This piece and today's piece are really weird-in my view. There ae a bunch of people who are really upset by the status quo. this has resulted in the part of the democratic coalition that is upset with the status quo in democratic party to grow in stregnth. What else shoudl they do but exert their new power. After all there is a general sense (I beleive quite understandably) that the establishment faction of the democratic party failed to stop trump twice. Maybe they should step aside and let give teh new guys a chance. Why are the new guys any more at fault for fighting for control of the party than the old guys?
This is fundamentally downstream of people being unable to understand just how differently other people see the world than they do. They lesson of Trump should be: shit looks like the kind of things he says excite a large fraction of the voters and we need them to vote for us so we should co-opt that to the extent we can.
But people who despise Trump have trouble seeing what is appealing about him.
For an understanding of political philosophy, Pluribus was Andor Plus. Pluribus’ use of an abrupt collapse of all but 13 humans into to pit of zombie Utopianism was pretty relevant to the sudden popularity of the DSA. The new zombies are so anti-utilitarian they are not only uninterested in winning, they aren’t even going to do something to stave off eventual mass starvation. Pluribus is all the more symbolic of the Dems’ current transition in that the thing the nice zombies won’t do to prevent starvation is simple hard work. Better to be in communion with the comrades, apparently, than to join the actual working class.
Matt keeps treating non-moderation as a revealed preference: if leftists won't tack to the center, they must not actually care about beating Trump. But that inference only works if everyone already agrees that moderation is what wins elections. The people Matt is describing don't agree, they think he's overrating it. "They read the evidence differently than I do" and "they don't care about winning" are very different accusations.
Personally, I distrust confident causal claims built on a handful of noisy national elections in either direction. The modest version of the thesis (positioning matters at the margin; stop volunteering unpopular opinions) is probably true. But the modest version can't carry the weight being loaded onto it: that anyone to my left who won't moderate has revealed they'd rather feel pure than win.
I'll preempt the comeback, because Matt has made it before: even if the gains are marginal, winning is the whole ballgame, so leaving marginal gains on the table is the tell. Two problems.
1) Hanlon's razor exists
2) We're being asked to accept *progressives would rather feel smarmy than beat Donald Trump*, which is a helluvah reach.
Matt's whole catalog argues that progressives systematically misread the electorate. If he's right about that, sincere misreading fully explains their behavior, and "they don't actually want to win" explains nothing further. It just adds the insult.
Which raises the question of what a post like this is actually for. Progressives won't read it, and the few who do won't stop running candidates. Its practical function is to reassure people who already find progressives annoying that they're right to be annoyed. Fair enough, some days that's me. But in a midterm year, it's worth asking whether manufacturing that feeling helps us or hurts us, and if it hurts us, then ironically Matt is participating in the very thing he attacks leftists for!
I liked "Andor", but as Resistance agitprop it left me cold. For Luthen and Cassian, "winning" meant icing their best assets and whining about it later. I wound up rooting for Empire Karen.
Wait wasn't the whole thing that Platner was running for what is explicitly NOT a safe blue seat? Susan Collins is the longest serving female Senator in US history. I get Matt's point but this wasn't the case that makes it.
Yeah, I dropped my subscription to TPM after Trump's second inauguration. I like Marshall; but unfortunately, Trump has driven him around the bend. Orange Man is bad, I get it. But Marshall just wanted to keep telling me how bad Orange Man is. I already knew how bad Orange Man is; I wanted to read about ways to beat Orange Man. And the way is to win Republican-leaning constituencies, not to keep telling us Democrats how bad Trump is.
Don't let tha bastards get ya down, Matt. *You're* fighting the *good* fight.
Your framing that this is a waste of resources is a bit awkward. There are plenty of resources available to Dems and it isn’t clear ppl spending on primaries wld automatically spend on general elections in swing states. Otherwise good piece.
