities.
In this essay, Dunbar discusses the theory and some critiques of it. https://theconversation.com/dunbars-number-why-my-theory-that-humans-can-only-maintain-150-friendships-has-withstood-30-years-of-scrutiny-160676
Ok, but what’s the solution then? We’re not going to break up the US into three million independent hunter-gatherer bands.
Two things can be true: you are right that we need solutions, and I am right that we won’t get them if we mid frame the problem. More on my hypothetical solutions if I get a chance
No. You just manage society in a way that focus on the building and maintenance of shared infrastructure and broadly supported institutions, including a reasonable transfer of wealth for shared purposes, and leaves people’s lifestyles and both their chosen and natural bonds alone.
Democrats REALLY need to get away from this earnest, millennial undergraduate mindset that it is their job to “change the world.” The Democrats have far too many elite educated narcissists who can’t conceive of doing anything that doesn’t involving imposing their ideological pets on people, usually with the help of their favorite non-profits and NGOs.
But ordinary people don’t want their lives “transformed;” they just want their home insurance to be affordable again and their kids to not learn about sex changes at school.
It’s not hard, Democrats.
Ok but that's Sam Penrose's point: "just implement commonsense solutions, dumbass" is easy to say when you're in a band of ~100 people and pretty much everyone agrees on what "commonsense solutions" are; it becomes much harder when you're trying to scale up to a nation of 300 million people with different values and priorities.
Let's break down your comment a bit. "Focus on building shared infrastructure" - libertarians aren't down with that, and many people who support "infrastructure" really support "infrastructure for me and people like me, not for those other people over there." Witness the perennial bitching from some (certainly not all!) childless people about "why do I gotta pay taxes to support public schools, I don't have any children in school."
"A reasonable transfer of wealth" - boy howdy, is that word "reasonable" doing a ton of heavy lifting! What is reasonable? What you, I, Elon Musk, and a card-carrying Communist think is "reasonable" will differ by orders of magnitude. It's not like "agreeing on a reasonable transfer of wealth is super easy, barely an inconvenience!"
"Leave people's lifestyles... alone" ok, what if my lifestyle imposes severe negative externalities on you? What if I'm your next-door neighbor and I like to hold really noisy parties right outside your bedroom window late into the night? And when you object I tell you to leave my lifestyle the f alone!
You don't have to invoke some caricature of a holier-than-thou Democratic do-gooder who's bossily trying to impose their lifestyle on everyone else to recognize that coordinating and coming to an agreement in a society of hundreds of millions is hella hard, and that's what Sam was getting at with his comment.
Isn't it a bit early to conclude that DOGE doesn't contribute to Musk's unpopularity? The wrecking ball has only been out for what, two weeks?
Definitely true. I think even though public opinion is generally on Trump's side for things like cutting foreign aid, sentiment will shift when people fully grasp the concrete impacts and how much it's hurting the extreme poor.
The Musk poll just shows that people's top concerns when they hear about cutting spending is whether it'll impact their government benefits.
I don't think that sentiment will shift on DOGE cutting foreign aid.
I think the biggest risk factor for cutting USAID for Republicans is that fundamentally it's just not a big part of the federal budget. They've been able to very constructively exploit people's fuzziness in thinking about large numbers, where tens or hundreds of millions of dollars "feels like a big number." But at the end of the day if they full close USAID it won't lower people's taxes much, and then where do they go for "we can make cuts that are painless to you"?
Magically a lot of USAID is buying grain from US farmers. Who knew that? People are going to learn a lot about specifics on all kinds of topics because of secondary effects. And it will get through the media screening. And then it will transform into some aid is good. And then their magic blanket statements will be all kinds of messy caveat filled messages.
Along the same lines - Look for great stories about NRCS causing farmers to go under.
I've been listening to Ray Dalio's press tour for his new book. IMO -- it's a bit too doomer given the strength of the US economy vs. global markets right now but his main points are (1) Fed expenditures are up over $2T vs. 2020, (2) our debt to GDP is tracking back to break above 1, and (3) our interest expense to GDP is now above 3% which is a historic pressure point.
With this context we probably need to cut $1T. I think that's a reasonable target. The USAID budget is $40B. Gotta start somewhere.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYGFGDQ188S
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=iEiV
I'm sorry, but starting with USAID is like the CEO who is the highest paid person in the company not getting their normal bonus cause its a down year and their first spending cuts are to not participate in the company sponsored food drive.
