"Big, institutional change in the face of an antiquated constitution is hard"
That's a feature not a bug.
Big changes should have large bi-partisan support. And if it's not constitutional, then it should require a constitutional amendment. Rule of law is always a good idea
How's that working out for us? Does the United States seem like a particularly functional or governable polity? Is our public policy the envy of the world? Are other nations clamoring to copy our 60% approval threshold for major legislation, or our malapportioned upper chamber?
It's difficult because there are clearly certain life situations where a moral calculus that sort of resembles this is the right one, so people's internal compasses get confused. For instance, if you're told that if you want to advance in your job you have to (1) stop associating with embarrassing friends or family members, (2) pretend not to hold political or religious views that you actually do hold, (3) praise and fawn over bosses whom you find distasteful, (4) publicly downplay some morally repugnant things your industry does, (5) etc. - then the right moral decision may in fact be to sacrifice your job and find another one, even if your family suffers economically. So a lot of people start to incorrectly intuit that "staying true to yourself" is the value you should always maximize to the exclusion of all others.
Reflecting on this some more, I'm thinking there doesn't have to be a conflict between "staying true to yourself" and winning. The key is just understanding that politics is a team sport and embracing the underlying principles and logic of a democratic system of government. You don't have to deny that you want things that you want. You just need to make a conscious decision to defer, and say that you're deferring, to other members of the coalition when you collectively decide on a platform, because that's what it means to be part of a team.
Some (many?) even believe that 'winning' is an ambiguously violent revolution which overthrows capitalism, and that any policy change is only really important insofar as it builds old-school Marxist style class consciousness to prep for the revolution.
I think people are really underrating to what extent the activist class has been captured by actual real life communists because we are so used to listening to Fox News complain about non-communists being communists.
The post to which you’re replying is spot-on, borne out by the demographics of the activist class, their positions, and reams of anecdotes in this Substack.
In contrast, there’s no evidence at all to support this contention.
There are some people on Twitter who like to cosplay as anti-electoralists, but Twitter is not real life and in any event, even they are not sincere.
People with actual jobs on campaigns or activist organizations are not like this. They are just naive idealists who get blinded into thinking they have the votes.
1) Any cursory trip through humanities academia and prominent journals will reveal that most professors at elite universities who teach humanities courses are, at the very least, in a primarily anti-capitalist and Marxist-inspired milieu. Whether they openly discuss revolution varies, but one wonders how exactly they anticipate the current order to be overthrown.
2) Most of the language that filters through the activist sanewashing machine starts with actual communists. Police abolition begins not as a typical progressive activist class position, but rather was a deeply radical position held by actual anarchists and communists many years ago. Because the social cachet of these people has become so prominent on the left, even non-communists end up adopting their ideas and language and simply changing the actual policies to be less insane. But those people are still there, and they are the ones pushing their fellow-activist friends to be crazier and crazier.
3) Random college activities that used to be the places where activists were born, such as debate clubs, have almost completely been overtaken by actual communists. Spending literally any time at CEDA or NDT today (major debate tournaments for college students) will have you running into dozens of sincere communists who will openly tell you they intend to start a violent revolution at the earliest opportunity. This is a radical change from even 10 years ago, where the communism was mostly strategic and tongue-in-cheek, not sincere.
Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I really think that this is an actual issue. I'm not claiming that 50%, or even 30%, of progressive activists are communists. But I think the real number is probably in the 10% range, which is a HUGE number of people.
These are, I’ll note, assertions and not evidence, but I’ll take that last sentence at face value nonetheless: How many “progressive activists” do you think there are?
My guess is maybe 200,000 nationwide. 10% of that is 20,000, which is about the membership of the CPUSA in 1945.
The threat level hovers between “nonexistent” and “what are you smoking?”
Look, if the GOP fears an actual leftist revolution, it should be acting very differently, like the US did in the 1930’s. File the rough edges off of capitalism, restore faith in government by actually acting in the best interests of the electorate, and work to head off the foreseeable problems of the future.
Because the only way that revolution happens, let alone succeeds, is if life gets a lot worse for the great majority of the country.
To add (sorry, just thought of this): remember the book "In Defense of Looting" that was a big deal on the left during the summer of 2020? It literally, explicitly makes the argument that the left must use violence to fight "racial capitalism", and actively denounces non-violent resistance. I do not know how you could get more obviously-communist than that without directly saying you want a vanguard party to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.
How many people actually read that book, given how low sales of books are? How many people who might do a surface reading of that argument would then agree that they want to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat (nearly none of them, I expect)?
How many republicans are actively trying to establish a one-party strong man government right now? How many old people on facebook are essentially getting their information from Russian and Chinese influence programs (which are pushing them to the hard right)? Hell, how many American Democratic senators are being driven by various disguised hard right forces?
I lived through 1980's and I remember knowing people who were actual communists at the time, strongly supportive of the Soviet Union (sometimes China), and the number of those people was pretty small and they vastly outnumbered the people who are actual tankies right now.
I am pretty sure the hard right (neo-nazi right) massively outnumbers any actual communists in the American population.
elm
why are you carrying water for the glenn becks of the world?
Sure, it's not evidence, mostly because it's difficult to determine how many people are actual violent old-school communists and how many people are the "socialists" that actually just means social democracy. There's no real way to be objective about this even if I had the time to go digging for more concrete evidence.
But to be clear, I'm not a Republican, and I have no real concern for what the GOP thinks or doesn't think. I also don't fear a communist revolution.
What I do fear is that, if communists are the ones setting the agenda on the farthest-left parts of our party, and are deciding what issues the progressive left decides to champion (looting is Good, Actually; we should get rid of both prisons and police; violent riots are not that big of a deal if the cause is just, etc.) then we have a goal misalignment problem. For a communist, electoral victory for AOC-like politicians is almost counterproductive. For them, it is about generally undermining faith in the system that presently exists to create the conditions for revolution. They will almost certainly not succeed in actually causing a communist revolution, but they can certainly do damage and steer the progressive left away from its most popular ideas to extremely unpopular ones.
>Any cursory trip through humanities academia and prominent journals will reveal that most professors at elite universities who teach humanities courses are
Awww I call bullshit. Why not redbait the social scientists or the STEM divisions instead of picking on the arts and literature folks? If you think that the humanists are going to overthrow *anything* with violent revolution you haven't been on campus at one of those elite universities that you speak so confidently about.
You are being paranoid. I don't know what you mean by a 'Communist' other than someone who disagrees with you. I haven't met one in real life in the US despite living here 69 years. Must be cells of them all over if they're 10% of the population. How did I miss them???
