The NYT homepage headline yesterday was "Democratic Leaders Want the Party to Moderate. Its Base Has Other Ideas." on a story that was about the three NYC house seats that the Mamdani team swept. That framing drives me nuts because it's both incorrect (since when do three of the most progressive seats in the country represent the national base?) and because it plays directly into the emerging GOP comeback narrative ("Democrats are crazy leftists who can't be trusted")
I think so much of the need for a national rebrand is just getting the media to stop focusing on the left on left politics of LA and NYC and start focusing on owning the cons. That's really the difference between right wing media and "main stream". Right wing media is only focused on owning libs. I love beating Republicans. It brings me such joy. Why can't we get a media that relentlessly celebrates GOP fuckups and dances on their political graves when they get owned?
Yeah if the NYT went to west virginia or something and showed how psychotic conservative politics and rule really is, they'd get a lot more interesting stories but that'd require them to actually leave NYC and they just like covering cat fights.
Is west virginia poorly governed? Are unions eating its tax base and not providing good services. Is it wasting tens of billions upon trains that don’t go anywhere? Or is it just a rural backwater that has stagnated for structural reasons?
Red states have fewer stationary bandits than blue states.
It is. They have a budget crisis, a failures in public provision (due to basically capital stock exceeding revenues), and there was a recent scandal with the University of WV’s finances (basically overspending on frivolous stuff and then disguising the hole.)
Blue states just tend to have excess incomes to tax that can paper over governance failures.
You are being tendentious. The WVUfiscal scandal you are talking about is a $45 million shortfall, or about $22 per taxpayer.
If that is your threshold for “poorly governed” no state is well governed. The fact that such a small revenue shortfall is such a big deal rather reinforces my point about secular stagnation
After moving away from Iowa I absorbed a lot of the "left-behind and hollowed out" narrative that was popular among libs in 2016. Now that I go back frequently to visit my parents, it's teeth grinding how little interest these rural Iowans have in making their communities somewhat nicer and just seem content with the managed decline. The years long struggle to get a single community bike path funded on donated land. The continued rejection of any industry that their dadies didn't work in. It's just a bunch of rich farmers and impoverished service workers and nobody seems terribly interested in changing anything.
One of the things i've always thought was wrong with the stories was how involved the body politic is in the outcomes they talk about- because there's a desire to be respectful of the left-behind people, there's no ability to criticize them, so you just see the hogs at the top, and not the people who keep electing them.
I think it would probably destroy the country's opinion of rural voters to see what they want in politicians. (name recognition, and/or gaudy displays of christianity/americana over anything of substance). Even the left-leaning outlets don't seem really capable of criticizing rural voters or even possibly suggesting that they're partially responsible for their demise.
Why would you want a bike lane if you are too fat to use it? The rich farmers can afford a peloton the poor immigrants mainly can’t vote.
I don’t share the consumer tastes of rural voters, I hate television and try to burn the yummy calories I ingest. But I certainly don’t expect people with a quarter my household income and religious commitments I find absurd will land in my policy preferences.
There are a lot of aspects of rural Mitchell county that I genuinely admire; the hardworking ethics, the emphasis on practical trades, the many opportunities for community engagement, but their priorities will never be mine. Nice things cost money and money comes from being willing to pay taxes.
Ahahahaha okay, yeah, this is someone who's absolutely not serious, who says that west virginia does not have stationary bandits, as you put them. The average red state is extremely badly run. Conservatives mostly pick their appointees for nepotistic reasons.
Surely part of the reason it is a rural backwater is its policies. Rural blue states like Vermont and Maine are doing much better and seen as more desirable places to live. West Virginia is breathtakingly beautiful (as I’ve heard it put once: “very nice if you avoid all the areas with people”) and could be a Vermont-like place if it had liberal politics:
I currently live in Vermont and it has some very very very serious problems that mostly stem from wanting a 1800s settlement pattern and a 21st Nordic welfare state.
I don’t think state level policies make all that big a difference. The Erie canal is likely an exception, but I just can’t think of many things states have done which have overridden demographic and economic forces.
Do you think this would do good for them? I’m not sure the paying audience would be there. Maybe if it’s really bad enough it would be chum for socials but when it’s just red state governance is bad and difficult to live under it’s not usually much of a driver of anything.
Because I follow education policy stuff I see a lot of reporting in left of center outlets about outcomes in red states and most of the stuff that gets social media traction is high salience culture war stuff that’s bad for democrats winning swing seats.
I'm pretty sure there'd be more of a paying audience for more exciting stories talking about how bad republicans are, but then again, i don't know. The big thing is the NYT isn't owned by the democrats anyway so they can't really be marshalled to any strategy regardless, so i'll concede here.
I think this unfortunately makes the same mistake (of emphasis, perhaps) others also make when criticizing the media environment.
You’re talking about “getting the media to stop focusing” on something. But this doesn’t seem to me like an issue of supply. It’s an issue of demand, for these kinds of stories.
Readers just WANT to read about crazy fights going on in super-progressive districts between DSA members and hapless moderate Democrats. They click more on articles discussing these. They stay there for longer. They give you more ad money, and pay for more subscriptions if this is what you focus on instead of doing the boring, nitty-gritty analysis of contested-in-general-elections districts.
'Readers just WANT to read about crazy fights going on in super-progressive districts between DSA members and hapless moderate Democrats.'
The reason why 'readers' want this is that many of the readers are personally invested - politically, emotionally - in the outcome, and *that* happens because city-dwellers tend to be way to the left of the rest of the country. But a big problem with a lot of centrist takes is that they end up essentially arguing 'you shouldn't have the preferences you have'. You can't actually stop millions of people nationwide from acting politically if they decide to do so.
I think that's a great point, and it's worth reminding moderates that the big tent works both ways. We shouldn't get bent out of shape when NYC nominates DSAs to Congress. DSAs shouldn't get mad when immigration hawks get nominated in Texas. We should all be united in our love of crushing Republicans.
So far, this is the *only* way the “big tent” has worked in practice, isn’t it?
Ezra Klein wrote a piece about how a big tent Democratic Party should include people who are pro-life or something.
But literally every time “big tent” has come up since then, it’s been “Wouldn’t it be hypocritical to call for a big tent without allowing Hasan Piker? Plz come in we <3 u.”
In the meantime, Democrats haven’t really added anyone who’s more centrist…
What about all the big-name neocons and Never Trump Republicans? Seems they had a lot more influence on the Harris campaign than the left did. If they have less influence going forward it’s because they lost that election.
The "big tent" argument was from September 2025, i.e., after the 2024 loss. The point he was making was that he thought Democrats would benefit electorally (against the Trump II coalition) if they accepted candidates with more right-wing views on cultural issues, with abortion being the leading example.
Of course people can argue with this, but my point is that in practice, "big tent" has been operationalized in precisely the *opposite* way: it's been a slogan that liberals have used to rationalize strengthening their alliance with leftists.
Maybe Klein's column is wrong, and Democrats' path to victory lies in embracing Hasan Piker-thought. I don't know. But my point is that by the logic in Klein's original column, this move makes little sense. If Klein believes moving to the center is electorally advantageous, it's a bit strange that he wouldn't think cozying up to leftists is electorally costly.
Well, unless those DSA types become the targets of strong and persuasive Republican attack ads in the general election in contested races, talking about how crazy Democrats are and why you shouldn’t elect them (even if the actual Democrat they are running against is a moderate)… right?
It seems to me that figuring out whether this happens is an empirical question. And if it does, then I don’t quite think the argument “works both ways.”
I would rather have a big tent that was not fighting itself than a fractured tent sniping at itself and giving those GOP attack ads fodder in advance. I don't think some random progressive back bencher is a big problem for front liners. I think Democratic leadership in the House and Senate needs to worry about threading these needles and should be careful about tying them to the masts of anything nuts.
Let’s take an empirical question. Voters were clearly annoyed about immigration and this helped elect Trump and Republicans. Trump has overreached and deployed masked paramilitaries in American cities and gone after people arbitrarily and without due process. So he’s weak on immigration and the border now. Will a call for open borders and no/limited immigration enforcement affect broad Democratic chances in the midterms or not?
“I don't think some random progressive back bencher is a big problem for front liners”
Based on?
I mean, this really is the crux of the matter, the rest of it is really superfluous. If you are correct about this factual question, building a big tent requires embracing the left as well as the center. If you are wrong, it gets trickier, and trade-offs must be made.
Sure seems like a ton of people were mad in 2024 over “Democrats” supporting, for example, policies allowing transgender women to participate in the female section in collegiate sporting events. But “Democrats” largely didn’t; an extremely tiny number of far-left House members did.
Maybe the media overweighed all of this, and in fact this wasn’t that big of an issue. Maybe it would have been as big of an issue even if literally zero elected Democrats supported it, because there still would have been social media activists talking about it.
Maybe. But these are empirical questions, which can’t be confidently answered by gazing deeply at the sky and wondering what’s true. Do we have empirical analyses of this?
The point is you can't *do* anything about it, other than 'get mad'. The political system already greatly underweights the votes of urban residents, it would be hard to do so to a greater extent without just taking the right to vote away.
Completely false. If the actual complaint from urban Democrats is “we don't have power because rural voters have more power” they can very easily make noise about nominating people who support reforms to fix that. Resorting to claims of powerlessness to throw your hands up and do nothing is the worst course of action and if that's what they think then they deserve republicans winning nationally
I think it’s like that joke about the Jew in Nazi Germany who reads Der Sturmer. “I look around me and I’m scared and oppressed, then I read this propaganda and it says I rule everything, it’s great.”
It is worth noticing that crazy politician stories on both sides usually involve attractive people whose photos stand out in a social media feed, it is noticeable as a getting eyeballs and clicks effect.
I think this critique is the strongest - that outlets are providing demand. But I also think there's something to Beutler's "if you attack it they will care" ethos, and that media institutions have some ability to get people fired up about issues of their choosing. Maybe it's not the NYT. Maybe it can't work because the center and points left are just more intellectually honest and consistent than the right, which is full of literal fucking morons.
They want to sell papers, beautiful person says crazy things in a big city near their office is a lot more fun and sellable than GOP apparatchiks are misusing mortgage fraud investigations.
I think we have a media that does focus on GOP screw ups. They probably unfairly focus on the crazies on the left to a certain extent but perception of things in the ether on the left is not good lately if you count yourself as an abundance, Yglesian type. We got brain dead tax plan after brain dead tax plan being floated and some of our most moderate members in swing districts being primaried by progressives. It seems not good.