You can make the claim that you can't afford it anymore, but everyone you tell that to is just going to walk away thinking you're a tool, and they'll be correct.
Sure but so where would you start if you were them? Medicaid cuts? We're in week 2. Musk believes the US is facing an existential debt crisis. He's wrong but he's also been given who knows what power to implement his vision.
EDIT: I thought the whole DOGE thing was going to be a huge joke but it's now clear only the courts will be able to constrain their actions. There's no one inside the Trump administration running with them..
Where would I start?
Politically feasible:
1) Stop most of the tax cuts that Republicans keep pushing.
2) Drop most of the subsidies that Biden just pushed into the IRA.
Realistically, it all comes down to increasing taxes a bit, and finding ways to constrain spending by mandatory programs. That means figuring out how to slow SS and Medicare spending, the exact programs that are the hardest to touch politically. My personal ideas there are
1) SS to switch from wage adjustments to price adjustments, increase the age limits by up to 64/69 instead of 62/67, reduce benefits for high income earners.
2) Medicare - institute a cap on medicare spending and focus spending on his efficiency (QALY) as opposed to low efficiency spending.
One of Trumps tactics is to maintain an arm's length separation from people on his team. That way he can later either claim credit, or toss them under the bus.
Sure. And then the other 96% of the cut is... where?
Like, look, there are good and bad programs in USAID, I'm definitely open to the argument that there are more bad than good and I genuinely don't think that if USAID is just 100% closed that it will be all that huge a deal. But if you're looking to cut $1T, you've done less than 1/20th of the work there.
My point is that there aren't another $960B in cuts that the Republicans can make that will be as popular/non-painful for their voters as USAID. As long as a few fairly minor parts of the budget exist as boogeymen, they can make a lot of political hay about pointing at $50M here, $500M there, and sure, $40B altogether. You can focus way more than 4% of the attention on 4% of your cuts. But once that's gone, what do you do next?
Right. I think that's why they're starting there. These are easy and probably popular cuts. I'm sure Medicaid is next. Then a roll back of Biden's SNAP expansion. They seem very focused on breaking all leases and selling buildings. It'll keep going. My wish would be there's a path to some bipartisan solutions (e.g., 20 year phase in to raise SS age) but Trump is Trump and he's an idiot and unable to drive any legislation.
EDIT: This last part will help us. Ezra was on fire on the Bulwark pod about how the Trump administration is actually working against Congress right now. He had a bunch of examples so that's probably the only limiting factor to how much damage they can cause.
Isn’t the shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. the reason PEPFAR is down now? I don’t think killing a few million people in Africa is a good way to save a few bucks.
Everyone seems to agree that PEPFAR is the best program in USAID and I see no reason to doubt them. Clearly, on some level, we'd like to remove the bad programs and save the good programs.
But... I'm not sure I think that "prune out the bad programs" has a terribly strong track record. I understand why you might say, "Look, the system defends itself by making it illegible what's good and what's bad, by intertwining the bad with the good, etc." DOGE's mandate seems to be hatchetwork, and there is at least potentially a time and a place for hatchetwork.
My point though is whether you think this hatchetwork is the right decision or not, just tactically there is value to the Republicans in having a sort of generally unpopular category of spending around to point at as an example of what you're against, and to allow people to imagine is a more significant amount of spending than it is, and there is NOT much value to actually cutting this spending, in as much as it's a very small chunk of any savings that you might reasonably achieve.
Why not raise taxes by $1trillion? The deficit is caused by tax cuts, not spending.
We certainly can and hopefully will in 2028. I don’t think Trump is going to do that and I think Trump is probably going to further increase our deficit because the GOP is generally way more fiscally irresponsible. But just on which side is driving the current deficit … it’s all spending. Biden didn’t cut any taxes and our federal spending has increased by 40% vs. pre-COVID. This isn’t all on Biden. A large chuck of that was the wave 1 COVID stimulus and then inflation. My read though is we need to cut about $1T to minimize the debt risk.
Medicaid. Or so they think.
Much greater risk of blowback compared to USAID.
Definitely vs. USAID but still probably not much. A majority of Republican voters view Medicaid as a welfare program. It's not and they're wrong but that's how they would sell it.