10% of the activist population, not the general population
i.e. on the order of tens of thousands, not millions (i mention in another comment I am less concerned about an actual revolution than I am about it making the activist class do bad politics)
Why think the tweets are more revealing than the published work? I would think the tweets are a series of clever postures, while the published work represents the more considered view.
Activists simply don't have the same day to day incentives as, say, the chief of staff of a Senator or House member (or their campaign chair, or a high level staffer at the DCCC, or what have you). In most cases it's not "for the benefit of their peers" in the case of these activists (or digital media people, or Twitter influencers, or what have you) but their own careers or jobs. In most cases (assuming we're talking about people on the left) they're going to prefer that Democrats, rather than Republicans, win elections, of course, but it's not the *central focus of their jobs* the way it is for the people in the elections trenches. Which yes, can cause problems for Democrats, because "activists" influence what the media covers. And what the media covers matters. A lot.
(Republicans aren't immune from this dynamic, either, naturally; I have a feeling people like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCArthy aren't totally pumped for the specter of Texas abortion bounty hunters.)
on the other hand, performative wokism only works in intra-progressive status competitions because a lot of progressives go for it. without the likes and retweets, without the demand for doctrinaire content, there would be much less supply.
at a minimum, a significant number of media consuming progressives enjoy wilke performances.
I agree with most of this, but I think the problem is deeper in that, over the past 5 years, a substantial part of the progressive movement has increasingly not just failed to have the fact that the the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb in the front of their mind, but to actively seek to do things that aggravate someone fitting the profile of the median voter for very little practical gain. (See, e.g., anything involving pronouns -- even the vast majority of LGBTQ individuals use traditional pronouns, so you're talking about trying to get 99%+ of the population to rethink the manner in which they've been speaking on a daily basis for basically their entire lives for the sake of making a fraction of 1% of the population more comfortable.)
It feels like "delete Twitter" covers 90% of the actionable problems here.
I remember, 1000 years ago, when WarrenSanders was abuzz all over the internet and then Joe Biden went and talked with regular-ass people and then crushed it! And almost nobody learned anything.
The difference is you're basically in the manager's seat for democratic staffers -- you have stuff that you want them to accomplish that's more important to you than the stuff that you like about labor protections. At, say, a McDonalds, you don't really benefit from high team member performance, management control, or whatever, so it's easy for you to support the staff members themselves over their manager's goals.
I think this is why liberals carve out Police from "unions they want to protect", and Conservatives really only support unions for the police, even though those positions are mostly incoherent with regard to unionization itself. It's also why I generally support the existence of private unions, but not public unions - since the broader public has much more interest in "employees being accountable for doing a good job" in the latter.
One excuse I have for being in favor of private sector unions and against public sector unions is that at least public sector employees still have a say in management through voting, whereas private sector employees don't typically have any say in their management unless they are shareholders or in a co-op.
I think the other factor is private sector unions also face competitive market pressure - so there's a countervailing force to the negotiations that doesn't exist with the public sector (e.g., tenure based layoffs in a private sector downturn will actually further constrain operating margins leading to a downward spiral).
I saw a quote yesterday -- maybe in an LGM comments thread? -- from someone in the military service during the Cold War, talking about the relatively autocratic and hierarchical nature of military authority, saying "we're here to defend Democracy, not to practice it."
I don't think that's incoherent. So, I don't think it's incoherent to ask people fighting for greater unionization to do without certain protections or to tolerate less than ideal working conditions
Was reading a book on the Civil War, and one of the oddities of the Confederate army is that they did practice democracy, with officer elections. So did the Russian army for a little bit after 1917. So it's not totally impossible or unheard of.
I see no incoherence here. These people are basically poorly paid volunteers; there’s always going to be a big difference between a career and a vocation.
Also, more prosaically, no worker protections will ever cover incompetence, except incidentally to other goals, so I have no moral trouble supporting easy hiring and firing for competence issues alongside a decent standard of evidence to prevent that from being a figleaf.
Campaign staffers are a great example of why evidence requirements in competence-based firings are so messy. Let's say you manage campaign staffers. One tweets something from the campaign account that is (to your mind) obviously damaging to the candidate. But if you fire them, and end up in front of a jury or judge (in a blue city, in a purple state) that agrees with them, not only is the campaign liable, but as you as the manager can be *personally liable*. Is that really a risk you take?
While firing anyone for nonsense reasons is obviously abusive, having outsiders who don't understand the industry or the role try to quickly gauge what competence looks like puts companies and individual managers at great risk whenever they fire, even in very real cases of incompetence.
I think the goal of any employment protections shouldn’t be to force an employer to prove incompetence, but to dictate a relatively low bar for an employee to show probable cause that the issue was not incompetence.
Keep the burden of proof where it is, but lower it, if you will.
fair point and campaign workers do get treated like shit, mainly because a lot of idealistic young people want to do it (until they get burned out).
thing is, campaign workers are like 0.01% of the US workforce. I’m willing to tolerate bad conditions in campaigns to help the other 99.99% if they economy, and I don’t feel guilty about it. Soldiers in combat have much worse working conditions, even if their boss never grabs their ass.
This is also the paradox of police unions. In theory, we should like unions, but when their main function is to protect the jobs of people who really need to be fired, they're rather toxic.
FWIW, I think that our public health community would have done well to put up that Post-It Note(R) in the last twenty months or so. For example, a lot of smart highly educated people thought it was important to suspend the JNJ vaccine because there were six serious adverse events out of seven million injections. They (and a lot of academic physicians) thought that adhering to the "process" would boost the credibility of the vaccines. I think the median voter, a bit short on statistics training, heard instead that "six adverse events out of seven million is a good reason to suspend a vaccine." Vaccinations literally peaked the day of the suspension, and fell like a stone in the months thereafter, which clearly was the opposite of the reaction anticipated by the FDA. I think we would have had a better outcome if more people at the FDA and CDC had grown up spending their summers on the Gulf coast or the beaches of Lake Michigan rather than the Atlantic coast, or at least reminded themselves that the median American lives far outside their assumptions.
I think this post makes some important points, and I think also probably underestimates the demographic disconnect. I'm a 50 something white guy but with loads of prestigious degrees. But college was essentially nondenominational back then, and I find I have much more in common with people my age regardless of college experience than I do with the woke-brainwashed ideologues that constitute the media elite. I also predict that Asians, Latinos and a non trivial percentage of Blacks would desert the progressives in a heartbeat if the Republicans could just turn down the racism. But that's a topic for another day. The overall message is that this country is not receptive to the progressive message, nor will it be for the foreseeable future.
Being of a similar vintage and educational status, I agree. I have been hearing my whole adult life that progressives (or, back in the day, liberals) were one election cycle away from demographic domination. Not going to happen, especially if progressives continue to ignore and/or condescend to the majority of voters.