And what do you make of Maine? I think you're missing that a whole lot of us Dem voters are done with centrism. We're done with all the dang consultants & their oh so careful calibration. We need to be the anti-billionaire party & when we get power in DC we need to tax the billionaires out of existence. No centrist has the cojones to try that. so they'll rearrange the deck chairs while the billionaires turn the rest of us into their serfs. If we're gonna be serfs let's at least go down fighting!
What problem would driving the billionaires out accomplish? How would you do it such that #1) you actually collected trillions in tax revenue #2) you didn't also destroy a lot of businesses and drive out the much larger number of millionaires?
How exactly are you going to tax the billionaires out of existence? No one has managed it without a bloody revolution that just created a new class of wealthy people and often even more serfs. Can we reduce the power of the oligarchs, sure. But how are we going to remove them entirely without killing a lot of people and then creating Red princes à la China or nomenklatura like Russia?
I think Plattner was fine, I wish there were fewer skeletons in his closet, and I wish more serious Maine Democrats ran, but I think running in an anti-establishment mode was a perfectly fine play. I wish there was more narrative emphasis on beating Susan Collins.
And yet Matt who is critical of the medias focus on dem on dem fighting goes and does a podcast about Biden’s top failures as if that hasn’t been litigated and think pieced to death.
Talk less about NY primaries absolutely. Talk about Biden pointless. Matt, in theory, wants us to talk about how republicans are messing things up on affordability and talk more about senate races in Ohio, Georgia and Texas. Ignoring biden as the loser seems like the way forward.
You said it has been litigated and think pieced to death. Now you’re changing the goal posts to something else.
Well, the answer is that learning from one’s mistakes is often quite useful. Analyzing in a coherent and comprehensive fashion what went wrong can help movers and shakers in the future figure out how best to navigate similar environments.
It’s not like Matt has no influence in the Democratic Party.
I don’t think this really has goal posts. I (me) an (individual person) who is allowed to disagree on this, thinks that another Substack article/podcast about Biden is pointless and is instead subscriber bait for us sickos(me included) who want to hear about how Jill hated Kamala and is what Matt criticizes. This is not important news. It’s click bait for the audience the same as the NYTs does.
What does the latter part of your comment have to do with your first sentence?
You criticized Matt, in the grandparent comment, for talking about something that had been done to death. I pointed out it wasn’t done to death. Then you changed to something else.
If this is the first time you’re hearing pundits say that Biden was too old, shouldn’t have run again, picking Kamala was bad, and he messed up immigration and the economy then I commend you for touching more grass than I.
I think that catharsis needs to come individually to each of us, I'm not sure that we were ever going to get a big grand moment of "moving on from biden". And I am worried about 2028, that said, Newsom (who is bad) I'm pretty sure is cold enough to dunk on Biden. I'm pretty sure in normie middle of the country elections Biden is not top of mind and candidates are running decent campaigns that have moved on from Biden. That said, sure do wish some of these big east coast journalist institutions would write about that instead of more blue on blue infighting in east coast cities.
What does the latter part of your comment have to do with your first sentence?
You criticized Matt, in the grandparent comment, for talking about something that had been done to death. I pointed out it wasn’t done to death. Then you changed to something else.
I don't get the harshness on Whitmer. She's running for president as she should be.
Overall though I agree with the pessimism. I think chances are very high that for structural, thermostatic, whatever reasons the Democrats will retake the House decisively enough and thank God for that. But in terms of the bigger issue of saving our republic it's pretty simple. The democracies that have neutralized their far right threat have done it primarily by mainstream parties accepting the voters perspective on immigration and honoring it. The ones that remain in crisis are those where the defenders of the system refuse to do so. We've gotten very lucky that Trump has made myriad unforced errors and has never operated from a place of popularity. Instead of taking advantage of that the strategy seems to be something like hope the clock runs out before something irreversibly catastrophic happens and that the GOP is unable to hang together post Trump. Dangerous stuff indeed.
I’m unsure whether or not Whitmer will ultimately choose to run for the presidency, but otherwise agree! Matt’s comment came off as a bit too armchair general-ly to me, as though Whitmer were a chess piece failing to comply with the maximally optimal democrat attack plan. Her decision likely reflects real trade offs which might not be apparent to an outside observer.
There should also be more than 1 Democrat in the state capable of winning the office and a party that can come up with electable people in the primary!
Only a mod could possibly read a post saying "Democrats who vote to fund Donald Trump's government are bad" and suggest that that post contains no criticism of Republicans.
Correct me if I am wrong, but those countries that have defused the threat of the far right generally do not have a primary system.
So they don’t have a structural screening mechanism that systematically pushes for more and more extreme candidates to reach the general election. One in which the voting base in primaries is even further away from the center than the voting base (of the same party) in the general election.
It seems very hard, structurally, to get to a point where you can “moderate” on immigration as a party if the super-partisan and ideological members of your primary base want you to go even harder in the opposite direction.
Back when cultural gatekeepers had a ton of cultural capital and could keep out the plebs from public discourse, The Party Could Decide and decrees by from up high, sent by power brokers, could set the tone a certain way. I am genuinely unsure whether the equivalent outcome can be achieved in today’s media and primary ecosystem.
'The primary ecosystem' has existed for a very long time, much longer than the current period of polarisation. Your point about the media environment seems on safer ground.
Well, it seems more like the combination of the two. The media ecosystem exists in other countries as well, including the ones where The Party Can Decide to moderate on immigration and thus defuse the far right’s advantage there.
So it’s not just the media ecosystem alone either.
Seems most likely that the primary system was one step towards disempowering top-down coordination inside a party, then with every passing year changes to the media environment built upon that more and more and more. Until eventually the dam burst and we got to where we are now.
I don't think any democracy has successfully "neutralized their far right threat." Countries that have "accepted the voters perspective on immigration" have largely tanked their economies on account of immigration is really important! And then the far right runs on the tanking economy.
In a democracy, when the demos has substantively awful political views, you will get substantively awful policy.
“ Countries that have "accepted the voters perspective on immigration" have largely tanked their economies”
Lots of counter examples here, Australia being the primary one that comes to mind, Poland is another. The generic world wide moderate electorate wants to stop irregular arrivals and does not have the blood and soil nationalism impulse that far right parties do but they turn to far right parties because those parties are the only parties advocating for any change to irregular arrival policies and the best counterpunch is for liberal factions to restrict asylum and other irregular immigration claims.
Poland has generally benefitted from a return of Polish expats that had been living elsewhere in the EU for economic reasons since 2010. Also, Poland hasn’t entirely dealt with the Law and Justice party (which only lost power to Tusk’s liberal coalition in 2023, are still the second largest single party, and hold the presidency). Australia is a very good example, but is also obviously unique on the immigration front, being an island.
Polish expats returning are a consequence of an improving economy, not the main driver of it.
Point still remains that irregular arrivals are deeply unpopular.
Left, liberal and conservative fractions will lose power over support or continuation. Political elites need to move beyond the idea that distaste for the post WW2 asylum arrangement is immoral or evil.
Yes, the voters have incoherent views on immigration and we need it. Thus you have to have an immigration policy that is largely invisible to the dum dums.
Though I suppose if Miller/Noem/et al had confined themselves to theatrical deportations of drunks/homeless people/other nuisances they'd be sitting pretty right now.
Yeah, the Western democracies that have *most* neutralized their far-right threats are places like Canada or Australia that surprise also have the highest percentage of immigrants.
There is disorderly immigration that you want to control better like the border situation under Biden was a bad look, but overall immigration should be increased and that dampens the far right. There’s the simple mechanical reason that immigrants and their kids are much less likely to support the far-right. But more diversity also makes the native populations more liberal like we see in big diverse cities.
Mostly because they had a lot of temporary student visas who are now returning? It’s a bit of a different scenario from other countries. Overall Canada is 21% foreign-born compared to the US only 15%,
'The democracies that have neutralized their far right threat have done it primarily by mainstream parties accepting the voters perspective on immigration and honoring it.'
This just doesn't seem to be true? I'm having a hard time of thinking of any (western, advanced-democratic) country for which it's really true. It's not even really of Denmark or Australia any more, previously two of the poster children for the theory.
I think the key here is that if the voters and members of center-right parties decide to desert those parties for the far right, there is nothing the left can do to stop them from doing so. We can't make them be reasonable.
Yes this is much closer to the reality we see in most western countries, that far-right insurgents have simply eaten center-right legacy parties. A common problem in political discourse is people assuming that only left-wing [politicians/voters/organisations] have any agency; this is another common problem with centrist discourse.
Have you thought of a democracy which has 'neutralized their far right threat and done it primarily by mainstream parties accepting the voters' perspective on immigration and honoring it' yet? It would be more interesting to talk about tangible examples.
You'll have to better explain your position instead of wasting carbon on imitations of Socrates.
Edit: you know that was way too snarky but I'll leave it for transparency. My question is what standard you're setting for neutralized. Because if it's 'far right continues to exist' I think it's an impossible one but last I checked there are still center left governments in both Denmark and Australia. Orban was finally defeated by a coalition that more or less adopted Fidesz's immigration/asylum skepticism. Poland seems to have avoided this issue entirely with strict policy. I could go on.
I think that “peekaboo” picture from her White House visit is all everyone is going to associate with Whitmer and her national political career is done…
It’s pretty iconic, probably the most memorable politician picture recently, up there with Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt, gonna resurface.
Absolute banger line: "an insurgent whose views are identical on 90 percent of salient issues but who also says oligarchy and hates Israel."
If I am trying to be sanguine about Dem efforts and our future, these are probably the stronger of the lefty talking points to emphasize. The rhetoric on the left, outside of Chevalier, a true toxic academic left nutjob, has tended to be more 2016 Bernie than 2020 Bernie.
That said, I don't know which is worse the Dems slightly underperforming in 2026, or overperforming and getting high on their own supply for 2028. As bad as a 2 seat House margin and a 50-50 Senate would be for the next two years, President JD Vance on January 20, 2029 would be worse.
“The rhetoric on the left, outside of Chevalier, a true toxic academic left nutjob, has tended to be more 2016 Bernie than 2020 Bernie.”
Is this so? As Matt has noted several times, a huge part of what made Bernie popular in the 2016 primary was his moderation on a lot of cultural topics. Which drew in a lot of support from older, more conservative Democrats, which constituted the majority of his base (unlike what it seemed like from reading the media, who was talking about young people being his base).
