My question is how do Biden and Democrats take advantage of the bills they HAVE passed electorally? Your whole argument is bipartisanship exists so long as partisans can extract the political benefits of partisanship on the issues voters witness. If this is true, Biden and Schumer will be painted as failures regardless of how successful Congress is the next year plus. Can Biden, next year, start touting these bills and get credit for them?
Matt, respectfully, authorizations and appropriations are not the same. The Drinking Water and Wastewater Act didn't get coverage because it didn't appropriate any funding.
This connects a bit to a fight that's going on about corporate donations. Various activists, consumers, and employees of big companies yell about those companies donating money to particular congressional reps who are e.g. opposed to LGBT rights, or sometimes to outfits like NRCC that support those reps. I think that the companies are trying to make progress on low-salience, Secret Congress kind of issues, and their contributions are being perceived (not incorrectly) in the light of the high-salience issues.
It isn't wrong to slag Google for claiming to be gay-friendly while giving money to Steve King, for example, but at the same time the Secret Congress game seems to involve greasing all the wheels.
Good article, but I would argue big changes must be bi-partisan. Even if you have the votes to get your way on your own.
Look at 2010 and the Republican victories after the Dems pushed Obamacare through. If it was a bi-partisan bill, we wouldn't have spent 10 years arguing about it.
As for passing election reform at the federal level without bi-partisan ship. I can think of few things more likely to destroy faith in elections, which would most likely result in violence.
I think this theory is true now, but was not fifty years ago, and the thing that changed is asymmetric. Specifically, the majority of people voting for Democratic members of Congress in general elections, and in Democratic primaries (although that majority is eroding), still tell pollsters that they want their representative to work across the aisle and reach sensible compromises, while the majority of people voting for Republicans in general elections, and the _huge majority_ of people voting in Republican primaries, are quite open about their desire for their representatives to refuse compromise of any kind. (Hence the famous GOP debate in which nobody on the stage would accept a 10:1 spending cuts for increased taxes ratio, to eliminate the deficit.)
Even if you accept all the arguments of this piece - is it _not_ supposed to be horrifying that public advocacy on an issue prevents Congress from taking action on it and only quiet lobbying can make something pass? Is everyone who doesn't have a job on Capitol Hill just supposed to keep their mouth shut and hope that good things happen?
I have three very anodyne rules about American politics:
-- When you have big majorities, you can probably get big things done
-- When you have a small majority, you can keep the wheels of America greased but not too much more than that
-- If you want to get reelected, then just make sure the economy is good and we're at peace; doing big things legislatively will have no impact on your chances.
Oh, and I have one more rule about what legislation can pass:
-- If Tucker Carlson talks about it on his show, there's no way to pass bipartisan legislation; if Tucker Carlson doesn't pay attention to it, the Secret Congress may be able to pass something.
Caught me by surprise too. Next time I go inside a gas station, I'm going to look for that "you must have been born before this date in ___" calendars.
One thing not mentioned in this is the influence of term limits on GOP chairs/ranking members in the Senate, which may or may not push certain Republican Senators to try to make a deal for their "legacy" before they leave a position of influence. Was regarded as a large factor in Murkowski's push for last year's energy bill. Not clear how much of a role it played in other bills though.
"If you are persuasive, determined, and willing to be eclectic in who you partner with, then things can happen."
One of the frustrating aspects with the way intersectionality is understood by activists is that it can really push against this kind of approach.
If you're advocating for serious immigration reform, you're probably going to have to work with Catholic groups, many of whom are going to be pro-life. This isn't throwing Planned Parenthood under the bus, this is just taking your job seriously.
(Unions are much more effective, in part because they ARE willing to be transactional. If you asked a union to stop cutting deals in the name of activist solidarity, you'd be laughed out of the room.)
Re unions: one hopes, right? It's been alarming to see unions of educated professions, most prominently journalism unions, seeming to favor an intersectional approach.
Yup. I agree that the method of intersectionality is anti-political in this sense. It always demands a whole loaf over a half loaf, and a whole loaf for every constituency over a half-loaf for anyone. It's deeply opposed to incremental progress, and I think that's a mistake.