I think that you have been very unfair to Josh Marshall here. His point is that Democratic primary voters need something more than the status quo, and that far-left candidates are often the only ones offering them that. He says repeatedly that the ‘left-center’ axis in the Democratic Party and the ‘fight-no fight’ axis do not have to line up neatly, although people generally assume that they do: i.e. they assume that those on the far left are the fighters and that the centrists/moderates/liberals (CML) are milquetoast defenders of the status quo. And he is clearly annoyed that the CML do so little to challenge this assumption: their message is usually nostalgia for the pre-Trump status quo (a non-fighting stance), rather than an articulation of the bold, practical reform measures needed to reject MAGA and bolster American democracy. If CML primary candidates offered that kind of fight, then maybe they wouldn’t lose their primaries to DSA members. Hence the headline, “‘Centrists,’ This Is on You.”
You seem to be having a non-argument with Marshall on the idea of ‘fighting.’ To you, that seems to mean the kind of cringey Resistance performative rhetoric that leads ultimately to losing, not winning, and you accuse Marshall of prioritizing this kind of fighting over playing to win. But the kind of ‘fight’ Marshall wants is a bold vision for post-Trump reform. You may in fact have a significant disagreement about what it will take to defeat MAGA: he seems more focused on the fundamentals of government (Supreme Court reform, gerrymandering reform, etc.); you seem more focused on the specifics required for Democrats to win in red and red-leaning jurisdictions (moderating on cultural issues, focusing on improving the lives of people who live in those places). But you do not actually have a disagreement about ‘fighting.’
“You voted for Trump because of legitimate concerns about Biden’s failures on immigration and inflation, and I hear and acknowledge those concerns, but Trump has betrayed his affordability promises and I can help” is a plausible message for winning over disillusioned Trump voters."
I know it's not the main point in this hypothetical quote, but I'm just going to make my standard observation that it is okay, and in fact probably a really good idea, to make an affirmative defense of Biden's policies in those areas, rather than saying "our party is dumb, we suck at stuff, oh also give us another chance."
Especially because the policies ARE defensible. I mean, according to the projections of every single friggin' economist in the world in 2023 Biden's handling of inflation was LITERALLY A MIRACLE. Apparently we're supposed to keep apologizing forever, though?
STOP CEDING NARRATIVES, Holy Christ! It is not "refusing to acknowledge voter concerns" to say "hey, things would be better right now if you had stuck with our policies." And I remain in disbelief that I have to tell people that, and even greater disbelief that nobody seems to listen.
Biden screwed up on immigration, but other than that, he was mostly a good president! (I’m talking policy, not his disastrous decision to run again in 2024).
>STOP CEDING NARRATIVES
Embroider this on a pillow and hire a sky writer to write it above Matt’s house!
I think that you have been very unfair to Josh Marshall here. His point is that Democratic primary voters need something more than the status quo, and that far-left candidates are often the only ones offering them that. He says repeatedly that the ‘left-center’ axis in the Democratic Party and the ‘fight-no fight’ axis do not have to line up neatly, although people generally assume that they do: i.e. they assume that those on the far left are the fighters and that the centrists/moderates/liberals (CML) are milquetoast defenders of the status quo. And he is clearly annoyed that the CML do so little to challenge this assumption: their message is usually nostalgia for the pre-Trump status quo (a non-fighting stance), rather than an articulation of the bold, practical reform measures needed to reject MAGA and bolster American democracy. If CML primary candidates offered that kind of fight, then maybe they wouldn’t lose their primaries to DSA members. Hence the headline, “‘Centrists,’ This Is on You.”
You seem to be having a non-argument with Marshall on the idea of ‘fighting.’ To you, that seems to mean the kind of cringey Resistance performative rhetoric that leads ultimately to losing, not winning, and you accuse Marshall of prioritizing this kind of fighting over playing to win. But the kind of ‘fight’ Marshall wants is a bold vision for post-Trump reform. You may in fact have a significant disagreement about what it will take to defeat MAGA: he seems more focused on the fundamentals of government (Supreme Court reform, gerrymandering reform, etc.); you seem more focused on the specifics required for Democrats to win in red and red-leaning jurisdictions (moderating on cultural issues, focusing on improving the lives of people who live in those places). But you do not actually have a disagreement about ‘fighting.’