When Hillary was putting out tweets about intersectionality, talking about how breaking up big banks won’t stop racism and sexism, and generally being to Obama’s left on all cultural topics… Bernie was talking about how “open borders are a Koch brothers proposal” to destroy the wages of American workers, spoke about how “urban America has got to respect what rural America is about, where 99 percent of the people in my state who hunt are law abiding people,” and overall tried to make tons of overtures to cultural moderates or even cultural conservatives.
Then Bernie walked all of that back in 2020 and began talking about how ICE must be abolished.
Have any progressives actually done the 2016 Bernie strat this cycle instead of the 2020 one?
Yes, they’re talking about oligarchy (an economic issue with a ton of populist cross-over appeal) and Israel (a foreign policy issue where public opinion is rapidly shifting towards them), not cultural issues like race or gender stuff so much.
Also young people were Bernie’s base… look at the exit polls from the primary, he was pulling like 90-10 margins against Clinton with the youngest tier of voters.
“More like 2016 Bernie than 2020 Bernie” is about differences between the two. What you mentioned are not differences.
Also, the youngest tier of voters (under 30) was about 15% of the Democratic base in 2016. Bernie may have won the vast majority of those, but it doesn’t mean those were the vast majority of his base. They were loud voices on social media, but turnout was tiny still.
I think estimates put voters above 45 as over 50% of Sanders’ supporters in 2016.
This gets close to why I'm generally pessimistic. Sure feels like the Dems might get somewhere if they genuinely tried to win. But that doesn't appear to be a considered option.
Seems to me like a category error to say a large group of people can “try” to do anything.
It’s like a court wondering what the intent of “Congress” was when passing a law. It’s a legal fiction. Hundreds of people put together rarely have a coherent intent. Some have one idea, some interpret the text differently, some are going along because of inertia, some never read the text in the first place, some got tricked by what activists said the law contained even if it doesn’t, etc. The coherent intersection of all that in the end is often the empty set.
Likewise here. The Party Can’t Decide. Coordination mechanisms and decrees-from-up-high are markedly harder (and worse) than in the pre-social media, pre-disempowerment-of-cultural-gatekeepers era. As Matt said in response to Nate Silver arguing (paraphrasing here) “if the Dems lose in 2024, they can’t say they weren’t warned about their extreme positions”, the “Dems” are not a hive mind who can make coordinated decisions together! Individual actors and interest groups are interacting in a specific environment, with specific incentives, social status fights, and feedback loops.
You're right that millions of people aren't going to suddenly all change their mind independently of one another, but strong, inspiring leadership can lead in a coordinated direction.
But I have yet to see any part of the non-GOP population do anything to make me think they're serious about creating a coalition that can win. When I say the Dems, I mean literally anybody, not just electeds.
A profound danger to our democracy, and democracy in general, is the primary system. These kinds of elections magnify the power of the extremes, on both the left and the right. A more democratic and resilient system would abolish them for two round ranked choice general elections, with the ranked choice being crucial to end outsized power of the extremes.
The first round would include all candidates of any party who could meet signature and other ballot requirements high enough to keep it to typically 3-6 candidates, and almost always under 10. The two ranked choice winners would then face off in the final election.
If we had a system like this, the forces of democracy, and good intelligent government, would win far more elections. The far left and the far right would have profoundly less power, making democracy and freedom far more likely to survive.
With the current system, the general election voters are typically limited to a choice only between the candidate provided by very right constituencies and the candidate provided by very left constituencies. With a system like the one I propose, voters in the general election would also have the option to choose candidates in the middle area, making their choice much more democratic and fair, and making the survival of democracy and freedom far more likely.
I can't fathom why you would go to all the trouble of doing ranked-choice to cut to a top two and then just... throw the voters' ranked choices in the trash at that point and hold another election between the top two. Literally an incomprehensible proposal. 98 percent of the time the additional election would be an irrelevant waste of money, and the other 2 percent it would be of questionable democratic legitimacy.
Ideally, the second election would be unnecessary, but in practical terms, we live in a world where half the electorate voted for Trump even after eight years of atrocities. A second "run off" election would allow voters more time to think about their choice, and allow for more vetting, and in a lot of voters minds, a candidate being chosen in a one on one final election would have more legitamacy.
In addition, not to get too technical, but there is something called Arrow's Impossibiity theorem. Nobel Prize winning economist Kenneth Arrow mathematically proved that with any election design, theoretically, wierd things can still happen where the winner would not have beaten one of the candidates one on one. The extra run off election decreases the odds of something like that. I think it would probably add legitimacy in many voters minds and allow for a more considered choice.
I'm very familiar with Arrow's Theorem (to the extent that any non-professional mathematician is, I suppose), but I fail to see how it has any relevance here whatsoever. It has no applicability to the concept of voters, for whatever incomprehensible reason, choosing to advance something other than their own preferences. The premise of Arrow's Theorem is that voters are actors who are at a minimum trying to strategically optimize their outcomes (although, due to the inherent flaws in various voting systems, those voters sometimes have to vote for candidates who aren't their preference in order to outcome-optimize). Absent that premise, you're in cloud-cuckoo-land.
Any electoral system can be "improved" (scare quotes very much in effect there) by allowing the voters opportunities to reconsider their choices. Heck, we could make the term of the Presidency one day long. That would be quite democratically responsive. Of course, it would have other flaws.
Not any election design! Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem does not apply to approval or range voting because they are cardinal voting systems, not ordinal.
Now, they don’t satisfy the Condorcet criteria (neither does RCV) but that’s a separate matter.
It was an unusual feeling to read this in talkingpointsmemo: “My kids, who have been radicalized by the feckless failure of the extant Democratic Party establishment to defend the republic for which we stand, are not going to sit still for the conventional let’s-get-back-to-the-status-quo nostrums of grumpy middle-aged Matt Yglesias-style centrism.”
I’m not sure I understand the complaint. The Republicans control every branch of the federal government. The No Kings protests skew middle-aged or older. Very few Democratic office holders have opposed the protests in Minnesota or elsewhere against ICE and many have participated. Palestine essentially has nothing to do with saving the republic, except as a wedge issue against other Democrats, not against Republicans.
There is a real chance to defeat the Republicans, but the writer of this letter seems to consider a situation where Trump is defeated but large-scale revolutionary change hasn’t happened to be intolerable. Winning alone isn’t enough. Winning in the right way with only the right people and positions is the only answer. Seems like a high bar to cross.
Because if you know any Progs then you know what they really, truely, hate, far more than they hate Trump or MAGA or fascism, is the normies that want them to grow up and get a real job.
It really does seem partly like a generational, elite overproduction problem. The key is the use of the term middle-aged. Trump is old, as was Espilliat. They aren’t going after the Baby Boomers. The real target seems to be 40-55 year olds like Hakeem Jeffries so they can take their jobs. Hence the hate for Kamala Harris.
The complaint is that Democrats keep voting to fund Donald Trump's government without concessions, send military aid to Israel so that it can engage in wars they don't support, confirm unqualified right-wing radicals to lifetime judicial positions, and promote crypto and AI scams.
1 and 3 seems somewhat legitimate but small bore relative to “saving the republic”. 2 and 4 are specific hobby horses that have nothing to do with saving the republic, as far as I can tell. If Trump is the threat to the republic, how are you going to stop him by getting your way on those 4 things?
Congress exercising its power of the purse is in fact a siege-artillery bore concept when it comes to saving the republic, at least to the extent that you conceive of that republic as encompassing the rule of many rather than a (tenuously-)elected dictatorship.
I think the Democratic Primary base is making it clear; they don't give a shit. They want to nominate who they want to nominate. They don't care if it scares off persuadable voters. And they're tired of hearing from those of us who want them to consider that. So we'll just stand back and watch the trainwreck of which party's primary voters can nominate the grossest candidate. I'm done. 🤷
Re: Maine and Platner - One policy position he's apparently taken is that he wants to treat investment income the same as wages. On its face, that sounds fair and I'm sure it plays great with 20 somethings. However, imo this issue alone could lose the race for him because of how it'll play with older voters, especially lower information older voters.
A ton of retirees count on investment income for at least part of their retirement income and if they read his policy page on this, their first impression will be that a vote for Platner is a vote for much higher taxes. I wonder how much his team has polled this issue and what the results were?
When his campaign says tax investment income like wages, more engaged voters will assume he means tax it at the ordinary income rate and also apply the 15% payroll tax. In other words, more than double the taxes due on that income vs how it's treated now. The campaign doesn't lay out any specifics on this or exemptions for lower income seniors.
I'm sure the campaign is thinking about billionaires and people with high six-figure incomes with this policy, but honestly, the distorted anti-platner ads here practically write themselves. IMO it'll be relatively easy for unscrupulous opposition ads to distort this and make seniors think Platner wants to double the taxes due on not just their non-retirement account investment income, but also on their 401k investments. It seems like a stunningly brain-dead policy the way it's currently presented.
Considering how skewed federal income taxes are most people on fixed incomes are probably unaffected by such a policy change.
Taxing capital gains like regular income and ending the pass through income gaming would hit higher networth households (ones with political capital to complain.)
Specifically it would hit higher net-worth households whose money comes from inheritance and not working. As a self-made higher net-worth household I say go for it lol. I worked and continue to work hard for my wages and taxes on those should be minimized, stonk gains might as well be mana from heaven and I’m much happier to share those (especially if higher taxes on capital would also depress the price of housing which is the one thing I need my stonk gains to catch up with).
That'd be true if his website's policy page had a mention of this being only applicable to higher net worth households, but it doesn't.
A simple one liner saying this only applies to people with incomes over $X would diffuse the risk, but it's not there.
IMO, it's not there because Platner is a radical at heart and wants to significantly change the system. That's fine and will play great with other radicals. Unfortunately, it won't play well with normies and will lose him the election for him handily in my opinion.
Most middle-income people hold most of their stonks in a 401k or similar accounts and they wouldn’t be taxed anyway (or for a traditional 401k when you withdraw the whole thing is taxed as ordinary income already). They’d automatically be shielded.
How many lower-income seniors have significant investment income?
Investment income in a 401k isn’t taxed, which is the whole point of a 401k, so that shouldn’t be impacted.
It ought to be pretty easy to communicate the point that a dollar you get for free from passively watching your stonks go up should be taxed the same as a dollar you get from working with the sweat of your brow.
Maybe you're right, but I think people vote with their wallets first and foremost and are generally somewhat selfish overall. AI says about 48% of Mainers over 50 have investments in non-retirement accounts, but I'm sure a lot of that is small balance accounts.
