To tie this to another of MattY's analyses, the "Progressive Establishment" is very largely a coalition of stationary bandits.
And a very large part of the motivation for Trump 2's "burn it all down" is seeing the Progressive Establishment as entrenched in the media, the elite universities and the executive bureaucracy - which makes it easy and invisible to move toward their preferences, and controversial and difficult to move away from them.
This is excellent and helps distinguish Boston's Mayor Michelle Wu (a Warren-ite) from Mamdani (insurgent) and Maura Healey (traditional Dem). BUT the impact of October 7th and Israel deserves more than the passing mention is received. Insurgents aren't where they are without it.
"Hyper-sensitive, attuned to all forms of injustice, both real and fake, and extremely risk-averse to the point of dweebishness. But, we are also (allegedly) avid cheerleaders for crime and homelessness, and gleefully endorse the upending the social order of the country at large through open borders and drag queen story hour (or whatever)."
The PE is supremely risk-averse and moreover, is the primary enforcer of a lot of "cancel culture" within the party. Of course, the Left and the Right of the party (by which we mean 2016 Hillary Clinton primary voters) within the party join up if the object of the ~cancellation (or just electoral defeat) of someone they deem worthy. The Left and PE banded together to defeat Angie Craig for voting for the Laken Riley Act, and in 2020, the Right allied with the PE to call Bernie Sanders a transphobe and anti-vaxxer for going on Joe Rogan. Notably, AOC, a member of the insurgent left, really didn't like Bernie going on Rogan and distanced herself from his campaign, so even 6 years ago, she was already veering towards the PE.
Ultimately, it will be impossible for the Democratic party to moderate as an institution until the PE loses a general presidential election since the PE IS the Democratic Establishment at this point. Actual moderates have lost power (or have stopped voting in Democratic primaries altogether and become swing voters) and the Civil Rights generation is dying out (their corresponding moderating force in the Republican party, people like my bestie's parents that were showing off pictures of her as my maid of honor in an Indian outfit to all their country club friends, is also dying out) and Democratic base is dominated by people that are much more progressive on all metrics than the base was in 2016. These people simply aren't going to listen to electability arguments at this point, they're running on pure emotional and adrenaline, so they have to touch the fire to learn.
“And on foreign policy issues in general and the Israel-Gaza war in particular, Biden hewed very much to a line that was in keeping with his whole long personal identity as a fairly hawkish moderate Democrat”
Except of course Biden opposed Israeli military action against Hezbollah despite ongoing bombardments but Hezbollah against Israel’s north since October 8 and 80,000 people displaced. Of course Biden called for a ceasefire just days after the beeper attack (when Hezbollah was most disorganized and at its weakest). Of course Biden opposed eliminating Rafah as a Hamas stronghold and opposed a campaign by the IDF to unseat Hamas from Rafah. Biden paused a shipment of large munitions to Israel.
Yes Biden supported Israel in word and deed. But his record is much more mixed than Yglesias lets on.
The actual dynamics with Israel is that you have an insurgent left that thinks that Israel is inherently racist and illegitimate and thus has no right to defend itself. You have a progressive establishment that will pay lip service to Israel’s existence and its supposed right to defend itself, but not in any militarily coherent way that actually accomplishes any strategic goal against Israel’s numerous enemies who are seeking its annihilation. And because Israel didn’t cede to Biden‘s demands on Rafah and Lebanon (even though it did cede to many American demands through this war), this progressive establishment has decided to align itself with the leftist insurgents in Israel, even though these leftist insurgents actually buy into a coordinated global movement seeking to delegitimize and destroy the state of Israel.
Israel is not defending itself; it is invading other countries. Look at a map of the UN partition and you can see how much Israel has expanded. It’s acting like the Roman Empire claiming everything is self-defense while it in fact becomes an expansionist regional hegemon.
Rafah was a real city with hundreds of thousands of people living there, and eliminating it was collective punishment like a much bigger version of what the Nazis did at Lidice.
And a regime that invades multiple neighbors and does hundreds of Lidices is not legitimate. What other regime has invaded multiple neighbors and destroyed entire cities which you would consider legitimate?
Today's piece reveals, intentionally or not, a great deal about the left and why, should the left ever sweep the country, we would face disaster. Imagine the entire country being run by top down progressive fiat. We would be California.
I can't see an upside to any sort of one party rule (other than it being superior to one man rule). It's the populists that have truly awful economic ideas (in DC right now we're combining corruption with bad economics) whereas California is merely a bit of a mess while still being economically productive. Put a Warrenite trifecta in place in California and things get much worse.
I do not mean this as a "both sides-ism" but there is a striking similarity between this article and the arguments made about Trump by the center-right commentariat of yore (back when incredulous defenses of his sanity were still possible).