Marshall's super-weenie interpretation of the situation mirrors the general problem with the "factional divide" in the Democratic Party - the mainstream does not actually attack the left. (The left disagrees with this because their persecution complex is as robust as the far right's. They think effing "Abundance" is an attack on them.)
"it was unwise of Democrats to pick a candidate so closely associated with Joe Biden"
Yeah, if they were going to do that they should have just run Joe Biden instead of spending a month plus self-immolating to try to avoid that. Probably would have been worth it, to (1) not throw away a month of the campaign talking about how you suck and make bad decisions and (2) not show a preference for black women over white men (why doesn't anybody think this was significant?)
In all your continued slagging of Biden and refusal to reexamine the party's decisions in Summer '24, you seem to not want to engage with the fact that he was seen as more moderate as Harris, something you would typically assign a huge electoral importance to.
It's worth noting that Harris DOES have policy differences with Biden; she didn't articulate them because they AREN'T POPULAR. Which is part of the reason Biden easily won a primary in which Harris couldn't even make it to Iowa before people stopped writing her checks.
I suspect that sticking with the original candidate is also the only way to win the Maine Senate seat, and I'm also sure the party is going to melt down continuously and levy various threats at Platner until he drops out, so, let's hope the other states go well.
Here's the basic thing - Matt and many other centrist believe Joe Biden was too left-wing during hid administration and future Democratic administrations need to be more right-wing.
That's the message to Democratic voters, especially to the much more liberal segment of Democratic voters under 40 is - 'the best you're ever going to get in the near and medium future is Joe Biden because we think Joe Biden was too left-wing.'
If that's the moderate message, it's not a surprise left-factionalists are winning over voters.
There's also a fundamental disagreement over what 'defeating MAGA' is within the Democratic coalition.
If the bad parts of MAGA are just the rule of law and corruption stuff, then yes, get Josh Shapiro in there to continue large swaths of Trump's border and security policies and many of his other cultural policies since the centrists agree with Trump and Trump supporters on those issues and there, MAGA defeated. Now it's time to do some needed austerity (note this austerity will not involve repealing large swaths of the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts).
That's now what many Democratic voters believe defeating MAGA is which is why Matt and other centrists are confused why Democratic voters seem to not 'care' about defeating MAGA because those Democratic voters don't see what centrists do as 'defeating MAGA,' but rather bringing in the supposedly parts of MAGA they heavily disagree with.
I’m sincerely torn on this, as someone who is to the right of you but well to the left of the Median Swing Voter.
I want a fighter, as in, someone who will point at all the fucked-up shit that Trump has been doing and say “that shit is fucked up” instead of being all cautious and polite for fear of angering the Common Clay of the West.
That being said! You don’t have to *like* something to recognize it’s true, and “the American people have shown us that they’re totes cool with electing an utter shithead if the alternative is illegal immigration, socialism, or trans kids on high school sports teams” is a true statement, however much you may hate it.
Look, I’m second to none in my burning hatred and disdain for the double standard of American politics: Democrats have to be all things to all people; Trump just gets to be Trump. But at the same time, the lefty people who are impatient with the Democratic establishment ought to recognize when a quarter of a loaf is better than a bowl of raccoon crap with glass shards.
Except it's not 1/4 of a loaf - a 1/4 of a loaf was Biden and Matt thought that was too left-wing!
What Matt wants is it to be a slighlty smaller bowl or racccon crap w/ slighlty fewer glass shards, but we have to act like it's a full loaf, because otherwise, a swing voter in Iowa will realize we don't love the raccon crap and glass shards and vote for the fascists anyway.
At that point, if Matt is right, we're screwed anyway and I'd rather go down fighting for my values instead of compromising them away and ending up losing to the fascists in the long run anyway.
Thankfully, I disagree w/ Matt that the American voting populace has become insanely more right-wing just because Kamala lost after an insane amount of inflation that killed every other incumbent in the world as well.