I'm a brown guy in his 40s with a ton of degrees, and I've been told my whole life that conservatives will stop being racist if we would just be nicer to them. That turned out to be bullshit too.
Fair enough. The most obvious one that I witness directly is seeing people get deported. I lived in Tucson during that Joe Arpaio era, and I coached a teenage boys soccer team made up of mostly Mexican kids. Today I teach at an open-access college in Georgia with a large immigrant population. I've watched several kids deal with their parents getting deported, and I see the lucky ones who don't get deported but do get stuck with an expensive and burdensome process for renewing their DACA every year.
"I also predict that Asians, Latinos and a non trivial percentage of Blacks would desert the progressives in a heartbeat if the Republicans could just turn down the racism."
One of Matt's theses, which I agree with, is that it seems to be the other way -- the GOP's positions on OTHER issues is what drives non-white voters away. The Republicans would gain more of these voters by embracing the Medicaid expansion than changing up their racial views.
Maybe I misread him, but I believe he's saying that only as it pertains to the "average" Republican, the 50 something non college educated white man. Some of them clearly would be gettable on issues like Medicaid expansion. I don't know the polling on this, but I can't imagine why Latinos and Asians would be attracted to this en masse, especially since they skew younger.
On your point about nonwhite exit from the progressive movement if “Republicans could dial back the racism a bit.” I often wonder if this is possible even if they can’t “dial it back.”
Could the racism that’s present on the right become handled similarly to how “The Squad” is currently on the left? In that there’s this movement, that’s here, that can’t be banished but isn’t front and center in picking presidential candidates and policy decisions. Maybe this isn’t really possible, but if it is, I can still see this exit.
A healthy portion of the Black, Hispanic, and Asian population is younger. Many of them are part of the nation’s educated workforce with high technical skills. Like death and taxes, this means that they likely work for a progressive white person who is generally speaking not terribly impressive. This could translate to some like “F this person’s political party.” sentiment.
They can’t. A substantial part of their base and primary electorate is now so enmeshed in an interlinked constellation of Christian Dominionism, replacement theory, grievance politics, and reaction on sex and gender issues that they suffer the same exact problem as this article outlines, just with regards to cultural issues.
They’ll continue to “break through” now and again with minority groups, then slide backward… wash, rinse, repeat.
I agree with all that. The big issue obviously is Trump, who to most people personifies the racist Republican faction. But whereas the Squad is just a media curiosity off to the side, Trump is front, back and center with the Republicans, so I don't see it changing.
It's crazy that the Republicans are still going with Trump. He lost the popular vote twice! He has some smart political insight but I don't see why you couldn't find a better candidate with similar politics who appeals to non-college voters
Lost the popular vote twice and presided over a very bad midterm and lost the Senate shortly before his departure. I believe he's the first president since at least Hoover to both serve only one term AND lose both houses of Congress. MAGA normies aren't going to worry about such things, but can't Republican bigwigs come up with a way to SECRETLY stab him in the back and sabotage his comeback hopes?
I think the reason this isn't an effective argument in the party is that many grassroots voters truly believe that big city liberals are rigging elections and so the popular vote count is a lie and they are the real majority. If you follow this train of thought it makes a lot of sense they are trying to make elections more political because they believe that it is up to Republicans to "correct" the corrupt election system (which they will then win because it's finally been made fair). The Big Lie would not be effective without the Big Belief in it. I see the same threads of distrust in current elections from my conservative friends in the deep south and in my fairly liberal purple district outside a major city.
Essentially, election fraud allegations are their big excuse for not putting up their equivalent of the post-it Matt's talking about (theirs would just say, "Donald Trump is very unpopular"). Republican voters love voting for Trump, and the more involved they are in Republican politics the more they love it. They don't want to do the less-fun thing to help them win, but they also don't want to recognize that they're killing their party's chances, so they cover the cognitive dissonance with fraud claims and complaints about how stacked the cultural deck is.
A Republican friend of mine said “Trumps just like a celebrity, like Obama”. He actually made the argument that Trump is bad but so was Obama and they were similar. That really floored me. It did make me think that there are probably other people out there who hold that opinion though.
Obama was certainly more presidential than Trump. But they are saying Obama was bad because of his stupid (and often unconstitional) policies. See DACA, DAPA, etc. Not to mention having the IRS go after Tea Party groups
Yeah, I did think it was weird that Trump supporters were like "Obama is doing all this executive overreach!" and then 100% supported all of Trumps executive overreach. I still don't understand how the idea of the strong unitary executive fits with the idea of limiting government power, seems like a huge contradiction in conservative thought.
What exactly is “the racism” you are describing. I know of zero elected Republicans who advocate de outearn segregation, the repeal of anti-lynching laws, or even literacy tests and grandfather clauses. “The racism” is either chimerical or means policies that disproportionately hurt minorities, eg low taxes and a thin safety net or voter ID laws. The Republicans could ditch voter ID laws with relatively little cost because they have a minuscule effect on elections. However, the core “racism” of the Republican party is its affection for laissez faire economics, which perpetuate a social and economic hierarchy that marginalizes black and brown voters. This hierarchy is sufficiently robust that it also marginalizes non white people in places like France and the UK, which Republicans would describe as socialist shitholes. How exactly would anything resembling the modern GOP dial back the (racist) hierarchy of wealth and power?
Obama Birtherism, Charlottesville stuff, and Great Replacement theory are all big parts of Republican thought, AFAICT. There's also tolerance for more extreme bigotry like anti-semitic conspiracy theories.
To the extent that it isn’t *entirely* about allowing the police to brutalize black folks with no reason or consequence, it’s only because the people who believe it also have little issue with the police brutalizing urban white folks too. They must be libs, after all.
The hardcore Back the Blue fuckheads and the replacement theory nutjobs are the right’s version of the phenomenon described in this article.
I know a lot of people who feel like the police, nation wide, are getting attacked and unfairly treated by much less sympathetic forces, such as disingenuous politicians and ivy league NYTs reporters. For exactly none of them is the point "allowing police brutality".
A few of the people I know who are really into "back the blue"
* A white friend of mine who's adopted 2 black girls from foster care. He actually wants to join the police as a support volunteer for the same reasons he joined the military after 9/11 - which was that he felt some people were being asked to do dangerous jobs and he didn't want to sit on the sidelines while others took all the risks
* A friend from Tijuana who thinks police in thee US are 1000x better than in his hometown and thinks defund movements risk breaking something that isn't broken.