I don't know if anti-political is the right word exactly. You could say it's anti-democratic though. If "speaking truth to power" is your most cherished political principle, and you also live in a democracy, even a flawed one, then logically what you believe in is speaking truth, oppositionally, to the majority of voters. In which case, you must believe either (1) that it is appropriate and feasible for political leaders to manufacture the consent of the voters, or (2) that political leaders shouldn't be accountable to voters at all.
People with minority political views tend to be very focused on “the media” and “the two party system” because they see all of mainstream politics as flowing from those institutions engaging in (1), rather than a genuinely popular preference.
And the weirdest thing is the way that people keep going back to false consciousness arguments, even when doing so is contrary to their own material interests.
I've been hoping you'd discuss more about Secret Congress and what, if any, advice can be given to political actors based on the knowledge of Secret Congress. I'd especially like something like "What if David Shor was in Secret Congress" but ways to both find and identify popular issues to advocate for, while avoiding the trap of doing so by appealing to partisan advocacy organizations to get a bill on the agenda.
It seems like there's a bad loop with funders not recognizing that the metrics they are using to determine if their support for a group is effective is actually undermining the chance for legislative success.
I would add that with any high salience topic, the majority party has little interest in proposing bills that could gather support from the minority party. While this minority party probably wouldn't play ball either way, all the incentives you outline would apply here as well.
"Biden needs to stay as far away as possible, and let Manchin try and negotiate some incrementalist legislation. It probably won’t work, because the issue of electoral reform has the highest salience around. But it’s a better strategy than running into the brick wall of trying to pass a bill that a majority of senators oppose. "
Seems like you are missing the obvious point: Nothing we try will work on anything of high salience, and conservatives get to choose what is high salience.
I think this is where using a single moniker for conservatives is wildly misleading. This is no single person or entity controlling this and they are often conflicted. Immigration reform was something the leadership in the Republicans wanted to do and probably preferred to exist in secret congress, but outside actors/activists wouldn't allow that.
Good question - I don't know the best way to answer that other than my broad belief that most rank and file members of either party take their queues on issues from political actors they trust. So to the point you made below, the rank and file can switch their views on free trade, small government, family values, etc.
My view is that Republican's were the pro immigration party. Then the rank and file started feeling like the country was changing to fast and demagogues seized upon immigration being part of why the change was happening and used it as a wedge issue.
I think at least some of the time causation runs the other way, that there are deep salient disagreements in the public and that makes them nearly impossible to negotiate. Gun rights, abortion, tax policy mostly run this way.
Of course, then it becomes self reinforcing by becoming election level salient. But in those cases, other than nibbling around the edges public advocacy is the proper way to go for advocacy groups.
The hope is to raise the salience among your co-partisans to the point that they will feel as threatened by not acting as acting, hope to make it a 60/40 issue in your favor, or prevent it from going the other way. The ultimate success is something like gay marriage, where the other side eventually capitulated, though that it is very rare.
I think the causation works both ways and it is important to pay attention that.
Matt's point is relevant for issues that have not yet reached salience. For example, zoning reform is an issue that could burst into a high salience issue and become ideologically polarized.
Under this theory the advocates for zoning reform should work hard to keep the level of salience and publicity around the issue as low as possible. They should ask Biden to never mention it, and not do protests about how zoning is racist (even though it is). Instead they should go behind closed doors and tell Democratic policymakers about how racist it is, and tell Republican lawmakers how zoning is government bureaucratic overreach.
At the same time, the activists don't have full control over these issues and cannot always control them. If Republicans decide zoning reform is a politically useful attack on Democrats, and Trump tried to do this in 2020, then it will rise to high salience despite anything the activists do. I would argue that this is what has happened with immigration reform, activists attempted secret congress getting some Republicans on board, but xenophobic groups then had an incentive to raise the salience to block it.
Using "secret congress" is most useful for issues that are not already high salience (or can't easily be rebranded), and don't have committed opposition who can raise the salience. These kinds of issues are usually funding for project or issue that doesn't take funding away from something else.
So the issue of "infrastructure" has been handled badly because it was raised to high salience, although that may be because of how the Trump administration handled it. But other issues that are getting through congress have been doing better due to the lower salience, despite the fact that they are similiar issues.
On gay marriage: how much of that was advocacy groups and activists versus politicians pushing in that direction versus just the culture changing, organically?
In one of his interviews David Shor made the point that support for gay marriage actually stalled out during the years that it was most politicized, mid-2000s or so. But both before and after the support rose steadily.