This also comes down to my fundanemental view I largely agree w/ Beutler & Marshall that a lot of the 'double standard' is because the centrists Matt love buy into the negative framing of Democrats.
As I've said before, you know a big difference between 'moderates like Susan Collins or Brian Fitzpatrick and Democratic moderates? Republcan moderates don't spend seemingly half their money and ad budget apologizing of being Republicans and for other Republican voters.
"Multiple Republicans say insanely racist, sexist, etc. things" - Brian Fitzpatrick & Susan Collins don't say a damn thing and talk about their popular things they support.
"One DSA member somewhere says something wacky" - Every centrist/moderate Democratic pundit, consultant, and politician goes directly to Politico and Axios to apologize and talk about how this shows the Democrats need to work harder at being in touch with Real Americans, as opposed to the people who actually vote for them - dirty filthy liberals they apologize for having to appeal too at all, because deeep down, they as good centrists, think they're out of touch weirdos and insane people just like you do.
You are kind of conflating "left-wing" and "getting better for young people" in your head, because of your personal views, and the entire point is that Dems should try to get votes of people who don't do that.
A lot of people are never going to be left-wing, and I would like it those people voted for less shitty officials than they do.
A majority of swing state voters say "Democrats are too left-wing." How can you reconcile that with what you're saying here?
And btw, "liberal Democrats want to do austerity" is a bullshit DSA fever dream that they were incredibly insistent about with Biden, too, before he proved them incredibly wrong. (Also, "austerity" is dumb, but our current situation is not the same situation as in 2013, and we do need some budget control more than we need demand stimulus.)
(I also don't know if it was ever written down anywhere on an organization level but I had a lot of DSA types tell me Biden's border enforcement was TOO HARSH.)
This is accurate, but in the spirit of honesty I think it has to be conceded that the left is also increasingly unwilling to come to terms with the need to raise taxes on the middle class. The whole country seems to be in the grips of an antitax revolt.
Trump showed with tariffs that it actually is possible to raise taxes on the middle class, you just have to be really sneaky about it.
Really I think it's my center-left team that is too afraid of raising middle class taxes. I mean, I think the far left endorses basically replacing health insurance premiums out of pocket costs with taxes, right? So that's a huge tax increase on everybody (although with at least the stated intent of leaving more money in your pocket.)
One way I thought you could possibly raise taxes is to explicitly NAME what the tax increase is for. "We're implementing a 0.2% tax to expand SNAP for families with children," "We're increasing payroll taxes by 0.5% to keep Social Security benefits from being cut," something like that. And tapering in a tax increase with slow annual adjustments to the rates or brackets would make people a lot less upset about it than just going "here's your new bill."
I agree, but to be fair, Bernie's plan does say that everybody across the board would pay 4% of their income. I have serious reservations that this would actually be the price because it seems to pie in the sky to me. And of course, I would like to see a more concrete plan for this.
Absolutely, but far too many soi-disant Marxists have convinced themselves that slopulism for the middle class is the new intermediate stage on the road to communism. Mostly because they are themselves the beneficiaries of said slopulism.
The far left/DSA types hate centrist Democrats and consider them the villain/worst enemy. Freddie seems to share this mindset. This is because, in the far leftist’s eyes, centrist/moderate Democrats are human and hence have *agency*. “Those centrist Democrats could have chosen to be good, but instead they have chosen evil! They have thrown in with the capitalists and the rich and the cops and the genocidal Israel enablers! Fuck them! We hate them!”
Republicans, in contrast, are not human in the far left people’s eyes; they are a destructive force of nature, like a wildfire or hurricane or flood. A flood has no agency. What’s the point in getting angry at it or hating it? It’s gonna do what it’s gonna do, you just get out of the way.
Nailed it, except I do think Freddie has reformed himself a decent amount, largely because he's noticed how incredibly annoying the online left can be about politics-adjacent cultural issues, and as a result turned a more critical eye to their direct political claims.