Matt cites the ability of Mamdani to ditch unpopular opinions as a virtue and even says of the insurgent left "I do think their strong leader model and appetite for risk mean they have more upside." That is a near-perfect summary of optimistic takes on Trump and Trumpism.
Trump's dropping of insincere promises to cut Social Security and his lack of interest in social conservatism were positive steps that made the GOP much more electable.
It's increasingly obvious that a large portion of the Democratic base ( a majority? ) is no better than Republicans.
I no longer believe that the Dems wouldn't line up behind a left-wing Trump. If the left-wing Trump attacked the right people, held most of the correct positions, carried the correct grievances, and made them feel good about their politics, the Democratic base would line up right behind him.
It is depressing the unwillingness to stand up against AES, they did push Platner out but I didn't see many Democrats say they would support Collins against a clearly inappropriate candidate.
I think that is what political scientists call affective polarization? Whatever it's called, it seems to be driving politics globally, on the left and right---this tendency to organize around opposition to your erstwhile allies by branding them "the establishment" and absolving you of all personal responsibility by tracing the source of all of your problems to its corruption.
Well Trump won. He carved away a meaningful chunk of blue collar Obama voters. So the center-right commentariat were largely proven right in supporting him if the goal was to win elections.
Absolutely, and I hope that the insurgent left sees Trump as a cautionary example and avoids the pitfalls of personalist-populist politics, because it seems that is the mode of politics that wins elections now.
The most striking feature of Trumpism, to me, is how it went beyond catering to its base to outright performative cruelty towards everyone else, starting with the holdouts in the party it took over (the RINOs); and that this tactic succeeded electorally.
It is all too easy for me to see an ascendant insurgent left following that same path, gleefully purging the party of "Zionists" or whatever they decide the Democratic version of a RINO is and then spiraling into a hardened mass of lunatics living in the Potemkin village they construct in their social media bubbles.
Trump raises my blood pressure. The only thing I don’t like about Mamdani are people in the local city sub being like “why can’t we have this guy as mayor” when our mayor is doing good work.
The other problem with the progressive establishment is that they are the most indulgent of the insurgent left. Even if the insurgent left and the progressive establishment were adversarial in a few races, by and large the progressive establishment has been conciliatory to the insurgents. They are most willing to try to sane wash the insurgent left’s worst ideas. They are the most committed to coalition management with the insurgents.
I understand that Yglesias prefers the insurgent left to interests the group-beholden progressive establishment. But I think the real questions is where does the Democratic Party draw the line, not only to bad behavior like alleged rape (à la Platner), but also to terrible ideas that have a potential to harm the image and values of the party.
The Democrats should be a large tent coalition, but even a large tent has poles. Some things, like campaigning with bigots and terrorists sympathizers like Hasan Piker, as well as America haters, should be over the line.
The progressive establishment has been most conciliatory to the insurgent and insistent on this idea that there shouldn’t be lines (at least not to the left). The insurgent left has been most willing to cross the line.
I understand the impulse to try to maintain everyone under the tent. But with the Republican Party going so far cuckoo bananas, the Democratic Party has nothing to check it. And letting in harmful ideas and terrible associations into the party on the extreme has the potential of alienating moderates, swing voters (and even persuadable Republicans who are disillusioned with Trumpism), who together are much more numerous in the country than far left progressive radicals. And in the long run it’s a losing strategy.
Most of the progressive establishment people, Warren aside, are just doing what regular political practitioners always do, trying to find the center of their [primary] electorate, which has moved left. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were both historical moderates who shifted left because they wanted to reflect the center of the party and guard their flanks. They shouldn't do that, but politicians are going to politician. Most of them don't even put any thought into it as they aren't deep thinkers, they act on animal instinct. (Clinton did put thought into it and made an error in judgment, but she's the exception, not the rule.)
One of the big reasons why the incentives have gotten to the point where Dem pols act this way is that the insurgent left, through its loud advocacy, has moved the party's ideological center. While the progressive establishment is clearly a problem for all the reasons discussed in the article, actively preferring the insurgent left over them seems to me to reward bad behavior and worsen the incentives in the long run, notwithstanding any upside presented by their "strong leader" model.
I think this column offers useful insight, but I also think that a lot of these problems go away, at least for a little while, with the emergency of a sufficiently charismatic and gifted political leader. That could be good (Obama) or bad (Trump), but the present instantiation of the Democratic party kind of gives me Bush 1 GOP vibes.
(Admittedly that was a looooong time ago, and I was much, much younger, so maybe I'm misremembering.)