* a friend from Iraq who was utterly terrified of the looting post-Floyd and sees the police as the only thing protecting society from the conditions he fled
You can disagree with any of these perspectives; I probably disagree about 50%. But when I have people like this in mind your comment on police support reads as quite an ugly character assassination.
Every single person I know who flies one of those fucking flags fantasizes about breaking Chauvin out of jail, or posted on Facebook about wanting to come to Philadelphia and shoot protesters, or Tweeted in support of 1/6.
The folks who share the attitudes you post here are routinely downvoted to hell on Fox News, /rConservative, and Breitbart comment sections.
I'm aware that the nutjobs aren't the whole of the movement, but the limited data available bears out that they are much or most of it, and definitely the most vocal part.
This is no comment on the police themselves, nor on people who hold moderate attitudes like those you describe. Having discussed this and read a lot of Graham's work, I'm of the opinion that the problems are less all-encompassing than the media would have me believe.
I think there are more problems than he believes, and as a moderate civil libertarian I'm not inclined to forgive or permit the dragnet approach that he believes is the only way to conduct police work, but I recognize that media portrayals of outright racism and excessive violence in policing are either ignorant or disingenuous.
But then, I also think the data bears out the notion that the position you've described is the mainstream Democratic position, too! We're just saddled with the "activists" that this and many other MY articles have discussed.
TL;DR: Don't assume that by "Back the Blue" fuckheads, I'm referring to the folks you describe, please. We both know better.
Well, that's how it strikes some people. I think the Blue Lives matter people feel that the police are a respected institution in society and that police officers mostly do a hard job and deserve respect, and they are angry that they are treated with disrespect by people who have strange values that they don't share. This is thoroughly human. It does not seem inherently racist to me. Supporting the BLM point of view on the police is not a litmus test.
Is there a coherent "BLM point of view on the police"?
I think not...
My (mostly black) neighbors want better police who do their jobs instead of ripping lost moms from minivans, beating them, and tweeting photos of how they saved their "lost barefoot toddlers".
That involves burning the police unions to the fucking ground and enforcing the same accountability that exists in every other industry.
You can agree with all that and still think that we need to improve policing in ways that involve fewer armed officers responding to nuisance complaints/mental health emergencies/routine traffic control and more time on solving crimes against person and property especially crimes against poor and minority victims.
Along the same lines - if you told me police were going to start disproportionately stopping and monitoring white people in my county, I'd pretty much be (selfishly) overjoyed. It would mean they'd be arresting more of the drug dealers and petty thief junkies and my neighborhood. It would probably mean more shootings in other neighborhoods, though.
So you don't know about Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms?
You don't know about Steven Miller, who was a top legislative aid to Jeff Sessions before getting promoted to the White House?
You don't know about the NC Republican party leaders who drew a redistricting map that was so obviously racist that even conservative SCOTUS members called it racist? And you don't know about how all of the people who did that are still extremely prominent members of the NC Republican party?
There is a shitload of obvious and explicit racism in the Republican party, and there has been for generations. A refusal to acknowledge this truth seems like a huge part of the problem to me.
They were both elected and reelected by landslides in the 80s. You're alleging that the Republican party stopped being racist in the mid 80s (when Helms and Thurmond left he scene) and started again in 2016 but had completely stopped being racist in between?
I never said Republicans aren’t racist. I questioned whether they are racist in a way that can be “dialed back.”. Laissez faire economics, as applied to the US, systematically give black and brown people worse outcomes. I don’t see how Republicans can get to better economic outcomes for black and brown people without abandoning their core commitments to business interests
Trump's rhetoric, certainly. Some of it might _just_ be xenophobia "... They're not sending us their best people..." but the Charlottesville stuff.
I have a friend whose dad seems to have voted for Trump partly for bigoted semi-racist reasons - hadn't voted in years and seems to have been excited to finally hear someone speak the truth.
I also know people who voted for him that I don't think are particularly racist (_everyone_ has unconscious in-group biases) and didn't like his rhetoric on that but didn't like the Democrats more.
I agree with you that while the overall policies aren't designed for equity they don't seem (to me) to be pro-racist.
I am just guessing but the racism that I see across the Republican governing party is this:
In order to win elections Republicans need every vote. Thus R. politicians turn a blind eye to racist dog whistles (overt and covert) in Right Wing media and among a few of their colleagues.
I am not following. The small percent of voters at whom the dog whistles are directed have given up what? Seemingly the politicians humoring them do not believe they have given up voting.
"However, the core “racism” of the Republican party is its affection for laissez faire economics, which perpetuate a social and economic hierarchy that marginalizes black and brown voters."
And you've nailed the heart of the disagreement right there. You consider the free market to be racist.
The free market, and the liberal order has brought billions of people out of poverty of every skin color, religion and creed.
It's the American dream that says if you work hard you can get ahead. It's why millions of black and brown people want to immigrate here each year. Even if they have to risk their life via cartel to do so.
let me add, i support free markets, subject to progressive (not confiscatory) taxation. i support free markets even though they entrench the power of certain reactionary elements precisely because market's create really good incentives to invent and produce useful things. markets are probably the best tool we have in the struggle for subsistence. because markets encourage useful production, the struggle for subsistence is increasingly a cakewalk.
markets are more ambiguous, even dubious, in their distributive effect.
finally, combatting racism is not my lodestar or even my primary goal. my aim is human happiness. I don’t want anyone condemned to misery because of their race, but equalizing the distribution of happiness between races seems less urgent than increasing happiness generally.
Some activists are more interested in displaying their righteousness for the benefit of their peers rather than winning.
Being admired and getting laid are achievable goals. Big, institutional change in the face of an antiquated constitution is hard.
"Being admired and getting laid are achievable goals."
Ha! Must be nice being you....
"Big, institutional change in the face of an antiquated constitution is hard"
That's a feature not a bug.
Big changes should have large bi-partisan support. And if it's not constitutional, then it should require a constitutional amendment. Rule of law is always a good idea
How's that working out for us? Does the United States seem like a particularly functional or governable polity? Is our public policy the envy of the world? Are other nations clamoring to copy our 60% approval threshold for major legislation, or our malapportioned upper chamber?
It's difficult because there are clearly certain life situations where a moral calculus that sort of resembles this is the right one, so people's internal compasses get confused. For instance, if you're told that if you want to advance in your job you have to (1) stop associating with embarrassing friends or family members, (2) pretend not to hold political or religious views that you actually do hold, (3) praise and fawn over bosses whom you find distasteful, (4) publicly downplay some morally repugnant things your industry does, (5) etc. - then the right moral decision may in fact be to sacrifice your job and find another one, even if your family suffers economically. So a lot of people start to incorrectly intuit that "staying true to yourself" is the value you should always maximize to the exclusion of all others.