This piece and today's piece are really weird-in my view. There ae a bunch of people who are really upset by the status quo. this has resulted in the part of the democratic coalition that is upset with the status quo in democratic party to grow in stregnth. What else shoudl they do but exert their new power. After all there is a general sense (I beleive quite understandably) that the establishment faction of the democratic party failed to stop trump twice. Maybe they should step aside and let give teh new guys a chance. Why are the new guys any more at fault for fighting for control of the party than the old guys?
This is fundamentally downstream of people being unable to understand just how differently other people see the world than they do. They lesson of Trump should be: shit looks like the kind of things he says excite a large fraction of the voters and we need them to vote for us so we should co-opt that to the extent we can.
But people who despise Trump have trouble seeing what is appealing about him.
For an understanding of political philosophy, Pluribus was Andor Plus. Pluribus’ use of an abrupt collapse of all but 13 humans into to pit of zombie Utopianism was pretty relevant to the sudden popularity of the DSA. The new zombies are so anti-utilitarian they are not only uninterested in winning, they aren’t even going to do something to stave off eventual mass starvation. Pluribus is all the more symbolic of the Dems’ current transition in that the thing the nice zombies won’t do to prevent starvation is simple hard work. Better to be in communion with the comrades, apparently, than to join the actual working class.
Matt keeps treating non-moderation as a revealed preference: if leftists won't tack to the center, they must not actually care about beating Trump. But that inference only works if everyone already agrees that moderation is what wins elections. The people Matt is describing don't agree, they think he's overrating it. "They read the evidence differently than I do" and "they don't care about winning" are very different accusations.
Personally, I distrust confident causal claims built on a handful of noisy national elections in either direction. The modest version of the thesis (positioning matters at the margin; stop volunteering unpopular opinions) is probably true. But the modest version can't carry the weight being loaded onto it: that anyone to my left who won't moderate has revealed they'd rather feel pure than win.
I'll preempt the comeback, because Matt has made it before: even if the gains are marginal, winning is the whole ballgame, so leaving marginal gains on the table is the tell. Two problems.
1) Hanlon's razor exists
2) We're being asked to accept *progressives would rather feel smarmy than beat Donald Trump*, which is a helluvah reach.
Matt's whole catalog argues that progressives systematically misread the electorate. If he's right about that, sincere misreading fully explains their behavior, and "they don't actually want to win" explains nothing further. It just adds the insult.
Which raises the question of what a post like this is actually for. Progressives won't read it, and the few who do won't stop running candidates. Its practical function is to reassure people who already find progressives annoying that they're right to be annoyed. Fair enough, some days that's me. But in a midterm year, it's worth asking whether manufacturing that feeling helps us or hurts us, and if it hurts us, then ironically Matt is participating in the very thing he attacks leftists for!
I liked "Andor", but as Resistance agitprop it left me cold. For Luthen and Cassian, "winning" meant icing their best assets and whining about it later. I wound up rooting for Empire Karen.
Wait wasn't the whole thing that Platner was running for what is explicitly NOT a safe blue seat? Susan Collins is the longest serving female Senator in US history. I get Matt's point but this wasn't the case that makes it.
Yeah, I dropped my subscription to TPM after Trump's second inauguration. I like Marshall; but unfortunately, Trump has driven him around the bend. Orange Man is bad, I get it. But Marshall just wanted to keep telling me how bad Orange Man is. I already knew how bad Orange Man is; I wanted to read about ways to beat Orange Man. And the way is to win Republican-leaning constituencies, not to keep telling us Democrats how bad Trump is.
Don't let tha bastards get ya down, Matt. *You're* fighting the *good* fight.
<3
Your framing that this is a waste of resources is a bit awkward. There are plenty of resources available to Dems and it isn’t clear ppl spending on primaries wld automatically spend on general elections in swing states. Otherwise good piece.