Yes, none of the last three Democratic nominees has come to the nomination via their own base of support. They were all from the Obama coaching tree, his all but named successor (and wife of a former POTUS), his VP and his VP's VP (named without a primary).
Just the process of having a clean nomination process gives the chance to realign the party and enable priority setting. Though Harris running does give me pause, Matt called Warren the Progressive Establishment incarnate, I would give the title to Harris.
That's a very good point about Harris that I didn't even know I agreed with until I read your comment. Say what you will about Warren, but she entered politics with what I'd call a point of view of her own, and even had some interesting outside of the box angles that, if cultivated could have been part of a much more pragmatic politics (think The Two Income Trap). All of that independence has seemingly since been fully dissolved into what MY calls the Progressive Establishment but I don't know that it had to go that way for her.
Harris on the other hand really is a creature of that Progressive Establishment from root to bough and has never been anything else.
Yeah, although I think that's also kind of the rub: you can't really decide to adopt a "strong, charismatic leader" as some kind of model for governance. It just kind of has to happen organically. I guess you could try to create an architecture for to search for those kinds of people, but I tend to think it would be a cursed project (see: Project Platner, the Fetterman Experience, etc.).
Neither structure solves anything, they just fail differently. Institutional design can only pick which fairness axiom to break. Arrow proved the break is unavoidable. Human psychology reads fast-and-sharp harm as villainy and slow-and-broad harm as background, so populism wins on affect while paralysis wins on inertia. Progressive Establishment breaks Pareto efficiency. Insurgent Left breaks non-dictatorship. The choice is which axiom to lose.
Matt often writes about the personalist nature of the insurgent left. But I think the real story is that both the actual"establishment" (leaders like Biden and Schumer and Harris) and the insurgents are fundamentally personalist, which has allowed the Progressive Establishment described here to accomplish its policy goals since it is not personalist. This is fundamentally the story of the past 2 presidential primaries -- a person from the establishment adopts the policy positions and orientation of the "Progressive Establishment" to keep them on side in the conflict with the Bernie wing.
I think the results of this have not been great, although I agree with the Progressive Establishment policy views more than Matt does. But you can't understand this dynamic unless you see that there are multiple groups that think they personally should be in charge, which empowers anyone who doesn't care as much about that.
My point is that if you don't like the fact that Jayapal's ideas and approach are consistently winning, you should try to understand why, rather than just posting about why they're a plague.
It's only real policy wins are from being bureaucrats rather than passing anything in the leg to be fair. Their biggest leg policy wins are all at state level where races have <20% primary turnout. Success through apathy.
I'm not sure who you mean by "they" but the Progressive Establishment was the driving force behind lots of federal policies, ranging from the IRA to the ARP to numerous executive and rulemaking actions.
Well executive and rulemaking actions are core bureaucratic functions rather than legislative. I agree they had a hand in the larger IRA etc bills but so much of that flopped on implementation, because they are bad at writing legislation. My point is they rulemake from the bureaucratic machine more than the legislative side. As Matt notes it's a problem with the “everything bagel” approach to both
Good, the important thing is not to give into every demand of every advocacy group but to generally be on the side of the oppressed and be flexible about what that means in practice. The ideal left-wing leader should have a pragmatic attitude like Deng Xiaoping’s economics—the important thing is not what specific policies are enacted, but that poor people should be less poor and the imperialist powers should be less powerful (which will inevitably happen if poor people are less poor because power is relative).
Israel is an important issue here because Israel has killed more people than the total number of murders in the US and made more people homeless than the total number of homeless in the US. If you care about the suffering of all people equally—which you should, because which country you are born in is a birth lottery—it is simply a bigger deal than any domestic policies that have been done in the US. Not supporting this immense violence and impoverishment is a better guide to someone’s character than the specific policy positions they want to take on policing or Medicare etc.
Zohran banging on about Israel would be more believable if he didn't turn around and celebrate Pakistan, a country born in blood, slaughtered tens of millions, is extremely repressive, and is actively forcibly deporting millions. It's 100x all your critiques about Israel and none of you care. The hamasification of the insurgent left is clearly a foreign import and it's hilarious how obviously hypocritical everyone spouting this nonsense is.
Uh, I don’t agree with China’s repression of the Uyghurs, but I’m pretty sure the average Palestinian would trade places with the average Uyghur in an instant. Most Gazans are literally homeless and will get murdered by drone if they say the wrong thing in social media. Most Uyghurs are not literally homeless. Xinjiang is open to Western tourists now, people have gone to see it. Here’s a video from a travel blogger who is not a China shill: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_mrm0H7sibE. Looks a lot better than Gaza or the West Bank to me.