I guess I'm skeptical of the ability of either activists or politicians to change minds or move voters. I feel like the internet, globalization and TV / Movies probably do much more, and that's why we see broad correlations across countries when it comes to support for cultural issues.
Culture changing "organically" isn't a thing. Culture always has people making explicit arguments, and those arguments always feed into art, and that art informs future arguments, and so on.
The guy who wrote the Black Panther movie was unquestionably informed by activism and politics. Same with the people who wrote Atlas Shrugged and The Color Purple, and with the people who made Will and Grace.
Organic-isn't-a -thing seems a strangely hardline position to take. People used to get married and have children at earlier ages - which artist or activist drove that change? The percentage of Americans with a passport has risen steadily, over the last 30 years, from a base of only 5% - is that due to politics? Who are the people organizing the steady rise of interracial marriage among Americans? Who's behind men no longer wearing hats and sometimes wearing their hair long?
It seems like you have picked several examples with pretty clear political/activist connections.
-- marriage age -- women can't be forced to get married at early ages anymore, and more women have opportunities to do things like go to college and start careers
-- rise in passports -- increasing cultural diversity due to changes in immigration laws in the late 70s, reduction in xenophobia starting with Civil Rights, airline bailouts, growth of trade
-- interracial marriage -- seems obviously related to decades or antiracism
-- hats and hair -- the hat industry is still huge, and hat and hair trends have long been connected to politics and activism: hippy long hair, the natural hair movement among African Americans, skinheads
Finally -- finally!! -- someone asking the tough questions that will blow the cover off this whole sordid conspiracy.
You got your bare-headed men, your penny-loafers replacing wing-tips, and then one day, bam! it's rampant drug abuse in the streets and sexual commerce with komodo dragons. After that it's only a short step to utter degradation: whole-language literacy and people using "assumedly" for "presumably." It all starts so innocently, with a Vidal Sassoon shampoo commercial, and before you know it Western Culture has crumbled into dust.
That's also the period both when the issue was being fought in the states, and when the issue was just crossing the 50% line. I wonder if one or the other of those two facts was most relevant.
It's notable that marijuana legalization mostly stalled in the 1980s and 1990s, but has continued since then on the same trajectory it was on in the 1970s. In this case, the issue crossed 50% around 2012, just before it started being fought in the states (unless you count the pre-history of medical marijuana, which started right when the issue got un-stalled, in the late 1990s).
A 20-year stall-out would seem to coincide with generational change. A pause while those too young to be involved in the prior fight came of age and many opposed died out.
Yeah - the stall out on marijuana happened at a time when it was less salient in politics. So it's a good counter-example to the Shor gay marriage chart.
I think tax policy is the ultimate negotiable policy within limits. Increasing the tax rates by 5-10% would generate huge talking points, but I don't it generates the passion that any of the culture war issues like gun rights or abortion does. If you moved it 40% maybe, but even then I suspect not.
On the whole, I would say that it was about fear. Much of what animates both parties in part, but especially conservatives, is the fear of loss. They feel they should have good lives in a good country and progressives want to destroy that. Some of the fear is bound up in racism, but I think its a smaller part than I've read you to believe. More of it is built up in a broader cultural understanding of how the country should work with regards to jobs, family, religion, etc. Its also an incredibly power motivator that politicians have used to drive votes.
Idk, the tea party got started after the bailouts were done proposed, and before a lot of the social fears were stoked. Obama hadn't really even taken charge yet (Santelli's Tea Party screed on CNBC was Feb 19, 2009, only a month after Obama was inaugurated) and Obama campaigned as kind of a moderate....he got lots of WWC votes. Are you reading 2021 politics into 2009?
A major underlying contention is that conservatives believe things are pretty good and we shouldn't change very much - aka conserve things the way they are. Progressives think things could be much better if we changed some stuff and progressed forward.
There is undeniable tension in these perspectives and its easy for Conservatives to believe that Progressives want to destroy their good life and its easy for Progressives to believe that Conservatives want to keep the bad things.
I think they are both right. Relative to history - things are amazing right now for more people than ever before. We should be careful not to mess that up. We also didn't get here by conserving what was, we got here by progressing forward and there are still many things that could be better. I try very hard (not always successfully) to see the best in both perspectives as I think they can both be valuable. That doesn't mean that on any particular issue both are right, one perspective is more right than the other on any specific issue.