Reflecting on this some more, I'm thinking there doesn't have to be a conflict between "staying true to yourself" and winning. The key is just understanding that politics is a team sport and embracing the underlying principles and logic of a democratic system of government. You don't have to deny that you want things that you want. You just need to make a conscious decision to defer, and say that you're deferring, to other members of the coalition when you collectively decide on a platform, because that's what it means to be part of a team.
Some (many?) even believe that 'winning' is an ambiguously violent revolution which overthrows capitalism, and that any policy change is only really important insofar as it builds old-school Marxist style class consciousness to prep for the revolution.
I think people are really underrating to what extent the activist class has been captured by actual real life communists because we are so used to listening to Fox News complain about non-communists being communists.
No.
The post to which you’re replying is spot-on, borne out by the demographics of the activist class, their positions, and reams of anecdotes in this Substack.
In contrast, there’s no evidence at all to support this contention.
There are some people on Twitter who like to cosplay as anti-electoralists, but Twitter is not real life and in any event, even they are not sincere.
People with actual jobs on campaigns or activist organizations are not like this. They are just naive idealists who get blinded into thinking they have the votes.
Here are three points I would make, then.
1) Any cursory trip through humanities academia and prominent journals will reveal that most professors at elite universities who teach humanities courses are, at the very least, in a primarily anti-capitalist and Marxist-inspired milieu. Whether they openly discuss revolution varies, but one wonders how exactly they anticipate the current order to be overthrown.
2) Most of the language that filters through the activist sanewashing machine starts with actual communists. Police abolition begins not as a typical progressive activist class position, but rather was a deeply radical position held by actual anarchists and communists many years ago. Because the social cachet of these people has become so prominent on the left, even non-communists end up adopting their ideas and language and simply changing the actual policies to be less insane. But those people are still there, and they are the ones pushing their fellow-activist friends to be crazier and crazier.
3) Random college activities that used to be the places where activists were born, such as debate clubs, have almost completely been overtaken by actual communists. Spending literally any time at CEDA or NDT today (major debate tournaments for college students) will have you running into dozens of sincere communists who will openly tell you they intend to start a violent revolution at the earliest opportunity. This is a radical change from even 10 years ago, where the communism was mostly strategic and tongue-in-cheek, not sincere.
Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I really think that this is an actual issue. I'm not claiming that 50%, or even 30%, of progressive activists are communists. But I think the real number is probably in the 10% range, which is a HUGE number of people.
These are, I’ll note, assertions and not evidence, but I’ll take that last sentence at face value nonetheless: How many “progressive activists” do you think there are?
My guess is maybe 200,000 nationwide. 10% of that is 20,000, which is about the membership of the CPUSA in 1945.
The threat level hovers between “nonexistent” and “what are you smoking?”
Look, if the GOP fears an actual leftist revolution, it should be acting very differently, like the US did in the 1930’s. File the rough edges off of capitalism, restore faith in government by actually acting in the best interests of the electorate, and work to head off the foreseeable problems of the future.
Because the only way that revolution happens, let alone succeeds, is if life gets a lot worse for the great majority of the country.
To add (sorry, just thought of this): remember the book "In Defense of Looting" that was a big deal on the left during the summer of 2020? It literally, explicitly makes the argument that the left must use violence to fight "racial capitalism", and actively denounces non-violent resistance. I do not know how you could get more obviously-communist than that without directly saying you want a vanguard party to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.
How many people actually read that book, given how low sales of books are? How many people who might do a surface reading of that argument would then agree that they want to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat (nearly none of them, I expect)?
How many republicans are actively trying to establish a one-party strong man government right now? How many old people on facebook are essentially getting their information from Russian and Chinese influence programs (which are pushing them to the hard right)? Hell, how many American Democratic senators are being driven by various disguised hard right forces?
I lived through 1980's and I remember knowing people who were actual communists at the time, strongly supportive of the Soviet Union (sometimes China), and the number of those people was pretty small and they vastly outnumbered the people who are actual tankies right now.
I am pretty sure the hard right (neo-nazi right) massively outnumbers any actual communists in the American population.
elm
why are you carrying water for the glenn becks of the world?
Sure, it's not evidence, mostly because it's difficult to determine how many people are actual violent old-school communists and how many people are the "socialists" that actually just means social democracy. There's no real way to be objective about this even if I had the time to go digging for more concrete evidence.
But to be clear, I'm not a Republican, and I have no real concern for what the GOP thinks or doesn't think. I also don't fear a communist revolution.
What I do fear is that, if communists are the ones setting the agenda on the farthest-left parts of our party, and are deciding what issues the progressive left decides to champion (looting is Good, Actually; we should get rid of both prisons and police; violent riots are not that big of a deal if the cause is just, etc.) then we have a goal misalignment problem. For a communist, electoral victory for AOC-like politicians is almost counterproductive. For them, it is about generally undermining faith in the system that presently exists to create the conditions for revolution. They will almost certainly not succeed in actually causing a communist revolution, but they can certainly do damage and steer the progressive left away from its most popular ideas to extremely unpopular ones.
>Any cursory trip through humanities academia and prominent journals will reveal that most professors at elite universities who teach humanities courses are
Awww I call bullshit. Why not redbait the social scientists or the STEM divisions instead of picking on the arts and literature folks? If you think that the humanists are going to overthrow *anything* with violent revolution you haven't been on campus at one of those elite universities that you speak so confidently about.
You are being paranoid. I don't know what you mean by a 'Communist' other than someone who disagrees with you. I haven't met one in real life in the US despite living here 69 years. Must be cells of them all over if they're 10% of the population. How did I miss them???
10% of the activist population, not the general population
i.e. on the order of tens of thousands, not millions (i mention in another comment I am less concerned about an actual revolution than I am about it making the activist class do bad politics)
Why think the tweets are more revealing than the published work? I would think the tweets are a series of clever postures, while the published work represents the more considered view.
My impression is that published work is how they act at work, and tweets are what they tell their friends they were doing at work.
see: The Iron Law of Institutions and the Left
https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/the-iron-law-of-institutions-and-the-left-333c42c246af
Activists simply don't have the same day to day incentives as, say, the chief of staff of a Senator or House member (or their campaign chair, or a high level staffer at the DCCC, or what have you). In most cases it's not "for the benefit of their peers" in the case of these activists (or digital media people, or Twitter influencers, or what have you) but their own careers or jobs. In most cases (assuming we're talking about people on the left) they're going to prefer that Democrats, rather than Republicans, win elections, of course, but it's not the *central focus of their jobs* the way it is for the people in the elections trenches. Which yes, can cause problems for Democrats, because "activists" influence what the media covers. And what the media covers matters. A lot.