I observe that 'goo' is a much better metaphor to end with than 'sludge'. The idea of political courage being enervated by an unyielding goo is now lodged in my memory. Not malevolent or poisonous, just energy sapping - but no less powerful for it.
I think the reason moderates have a bugaboo about the Insurgent Left is that many of its members are just mean. Like needlessly mean, combative, accusatory, and bullying. Many of us oldies remember how mean Sanders and his supporters were during the 2016 primary. That casts a long shadow.
I think a lot of voters want someone combative, against Trump. The continuing failure of the establishment “center left” to engage in any sort of combat (even when their own seats are at stake, they can’t rise to the occasion!) is very unappealing and disqualifying. That doesn’t mean the Insurgent Left is the best answer, it just means they’ve been made into the only answer
The “insurgent left” has the populist belief that its views are self-evidently correct, disagreement is evidence of corruption, and the establishment/elite corruption (and its propaganda that warps the views of the voting public) is standing in the way of straightforward solutions.
If you believed that, you might be pretty mean too.
I really dont understand where this move came from. Like the heart of why I’m a left liberal is like scaled., from one to 8 billion, empathy or kindness or sympathy and I see very little of this in either coalition in politics.
That's the nature of extremist flag wavers. I know a few of these folks. Obsessive, not listening to reason or adopting a middle road. Both sides of the aisle. It's why they're shunted to the few percentiles on the ends of the bell-shaped curve. One should always be careful entering those camps and somewhere along the way they've captured much of our population who are now drawn into their malicious game of ping pong that has no winner.
I don't understand what you are trying to tell me in this post. Are you saying that everyone in politics exhibits the same heartless monster behavior and they are all the same, with no difference between them?
They’re saying that one side operates concentration camps and the other once insulted them on Twitter. All politics is personal. With that said, being not-insulted on Twitter is better than being insulted on Twitter, and we should seek out positive political movements.
I think there's a lot of insight into Matt's post that big personalities can beat the progressive borg machine at the polls. The Groups are political insiders but they've lost their general clout with populist movements.
That said what you're describing reminds me more of the idea that the insurgent left brings in an international flavor of politics into America. Not just the policies but the callous campaign tactics remind me more of a Latin American or SE Asian political campaign style than a domestic door knocking+fundraising style. Our politics is internationalizing and our policies are affected by posters and ideas from abroad as well.
I mean everyone’s their worst selves on Twitter. It’s a bad website in large part because the way to get traction is to pick fights and get personal when doing so. This is why I’ve stopped using it.
One of the big insurgent left victories was Melat Kiros, who wrote a very nice article that was not combative or accusatory or bullying at all but was fired and blacklisted anyway and forced to become a bartender. That seems meaner than whatever the insurgent left has done. I don’t believe there are any instances of insurgent left people doing this to their political opponents.
Nikuruga, thank you for providing an example of the disrespectful, dismissive, and dishonest rhetoric that I find offputting.
The blood of 10-7 was still fresh. She made a public statement at odds with her employer’s public statement, was asked to remove the post, and refused.
You ignore the substance that was written and substituted in something irrelevant just so you could play the “whataboutism” and “hypocrisy” cards.
Agreed. The insurgent left often seems to delight in performative cruelty against their opponents, many of which are in the Democratic Party. There is a strong us vs them vibe in their discussions that is a natural outgrowth of their strong leader and party-based organization. Obama, Clinton, and Biden weren’t mean in the same way. Mamdani isn’t like that either, and AOC is as well. In life, it’s hard to get behind something if it is all stick and no carrot.
There are several psychological tribes in the DSA: really disagreeable people, conspiracy theorists, actual Communists, people who think Democrats are deciding to not to press a magic make everything better button, race grifters, teachers, single issue activists.
To tie this to another of MattY's analyses, the "Progressive Establishment" is very largely a coalition of stationary bandits.
And a very large part of the motivation for Trump 2's "burn it all down" is seeing the Progressive Establishment as entrenched in the media, the elite universities and the executive bureaucracy - which makes it easy and invisible to move toward their preferences, and controversial and difficult to move away from them.
This is excellent and helps distinguish Boston's Mayor Michelle Wu (a Warren-ite) from Mamdani (insurgent) and Maura Healey (traditional Dem). BUT the impact of October 7th and Israel deserves more than the passing mention is received. Insurgents aren't where they are without it.
The Progressive Establishment (PE) is the primary target of what I wrote here. https://www.dhaaruni.com/p/theater-kids-and-playing-risk
"Hyper-sensitive, attuned to all forms of injustice, both real and fake, and extremely risk-averse to the point of dweebishness. But, we are also (allegedly) avid cheerleaders for crime and homelessness, and gleefully endorse the upending the social order of the country at large through open borders and drag queen story hour (or whatever)."