I think that you have been very unfair to Josh Marshall here. His point is that Democratic primary voters need something more than the status quo, and that far-left candidates are often the only ones offering them that. He says repeatedly that the ‘left-center’ axis in the Democratic Party and the ‘fight-no fight’ axis do not have to line up neatly, although people generally assume that they do: i.e. they assume that those on the far left are the fighters and that the centrists/moderates/liberals (CML) are milquetoast defenders of the status quo. And he is clearly annoyed that the CML do so little to challenge this assumption: their message is usually nostalgia for the pre-Trump status quo (a non-fighting stance), rather than an articulation of the bold, practical reform measures needed to reject MAGA and bolster American democracy. If CML primary candidates offered that kind of fight, then maybe they wouldn’t lose their primaries to DSA members. Hence the headline, “‘Centrists,’ This Is on You.”
You seem to be having a non-argument with Marshall on the idea of ‘fighting.’ To you, that seems to mean the kind of cringey Resistance performative rhetoric that leads ultimately to losing, not winning, and you accuse Marshall of prioritizing this kind of fighting over playing to win. But the kind of ‘fight’ Marshall wants is a bold vision for post-Trump reform. You may in fact have a significant disagreement about what it will take to defeat MAGA: he seems more focused on the fundamentals of government (Supreme Court reform, gerrymandering reform, etc.); you seem more focused on the specifics required for Democrats to win in red and red-leaning jurisdictions (moderating on cultural issues, focusing on improving the lives of people who live in those places). But you do not actually have a disagreement about ‘fighting.’
“You voted for Trump because of legitimate concerns about Biden’s failures on immigration and inflation, and I hear and acknowledge those concerns, but Trump has betrayed his affordability promises and I can help” is a plausible message for winning over disillusioned Trump voters."
I know it's not the main point in this hypothetical quote, but I'm just going to make my standard observation that it is okay, and in fact probably a really good idea, to make an affirmative defense of Biden's policies in those areas, rather than saying "our party is dumb, we suck at stuff, oh also give us another chance."
Especially because the policies ARE defensible. I mean, according to the projections of every single friggin' economist in the world in 2023 Biden's handling of inflation was LITERALLY A MIRACLE. Apparently we're supposed to keep apologizing forever, though?
STOP CEDING NARRATIVES, Holy Christ! It is not "refusing to acknowledge voter concerns" to say "hey, things would be better right now if you had stuck with our policies." And I remain in disbelief that I have to tell people that, and even greater disbelief that nobody seems to listen.
Yes! Thank you!
Biden screwed up on immigration, but other than that, he was mostly a good president! (I’m talking policy, not his disastrous decision to run again in 2024).
>STOP CEDING NARRATIVES
Embroider this on a pillow and hire a sky writer to write it above Matt’s house!
I think that you have been very unfair to Josh Marshall here. His point is that Democratic primary voters need something more than the status quo, and that far-left candidates are often the only ones offering them that. He says repeatedly that the ‘left-center’ axis in the Democratic Party and the ‘fight-no fight’ axis do not have to line up neatly, although people generally assume that they do: i.e. they assume that those on the far left are the fighters and that the centrists/moderates/liberals (CML) are milquetoast defenders of the status quo. And he is clearly annoyed that the CML do so little to challenge this assumption: their message is usually nostalgia for the pre-Trump status quo (a non-fighting stance), rather than an articulation of the bold, practical reform measures needed to reject MAGA and bolster American democracy. If CML primary candidates offered that kind of fight, then maybe they wouldn’t lose their primaries to DSA members. Hence the headline, “‘Centrists,’ This Is on You.”
You seem to be having a non-argument with Marshall on the idea of ‘fighting.’ To you, that seems to mean the kind of cringey Resistance performative rhetoric that leads ultimately to losing, not winning, and you accuse Marshall of prioritizing this kind of fighting over playing to win. But the kind of ‘fight’ Marshall wants is a bold vision for post-Trump reform. You may in fact have a significant disagreement about what it will take to defeat MAGA: he seems more focused on the fundamentals of government (Supreme Court reform, gerrymandering reform, etc.); you seem more focused on the specifics required for Democrats to win in red and red-leaning jurisdictions (moderating on cultural issues, focusing on improving the lives of people who live in those places). But you do not actually have a disagreement about ‘fighting.’