(Republicans aren't immune from this dynamic, either, naturally; I have a feeling people like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCArthy aren't totally pumped for the specter of Texas abortion bounty hunters.)
on the other hand, performative wokism only works in intra-progressive status competitions because a lot of progressives go for it. without the likes and retweets, without the demand for doctrinaire content, there would be much less supply.
at a minimum, a significant number of media consuming progressives enjoy wilke performances.
*woke performances
I agree with most of this, but I think the problem is deeper in that, over the past 5 years, a substantial part of the progressive movement has increasingly not just failed to have the fact that the the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb in the front of their mind, but to actively seek to do things that aggravate someone fitting the profile of the median voter for very little practical gain. (See, e.g., anything involving pronouns -- even the vast majority of LGBTQ individuals use traditional pronouns, so you're talking about trying to get 99%+ of the population to rethink the manner in which they've been speaking on a daily basis for basically their entire lives for the sake of making a fraction of 1% of the population more comfortable.)
It feels like "delete Twitter" covers 90% of the actionable problems here.
I remember, 1000 years ago, when WarrenSanders was abuzz all over the internet and then Joe Biden went and talked with regular-ass people and then crushed it! And almost nobody learned anything.
If I were either a candidate or running a campaign, I’d have three post-it’s on my staffer’s desks.
1. Anyone who frames a bread-and-butter issue in “equity” terms will be fired.
2. More and better police, not none.
3. All press interactions must be delegated upward.
I agree with point # 1 so much I just came here 2.5 years later to confirm that!
Point 3 is a recipe for letting your opponent define your campaign before you can sit down to breakfast.
The difference is you're basically in the manager's seat for democratic staffers -- you have stuff that you want them to accomplish that's more important to you than the stuff that you like about labor protections. At, say, a McDonalds, you don't really benefit from high team member performance, management control, or whatever, so it's easy for you to support the staff members themselves over their manager's goals.
I think this is why liberals carve out Police from "unions they want to protect", and Conservatives really only support unions for the police, even though those positions are mostly incoherent with regard to unionization itself. It's also why I generally support the existence of private unions, but not public unions - since the broader public has much more interest in "employees being accountable for doing a good job" in the latter.
One excuse I have for being in favor of private sector unions and against public sector unions is that at least public sector employees still have a say in management through voting, whereas private sector employees don't typically have any say in their management unless they are shareholders or in a co-op.
I think the other factor is private sector unions also face competitive market pressure - so there's a countervailing force to the negotiations that doesn't exist with the public sector (e.g., tenure based layoffs in a private sector downturn will actually further constrain operating margins leading to a downward spiral).
I saw a quote yesterday -- maybe in an LGM comments thread? -- from someone in the military service during the Cold War, talking about the relatively autocratic and hierarchical nature of military authority, saying "we're here to defend Democracy, not to practice it."
I don't think that's incoherent. So, I don't think it's incoherent to ask people fighting for greater unionization to do without certain protections or to tolerate less than ideal working conditions
Was reading a book on the Civil War, and one of the oddities of the Confederate army is that they did practice democracy, with officer elections. So did the Russian army for a little bit after 1917. So it's not totally impossible or unheard of.
I see no incoherence here. These people are basically poorly paid volunteers; there’s always going to be a big difference between a career and a vocation.
Also, more prosaically, no worker protections will ever cover incompetence, except incidentally to other goals, so I have no moral trouble supporting easy hiring and firing for competence issues alongside a decent standard of evidence to prevent that from being a figleaf.
Campaign staffers are a great example of why evidence requirements in competence-based firings are so messy. Let's say you manage campaign staffers. One tweets something from the campaign account that is (to your mind) obviously damaging to the candidate. But if you fire them, and end up in front of a jury or judge (in a blue city, in a purple state) that agrees with them, not only is the campaign liable, but as you as the manager can be *personally liable*. Is that really a risk you take?
While firing anyone for nonsense reasons is obviously abusive, having outsiders who don't understand the industry or the role try to quickly gauge what competence looks like puts companies and individual managers at great risk whenever they fire, even in very real cases of incompetence.
I think the goal of any employment protections shouldn’t be to force an employer to prove incompetence, but to dictate a relatively low bar for an employee to show probable cause that the issue was not incompetence.
Keep the burden of proof where it is, but lower it, if you will.
fair point and campaign workers do get treated like shit, mainly because a lot of idealistic young people want to do it (until they get burned out).
thing is, campaign workers are like 0.01% of the US workforce. I’m willing to tolerate bad conditions in campaigns to help the other 99.99% if they economy, and I don’t feel guilty about it. Soldiers in combat have much worse working conditions, even if their boss never grabs their ass.
This is also the paradox of police unions. In theory, we should like unions, but when their main function is to protect the jobs of people who really need to be fired, they're rather toxic.
Progressives are also in favor of economic redistribution, which helps working class whites
Ridiculous assertion...
Your previous statement was: for all values of (A) and (B) the country is worse off. I maintain that statement is ridiculous.
FWIW, I think that our public health community would have done well to put up that Post-It Note(R) in the last twenty months or so. For example, a lot of smart highly educated people thought it was important to suspend the JNJ vaccine because there were six serious adverse events out of seven million injections. They (and a lot of academic physicians) thought that adhering to the "process" would boost the credibility of the vaccines. I think the median voter, a bit short on statistics training, heard instead that "six adverse events out of seven million is a good reason to suspend a vaccine." Vaccinations literally peaked the day of the suspension, and fell like a stone in the months thereafter, which clearly was the opposite of the reaction anticipated by the FDA. I think we would have had a better outcome if more people at the FDA and CDC had grown up spending their summers on the Gulf coast or the beaches of Lake Michigan rather than the Atlantic coast, or at least reminded themselves that the median American lives far outside their assumptions.
I think this post makes some important points, and I think also probably underestimates the demographic disconnect. I'm a 50 something white guy but with loads of prestigious degrees. But college was essentially nondenominational back then, and I find I have much more in common with people my age regardless of college experience than I do with the woke-brainwashed ideologues that constitute the media elite. I also predict that Asians, Latinos and a non trivial percentage of Blacks would desert the progressives in a heartbeat if the Republicans could just turn down the racism. But that's a topic for another day. The overall message is that this country is not receptive to the progressive message, nor will it be for the foreseeable future.
Being of a similar vintage and educational status, I agree. I have been hearing my whole adult life that progressives (or, back in the day, liberals) were one election cycle away from demographic domination. Not going to happen, especially if progressives continue to ignore and/or condescend to the majority of voters.
I'm a brown guy in his 40s with a ton of degrees, and I've been told my whole life that conservatives will stop being racist if we would just be nicer to them. That turned out to be bullshit too.