The PE is supremely risk-averse and moreover, is the primary enforcer of a lot of "cancel culture" within the party. Of course, the Left and the Right of the party (by which we mean 2016 Hillary Clinton primary voters) within the party join up if the object of the ~cancellation (or just electoral defeat) of someone they deem worthy. The Left and PE banded together to defeat Angie Craig for voting for the Laken Riley Act, and in 2020, the Right allied with the PE to call Bernie Sanders a transphobe and anti-vaxxer for going on Joe Rogan. Notably, AOC, a member of the insurgent left, really didn't like Bernie going on Rogan and distanced herself from his campaign, so even 6 years ago, she was already veering towards the PE.
Ultimately, it will be impossible for the Democratic party to moderate as an institution until the PE loses a general presidential election since the PE IS the Democratic Establishment at this point. Actual moderates have lost power (or have stopped voting in Democratic primaries altogether and become swing voters) and the Civil Rights generation is dying out (their corresponding moderating force in the Republican party, people like my bestie's parents that were showing off pictures of her as my maid of honor in an Indian outfit to all their country club friends, is also dying out) and Democratic base is dominated by people that are much more progressive on all metrics than the base was in 2016. These people simply aren't going to listen to electability arguments at this point, they're running on pure emotional and adrenaline, so they have to touch the fire to learn.
“And on foreign policy issues in general and the Israel-Gaza war in particular, Biden hewed very much to a line that was in keeping with his whole long personal identity as a fairly hawkish moderate Democrat”
Except of course Biden opposed Israeli military action against Hezbollah despite ongoing bombardments but Hezbollah against Israel’s north since October 8 and 80,000 people displaced. Of course Biden called for a ceasefire just days after the beeper attack (when Hezbollah was most disorganized and at its weakest). Of course Biden opposed eliminating Rafah as a Hamas stronghold and opposed a campaign by the IDF to unseat Hamas from Rafah. Biden paused a shipment of large munitions to Israel.
Yes Biden supported Israel in word and deed. But his record is much more mixed than Yglesias lets on.
The actual dynamics with Israel is that you have an insurgent left that thinks that Israel is inherently racist and illegitimate and thus has no right to defend itself. You have a progressive establishment that will pay lip service to Israel’s existence and its supposed right to defend itself, but not in any militarily coherent way that actually accomplishes any strategic goal against Israel’s numerous enemies who are seeking its annihilation. And because Israel didn’t cede to Biden‘s demands on Rafah and Lebanon (even though it did cede to many American demands through this war), this progressive establishment has decided to align itself with the leftist insurgents in Israel, even though these leftist insurgents actually buy into a coordinated global movement seeking to delegitimize and destroy the state of Israel.
Israel is not defending itself; it is invading other countries. Look at a map of the UN partition and you can see how much Israel has expanded. It’s acting like the Roman Empire claiming everything is self-defense while it in fact becomes an expansionist regional hegemon.
Rafah was a real city with hundreds of thousands of people living there, and eliminating it was collective punishment like a much bigger version of what the Nazis did at Lidice.
And a regime that invades multiple neighbors and does hundreds of Lidices is not legitimate. What other regime has invaded multiple neighbors and destroyed entire cities which you would consider legitimate?
Today's piece reveals, intentionally or not, a great deal about the left and why, should the left ever sweep the country, we would face disaster. Imagine the entire country being run by top down progressive fiat. We would be California.
Sounds like at least a mild improvement over degrowth fascism, even if they do want to slap warning labels on everything.
I can't see any upside to Democrat one party rule. Biden was bad enough. The Ro Khanna/AOC/Warrenite axis would sink the economy.
I can't see an upside to any sort of one party rule (other than it being superior to one man rule). It's the populists that have truly awful economic ideas (in DC right now we're combining corruption with bad economics) whereas California is merely a bit of a mess while still being economically productive. Put a Warrenite trifecta in place in California and things get much worse.
Are there any philosophies or books than inspire the insurgents? I don't really know what they believe apart from anger.
Frantz Fanon
I do not mean this as a "both sides-ism" but there is a striking similarity between this article and the arguments made about Trump by the center-right commentariat of yore (back when incredulous defenses of his sanity were still possible).
Matt cites the ability of Mamdani to ditch unpopular opinions as a virtue and even says of the insurgent left "I do think their strong leader model and appetite for risk mean they have more upside." That is a near-perfect summary of optimistic takes on Trump and Trumpism.
Trump's dropping of insincere promises to cut Social Security and his lack of interest in social conservatism were positive steps that made the GOP much more electable.
It's increasingly obvious that a large portion of the Democratic base ( a majority? ) is no better than Republicans.