TL;DR - I don't think you want to destroy a good life or country. You might advance specific policies I think will make things better or worse though...
"The ultimate success is something like gay marriage, where the other side eventually capitulated, though that it is very rare."
That kind of depends on the standard for "rare." Social Security, Medicare, universal suffrage, Civil Rights, Obamacare, gay marriage, and legal weed were all super unpopular and unpassable until they weren't.
And none of those things happened because we did them "in secret."
My question is how do Biden and Democrats take advantage of the bills they HAVE passed electorally? Your whole argument is bipartisanship exists so long as partisans can extract the political benefits of partisanship on the issues voters witness. If this is true, Biden and Schumer will be painted as failures regardless of how successful Congress is the next year plus. Can Biden, next year, start touting these bills and get credit for them?
Matt, respectfully, authorizations and appropriations are not the same. The Drinking Water and Wastewater Act didn't get coverage because it didn't appropriate any funding.
But authorizing funds sets the stage for appropriating them!
This connects a bit to a fight that's going on about corporate donations. Various activists, consumers, and employees of big companies yell about those companies donating money to particular congressional reps who are e.g. opposed to LGBT rights, or sometimes to outfits like NRCC that support those reps. I think that the companies are trying to make progress on low-salience, Secret Congress kind of issues, and their contributions are being perceived (not incorrectly) in the light of the high-salience issues.
It isn't wrong to slag Google for claiming to be gay-friendly while giving money to Steve King, for example, but at the same time the Secret Congress game seems to involve greasing all the wheels.
Good article, but I would argue big changes must be bi-partisan. Even if you have the votes to get your way on your own.
Look at 2010 and the Republican victories after the Dems pushed Obamacare through. If it was a bi-partisan bill, we wouldn't have spent 10 years arguing about it.
As for passing election reform at the federal level without bi-partisan ship. I can think of few things more likely to destroy faith in elections, which would most likely result in violence.
I think this theory is true now, but was not fifty years ago, and the thing that changed is asymmetric. Specifically, the majority of people voting for Democratic members of Congress in general elections, and in Democratic primaries (although that majority is eroding), still tell pollsters that they want their representative to work across the aisle and reach sensible compromises, while the majority of people voting for Republicans in general elections, and the _huge majority_ of people voting in Republican primaries, are quite open about their desire for their representatives to refuse compromise of any kind. (Hence the famous GOP debate in which nobody on the stage would accept a 10:1 spending cuts for increased taxes ratio, to eliminate the deficit.)
Props for the audio version.
Even if you accept all the arguments of this piece - is it _not_ supposed to be horrifying that public advocacy on an issue prevents Congress from taking action on it and only quiet lobbying can make something pass? Is everyone who doesn't have a job on Capitol Hill just supposed to keep their mouth shut and hope that good things happen?
If political progress will come from a President who puts people to sleep rather than fires them up, I'd say Biden is the man for the moment.
I have three very anodyne rules about American politics:
-- When you have big majorities, you can probably get big things done
-- When you have a small majority, you can keep the wheels of America greased but not too much more than that
-- If you want to get reelected, then just make sure the economy is good and we're at peace; doing big things legislatively will have no impact on your chances.
Oh, and I have one more rule about what legislation can pass:
-- If Tucker Carlson talks about it on his show, there's no way to pass bipartisan legislation; if Tucker Carlson doesn't pay attention to it, the Secret Congress may be able to pass something.
Addendum: If Republicans are in charge, liberals need to figure out how to get Tuck Carlson to agree with them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/24/energy-202-how-pebble-mine-opponents-used-fox-news-push-trump-delay-alaska-project/
You need to be 21 to buy tobacco now?
Caught me by surprise too. Next time I go inside a gas station, I'm going to look for that "you must have been born before this date in ___" calendars.
One thing not mentioned in this is the influence of term limits on GOP chairs/ranking members in the Senate, which may or may not push certain Republican Senators to try to make a deal for their "legacy" before they leave a position of influence. Was regarded as a large factor in Murkowski's push for last year's energy bill. Not clear how much of a role it played in other bills though.
"If you are persuasive, determined, and willing to be eclectic in who you partner with, then things can happen."