Marshall's super-weenie interpretation of the situation mirrors the general problem with the "factional divide" in the Democratic Party - the mainstream does not actually attack the left. (The left disagrees with this because their persecution complex is as robust as the far right's. They think effing "Abundance" is an attack on them.)
It's bad to not attack people who attack you!
"it was unwise of Democrats to pick a candidate so closely associated with Joe Biden"
Yeah, if they were going to do that they should have just run Joe Biden instead of spending a month plus self-immolating to try to avoid that. Probably would have been worth it, to (1) not throw away a month of the campaign talking about how you suck and make bad decisions and (2) not show a preference for black women over white men (why doesn't anybody think this was significant?)
In all your continued slagging of Biden and refusal to reexamine the party's decisions in Summer '24, you seem to not want to engage with the fact that he was seen as more moderate as Harris, something you would typically assign a huge electoral importance to.
It's worth noting that Harris DOES have policy differences with Biden; she didn't articulate them because they AREN'T POPULAR. Which is part of the reason Biden easily won a primary in which Harris couldn't even make it to Iowa before people stopped writing her checks.
I suspect that sticking with the original candidate is also the only way to win the Maine Senate seat, and I'm also sure the party is going to melt down continuously and levy various threats at Platner until he drops out, so, let's hope the other states go well.
Here's the basic thing - Matt and many other centrist believe Joe Biden was too left-wing during hid administration and future Democratic administrations need to be more right-wing.
That's the message to Democratic voters, especially to the much more liberal segment of Democratic voters under 40 is - 'the best you're ever going to get in the near and medium future is Joe Biden because we think Joe Biden was too left-wing.'
If that's the moderate message, it's not a surprise left-factionalists are winning over voters.
There's also a fundamental disagreement over what 'defeating MAGA' is within the Democratic coalition.
If the bad parts of MAGA are just the rule of law and corruption stuff, then yes, get Josh Shapiro in there to continue large swaths of Trump's border and security policies and many of his other cultural policies since the centrists agree with Trump and Trump supporters on those issues and there, MAGA defeated. Now it's time to do some needed austerity (note this austerity will not involve repealing large swaths of the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts).
That's now what many Democratic voters believe defeating MAGA is which is why Matt and other centrists are confused why Democratic voters seem to not 'care' about defeating MAGA because those Democratic voters don't see what centrists do as 'defeating MAGA,' but rather bringing in the supposedly parts of MAGA they heavily disagree with.
Hi Jesse!
I’m sincerely torn on this, as someone who is to the right of you but well to the left of the Median Swing Voter.
I want a fighter, as in, someone who will point at all the fucked-up shit that Trump has been doing and say “that shit is fucked up” instead of being all cautious and polite for fear of angering the Common Clay of the West.
That being said! You don’t have to *like* something to recognize it’s true, and “the American people have shown us that they’re totes cool with electing an utter shithead if the alternative is illegal immigration, socialism, or trans kids on high school sports teams” is a true statement, however much you may hate it.
Look, I’m second to none in my burning hatred and disdain for the double standard of American politics: Democrats have to be all things to all people; Trump just gets to be Trump. But at the same time, the lefty people who are impatient with the Democratic establishment ought to recognize when a quarter of a loaf is better than a bowl of raccoon crap with glass shards.
Except it's not 1/4 of a loaf - a 1/4 of a loaf was Biden and Matt thought that was too left-wing!
What Matt wants is it to be a slighlty smaller bowl or racccon crap w/ slighlty fewer glass shards, but we have to act like it's a full loaf, because otherwise, a swing voter in Iowa will realize we don't love the raccon crap and glass shards and vote for the fascists anyway.
At that point, if Matt is right, we're screwed anyway and I'd rather go down fighting for my values instead of compromising them away and ending up losing to the fascists in the long run anyway.
Thankfully, I disagree w/ Matt that the American voting populace has become insanely more right-wing just because Kamala lost after an insane amount of inflation that killed every other incumbent in the world as well.
This also comes down to my fundanemental view I largely agree w/ Beutler & Marshall that a lot of the 'double standard' is because the centrists Matt love buy into the negative framing of Democrats.