I no longer believe that the Dems wouldn't line up behind a left-wing Trump. If the left-wing Trump attacked the right people, held most of the correct positions, carried the correct grievances, and made them feel good about their politics, the Democratic base would line up right behind him.
And that is just depressing
It is depressing the unwillingness to stand up against AES, they did push Platner out but I didn't see many Democrats say they would support Collins against a clearly inappropriate candidate.
I think that is what political scientists call affective polarization? Whatever it's called, it seems to be driving politics globally, on the left and right---this tendency to organize around opposition to your erstwhile allies by branding them "the establishment" and absolving you of all personal responsibility by tracing the source of all of your problems to its corruption.
This person can't exist; Democrats don't do leaders (even Obama could only do so much). Fighting like a bag of cats is more the style.
Well Trump won. He carved away a meaningful chunk of blue collar Obama voters. So the center-right commentariat were largely proven right in supporting him if the goal was to win elections.
Absolutely, and I hope that the insurgent left sees Trump as a cautionary example and avoids the pitfalls of personalist-populist politics, because it seems that is the mode of politics that wins elections now.
The most striking feature of Trumpism, to me, is how it went beyond catering to its base to outright performative cruelty towards everyone else, starting with the holdouts in the party it took over (the RINOs); and that this tactic succeeded electorally.
It is all too easy for me to see an ascendant insurgent left following that same path, gleefully purging the party of "Zionists" or whatever they decide the Democratic version of a RINO is and then spiraling into a hardened mass of lunatics living in the Potemkin village they construct in their social media bubbles.
Right but Mamdani is in fact promoting good change to housing policy and presiding over a decline in crime, whereas Trump ...
Trump raises my blood pressure. The only thing I don’t like about Mamdani are people in the local city sub being like “why can’t we have this guy as mayor” when our mayor is doing good work.
The other problem with the progressive establishment is that they are the most indulgent of the insurgent left. Even if the insurgent left and the progressive establishment were adversarial in a few races, by and large the progressive establishment has been conciliatory to the insurgents. They are most willing to try to sane wash the insurgent left’s worst ideas. They are the most committed to coalition management with the insurgents.
I understand that Yglesias prefers the insurgent left to interests the group-beholden progressive establishment. But I think the real questions is where does the Democratic Party draw the line, not only to bad behavior like alleged rape (à la Platner), but also to terrible ideas that have a potential to harm the image and values of the party.
The Democrats should be a large tent coalition, but even a large tent has poles. Some things, like campaigning with bigots and terrorists sympathizers like Hasan Piker, as well as America haters, should be over the line.
The progressive establishment has been most conciliatory to the insurgent and insistent on this idea that there shouldn’t be lines (at least not to the left). The insurgent left has been most willing to cross the line.
I understand the impulse to try to maintain everyone under the tent. But with the Republican Party going so far cuckoo bananas, the Democratic Party has nothing to check it. And letting in harmful ideas and terrible associations into the party on the extreme has the potential of alienating moderates, swing voters (and even persuadable Republicans who are disillusioned with Trumpism), who together are much more numerous in the country than far left progressive radicals. And in the long run it’s a losing strategy.
Most of the progressive establishment people, Warren aside, are just doing what regular political practitioners always do, trying to find the center of their [primary] electorate, which has moved left. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were both historical moderates who shifted left because they wanted to reflect the center of the party and guard their flanks. They shouldn't do that, but politicians are going to politician. Most of them don't even put any thought into it as they aren't deep thinkers, they act on animal instinct. (Clinton did put thought into it and made an error in judgment, but she's the exception, not the rule.)
One of the big reasons why the incentives have gotten to the point where Dem pols act this way is that the insurgent left, through its loud advocacy, has moved the party's ideological center. While the progressive establishment is clearly a problem for all the reasons discussed in the article, actively preferring the insurgent left over them seems to me to reward bad behavior and worsen the incentives in the long run, notwithstanding any upside presented by their "strong leader" model.
Which midterm races are people paying the most attention to today?
Texas and Michigan are both good tests of whether voters, care about the quality of their politicians.
I think this column offers useful insight, but I also think that a lot of these problems go away, at least for a little while, with the emergency of a sufficiently charismatic and gifted political leader. That could be good (Obama) or bad (Trump), but the present instantiation of the Democratic party kind of gives me Bush 1 GOP vibes.
(Admittedly that was a looooong time ago, and I was much, much younger, so maybe I'm misremembering.)
Yes, none of the last three Democratic nominees has come to the nomination via their own base of support. They were all from the Obama coaching tree, his all but named successor (and wife of a former POTUS), his VP and his VP's VP (named without a primary).