I was assuming the biggest political blowback would come from the healthcare industry, but maybe that's not how it'd work.
If 10% of Republicans shift, that's the Presidency and a Senate majority for the Democrats. If 20% of Republicans shift, that's a filibuster-proof majority.
Like, not that I think that that much of a shift will happen, but whether "a majority" of Republicans care about Medicaid isn't the issue.
If Medicaid is not a welfare program, what about it draws a distinction?
I'd be really surprised. Not because I don't wish it wasn't the case but because I don't think the majority of the US even cares about the 10-15% of the US living in extreme poverty. On an issue list I'd be shocked if foreign aid cracks the top 50 issues. Add on top of the that the drip drip drip of legitimately stupid projects and there's just no chance this gets any traction.
And that 10-15% of the country is moving toward the people who don’t want to help them, because liberals have expressed such contempt for them.
My own mother brought up again the “ugh, Trump is the guy who openly says he loves uneducated people” (picture her sneering). I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this, it’s another instance where Trump ends up owning the libs because of the way they react to him.
That 10-15%? Guess what, they’re uneducated. Over 60% of the country lacks a college degree and, given the cost of college, that number is probably going up. If, as a Democratic politician, you don’t at least *like* the uneducated then you should find another line of work. You can’t be the party that claims to want to improve their lives while being so openly contemptuous.
Someone needs to stop reading the room and *lead* this group, bring them back to old school liberalism that is about helping the least among us. Contempt for Americans comes off of us in waves; everyone can see us having a conversation about how to win over “these morons” instead of having conversations about how to create improvements in their lives. All of the lurkers in the country, who never comment, can see us.
I agree with your comment, but the percentage of people with a college degree is going to continue to increase for the time being due to older generations dying off. The percentage of 18-25s enrolled/graduated might drop from poor ROI for the marginal student, but that will take a long time to swamp the death of the less educated generations.
The problem is that the utility of “left-right” political spectrum is dead as hell and we keep using it anyway. (I suppose we would not know what else to say.) Thanks for pointing out some of its limitations.
People on the so-called-right have actually been living in that reality for a decade, we are welcome to join them whenever…
I hate to say it (find myself saying *that* a lot lately), but some Democrat/s are going to have to come in and pull a (hopefully slightly nicer) Trump: point at the other long term Democrats and say “these people are not effective and we have to do something else now”. I’d clean up government agencies that are going to build things or provide services, overtly return to a colorblind politics, which is where you’ll still find most normal people.
More of this, but on a bigger scale:
https://www.theprogressnews.com/news/state/license-processing-times-cut-for-hair-salons-barbershops-and-health-care-professionals/article_c281060c-866e-11ef-a885-f3d456409c14.html
If we want to convince people that government needs to do big things, we have to convince them that it can and then follow through. If we really are the party of smart people and The Experts, we need to stop saying it and damn well prove it.
The GAL-TAN scale is marginally better but runs together liberal attitudes on abortion, gay issues etc (which I personally share) with permissive attitudes on crime and border control (which I absolutely do not share). I’d say there is at least three dimensions (economic left vs right, social liberalism vs conservatism, state authority vs anarchy).
No, I don’t think so. People on the right still want to cut their taxes while punishing the poor and foreigners. Seems consistent.
Left economic populism needs to be combined with centrist-right positions on immigration and cultural issues.
Needless to say, this produces shrieks of horror.
I think there is a real underestimation on the left of how viscerally many Americans want the “trans” issue to go away. At this point they just associate the entire movement with violation of some of their deepest held realities, including their loss of trust in their local schools and pediatricians.
I don’t know if the left really realizes how desperately people, especially parents, want this issue to just vanish from the earth so we can feel trust and normalcy in our community institutions again.
If it had just been about being kind to adults with Gender Dysphoria and giving them reasonable accommodations under ADA it would have been fine.
But instead The Groups declared war on the very shared reality of ordinary, middle class Americans in a really violating, personal way that threatened our children, our job security, and divided our communities. A lot of people aren’t going to forgive that for a long time.
It's amazing how often common sense produces these "shrieks of horror"
Witness the attempts to charge people to use the overcrowded streets of Manhattan! Just common sense, but shriek after shriek after shriek from Cuomo and Hochul and Trump trying to be the one to block common sense.
Good points.
We believe that the discussion could benefit from being held at deeper psychological realities than we usually see.