As I've said before, you know a big difference between 'moderates like Susan Collins or Brian Fitzpatrick and Democratic moderates? Republcan moderates don't spend seemingly half their money and ad budget apologizing of being Republicans and for other Republican voters.
"Multiple Republicans say insanely racist, sexist, etc. things" - Brian Fitzpatrick & Susan Collins don't say a damn thing and talk about their popular things they support.
"One DSA member somewhere says something wacky" - Every centrist/moderate Democratic pundit, consultant, and politician goes directly to Politico and Axios to apologize and talk about how this shows the Democrats need to work harder at being in touch with Real Americans, as opposed to the people who actually vote for them - dirty filthy liberals they apologize for having to appeal too at all, because deeep down, they as good centrists, think they're out of touch weirdos and insane people just like you do.
You are kind of conflating "left-wing" and "getting better for young people" in your head, because of your personal views, and the entire point is that Dems should try to get votes of people who don't do that.
A lot of people are never going to be left-wing, and I would like it those people voted for less shitty officials than they do.
A majority of swing state voters say "Democrats are too left-wing." How can you reconcile that with what you're saying here?
And btw, "liberal Democrats want to do austerity" is a bullshit DSA fever dream that they were incredibly insistent about with Biden, too, before he proved them incredibly wrong. (Also, "austerity" is dumb, but our current situation is not the same situation as in 2013, and we do need some budget control more than we need demand stimulus.)
(I also don't know if it was ever written down anywhere on an organization level but I had a lot of DSA types tell me Biden's border enforcement was TOO HARSH.)
This is accurate, but in the spirit of honesty I think it has to be conceded that the left is also increasingly unwilling to come to terms with the need to raise taxes on the middle class. The whole country seems to be in the grips of an antitax revolt.
Trump showed with tariffs that it actually is possible to raise taxes on the middle class, you just have to be really sneaky about it.
Really I think it's my center-left team that is too afraid of raising middle class taxes. I mean, I think the far left endorses basically replacing health insurance premiums out of pocket costs with taxes, right? So that's a huge tax increase on everybody (although with at least the stated intent of leaving more money in your pocket.)
One way I thought you could possibly raise taxes is to explicitly NAME what the tax increase is for. "We're implementing a 0.2% tax to expand SNAP for families with children," "We're increasing payroll taxes by 0.5% to keep Social Security benefits from being cut," something like that. And tapering in a tax increase with slow annual adjustments to the rates or brackets would make people a lot less upset about it than just going "here's your new bill."
I agree, but to be fair, Bernie's plan does say that everybody across the board would pay 4% of their income. I have serious reservations that this would actually be the price because it seems to pie in the sky to me. And of course, I would like to see a more concrete plan for this.
Hey, AOC was on the side of the angels with this one, more than even Bernie and unfortunately seemingly El-Sayed!
Absolutely, but far too many soi-disant Marxists have convinced themselves that slopulism for the middle class is the new intermediate stage on the road to communism. Mostly because they are themselves the beneficiaries of said slopulism.
The far left/DSA types hate centrist Democrats and consider them the villain/worst enemy. Freddie seems to share this mindset. This is because, in the far leftist’s eyes, centrist/moderate Democrats are human and hence have *agency*. “Those centrist Democrats could have chosen to be good, but instead they have chosen evil! They have thrown in with the capitalists and the rich and the cops and the genocidal Israel enablers! Fuck them! We hate them!”
Republicans, in contrast, are not human in the far left people’s eyes; they are a destructive force of nature, like a wildfire or hurricane or flood. A flood has no agency. What’s the point in getting angry at it or hating it? It’s gonna do what it’s gonna do, you just get out of the way.
TL;DR Murc’s Law is alive and well!
Nailed it, except I do think Freddie has reformed himself a decent amount, largely because he's noticed how incredibly annoying the online left can be about politics-adjacent cultural issues, and as a result turned a more critical eye to their direct political claims.
“Fighting, but not the kind that lands blows that make it easier to ultimately win the battle or the war.”