Just the process of having a clean nomination process gives the chance to realign the party and enable priority setting. Though Harris running does give me pause, Matt called Warren the Progressive Establishment incarnate, I would give the title to Harris.
That's a very good point about Harris that I didn't even know I agreed with until I read your comment. Say what you will about Warren, but she entered politics with what I'd call a point of view of her own, and even had some interesting outside of the box angles that, if cultivated could have been part of a much more pragmatic politics (think The Two Income Trap). All of that independence has seemingly since been fully dissolved into what MY calls the Progressive Establishment but I don't know that it had to go that way for her.
Harris on the other hand really is a creature of that Progressive Establishment from root to bough and has never been anything else.
I think that's a good point. The whole party could run more on the strong leader model that Matt talks about in the piece
Yeah, although I think that's also kind of the rub: you can't really decide to adopt a "strong, charismatic leader" as some kind of model for governance. It just kind of has to happen organically. I guess you could try to create an architecture for to search for those kinds of people, but I tend to think it would be a cursed project (see: Project Platner, the Fetterman Experience, etc.).
I feel like talent spotting is an important job of leading politicians and it has to include tests for decency and intelligence.
Neither structure solves anything, they just fail differently. Institutional design can only pick which fairness axiom to break. Arrow proved the break is unavoidable. Human psychology reads fast-and-sharp harm as villainy and slow-and-broad harm as background, so populism wins on affect while paralysis wins on inertia. Progressive Establishment breaks Pareto efficiency. Insurgent Left breaks non-dictatorship. The choice is which axiom to lose.
Matt often writes about the personalist nature of the insurgent left. But I think the real story is that both the actual"establishment" (leaders like Biden and Schumer and Harris) and the insurgents are fundamentally personalist, which has allowed the Progressive Establishment described here to accomplish its policy goals since it is not personalist. This is fundamentally the story of the past 2 presidential primaries -- a person from the establishment adopts the policy positions and orientation of the "Progressive Establishment" to keep them on side in the conflict with the Bernie wing.
I think the results of this have not been great, although I agree with the Progressive Establishment policy views more than Matt does. But you can't understand this dynamic unless you see that there are multiple groups that think they personally should be in charge, which empowers anyone who doesn't care as much about that.
The “progressive establishment” is the orthodoxy and design by committee leadership that has plagued democrats since Obama left the limelight.
My point is that if you don't like the fact that Jayapal's ideas and approach are consistently winning, you should try to understand why, rather than just posting about why they're a plague.
I don’t think they are the plague. Social media is the plague.
It's only real policy wins are from being bureaucrats rather than passing anything in the leg to be fair. Their biggest leg policy wins are all at state level where races have <20% primary turnout. Success through apathy.
Bureaucrats can’t do anything because of how many process hurdles exist….
I'm not sure who you mean by "they" but the Progressive Establishment was the driving force behind lots of federal policies, ranging from the IRA to the ARP to numerous executive and rulemaking actions.
Well executive and rulemaking actions are core bureaucratic functions rather than legislative. I agree they had a hand in the larger IRA etc bills but so much of that flopped on implementation, because they are bad at writing legislation. My point is they rulemake from the bureaucratic machine more than the legislative side. As Matt notes it's a problem with the “everything bagel” approach to both
Freaking showerhead flow rate regulations….
Good, the important thing is not to give into every demand of every advocacy group but to generally be on the side of the oppressed and be flexible about what that means in practice. The ideal left-wing leader should have a pragmatic attitude like Deng Xiaoping’s economics—the important thing is not what specific policies are enacted, but that poor people should be less poor and the imperialist powers should be less powerful (which will inevitably happen if poor people are less poor because power is relative).
Israel is an important issue here because Israel has killed more people than the total number of murders in the US and made more people homeless than the total number of homeless in the US. If you care about the suffering of all people equally—which you should, because which country you are born in is a birth lottery—it is simply a bigger deal than any domestic policies that have been done in the US. Not supporting this immense violence and impoverishment is a better guide to someone’s character than the specific policy positions they want to take on policing or Medicare etc.
Zohran banging on about Israel would be more believable if he didn't turn around and celebrate Pakistan, a country born in blood, slaughtered tens of millions, is extremely repressive, and is actively forcibly deporting millions. It's 100x all your critiques about Israel and none of you care. The hamasification of the insurgent left is clearly a foreign import and it's hilarious how obviously hypocritical everyone spouting this nonsense is.
Your comment would have more credibility if you extended the same valuation of human suffering to the Uyghurs.
Gulags are probably marginally better but I'm not sure residents of our ICE internment camps would see it that way.