What have the racist conservatives done to you?
Are you looking for an answer about conservative political policy or about my personal anecdotes of interactions with conservatives in everyday life?
Policy would be a lot easier to verify.
Fair enough. The most obvious one that I witness directly is seeing people get deported. I lived in Tucson during that Joe Arpaio era, and I coached a teenage boys soccer team made up of mostly Mexican kids. Today I teach at an open-access college in Georgia with a large immigrant population. I've watched several kids deal with their parents getting deported, and I see the lucky ones who don't get deported but do get stuck with an expensive and burdensome process for renewing their DACA every year.
"I also predict that Asians, Latinos and a non trivial percentage of Blacks would desert the progressives in a heartbeat if the Republicans could just turn down the racism."
One of Matt's theses, which I agree with, is that it seems to be the other way -- the GOP's positions on OTHER issues is what drives non-white voters away. The Republicans would gain more of these voters by embracing the Medicaid expansion than changing up their racial views.
Maybe I misread him, but I believe he's saying that only as it pertains to the "average" Republican, the 50 something non college educated white man. Some of them clearly would be gettable on issues like Medicaid expansion. I don't know the polling on this, but I can't imagine why Latinos and Asians would be attracted to this en masse, especially since they skew younger.
An obvious dumb mistake in my previous post, Matt was describing the average voter, not the average Republican.
On your point about nonwhite exit from the progressive movement if “Republicans could dial back the racism a bit.” I often wonder if this is possible even if they can’t “dial it back.”
Could the racism that’s present on the right become handled similarly to how “The Squad” is currently on the left? In that there’s this movement, that’s here, that can’t be banished but isn’t front and center in picking presidential candidates and policy decisions. Maybe this isn’t really possible, but if it is, I can still see this exit.
A healthy portion of the Black, Hispanic, and Asian population is younger. Many of them are part of the nation’s educated workforce with high technical skills. Like death and taxes, this means that they likely work for a progressive white person who is generally speaking not terribly impressive. This could translate to some like “F this person’s political party.” sentiment.
They can’t. A substantial part of their base and primary electorate is now so enmeshed in an interlinked constellation of Christian Dominionism, replacement theory, grievance politics, and reaction on sex and gender issues that they suffer the same exact problem as this article outlines, just with regards to cultural issues.
They’ll continue to “break through” now and again with minority groups, then slide backward… wash, rinse, repeat.
I agree with all that. The big issue obviously is Trump, who to most people personifies the racist Republican faction. But whereas the Squad is just a media curiosity off to the side, Trump is front, back and center with the Republicans, so I don't see it changing.
It's crazy that the Republicans are still going with Trump. He lost the popular vote twice! He has some smart political insight but I don't see why you couldn't find a better candidate with similar politics who appeals to non-college voters
Lost the popular vote twice and presided over a very bad midterm and lost the Senate shortly before his departure. I believe he's the first president since at least Hoover to both serve only one term AND lose both houses of Congress. MAGA normies aren't going to worry about such things, but can't Republican bigwigs come up with a way to SECRETLY stab him in the back and sabotage his comeback hopes?
I think the reason this isn't an effective argument in the party is that many grassroots voters truly believe that big city liberals are rigging elections and so the popular vote count is a lie and they are the real majority. If you follow this train of thought it makes a lot of sense they are trying to make elections more political because they believe that it is up to Republicans to "correct" the corrupt election system (which they will then win because it's finally been made fair). The Big Lie would not be effective without the Big Belief in it. I see the same threads of distrust in current elections from my conservative friends in the deep south and in my fairly liberal purple district outside a major city.
Essentially, election fraud allegations are their big excuse for not putting up their equivalent of the post-it Matt's talking about (theirs would just say, "Donald Trump is very unpopular"). Republican voters love voting for Trump, and the more involved they are in Republican politics the more they love it. They don't want to do the less-fun thing to help them win, but they also don't want to recognize that they're killing their party's chances, so they cover the cognitive dissonance with fraud claims and complaints about how stacked the cultural deck is.
A Republican friend of mine said “Trumps just like a celebrity, like Obama”. He actually made the argument that Trump is bad but so was Obama and they were similar. That really floored me. It did make me think that there are probably other people out there who hold that opinion though.
Obama was certainly more presidential than Trump. But they are saying Obama was bad because of his stupid (and often unconstitional) policies. See DACA, DAPA, etc. Not to mention having the IRS go after Tea Party groups
Yeah, I did think it was weird that Trump supporters were like "Obama is doing all this executive overreach!" and then 100% supported all of Trumps executive overreach. I still don't understand how the idea of the strong unitary executive fits with the idea of limiting government power, seems like a huge contradiction in conservative thought.
Do you mind if I ask where your friend is from?
a north Mississippi suburb
I mean, Trump got a giant swing of Hispanic voters in 2020, mostly women.
What exactly is “the racism” you are describing. I know of zero elected Republicans who advocate de outearn segregation, the repeal of anti-lynching laws, or even literacy tests and grandfather clauses. “The racism” is either chimerical or means policies that disproportionately hurt minorities, eg low taxes and a thin safety net or voter ID laws. The Republicans could ditch voter ID laws with relatively little cost because they have a minuscule effect on elections. However, the core “racism” of the Republican party is its affection for laissez faire economics, which perpetuate a social and economic hierarchy that marginalizes black and brown voters. This hierarchy is sufficiently robust that it also marginalizes non white people in places like France and the UK, which Republicans would describe as socialist shitholes. How exactly would anything resembling the modern GOP dial back the (racist) hierarchy of wealth and power?
Obama Birtherism, Charlottesville stuff, and Great Replacement theory are all big parts of Republican thought, AFAICT. There's also tolerance for more extreme bigotry like anti-semitic conspiracy theories.
You’ve left out the thin blue line stuff.
Why is that inherently racist?
To the extent that it isn’t *entirely* about allowing the police to brutalize black folks with no reason or consequence, it’s only because the people who believe it also have little issue with the police brutalizing urban white folks too. They must be libs, after all.
The hardcore Back the Blue fuckheads and the replacement theory nutjobs are the right’s version of the phenomenon described in this article.
I know a lot of people who feel like the police, nation wide, are getting attacked and unfairly treated by much less sympathetic forces, such as disingenuous politicians and ivy league NYTs reporters. For exactly none of them is the point "allowing police brutality".
A few of the people I know who are really into "back the blue"
* A white friend of mine who's adopted 2 black girls from foster care. He actually wants to join the police as a support volunteer for the same reasons he joined the military after 9/11 - which was that he felt some people were being asked to do dangerous jobs and he didn't want to sit on the sidelines while others took all the risks
* A friend from Tijuana who thinks police in thee US are 1000x better than in his hometown and thinks defund movements risk breaking something that isn't broken.