IMO, this policy will allow Platner to be classified as someone that wants to raise seniors' taxes. Add in some distortion on the details and that message easily wins.
I could be wrong, but imo a large share of older voters in Maine, especially low information voters, will see this as a radical change and a risk for them. It'd have been so much smarter to attach at least some clear caveats/exemptions and the lack of any and the generally vague details on the policy makes it hugely ripe for fearmongering. Imo this reeks of political inexperience and being out of touch with voters except for a small minority of radical lefties.
A very tiny segment of the population, especially in Maine, do not have investment income. Also if you have under $80k as a couple filing jointly you pay no capital gains so that position I don’t think will hurt him with most Maine voters.
Current policy is lower income couples pay 0% capital gains, so if it's true that "a very tiny segment of the population do not have investment income" wouldn't the change hurt him?
Apparently the Maine tax code already has three tiers for investment income and treats short and long term capital gains as income already! It sounds like Platner is trying to extend this by introducing a wealth tax. I was surprised to learn about how they tax investment income. Maybe Platner is the one who is confused?
Parties rarely make a significant course changes unless they lose big, and neither party has had a big loss for quite some time, so neither of them are going to make big changes.
The Democrats are just deeply, broadly unpopular. Their turn to identity politics, trans rights and the whole set of ideas that Republicans like to label "wokeism" has put them seriously out of step with the electorate. The only reason they haven't lost big is because the GOP has gone insane, rallying around a despicable, incompetent narcissist. This wasn't a large policy shift, at least initially, because Trump took all the GOP positions, while also offering a personality that somehow (I don't get it, but it's incontrovertible) appealed to lots of GOP voters.
This highlights the other way that parties can make a big course change: rally around an extremely popular (to their base) leader. But I don't think the Democrats are capable of that. Bernie was the closest thing to a popular personality they've been able to put up for quite a while, and he couldn't do it. I think the party is too fractious and, frankly, too educated to take the cult of personality path.
So I don't see Democrats making significant changes until they lose in a landslide, and I don't see that happening as long as the Republicans continue being insane. Maybe the voters will tire of the GOP's rejection of reality and give the Democrats a big win, forcing the GOP to change. But that's not happening this year, and I don't expect it to happen in 2028, either.
Instead, it seems like the electorate is just going to become even more cynical while our national institutions are eroded -- which is enabled by the cynicism of the electorate.
I do think we'll come out of it eventually, but I think we've had a rough decade, and we're going to have another rough decade.
So, first off, please explain why Dems pay a terrible price for having even a handful of extremists in Congress but somehow the Republicans never seem to pay for the likes of Andy Biggs or Chip Roy and so many others. Does all the handwringing in say, the NYT, play a role?
Second, if we take back power in '29 with wimpy centrists what do you think will happen? I think nothing will be accomplished to actually help ordinary Americans because anything with a chance to be effective will be shunned as too divisive. Result, the voters turn back to the Republicans.
As Democrats move ever farther left despite copious evidence (CA, IL, Seattle, Portland, LA etc.) of incompetent governance, Matt doesn't even try to make the argument that electing Democrats will 'save the country.' Rather, he assumes that not being MAGA necessarily means competence. This reasoning doesn't even rise to the level of sloppiness. Finding a different way to ruin the country isn't success.
The point is that Trump and his movement have done and will continue to do lasting damage to the country so long as they have the power, through a mix of bad ideas, corruption, and incompetence. Democratic majorities in one or both houses make it easier to put a brake on some of that.
Matt’s claim that the Republic is in danger because Republicans have shown essentially limitless tolerance for Trump’s misconduct is hyperbole. Trump just lost war-powers style votes in both houses of Congress because Republicans defected. While 97% of congressional Republicans have been spineless sycophants, Republican voters have not been monolithic. Trump is polling -19 partly because roughly a fifth of Republican voters oppose him. Most importantly, Trump is term-limited, and he would lose even more Republican voters and politicians if he tried to defy such clear constitutional language. He’s also getting old.
Trump can put a heavy thumb on the scale in the 2028 primary and that’s basically it. His primary picks are generally not optimized for winning general elections, and Vance and Rubio will both struggle when their boss is pushing -20.
The next two years will be somewhat more pleasant if Democrats flip the Senate, but this is hardly a necessary condition of saving the Republic. Indeed, flipping the Senate without moderating their national message might be a false dawn if it helps Newsom or Harris capture the nomination. Rerunning a midterm strategy with a bigger, less informed quadrennial electorate is not smart.
Matt is near the tip of the spear. The fascists will probably come for prominent center-left bloggers before they come for edgy commenters, and his personal situation is not completely safe. His hyperbole is understandable but also misleading.
This is actually an incorrect characterization IMO-- hence why I needed to clarify who you were talking about. Thomas is Neutral Evil; he has consistent principles but will deviate from them when necessary to achieve an important evil result. (But for the latter tendency, he would actually be Lawful Evil; if you read the full package of his dissents you'll find that he's applying a fairly consistent package of batshit-fascist legal principles, except when a case outcome is really important to him.) Alito is Chaotic Evil; he has no principles at all and simply picks the theory that will produce the most evil result possible.
I hope you're right that this is hyperbole, but I'm not at all convinced. I've never seen anything as dangerous as Trump my life of following in US politics. He has irrevocably changed decades of US foreign policy and thus the entire world order singlehandedly.
IMO it's a huge mistake to underestimate his hold on the Republican party and ability to fully leverage all his legitimate power and much more. The Republican party seems pretty firmly cemented in as the Donald Trump party with no sign of ebbing. Anyone thinking that's not the case just needs to look at the results of the Cassidy and Cornyn primaries.
Under normal analysis, I'd guess the cult would get dismantled after he leaves office, but there's nothing normal about this cult imo.
I find many situations in the cold war far far far more dangerous than anything Trump has done because the path to Armageddon was much more direct.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, most members of Kennedy’s cabinet wanted to invade Cuba. A close blockade against a nuclear power sending ships to a client state was the Dovish strategy.
Nixon became president by scuttling the Paris peace process and promising he had a secret plan to end the war.
Johnson became a senator by stuffing ballot boxes in a Democratic primary.
And of course Russia almost nuked u.s. in the early 80s due to a false alarm.
The basic problem is our moral intuitions are designed to punish cheating and dishonesty and encourage bravery. Accordingly, aggressive and reckless military strategies seem less odious than domestic perfidy even if the stakes are lower.
Yes, January 6 had civil war as a tail risk. That’s an order of magnitude less severe than 0.5 sigma and 1 sigma risks we faced during the cold war.
My personal experience following politics and world affairs doesn't go back quite as far as yours do and I agree those are great examples of huge potentially civilization ending geopolitical risks.
I'd also concede that in terms of overall danger, Putin is a huge wild card right now that I'm very concerned about, especially as Ukraine continues to improve their drone efficacy (again thinking in terms of overall geopolitical risks).
But my comment was meant to be about US political leaders specifically, and about their temperaments and ability to make sound judgements. I should have been more careful with my wording.
I think Trump is fundamentally a brazen radical who doesn't have the ability to properly weigh downside risk. I think many of the people around him suffer from this same mental deficiency, and those who don't know he doesn't tolerate disagreement or dissent well.
Read about El-Sayed’s background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_El-Sayed. Putting aside any disagreements you may have with his political views, he’s legitimately one of the most impressive people I’ve ever seen run for office, child of immigrants who became a Rhodes Scholar and elite-tier medical degree. Meanwhile his main opponent seems like a textbook mediocre career politician. Seems like he’s gaining in the polls because when people look into him they learn this. There are still a decent number of relatively less political swing voters who don’t really care or even know politicians’ issue positions but vote based on qualifications and will go for El-Sayed both in the primary and general.
There is a very common blogpost genre that I like to call, “we need to save Democracy from the voters.” Matt is smarter than most authors, so he at least notices the contradictions here, but you can tell that he still hasn’t fully internalized the implications.
“Saving the Republic,” or at least Matt’s conception of it, is about the third most important issue for Democratic voters and far lower than that for Republicans voters. People just don’t care enough about the issue to make that the core ideology of one of the major parties in a two-party system. Immigration or health care or some other more salient issue will crowd it out.
And really, that’s the most democratic result of all.
The NYT homepage headline yesterday was "Democratic Leaders Want the Party to Moderate. Its Base Has Other Ideas." on a story that was about the three NYC house seats that the Mamdani team swept. That framing drives me nuts because it's both incorrect (since when do three of the most progressive seats in the country represent the national base?) and because it plays directly into the emerging GOP comeback narrative ("Democrats are crazy leftists who can't be trusted")
I think so much of the need for a national rebrand is just getting the media to stop focusing on the left on left politics of LA and NYC and start focusing on owning the cons. That's really the difference between right wing media and "main stream". Right wing media is only focused on owning libs. I love beating Republicans. It brings me such joy. Why can't we get a media that relentlessly celebrates GOP fuckups and dances on their political graves when they get owned?
Yeah if the NYT went to west virginia or something and showed how psychotic conservative politics and rule really is, they'd get a lot more interesting stories but that'd require them to actually leave NYC and they just like covering cat fights.
Is west virginia poorly governed? Are unions eating its tax base and not providing good services. Is it wasting tens of billions upon trains that don’t go anywhere? Or is it just a rural backwater that has stagnated for structural reasons?
Red states have fewer stationary bandits than blue states.
It is. They have a budget crisis, a failures in public provision (due to basically capital stock exceeding revenues), and there was a recent scandal with the University of WV’s finances (basically overspending on frivolous stuff and then disguising the hole.)
Blue states just tend to have excess incomes to tax that can paper over governance failures.
But if this were true Abbott would have read it in the NYT. Since they don't cover it doesn't exist and there's therefore no reason to cover it.
You are being tendentious. The WVUfiscal scandal you are talking about is a $45 million shortfall, or about $22 per taxpayer.
If that is your threshold for “poorly governed” no state is well governed. The fact that such a small revenue shortfall is such a big deal rather reinforces my point about secular stagnation
Put me in the camp that believes that no state is well governed by all evidence and any upside to any of them is largely a quirk.
Lack of over governing can be its own kind of good government.
After moving away from Iowa I absorbed a lot of the "left-behind and hollowed out" narrative that was popular among libs in 2016. Now that I go back frequently to visit my parents, it's teeth grinding how little interest these rural Iowans have in making their communities somewhat nicer and just seem content with the managed decline. The years long struggle to get a single community bike path funded on donated land. The continued rejection of any industry that their dadies didn't work in. It's just a bunch of rich farmers and impoverished service workers and nobody seems terribly interested in changing anything.