Case in point. What if all of these different campaigns were ranked on the psychological variable of "ease of psychological change?"
How much of the Republican wins were because people, instead of not approving, for example, of trans issues, were actually seeing those issues as "too much change in too little time."
How much of peoples anti-immigration stances are because the change was too fast for them to psychologically process?
Look at gay marriage. The issue is still there, but in highly muted form. People have gradually gotten used to it so it carries little psychological weight.
We know that people adapt to change at different rates. What are the "adaptation rates" for Republicans versus Democrats versus Progressives?
There are other, deep, psychological dimensions that we rarely see discussed as being fundamental to what people are reacting to. When asked, they may say things like "immigration," or "the economy," or "men playing in women's sports." But people don't even know how to put some of those psychological dimensions into words.
So, are we dealing mostly with surface issues, but not the ones that really drive and matter to people...issues that arose from millions of years of survival of the fittest.
As much as I’d love to focus on political platforms and policy to win elections in this fraught moment, it all seems a little cute and precious right now.
To be blunt, the country is under attack and on fire. Trump’s FEC commissioners, once he finishes his illegal purge of the organization, are likely going to define “free and fair” elections exclusively as ones Democrats lose. Whether or not they follow prudent, moderate, district-specific messaging or not.
More pertinently, you can message prudently and moderately all you want—very little of that is likely going to resonate in 2026, an era of smartphones, AI propaganda, social media, and viral, Internet-addicted rage, especially if Mark Zuckerberg has in fact come to the same conclusion as Musk that Democrats are a dire threat to his precious bodily fluids.
Democrats, if they are to survive and save democracy, are going to have to take those things into account, far more than “moderate messaging” and their platforms.
The focus on that, rather than connection, outrage, and *emotional valence* of the message, is what one does when one is android-brained and trying to make sense of the situation from New York, DC, or some similar city far removed from reality on the ground.
Excellent points, and ones I would like to see discussed a lot more on SB!
We need firm but loving "parents" as opposed to the abusive ones we have now.
This makes me think of the distinction in parenting between being permissive (the cultural left), authoritarian (MAGA) and an authority (the sane center-left/right). The former two are bad and the last one is good, in politics as in child rearing.
If the Dan Osborn thing stands for anything it's that "left wing" and "populism" are highly separable ideas, but also that the "populist" piece is almost antithetical to any association with the pro-system aesthetics of the Democratic Party.
How do you make "independence from the party" the ethos of the party itself? It's a riddle.
Well, Trump pulled it off. And the Republicans fell in line. They're spineless and unprincipled, but they at least understood early enough that the popular tide was shifting towards Trump, and they went with it.
There's lots of reasons for this. Ironically, if the Republicans were a stronger party, they would've never let Trump get as far as he did in the 2016 primary.
The Democrats, by contrast, have much stronger resistance to upstarts like Trump (or AOC for that matter), keeping power in a relatively closed off circle. But it's clear now that it's preventing necessary reform. Pelosi and Schumer have had their time, but it's inarguable at this point that they're doing their party and the American people harm by refusing to let go of their hold on power. Schumer is a terrible messenger concerning the responsibility of the opposition parry to push back on what's currently happening, and Pelosi has been essentially absent since her book came out, and content to just cash in on the stock market. Her replacement in Jeffries has been totally unimpressive and uninspiring.
We haven't seen any real awakening to the new reality from the Democrats. Beyond a week or so of election post-mortem, no real changes have been made, no new voices are really standing out and standing up for the separation of powers, and actually exerting their authority as members of Congress. The party clearly needs to change, and that change has to come from within, or else they're at risk for becoming irrelevant. They already are seemingly irrelevant, if we're being honest. There is no unified vision, and no real leadership or charisma. We'll have to see what they do when the Republicans actually begin trying to get their tax cut through.
Pelosi was the #1 reason Biden got pushed out. I still want her around
Eh, I think praising any Democrats decision making this election cycle is dubious.
It's telling that, while she's all but made it blatantly clear that she's the reason we got Harris instead of Biden, her refusal to publically come out against his running again and then only act behind closed doors after it was too late, saddling Democrats with a weak candidate, proves that she's a poor steward of the party at this point.