One of the frustrating aspects with the way intersectionality is understood by activists is that it can really push against this kind of approach.
If you're advocating for serious immigration reform, you're probably going to have to work with Catholic groups, many of whom are going to be pro-life. This isn't throwing Planned Parenthood under the bus, this is just taking your job seriously.
(Unions are much more effective, in part because they ARE willing to be transactional. If you asked a union to stop cutting deals in the name of activist solidarity, you'd be laughed out of the room.)
Re unions: one hopes, right? It's been alarming to see unions of educated professions, most prominently journalism unions, seeming to favor an intersectional approach.
Yup. I agree that the method of intersectionality is anti-political in this sense. It always demands a whole loaf over a half loaf, and a whole loaf for every constituency over a half-loaf for anyone. It's deeply opposed to incremental progress, and I think that's a mistake.
I don't know if anti-political is the right word exactly. You could say it's anti-democratic though. If "speaking truth to power" is your most cherished political principle, and you also live in a democracy, even a flawed one, then logically what you believe in is speaking truth, oppositionally, to the majority of voters. In which case, you must believe either (1) that it is appropriate and feasible for political leaders to manufacture the consent of the voters, or (2) that political leaders shouldn't be accountable to voters at all.
People with minority political views tend to be very focused on “the media” and “the two party system” because they see all of mainstream politics as flowing from those institutions engaging in (1), rather than a genuinely popular preference.
Yep. False consciousness arguments. Same as it ever was.
And the weirdest thing is the way that people keep going back to false consciousness arguments, even when doing so is contrary to their own material interests.
I've been hoping you'd discuss more about Secret Congress and what, if any, advice can be given to political actors based on the knowledge of Secret Congress. I'd especially like something like "What if David Shor was in Secret Congress" but ways to both find and identify popular issues to advocate for, while avoiding the trap of doing so by appealing to partisan advocacy organizations to get a bill on the agenda.
It seems like there's a bad loop with funders not recognizing that the metrics they are using to determine if their support for a group is effective is actually undermining the chance for legislative success.
All of this rings true.
I would add that with any high salience topic, the majority party has little interest in proposing bills that could gather support from the minority party. While this minority party probably wouldn't play ball either way, all the incentives you outline would apply here as well.
"Biden needs to stay as far away as possible, and let Manchin try and negotiate some incrementalist legislation. It probably won’t work, because the issue of electoral reform has the highest salience around. But it’s a better strategy than running into the brick wall of trying to pass a bill that a majority of senators oppose. "
Seems like you are missing the obvious point: Nothing we try will work on anything of high salience, and conservatives get to choose what is high salience.
So they though? Right now Republicans seem to be focused on things like CRT which have very little salience in terms of what Congress can legislate.
Yes, of course they do. This is the power of Fox et al.
When conservatives want something in the news, they will put it there. They have learned to use that power extremely well.
I think this is where using a single moniker for conservatives is wildly misleading. This is no single person or entity controlling this and they are often conflicted. Immigration reform was something the leadership in the Republicans wanted to do and probably preferred to exist in secret congress, but outside actors/activists wouldn't allow that.
You don't feel that the "actors/activists" who stopped immigration reform were rank-and-file conservatives?
Who were they?
Good question - I don't know the best way to answer that other than my broad belief that most rank and file members of either party take their queues on issues from political actors they trust. So to the point you made below, the rank and file can switch their views on free trade, small government, family values, etc.
My view is that Republican's were the pro immigration party. Then the rank and file started feeling like the country was changing to fast and demagogues seized upon immigration being part of why the change was happening and used it as a wedge issue.
"Then the rank and file started feeling like the country was changing too fast."
This is the part that always gets me, John. From my perspective, it feels like a very vague complaint that is used to justify quite a lot.
*Do they though
I think at least some of the time causation runs the other way, that there are deep salient disagreements in the public and that makes them nearly impossible to negotiate. Gun rights, abortion, tax policy mostly run this way.
Of course, then it becomes self reinforcing by becoming election level salient. But in those cases, other than nibbling around the edges public advocacy is the proper way to go for advocacy groups.
The hope is to raise the salience among your co-partisans to the point that they will feel as threatened by not acting as acting, hope to make it a 60/40 issue in your favor, or prevent it from going the other way. The ultimate success is something like gay marriage, where the other side eventually capitulated, though that it is very rare.