One of the things i've always thought was wrong with the stories was how involved the body politic is in the outcomes they talk about- because there's a desire to be respectful of the left-behind people, there's no ability to criticize them, so you just see the hogs at the top, and not the people who keep electing them.
I think it would probably destroy the country's opinion of rural voters to see what they want in politicians. (name recognition, and/or gaudy displays of christianity/americana over anything of substance). Even the left-leaning outlets don't seem really capable of criticizing rural voters or even possibly suggesting that they're partially responsible for their demise.
Why would you want a bike lane if you are too fat to use it? The rich farmers can afford a peloton the poor immigrants mainly can’t vote.
I don’t share the consumer tastes of rural voters, I hate television and try to burn the yummy calories I ingest. But I certainly don’t expect people with a quarter my household income and religious commitments I find absurd will land in my policy preferences.
There are a lot of aspects of rural Mitchell county that I genuinely admire; the hardworking ethics, the emphasis on practical trades, the many opportunities for community engagement, but their priorities will never be mine. Nice things cost money and money comes from being willing to pay taxes.
Ahahahaha okay, yeah, this is someone who's absolutely not serious, who says that west virginia does not have stationary bandits, as you put them. The average red state is extremely badly run. Conservatives mostly pick their appointees for nepotistic reasons.
Let’s just take the coal industry, for one.
Surely part of the reason it is a rural backwater is its policies. Rural blue states like Vermont and Maine are doing much better and seen as more desirable places to live. West Virginia is breathtakingly beautiful (as I’ve heard it put once: “very nice if you avoid all the areas with people”) and could be a Vermont-like place if it had liberal politics:
I currently live in Vermont and it has some very very very serious problems that mostly stem from wanting a 1800s settlement pattern and a 21st Nordic welfare state.
I don’t think state level policies make all that big a difference. The Erie canal is likely an exception, but I just can’t think of many things states have done which have overridden demographic and economic forces.
Do you think this would do good for them? I’m not sure the paying audience would be there. Maybe if it’s really bad enough it would be chum for socials but when it’s just red state governance is bad and difficult to live under it’s not usually much of a driver of anything.
Because I follow education policy stuff I see a lot of reporting in left of center outlets about outcomes in red states and most of the stuff that gets social media traction is high salience culture war stuff that’s bad for democrats winning swing seats.
I'm pretty sure there'd be more of a paying audience for more exciting stories talking about how bad republicans are, but then again, i don't know. The big thing is the NYT isn't owned by the democrats anyway so they can't really be marshalled to any strategy regardless, so i'll concede here.
Weren’t they visiting Midwest diners for a time?
Yeah, when 'why did Trump win' was all the rage, they got in on that act.
I think this unfortunately makes the same mistake (of emphasis, perhaps) others also make when criticizing the media environment.
You’re talking about “getting the media to stop focusing” on something. But this doesn’t seem to me like an issue of supply. It’s an issue of demand, for these kinds of stories.
Readers just WANT to read about crazy fights going on in super-progressive districts between DSA members and hapless moderate Democrats. They click more on articles discussing these. They stay there for longer. They give you more ad money, and pay for more subscriptions if this is what you focus on instead of doing the boring, nitty-gritty analysis of contested-in-general-elections districts.
'Readers just WANT to read about crazy fights going on in super-progressive districts between DSA members and hapless moderate Democrats.'
The reason why 'readers' want this is that many of the readers are personally invested - politically, emotionally - in the outcome, and *that* happens because city-dwellers tend to be way to the left of the rest of the country. But a big problem with a lot of centrist takes is that they end up essentially arguing 'you shouldn't have the preferences you have'. You can't actually stop millions of people nationwide from acting politically if they decide to do so.
I think that's a great point, and it's worth reminding moderates that the big tent works both ways. We shouldn't get bent out of shape when NYC nominates DSAs to Congress. DSAs shouldn't get mad when immigration hawks get nominated in Texas. We should all be united in our love of crushing Republicans.
So far, this is the *only* way the “big tent” has worked in practice, isn’t it?
Ezra Klein wrote a piece about how a big tent Democratic Party should include people who are pro-life or something.
But literally every time “big tent” has come up since then, it’s been “Wouldn’t it be hypocritical to call for a big tent without allowing Hasan Piker? Plz come in we <3 u.”
In the meantime, Democrats haven’t really added anyone who’s more centrist…
What about all the big-name neocons and Never Trump Republicans? Seems they had a lot more influence on the Harris campaign than the left did. If they have less influence going forward it’s because they lost that election.
The "big tent" argument was from September 2025, i.e., after the 2024 loss. The point he was making was that he thought Democrats would benefit electorally (against the Trump II coalition) if they accepted candidates with more right-wing views on cultural issues, with abortion being the leading example.
Of course people can argue with this, but my point is that in practice, "big tent" has been operationalized in precisely the *opposite* way: it's been a slogan that liberals have used to rationalize strengthening their alliance with leftists.
Maybe Klein's column is wrong, and Democrats' path to victory lies in embracing Hasan Piker-thought. I don't know. But my point is that by the logic in Klein's original column, this move makes little sense. If Klein believes moving to the center is electorally advantageous, it's a bit strange that he wouldn't think cozying up to leftists is electorally costly.
Well, unless those DSA types become the targets of strong and persuasive Republican attack ads in the general election in contested races, talking about how crazy Democrats are and why you shouldn’t elect them (even if the actual Democrat they are running against is a moderate)… right?
It seems to me that figuring out whether this happens is an empirical question. And if it does, then I don’t quite think the argument “works both ways.”
I would rather have a big tent that was not fighting itself than a fractured tent sniping at itself and giving those GOP attack ads fodder in advance. I don't think some random progressive back bencher is a big problem for front liners. I think Democratic leadership in the House and Senate needs to worry about threading these needles and should be careful about tying them to the masts of anything nuts.
Let’s take an empirical question. Voters were clearly annoyed about immigration and this helped elect Trump and Republicans. Trump has overreached and deployed masked paramilitaries in American cities and gone after people arbitrarily and without due process. So he’s weak on immigration and the border now. Will a call for open borders and no/limited immigration enforcement affect broad Democratic chances in the midterms or not?
“I don't think some random progressive back bencher is a big problem for front liners”
Based on?
I mean, this really is the crux of the matter, the rest of it is really superfluous. If you are correct about this factual question, building a big tent requires embracing the left as well as the center. If you are wrong, it gets trickier, and trade-offs must be made.
Sure seems like a ton of people were mad in 2024 over “Democrats” supporting, for example, policies allowing transgender women to participate in the female section in collegiate sporting events. But “Democrats” largely didn’t; an extremely tiny number of far-left House members did.
Maybe the media overweighed all of this, and in fact this wasn’t that big of an issue. Maybe it would have been as big of an issue even if literally zero elected Democrats supported it, because there still would have been social media activists talking about it.
Maybe. But these are empirical questions, which can’t be confidently answered by gazing deeply at the sky and wondering what’s true. Do we have empirical analyses of this?
The point is you can't *do* anything about it, other than 'get mad'. The political system already greatly underweights the votes of urban residents, it would be hard to do so to a greater extent without just taking the right to vote away.
Completely false. If the actual complaint from urban Democrats is “we don't have power because rural voters have more power” they can very easily make noise about nominating people who support reforms to fix that. Resorting to claims of powerlessness to throw your hands up and do nothing is the worst course of action and if that's what they think then they deserve republicans winning nationally
I think it’s like that joke about the Jew in Nazi Germany who reads Der Sturmer. “I look around me and I’m scared and oppressed, then I read this propaganda and it says I rule everything, it’s great.”
It is worth noticing that crazy politician stories on both sides usually involve attractive people whose photos stand out in a social media feed, it is noticeable as a getting eyeballs and clicks effect.
ProPublica is such a great organization and I'm glad they exist, but I'll be damned if I've ever read one of their articles the whole way through.
I think this critique is the strongest - that outlets are providing demand. But I also think there's something to Beutler's "if you attack it they will care" ethos, and that media institutions have some ability to get people fired up about issues of their choosing. Maybe it's not the NYT. Maybe it can't work because the center and points left are just more intellectually honest and consistent than the right, which is full of literal fucking morons.
They want to sell papers, beautiful person says crazy things in a big city near their office is a lot more fun and sellable than GOP apparatchiks are misusing mortgage fraud investigations.
I think we have a media that does focus on GOP screw ups. They probably unfairly focus on the crazies on the left to a certain extent but perception of things in the ether on the left is not good lately if you count yourself as an abundance, Yglesian type. We got brain dead tax plan after brain dead tax plan being floated and some of our most moderate members in swing districts being primaried by progressives. It seems not good.
And what do you make of Maine? I think you're missing that a whole lot of us Dem voters are done with centrism. We're done with all the dang consultants & their oh so careful calibration. We need to be the anti-billionaire party & when we get power in DC we need to tax the billionaires out of existence. No centrist has the cojones to try that. so they'll rearrange the deck chairs while the billionaires turn the rest of us into their serfs. If we're gonna be serfs let's at least go down fighting!
What problem would driving the billionaires out accomplish? How would you do it such that #1) you actually collected trillions in tax revenue #2) you didn't also destroy a lot of businesses and drive out the much larger number of millionaires?
How exactly are you going to tax the billionaires out of existence? No one has managed it without a bloody revolution that just created a new class of wealthy people and often even more serfs. Can we reduce the power of the oligarchs, sure. But how are we going to remove them entirely without killing a lot of people and then creating Red princes à la China or nomenklatura like Russia?
I think Plattner was fine, I wish there were fewer skeletons in his closet, and I wish more serious Maine Democrats ran, but I think running in an anti-establishment mode was a perfectly fine play. I wish there was more narrative emphasis on beating Susan Collins.
And yet Matt who is critical of the medias focus on dem on dem fighting goes and does a podcast about Biden’s top failures as if that hasn’t been litigated and think pieced to death.
He thinks they should talk more about Biden's failures and less about Congressional primaries in New York, that is a perfectly consistent position.
Talk less about NY primaries absolutely. Talk about Biden pointless. Matt, in theory, wants us to talk about how republicans are messing things up on affordability and talk more about senate races in Ohio, Georgia and Texas. Ignoring biden as the loser seems like the way forward.
There are useful lessons to be learnt from Biden’s failures and successes.