I respect her effectiveness as speaker and admire her political skill, but her actions only contributed to the distrust Americans have towards the Democratic party. There's a reason she was a favorite punching-bag of Trump in his first term. Her name is mud in middle-America, and synonymous with disconnected elitism. The party needs to shed her if they want to shed their toxic branding.
Maybe the Democrats should decide what they stand for, rather than trying to dash back and forth seeking something, anything, that will keep them in power from moment to moment.
If the Dems believe in left wing populism, fine. Be that party.
But if they don't it's going to be obvious, and it's going to be another disaster for them.
Trump took Medicare and SS away from Democrats as political issues, and woke identity politics and infinite bureaucracy are so unpopular that Democrats don't have much remaining to stand on.
It may be helpful to take a step back and think about how people that you disagree with are human beings who also have brains. Do democrats wake up each morning and think "I want more bueracrats for no reason"? Obviously not.
Instead the most common reason is that there are places where privatization delivers good results but there are many other places where you need a model that can think of the public good and managing negative externalities. Those are two things that the "maximize shareholder value" brand of business can't do, so there are some things the government needs to do and if the government needs to do them you need rules and staffing for them. More than that, you need good rules, even people who trust the government more than you do would agree that if a law prevents a child from being fed a healthy meal that it is a bad law.
No, my local Democrats wake up and say "let's close the Greenway because we can't keep the public safe from addicts and vagrants while our mayor tells people to get a reverse mortgage to afford tax increases" (this actually happened this year).
Ugh
But many of them do wake up and ask, how can we make public unions happy
And often that's just bad policy
Yeah I think the summary of the post-election left-wing discourse is “what should we say to get these morons to vote for us?”
Like, even if the answer is “be super-Peronist,” will the Dems just do that even if it’s a bad idea? Who would vote for people like that?
Off-topic, but I find it darkly funny that when I go to the SB main page, under "Most popular" I see the headline: "Why Are Young Liberals So Depressed?" And these days I can point at pretty much any random headline on current events and say "That's why!" (I'm not a *young* liberal anymore, but the point remains.)
I agree with all of this and I’m as contrarian as the day is long. I feel like the last liberal who is a fan of “just asking questions”, and playing devil’s advocate. Ideas are supposed to be critiqued, picked at and ultimately refined.
Kamala just had a lot of other baggage and a few weeks of the politics of joy couldn’t overcome it. Frankly it felt manufactured. We’re going to need fresh faces and a fresh start. The Obama’s of the world (as if they’re everywhere, right?) who still have the opportunity to define themselves and align with with more Americans.
I think there has never been a better time or place to be a human being (no matter what an internet meme tells you), and we should say so. No one wants to follow all these neurotic, depressed people. We need a “happy warrior” mentality, I think, even if it’s difficult to summon sometimes.
Randall, I like you and I agree with you a lot, so sorry for being all contrarian and argumentative, but I'm just gonna say this:
"We need a happy warrior, not a neurotic depressive" has been common wisdom in politics for decades. Ronald "Morning in America" Reagan trounced Jimmy "Malaise" Carter. Makes sense! Being happy and optimistic is better than being miserable and pessimistic! Americans are an optimistic, positive, can-do people!
But, like so much common wisdom, this failed utterly in 2024. Kamala ran on "Joy," she was upbeat and smiling, her memes were cheerful - all those coconuts and brat, Taylor Swift, America's sweetheart and biggest pop star, posting "Childless Cat Ladies for Harris" etc. And Trump? Grumpy, scowling, insulting, Xeeting about how America is going down the tubes and how he's our RETRIBUTION and if we don't elect him America will be destroyed in a godless woke Commie apocalypse. At the debate, Kamala was in control, openly laughing at Trump while he spluttered angrily about "They're EATING THE DOGZ!!!!"
How'd that work out for Kamala?
Ok I'm done. I'm going outside to touch some grass now.
Going outside always a great idea. I just planted two cherry trees!
I want to believe this is true, the happy warrior ethos as being effective, but I just don't think it's correct for the political moment.
Trump and the Republicans messaging has been anything but. It's built on hate of their fellow citizens, and fear.
I'm not saying the Democrats should sink to their level at all. But justified anger at all the shitting on the constitution we're currently seeing is necessary. The civil rights movement was powered by compassion, but also by rage at the status-quo. It's an underrated source of momentum.
@Ben — Does this mean the Take Bakery is back? 👨🍳