* a friend from Iraq who was utterly terrified of the looting post-Floyd and sees the police as the only thing protecting society from the conditions he fled
You can disagree with any of these perspectives; I probably disagree about 50%. But when I have people like this in mind your comment on police support reads as quite an ugly character assassination.
Every single person I know who flies one of those fucking flags fantasizes about breaking Chauvin out of jail, or posted on Facebook about wanting to come to Philadelphia and shoot protesters, or Tweeted in support of 1/6.
The folks who share the attitudes you post here are routinely downvoted to hell on Fox News, /rConservative, and Breitbart comment sections.
I'm aware that the nutjobs aren't the whole of the movement, but the limited data available bears out that they are much or most of it, and definitely the most vocal part.
This is no comment on the police themselves, nor on people who hold moderate attitudes like those you describe. Having discussed this and read a lot of Graham's work, I'm of the opinion that the problems are less all-encompassing than the media would have me believe.
I think there are more problems than he believes, and as a moderate civil libertarian I'm not inclined to forgive or permit the dragnet approach that he believes is the only way to conduct police work, but I recognize that media portrayals of outright racism and excessive violence in policing are either ignorant or disingenuous.
But then, I also think the data bears out the notion that the position you've described is the mainstream Democratic position, too! We're just saddled with the "activists" that this and many other MY articles have discussed.
TL;DR: Don't assume that by "Back the Blue" fuckheads, I'm referring to the folks you describe, please. We both know better.
The "why" is an interesting question in the abstract, but it sort of sidesteps the fact that right now it very clearly *is*.
Well, that's how it strikes some people. I think the Blue Lives matter people feel that the police are a respected institution in society and that police officers mostly do a hard job and deserve respect, and they are angry that they are treated with disrespect by people who have strange values that they don't share. This is thoroughly human. It does not seem inherently racist to me. Supporting the BLM point of view on the police is not a litmus test.
Is there a coherent "BLM point of view on the police"?
I think not...
My (mostly black) neighbors want better police who do their jobs instead of ripping lost moms from minivans, beating them, and tweeting photos of how they saved their "lost barefoot toddlers".
That involves burning the police unions to the fucking ground and enforcing the same accountability that exists in every other industry.
You can agree with all that and still think that we need to improve policing in ways that involve fewer armed officers responding to nuisance complaints/mental health emergencies/routine traffic control and more time on solving crimes against person and property especially crimes against poor and minority victims.
Violent and sexual crime disproportionately victimized minorities. Lots of block people want to lock up the bad guys.
Along the same lines - if you told me police were going to start disproportionately stopping and monitoring white people in my county, I'd pretty much be (selfishly) overjoyed. It would mean they'd be arresting more of the drug dealers and petty thief junkies and my neighborhood. It would probably mean more shootings in other neighborhoods, though.
So you don't know about Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms?
You don't know about Steven Miller, who was a top legislative aid to Jeff Sessions before getting promoted to the White House?
You don't know about the NC Republican party leaders who drew a redistricting map that was so obviously racist that even conservative SCOTUS members called it racist? And you don't know about how all of the people who did that are still extremely prominent members of the NC Republican party?
There is a shitload of obvious and explicit racism in the Republican party, and there has been for generations. A refusal to acknowledge this truth seems like a huge part of the problem to me.
are strom thurmond and jesse helms elected republicans or are they dead white dudes?
They were both elected and reelected by landslides in the 80s. You're alleging that the Republican party stopped being racist in the mid 80s (when Helms and Thurmond left he scene) and started again in 2016 but had completely stopped being racist in between?
I never said Republicans aren’t racist. I questioned whether they are racist in a way that can be “dialed back.”. Laissez faire economics, as applied to the US, systematically give black and brown people worse outcomes. I don’t see how Republicans can get to better economic outcomes for black and brown people without abandoning their core commitments to business interests
Laissez faire economics marginalizes a lot of white voters, too. To me, the race talk seems beside the point.
Trump's rhetoric, certainly. Some of it might _just_ be xenophobia "... They're not sending us their best people..." but the Charlottesville stuff.
I have a friend whose dad seems to have voted for Trump partly for bigoted semi-racist reasons - hadn't voted in years and seems to have been excited to finally hear someone speak the truth.
I also know people who voted for him that I don't think are particularly racist (_everyone_ has unconscious in-group biases) and didn't like his rhetoric on that but didn't like the Democrats more.
I agree with you that while the overall policies aren't designed for equity they don't seem (to me) to be pro-racist.
>“The racism” is either chimerical
Oh boy here we go again this is tedious
I am just guessing but the racism that I see across the Republican governing party is this:
In order to win elections Republicans need every vote. Thus R. politicians turn a blind eye to racist dog whistles (overt and covert) in Right Wing media and among a few of their colleagues.
maybe. yet a constituency that is satisfied with dog whistles has basically given up.
I am not following. The small percent of voters at whom the dog whistles are directed have given up what? Seemingly the politicians humoring them do not believe they have given up voting.
if you vote for a dog whistle, the chances you get actual legislation promoting your goal are slim. you’ve given up on actually having power
"However, the core “racism” of the Republican party is its affection for laissez faire economics, which perpetuate a social and economic hierarchy that marginalizes black and brown voters."
And you've nailed the heart of the disagreement right there. You consider the free market to be racist.
The free market, and the liberal order has brought billions of people out of poverty of every skin color, religion and creed.
It's the American dream that says if you work hard you can get ahead. It's why millions of black and brown people want to immigrate here each year. Even if they have to risk their life via cartel to do so.
"The free market, and the liberal order has brought billions of people out of poverty"
_Regulated_ markets have done this. It's a fiction to claim those results from unregulated markets.
Free market doesn't mean unregulated market. Of course there has to be rules of the game enforced by government.
Moreover, certain actions cause externalities, that again need government action (pollution is a classic example)
let me add, i support free markets, subject to progressive (not confiscatory) taxation. i support free markets even though they entrench the power of certain reactionary elements precisely because market's create really good incentives to invent and produce useful things. markets are probably the best tool we have in the struggle for subsistence. because markets encourage useful production, the struggle for subsistence is increasingly a cakewalk.
markets are more ambiguous, even dubious, in their distributive effect.
finally, combatting racism is not my lodestar or even my primary goal. my aim is human happiness. I don’t want anyone condemned to misery because of their race, but equalizing the distribution of happiness between races seems less urgent than increasing happiness generally.
*de iure segregation. Autocorrect didn’t take Latin.