Litigated to death? They literally didn’t publish the election post-mortem lol
Another podcast to the same audience that already knows will change that how?
You said it has been litigated and think pieced to death. Now you’re changing the goal posts to something else.
Well, the answer is that learning from one’s mistakes is often quite useful. Analyzing in a coherent and comprehensive fashion what went wrong can help movers and shakers in the future figure out how best to navigate similar environments.
It’s not like Matt has no influence in the Democratic Party.
I don’t think this really has goal posts. I (me) an (individual person) who is allowed to disagree on this, thinks that another Substack article/podcast about Biden is pointless and is instead subscriber bait for us sickos(me included) who want to hear about how Jill hated Kamala and is what Matt criticizes. This is not important news. It’s click bait for the audience the same as the NYTs does.
What does the latter part of your comment have to do with your first sentence?
You criticized Matt, in the grandparent comment, for talking about something that had been done to death. I pointed out it wasn’t done to death. Then you changed to something else.
That’s the goalpost shift.
Has it been litigated to death? What precisely would you change vis a vis Biden going forward and why? He failed. How would you succeed?
If this is the first time you’re hearing pundits say that Biden was too old, shouldn’t have run again, picking Kamala was bad, and he messed up immigration and the economy then I commend you for touching more grass than I.
Ok, so what’s the point going forward then? It seems to me that the report wasn’t issued and there had been no real catharsis on Biden.
I think that catharsis needs to come individually to each of us, I'm not sure that we were ever going to get a big grand moment of "moving on from biden". And I am worried about 2028, that said, Newsom (who is bad) I'm pretty sure is cold enough to dunk on Biden. I'm pretty sure in normie middle of the country elections Biden is not top of mind and candidates are running decent campaigns that have moved on from Biden. That said, sure do wish some of these big east coast journalist institutions would write about that instead of more blue on blue infighting in east coast cities.
What does the latter part of your comment have to do with your first sentence?
You criticized Matt, in the grandparent comment, for talking about something that had been done to death. I pointed out it wasn’t done to death. Then you changed to something else.
That’s the goalpost shift.
I don't get the harshness on Whitmer. She's running for president as she should be.
Overall though I agree with the pessimism. I think chances are very high that for structural, thermostatic, whatever reasons the Democrats will retake the House decisively enough and thank God for that. But in terms of the bigger issue of saving our republic it's pretty simple. The democracies that have neutralized their far right threat have done it primarily by mainstream parties accepting the voters perspective on immigration and honoring it. The ones that remain in crisis are those where the defenders of the system refuse to do so. We've gotten very lucky that Trump has made myriad unforced errors and has never operated from a place of popularity. Instead of taking advantage of that the strategy seems to be something like hope the clock runs out before something irreversibly catastrophic happens and that the GOP is unable to hang together post Trump. Dangerous stuff indeed.
I’m unsure whether or not Whitmer will ultimately choose to run for the presidency, but otherwise agree! Matt’s comment came off as a bit too armchair general-ly to me, as though Whitmer were a chess piece failing to comply with the maximally optimal democrat attack plan. Her decision likely reflects real trade offs which might not be apparent to an outside observer.
There should also be more than 1 Democrat in the state capable of winning the office and a party that can come up with electable people in the primary!
Sure-- the tradeoff of not being able to suck endlessly at the teat of crypto and AI lobbying.
Not sure why we should respect or care about that tho.
It’s really striking how much you criticize Democrats and how little you criticize Republicans.
Nah, I bristle at Zagarna’s general radicalized tone and position taking too, but he definitely criticizes Trump regularly.
Only a mod could possibly read a post saying "Democrats who vote to fund Donald Trump's government are bad" and suggest that that post contains no criticism of Republicans.
I deleted my comment because the new Substack alert system made me think this was a response to me. Sorry!
Correct me if I am wrong, but those countries that have defused the threat of the far right generally do not have a primary system.
So they don’t have a structural screening mechanism that systematically pushes for more and more extreme candidates to reach the general election. One in which the voting base in primaries is even further away from the center than the voting base (of the same party) in the general election.
It seems very hard, structurally, to get to a point where you can “moderate” on immigration as a party if the super-partisan and ideological members of your primary base want you to go even harder in the opposite direction.
Back when cultural gatekeepers had a ton of cultural capital and could keep out the plebs from public discourse, The Party Could Decide and decrees by from up high, sent by power brokers, could set the tone a certain way. I am genuinely unsure whether the equivalent outcome can be achieved in today’s media and primary ecosystem.
'The primary ecosystem' has existed for a very long time, much longer than the current period of polarisation. Your point about the media environment seems on safer ground.
Well, it seems more like the combination of the two. The media ecosystem exists in other countries as well, including the ones where The Party Can Decide to moderate on immigration and thus defuse the far right’s advantage there.
So it’s not just the media ecosystem alone either.
Seems most likely that the primary system was one step towards disempowering top-down coordination inside a party, then with every passing year changes to the media environment built upon that more and more and more. Until eventually the dam burst and we got to where we are now.
I don't think any democracy has successfully "neutralized their far right threat." Countries that have "accepted the voters perspective on immigration" have largely tanked their economies on account of immigration is really important! And then the far right runs on the tanking economy.
In a democracy, when the demos has substantively awful political views, you will get substantively awful policy.
“ Countries that have "accepted the voters perspective on immigration" have largely tanked their economies”
Lots of counter examples here, Australia being the primary one that comes to mind, Poland is another. The generic world wide moderate electorate wants to stop irregular arrivals and does not have the blood and soil nationalism impulse that far right parties do but they turn to far right parties because those parties are the only parties advocating for any change to irregular arrival policies and the best counterpunch is for liberal factions to restrict asylum and other irregular immigration claims.
Poland has generally benefitted from a return of Polish expats that had been living elsewhere in the EU for economic reasons since 2010. Also, Poland hasn’t entirely dealt with the Law and Justice party (which only lost power to Tusk’s liberal coalition in 2023, are still the second largest single party, and hold the presidency). Australia is a very good example, but is also obviously unique on the immigration front, being an island.
Polish expats returning are a consequence of an improving economy, not the main driver of it.
Point still remains that irregular arrivals are deeply unpopular.
Left, liberal and conservative fractions will lose power over support or continuation. Political elites need to move beyond the idea that distaste for the post WW2 asylum arrangement is immoral or evil.
Yes, the voters have incoherent views on immigration and we need it. Thus you have to have an immigration policy that is largely invisible to the dum dums.
Though I suppose if Miller/Noem/et al had confined themselves to theatrical deportations of drunks/homeless people/other nuisances they'd be sitting pretty right now.
Yeah, the Western democracies that have *most* neutralized their far-right threats are places like Canada or Australia that surprise also have the highest percentage of immigrants.
There is disorderly immigration that you want to control better like the border situation under Biden was a bad look, but overall immigration should be increased and that dampens the far right. There’s the simple mechanical reason that immigrants and their kids are much less likely to support the far-right. But more diversity also makes the native populations more liberal like we see in big diverse cities.
Canada is a liberal country but Carney has slashed immigration so much the country is shrinking https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-population-decline-first-time-9.7133643
Mostly because they had a lot of temporary student visas who are now returning? It’s a bit of a different scenario from other countries. Overall Canada is 21% foreign-born compared to the US only 15%,
'Everyone won't do exactly what I want so I'm declaring everything doomed and ceding control to the maniacs.'
We don’t have to accept the inevitability of either Fascism or Communism. There is a better way.
'The democracies that have neutralized their far right threat have done it primarily by mainstream parties accepting the voters perspective on immigration and honoring it.'
This just doesn't seem to be true? I'm having a hard time of thinking of any (western, advanced-democratic) country for which it's really true. It's not even really of Denmark or Australia any more, previously two of the poster children for the theory.
I think the key here is that if the voters and members of center-right parties decide to desert those parties for the far right, there is nothing the left can do to stop them from doing so. We can't make them be reasonable.
Yes this is much closer to the reality we see in most western countries, that far-right insurgents have simply eaten center-right legacy parties. A common problem in political discourse is people assuming that only left-wing [politicians/voters/organisations] have any agency; this is another common problem with centrist discourse.
Yea and the common problem in far left discourse is treating a guy that's never cracked a 50% approval rating as an unstoppable juggernaut.
Have you thought of a democracy which has 'neutralized their far right threat and done it primarily by mainstream parties accepting the voters' perspective on immigration and honoring it' yet? It would be more interesting to talk about tangible examples.
Wow and I didn't realize what Carney was doing in Canada until ejsk posted that link above.
You'll have to better explain your position instead of wasting carbon on imitations of Socrates.
Edit: you know that was way too snarky but I'll leave it for transparency. My question is what standard you're setting for neutralized. Because if it's 'far right continues to exist' I think it's an impossible one but last I checked there are still center left governments in both Denmark and Australia. Orban was finally defeated by a coalition that more or less adopted Fidesz's immigration/asylum skepticism. Poland seems to have avoided this issue entirely with strict policy. I could go on.
Hungary
I think that “peekaboo” picture from her White House visit is all everyone is going to associate with Whitmer and her national political career is done…
I think chances people outside of BlueSky even remember that incident are pretty low.
True, but it's great primary fodder, so it would get used.
It’s pretty iconic, probably the most memorable politician picture recently, up there with Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt, gonna resurface.
I'm mostly confused that Whitmer is still considered a factor. Is there any more discredited Dem in the Trump II era?
Absolute banger line: "an insurgent whose views are identical on 90 percent of salient issues but who also says oligarchy and hates Israel."
If I am trying to be sanguine about Dem efforts and our future, these are probably the stronger of the lefty talking points to emphasize. The rhetoric on the left, outside of Chevalier, a true toxic academic left nutjob, has tended to be more 2016 Bernie than 2020 Bernie.
That said, I don't know which is worse the Dems slightly underperforming in 2026, or overperforming and getting high on their own supply for 2028. As bad as a 2 seat House margin and a 50-50 Senate would be for the next two years, President JD Vance on January 20, 2029 would be worse.
“The rhetoric on the left, outside of Chevalier, a true toxic academic left nutjob, has tended to be more 2016 Bernie than 2020 Bernie.”
Is this so? As Matt has noted several times, a huge part of what made Bernie popular in the 2016 primary was his moderation on a lot of cultural topics. Which drew in a lot of support from older, more conservative Democrats, which constituted the majority of his base (unlike what it seemed like from reading the media, who was talking about young people being his base).