Uh, I don’t agree with China’s repression of the Uyghurs, but I’m pretty sure the average Palestinian would trade places with the average Uyghur in an instant. Most Gazans are literally homeless and will get murdered by drone if they say the wrong thing in social media. Most Uyghurs are not literally homeless. Xinjiang is open to Western tourists now, people have gone to see it. Here’s a video from a travel blogger who is not a China shill: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_mrm0H7sibE. Looks a lot better than Gaza or the West Bank to me.
I observe that 'goo' is a much better metaphor to end with than 'sludge'. The idea of political courage being enervated by an unyielding goo is now lodged in my memory. Not malevolent or poisonous, just energy sapping - but no less powerful for it.
I think the reason moderates have a bugaboo about the Insurgent Left is that many of its members are just mean. Like needlessly mean, combative, accusatory, and bullying. Many of us oldies remember how mean Sanders and his supporters were during the 2016 primary. That casts a long shadow.
I think a lot of voters want someone combative, against Trump. The continuing failure of the establishment “center left” to engage in any sort of combat (even when their own seats are at stake, they can’t rise to the occasion!) is very unappealing and disqualifying. That doesn’t mean the Insurgent Left is the best answer, it just means they’ve been made into the only answer
Go back and look at a blog comment section from the height of the 2008 primary and this all looks much less distinctive.
The “insurgent left” has the populist belief that its views are self-evidently correct, disagreement is evidence of corruption, and the establishment/elite corruption (and its propaganda that warps the views of the voting public) is standing in the way of straightforward solutions.
If you believed that, you might be pretty mean too.
I really dont understand where this move came from. Like the heart of why I’m a left liberal is like scaled., from one to 8 billion, empathy or kindness or sympathy and I see very little of this in either coalition in politics.
Just an atavistic monster swallowing everything.
That's the nature of extremist flag wavers. I know a few of these folks. Obsessive, not listening to reason or adopting a middle road. Both sides of the aisle. It's why they're shunted to the few percentiles on the ends of the bell-shaped curve. One should always be careful entering those camps and somewhere along the way they've captured much of our population who are now drawn into their malicious game of ping pong that has no winner.
I don't understand what you are trying to tell me in this post. Are you saying that everyone in politics exhibits the same heartless monster behavior and they are all the same, with no difference between them?
They’re saying that one side operates concentration camps and the other once insulted them on Twitter. All politics is personal. With that said, being not-insulted on Twitter is better than being insulted on Twitter, and we should seek out positive political movements.
I think there's a lot of insight into Matt's post that big personalities can beat the progressive borg machine at the polls. The Groups are political insiders but they've lost their general clout with populist movements.
That said what you're describing reminds me more of the idea that the insurgent left brings in an international flavor of politics into America. Not just the policies but the callous campaign tactics remind me more of a Latin American or SE Asian political campaign style than a domestic door knocking+fundraising style. Our politics is internationalizing and our policies are affected by posters and ideas from abroad as well.
I mean everyone’s their worst selves on Twitter. It’s a bad website in large part because the way to get traction is to pick fights and get personal when doing so. This is why I’ve stopped using it.
Man have you seen the "politics" accounts on tiktok or IG? It's so much worse.
Pp
Ughhhhhgg. I am so glad I am old.
Not really I don’t have TikTok and I use Instagram like once a quarter to check DMs from friends and watch reels
Unfortunately the userbases there are far, far larger than twitter
One of the big insurgent left victories was Melat Kiros, who wrote a very nice article that was not combative or accusatory or bullying at all but was fired and blacklisted anyway and forced to become a bartender. That seems meaner than whatever the insurgent left has done. I don’t believe there are any instances of insurgent left people doing this to their political opponents.
Nikuruga, thank you for providing an example of the disrespectful, dismissive, and dishonest rhetoric that I find offputting.
The blood of 10-7 was still fresh. She made a public statement at odds with her employer’s public statement, was asked to remove the post, and refused.
You ignore the substance that was written and substituted in something irrelevant just so you could play the “whataboutism” and “hypocrisy” cards.
Agreed. The insurgent left often seems to delight in performative cruelty against their opponents, many of which are in the Democratic Party. There is a strong us vs them vibe in their discussions that is a natural outgrowth of their strong leader and party-based organization. Obama, Clinton, and Biden weren’t mean in the same way. Mamdani isn’t like that either, and AOC is as well. In life, it’s hard to get behind something if it is all stick and no carrot.
A lot of DSA supporters do genuinely hate the Democratic mainstream
They might just be haters in general.
There are several psychological tribes in the DSA: really disagreeable people, conspiracy theorists, actual Communists, people who think Democrats are deciding to not to press a magic make everything better button, race grifters, teachers, single issue activists.