When Hillary was putting out tweets about intersectionality, talking about how breaking up big banks won’t stop racism and sexism, and generally being to Obama’s left on all cultural topics… Bernie was talking about how “open borders are a Koch brothers proposal” to destroy the wages of American workers, spoke about how “urban America has got to respect what rural America is about, where 99 percent of the people in my state who hunt are law abiding people,” and overall tried to make tons of overtures to cultural moderates or even cultural conservatives.
Then Bernie walked all of that back in 2020 and began talking about how ICE must be abolished.
Have any progressives actually done the 2016 Bernie strat this cycle instead of the 2020 one?
Yes, they’re talking about oligarchy (an economic issue with a ton of populist cross-over appeal) and Israel (a foreign policy issue where public opinion is rapidly shifting towards them), not cultural issues like race or gender stuff so much.
Also young people were Bernie’s base… look at the exit polls from the primary, he was pulling like 90-10 margins against Clinton with the youngest tier of voters.
So did Bernie in both 2016 and 2020.
“More like 2016 Bernie than 2020 Bernie” is about differences between the two. What you mentioned are not differences.
Also, the youngest tier of voters (under 30) was about 15% of the Democratic base in 2016. Bernie may have won the vast majority of those, but it doesn’t mean those were the vast majority of his base. They were loud voices on social media, but turnout was tiny still.
I think estimates put voters above 45 as over 50% of Sanders’ supporters in 2016.
This gets close to why I'm generally pessimistic. Sure feels like the Dems might get somewhere if they genuinely tried to win. But that doesn't appear to be a considered option.
Seems to me like a category error to say a large group of people can “try” to do anything.
It’s like a court wondering what the intent of “Congress” was when passing a law. It’s a legal fiction. Hundreds of people put together rarely have a coherent intent. Some have one idea, some interpret the text differently, some are going along because of inertia, some never read the text in the first place, some got tricked by what activists said the law contained even if it doesn’t, etc. The coherent intersection of all that in the end is often the empty set.
Likewise here. The Party Can’t Decide. Coordination mechanisms and decrees-from-up-high are markedly harder (and worse) than in the pre-social media, pre-disempowerment-of-cultural-gatekeepers era. As Matt said in response to Nate Silver arguing (paraphrasing here) “if the Dems lose in 2024, they can’t say they weren’t warned about their extreme positions”, the “Dems” are not a hive mind who can make coordinated decisions together! Individual actors and interest groups are interacting in a specific environment, with specific incentives, social status fights, and feedback loops.
It just takes leadership.
You're right that millions of people aren't going to suddenly all change their mind independently of one another, but strong, inspiring leadership can lead in a coordinated direction.
They are absolutely not a hive mind.
But I have yet to see any part of the non-GOP population do anything to make me think they're serious about creating a coalition that can win. When I say the Dems, I mean literally anybody, not just electeds.
The Abundance Agenda, Matt’s CSDM preaching moderation and a large tent, stuff like that is not enough?
Perhaps you think this is too unlikely to result in a meaningful coalition. Which I suppose it is.
I largely agree with abundance and most aspects of Matt's writings.
I'm not convinced it will result in competitive elections in enough states to move past thermostatic elections.
A profound danger to our democracy, and democracy in general, is the primary system. These kinds of elections magnify the power of the extremes, on both the left and the right. A more democratic and resilient system would abolish them for two round ranked choice general elections, with the ranked choice being crucial to end outsized power of the extremes.
The first round would include all candidates of any party who could meet signature and other ballot requirements high enough to keep it to typically 3-6 candidates, and almost always under 10. The two ranked choice winners would then face off in the final election.
If we had a system like this, the forces of democracy, and good intelligent government, would win far more elections. The far left and the far right would have profoundly less power, making democracy and freedom far more likely to survive.
With the current system, the general election voters are typically limited to a choice only between the candidate provided by very right constituencies and the candidate provided by very left constituencies. With a system like the one I propose, voters in the general election would also have the option to choose candidates in the middle area, making their choice much more democratic and fair, and making the survival of democracy and freedom far more likely.
I can't fathom why you would go to all the trouble of doing ranked-choice to cut to a top two and then just... throw the voters' ranked choices in the trash at that point and hold another election between the top two. Literally an incomprehensible proposal. 98 percent of the time the additional election would be an irrelevant waste of money, and the other 2 percent it would be of questionable democratic legitimacy.
Ideally, the second election would be unnecessary, but in practical terms, we live in a world where half the electorate voted for Trump even after eight years of atrocities. A second "run off" election would allow voters more time to think about their choice, and allow for more vetting, and in a lot of voters minds, a candidate being chosen in a one on one final election would have more legitamacy.
In addition, not to get too technical, but there is something called Arrow's Impossibiity theorem. Nobel Prize winning economist Kenneth Arrow mathematically proved that with any election design, theoretically, wierd things can still happen where the winner would not have beaten one of the candidates one on one. The extra run off election decreases the odds of something like that. I think it would probably add legitimacy in many voters minds and allow for a more considered choice.
I'm very familiar with Arrow's Theorem (to the extent that any non-professional mathematician is, I suppose), but I fail to see how it has any relevance here whatsoever. It has no applicability to the concept of voters, for whatever incomprehensible reason, choosing to advance something other than their own preferences. The premise of Arrow's Theorem is that voters are actors who are at a minimum trying to strategically optimize their outcomes (although, due to the inherent flaws in various voting systems, those voters sometimes have to vote for candidates who aren't their preference in order to outcome-optimize). Absent that premise, you're in cloud-cuckoo-land.
Any electoral system can be "improved" (scare quotes very much in effect there) by allowing the voters opportunities to reconsider their choices. Heck, we could make the term of the Presidency one day long. That would be quite democratically responsive. Of course, it would have other flaws.
Not any election design! Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem does not apply to approval or range voting because they are cardinal voting systems, not ordinal.
Now, they don’t satisfy the Condorcet criteria (neither does RCV) but that’s a separate matter.
RCV and California primary system don’t seem to perform much better though …
The huge problem with the CA primary system is that it doesn't have ranked choice.
It may take a bit for voters to learn ranked choice well, but it would eventually make an incredible difference.
It was an unusual feeling to read this in talkingpointsmemo: “My kids, who have been radicalized by the feckless failure of the extant Democratic Party establishment to defend the republic for which we stand, are not going to sit still for the conventional let’s-get-back-to-the-status-quo nostrums of grumpy middle-aged Matt Yglesias-style centrism.”
I’m not sure I understand the complaint. The Republicans control every branch of the federal government. The No Kings protests skew middle-aged or older. Very few Democratic office holders have opposed the protests in Minnesota or elsewhere against ICE and many have participated. Palestine essentially has nothing to do with saving the republic, except as a wedge issue against other Democrats, not against Republicans.
There is a real chance to defeat the Republicans, but the writer of this letter seems to consider a situation where Trump is defeated but large-scale revolutionary change hasn’t happened to be intolerable. Winning alone isn’t enough. Winning in the right way with only the right people and positions is the only answer. Seems like a high bar to cross.
Because if you know any Progs then you know what they really, truely, hate, far more than they hate Trump or MAGA or fascism, is the normies that want them to grow up and get a real job.
It really does seem partly like a generational, elite overproduction problem. The key is the use of the term middle-aged. Trump is old, as was Espilliat. They aren’t going after the Baby Boomers. The real target seems to be 40-55 year olds like Hakeem Jeffries so they can take their jobs. Hence the hate for Kamala Harris.
The complaint is that Democrats keep voting to fund Donald Trump's government without concessions, send military aid to Israel so that it can engage in wars they don't support, confirm unqualified right-wing radicals to lifetime judicial positions, and promote crypto and AI scams.
I would simply not do those things.
1 and 3 seems somewhat legitimate but small bore relative to “saving the republic”. 2 and 4 are specific hobby horses that have nothing to do with saving the republic, as far as I can tell. If Trump is the threat to the republic, how are you going to stop him by getting your way on those 4 things?
Congress exercising its power of the purse is in fact a siege-artillery bore concept when it comes to saving the republic, at least to the extent that you conceive of that republic as encompassing the rule of many rather than a (tenuously-)elected dictatorship.
Wow, sure is a shame that the Democrats, despite having a majority in the house and Senate foolishly don't use it.
Wait a second...
I think the Democratic Primary base is making it clear; they don't give a shit. They want to nominate who they want to nominate. They don't care if it scares off persuadable voters. And they're tired of hearing from those of us who want them to consider that. So we'll just stand back and watch the trainwreck of which party's primary voters can nominate the grossest candidate. I'm done. 🤷
Re: Maine and Platner - One policy position he's apparently taken is that he wants to treat investment income the same as wages. On its face, that sounds fair and I'm sure it plays great with 20 somethings. However, imo this issue alone could lose the race for him because of how it'll play with older voters, especially lower information older voters.
A ton of retirees count on investment income for at least part of their retirement income and if they read his policy page on this, their first impression will be that a vote for Platner is a vote for much higher taxes. I wonder how much his team has polled this issue and what the results were?
When his campaign says tax investment income like wages, more engaged voters will assume he means tax it at the ordinary income rate and also apply the 15% payroll tax. In other words, more than double the taxes due on that income vs how it's treated now. The campaign doesn't lay out any specifics on this or exemptions for lower income seniors.
I'm sure the campaign is thinking about billionaires and people with high six-figure incomes with this policy, but honestly, the distorted anti-platner ads here practically write themselves. IMO it'll be relatively easy for unscrupulous opposition ads to distort this and make seniors think Platner wants to double the taxes due on not just their non-retirement account investment income, but also on their 401k investments. It seems like a stunningly brain-dead policy the way it's currently presented.
Considering how skewed federal income taxes are most people on fixed incomes are probably unaffected by such a policy change.
Taxing capital gains like regular income and ending the pass through income gaming would hit higher networth households (ones with political capital to complain.)
Specifically it would hit higher net-worth households whose money comes from inheritance and not working. As a self-made higher net-worth household I say go for it lol. I worked and continue to work hard for my wages and taxes on those should be minimized, stonk gains might as well be mana from heaven and I’m much happier to share those (especially if higher taxes on capital would also depress the price of housing which is the one thing I need my stonk gains to catch up with).
That'd be true if his website's policy page had a mention of this being only applicable to higher net worth households, but it doesn't.
A simple one liner saying this only applies to people with incomes over $X would diffuse the risk, but it's not there.
IMO, it's not there because Platner is a radical at heart and wants to significantly change the system. That's fine and will play great with other radicals. Unfortunately, it won't play well with normies and will lose him the election for him handily in my opinion.
Most middle-income people hold most of their stonks in a 401k or similar accounts and they wouldn’t be taxed anyway (or for a traditional 401k when you withdraw the whole thing is taxed as ordinary income already). They’d automatically be shielded.
IDK, don't most lower income people end up paying 0% tax on capital gains right now?
If they have an AGi under like $90k
By definition that's probably almost all lower income people?
Yes
How many lower-income seniors have significant investment income?
Investment income in a 401k isn’t taxed, which is the whole point of a 401k, so that shouldn’t be impacted.
It ought to be pretty easy to communicate the point that a dollar you get for free from passively watching your stonks go up should be taxed the same as a dollar you get from working with the sweat of your brow.
Maybe you're right, but I think people vote with their wallets first and foremost and are generally somewhat selfish overall. AI says about 48% of Mainers over 50 have investments in non-retirement accounts, but I'm sure a lot of that is small balance accounts.
IMO, this policy will allow Platner to be classified as someone that wants to raise seniors' taxes. Add in some distortion on the details and that message easily wins.
I could be wrong, but imo a large share of older voters in Maine, especially low information voters, will see this as a radical change and a risk for them. It'd have been so much smarter to attach at least some clear caveats/exemptions and the lack of any and the generally vague details on the policy makes it hugely ripe for fearmongering. Imo this reeks of political inexperience and being out of touch with voters except for a small minority of radical lefties.
I mean, I'd think a lot of that is 529s for kids/grandkids?
A very tiny segment of the population, especially in Maine, do not have investment income. Also if you have under $80k as a couple filing jointly you pay no capital gains so that position I don’t think will hurt him with most Maine voters.
I'm confused. Maybe there's a typo in your reply?
Current policy is lower income couples pay 0% capital gains, so if it's true that "a very tiny segment of the population do not have investment income" wouldn't the change hurt him?
Apparently the Maine tax code already has three tiers for investment income and treats short and long term capital gains as income already! It sounds like Platner is trying to extend this by introducing a wealth tax. I was surprised to learn about how they tax investment income. Maybe Platner is the one who is confused?
https://learn.valur.com/maine-capital-gains-tax/
Parties rarely make a significant course changes unless they lose big, and neither party has had a big loss for quite some time, so neither of them are going to make big changes.
The Democrats are just deeply, broadly unpopular. Their turn to identity politics, trans rights and the whole set of ideas that Republicans like to label "wokeism" has put them seriously out of step with the electorate. The only reason they haven't lost big is because the GOP has gone insane, rallying around a despicable, incompetent narcissist. This wasn't a large policy shift, at least initially, because Trump took all the GOP positions, while also offering a personality that somehow (I don't get it, but it's incontrovertible) appealed to lots of GOP voters.
This highlights the other way that parties can make a big course change: rally around an extremely popular (to their base) leader. But I don't think the Democrats are capable of that. Bernie was the closest thing to a popular personality they've been able to put up for quite a while, and he couldn't do it. I think the party is too fractious and, frankly, too educated to take the cult of personality path.
So I don't see Democrats making significant changes until they lose in a landslide, and I don't see that happening as long as the Republicans continue being insane. Maybe the voters will tire of the GOP's rejection of reality and give the Democrats a big win, forcing the GOP to change. But that's not happening this year, and I don't expect it to happen in 2028, either.
Instead, it seems like the electorate is just going to become even more cynical while our national institutions are eroded -- which is enabled by the cynicism of the electorate.
I do think we'll come out of it eventually, but I think we've had a rough decade, and we're going to have another rough decade.
So, first off, please explain why Dems pay a terrible price for having even a handful of extremists in Congress but somehow the Republicans never seem to pay for the likes of Andy Biggs or Chip Roy and so many others. Does all the handwringing in say, the NYT, play a role?
Second, if we take back power in '29 with wimpy centrists what do you think will happen? I think nothing will be accomplished to actually help ordinary Americans because anything with a chance to be effective will be shunned as too divisive. Result, the voters turn back to the Republicans.
Reining in Trump is something moderate Democrats will be willing to do, and seems worthwhile in itself.
As Democrats move ever farther left despite copious evidence (CA, IL, Seattle, Portland, LA etc.) of incompetent governance, Matt doesn't even try to make the argument that electing Democrats will 'save the country.' Rather, he assumes that not being MAGA necessarily means competence. This reasoning doesn't even rise to the level of sloppiness. Finding a different way to ruin the country isn't success.
Did you not read the opening paragraphs?
Yes. What's your point? That MAGA is a train wreck? That's not news.
The point is that Trump and his movement have done and will continue to do lasting damage to the country so long as they have the power, through a mix of bad ideas, corruption, and incompetence. Democratic majorities in one or both houses make it easier to put a brake on some of that.
"As this thing that didn't happen continues to not happen, my complaints about it continue to remain incoherent."
Matt’s claim that the Republic is in danger because Republicans have shown essentially limitless tolerance for Trump’s misconduct is hyperbole. Trump just lost war-powers style votes in both houses of Congress because Republicans defected. While 97% of congressional Republicans have been spineless sycophants, Republican voters have not been monolithic. Trump is polling -19 partly because roughly a fifth of Republican voters oppose him. Most importantly, Trump is term-limited, and he would lose even more Republican voters and politicians if he tried to defy such clear constitutional language. He’s also getting old.
Trump can put a heavy thumb on the scale in the 2028 primary and that’s basically it. His primary picks are generally not optimized for winning general elections, and Vance and Rubio will both struggle when their boss is pushing -20.
The next two years will be somewhat more pleasant if Democrats flip the Senate, but this is hardly a necessary condition of saving the Republic. Indeed, flipping the Senate without moderating their national message might be a false dawn if it helps Newsom or Harris capture the nomination. Rerunning a midterm strategy with a bigger, less informed quadrennial electorate is not smart.
Matt is near the tip of the spear. The fascists will probably come for prominent center-left bloggers before they come for edgy commenters, and his personal situation is not completely safe. His hyperbole is understandable but also misleading.
The reason the Senate is essential is to prevent Justices Emil Bove and Aileen(sp) Cannon from being seated. That's a pretty big deal.
This is going to rapidly become moot in the next two to three weeks, so I'd get ready to find a different talking point.
So is the legitimately Chaotic Evil Justice retiring for real?
I'm not sure whether you're referring to Alito or Thomas here, but I would be exceptionally surprised if Alito doesn't step down.
Thomas is Chaotic Evil, Alito is Neutral Evil. I used to think Roberts was Lawful Evil but that obviously isn't true anymore.
This is actually an incorrect characterization IMO-- hence why I needed to clarify who you were talking about. Thomas is Neutral Evil; he has consistent principles but will deviate from them when necessary to achieve an important evil result. (But for the latter tendency, he would actually be Lawful Evil; if you read the full package of his dissents you'll find that he's applying a fairly consistent package of batshit-fascist legal principles, except when a case outcome is really important to him.) Alito is Chaotic Evil; he has no principles at all and simply picks the theory that will produce the most evil result possible.
I’m a heighten the contradictions, pack the court and gut the judiciary kind of lawyer. Up with parliament down with judicial oligarchs.
I hope you're right that this is hyperbole, but I'm not at all convinced. I've never seen anything as dangerous as Trump my life of following in US politics. He has irrevocably changed decades of US foreign policy and thus the entire world order singlehandedly.
IMO it's a huge mistake to underestimate his hold on the Republican party and ability to fully leverage all his legitimate power and much more. The Republican party seems pretty firmly cemented in as the Donald Trump party with no sign of ebbing. Anyone thinking that's not the case just needs to look at the results of the Cassidy and Cornyn primaries.
Under normal analysis, I'd guess the cult would get dismantled after he leaves office, but there's nothing normal about this cult imo.
I find many situations in the cold war far far far more dangerous than anything Trump has done because the path to Armageddon was much more direct.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, most members of Kennedy’s cabinet wanted to invade Cuba. A close blockade against a nuclear power sending ships to a client state was the Dovish strategy.
Nixon became president by scuttling the Paris peace process and promising he had a secret plan to end the war.
Johnson became a senator by stuffing ballot boxes in a Democratic primary.
And of course Russia almost nuked u.s. in the early 80s due to a false alarm.
The basic problem is our moral intuitions are designed to punish cheating and dishonesty and encourage bravery. Accordingly, aggressive and reckless military strategies seem less odious than domestic perfidy even if the stakes are lower.
Yes, January 6 had civil war as a tail risk. That’s an order of magnitude less severe than 0.5 sigma and 1 sigma risks we faced during the cold war.
My personal experience following politics and world affairs doesn't go back quite as far as yours do and I agree those are great examples of huge potentially civilization ending geopolitical risks.
I'd also concede that in terms of overall danger, Putin is a huge wild card right now that I'm very concerned about, especially as Ukraine continues to improve their drone efficacy (again thinking in terms of overall geopolitical risks).
But my comment was meant to be about US political leaders specifically, and about their temperaments and ability to make sound judgements. I should have been more careful with my wording.
I think Trump is fundamentally a brazen radical who doesn't have the ability to properly weigh downside risk. I think many of the people around him suffer from this same mental deficiency, and those who don't know he doesn't tolerate disagreement or dissent well.
Read about El-Sayed’s background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_El-Sayed. Putting aside any disagreements you may have with his political views, he’s legitimately one of the most impressive people I’ve ever seen run for office, child of immigrants who became a Rhodes Scholar and elite-tier medical degree. Meanwhile his main opponent seems like a textbook mediocre career politician. Seems like he’s gaining in the polls because when people look into him they learn this. There are still a decent number of relatively less political swing voters who don’t really care or even know politicians’ issue positions but vote based on qualifications and will go for El-Sayed both in the primary and general.
Michigan was worse than a crime; it was a mistake. - Matt (paraphrased)
There is a very common blogpost genre that I like to call, “we need to save Democracy from the voters.” Matt is smarter than most authors, so he at least notices the contradictions here, but you can tell that he still hasn’t fully internalized the implications.
“Saving the Republic,” or at least Matt’s conception of it, is about the third most important issue for Democratic voters and far lower than that for Republicans voters. People just don’t care enough about the issue to make that the core ideology of one of the major parties in a two-party system. Immigration or health care or some other more salient issue will crowd it out.
And really, that’s the most democratic result of all.
If the DSA manage to get their boy El-Sayed the Dem senate nomination in Michigan, the Dems will indeed fumble away what should be a Senate win there.