I think the causation works both ways and it is important to pay attention that.
Matt's point is relevant for issues that have not yet reached salience. For example, zoning reform is an issue that could burst into a high salience issue and become ideologically polarized.
Under this theory the advocates for zoning reform should work hard to keep the level of salience and publicity around the issue as low as possible. They should ask Biden to never mention it, and not do protests about how zoning is racist (even though it is). Instead they should go behind closed doors and tell Democratic policymakers about how racist it is, and tell Republican lawmakers how zoning is government bureaucratic overreach.
At the same time, the activists don't have full control over these issues and cannot always control them. If Republicans decide zoning reform is a politically useful attack on Democrats, and Trump tried to do this in 2020, then it will rise to high salience despite anything the activists do. I would argue that this is what has happened with immigration reform, activists attempted secret congress getting some Republicans on board, but xenophobic groups then had an incentive to raise the salience to block it.
Using "secret congress" is most useful for issues that are not already high salience (or can't easily be rebranded), and don't have committed opposition who can raise the salience. These kinds of issues are usually funding for project or issue that doesn't take funding away from something else.
So the issue of "infrastructure" has been handled badly because it was raised to high salience, although that may be because of how the Trump administration handled it. But other issues that are getting through congress have been doing better due to the lower salience, despite the fact that they are similiar issues.
On gay marriage: how much of that was advocacy groups and activists versus politicians pushing in that direction versus just the culture changing, organically?
In one of his interviews David Shor made the point that support for gay marriage actually stalled out during the years that it was most politicized, mid-2000s or so. But both before and after the support rose steadily.
I guess I'm skeptical of the ability of either activists or politicians to change minds or move voters. I feel like the internet, globalization and TV / Movies probably do much more, and that's why we see broad correlations across countries when it comes to support for cultural issues.
Culture changing "organically" isn't a thing. Culture always has people making explicit arguments, and those arguments always feed into art, and that art informs future arguments, and so on.
The guy who wrote the Black Panther movie was unquestionably informed by activism and politics. Same with the people who wrote Atlas Shrugged and The Color Purple, and with the people who made Will and Grace.
Organic-isn't-a -thing seems a strangely hardline position to take. People used to get married and have children at earlier ages - which artist or activist drove that change? The percentage of Americans with a passport has risen steadily, over the last 30 years, from a base of only 5% - is that due to politics? Who are the people organizing the steady rise of interracial marriage among Americans? Who's behind men no longer wearing hats and sometimes wearing their hair long?
It seems like you have picked several examples with pretty clear political/activist connections.
-- marriage age -- women can't be forced to get married at early ages anymore, and more women have opportunities to do things like go to college and start careers
-- rise in passports -- increasing cultural diversity due to changes in immigration laws in the late 70s, reduction in xenophobia starting with Civil Rights, airline bailouts, growth of trade
-- interracial marriage -- seems obviously related to decades or antiracism
-- hats and hair -- the hat industry is still huge, and hat and hair trends have long been connected to politics and activism: hippy long hair, the natural hair movement among African Americans, skinheads
"Who's behind men no longer wearing hats"
Finally -- finally!! -- someone asking the tough questions that will blow the cover off this whole sordid conspiracy.
You got your bare-headed men, your penny-loafers replacing wing-tips, and then one day, bam! it's rampant drug abuse in the streets and sexual commerce with komodo dragons. After that it's only a short step to utter degradation: whole-language literacy and people using "assumedly" for "presumably." It all starts so innocently, with a Vidal Sassoon shampoo commercial, and before you know it Western Culture has crumbled into dust.
That's an interesting point - I hadn't noticed the stall in the 2000s: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx
That's also the period both when the issue was being fought in the states, and when the issue was just crossing the 50% line. I wonder if one or the other of those two facts was most relevant.
It's notable that marijuana legalization mostly stalled in the 1980s and 1990s, but has continued since then on the same trajectory it was on in the 1970s. In this case, the issue crossed 50% around 2012, just before it started being fought in the states (unless you count the pre-history of medical marijuana, which started right when the issue got un-stalled, in the late 1990s).
https://news.gallup.com/poll/323582/support-legal-marijuana-inches-new-high.aspx
A 20-year stall-out would seem to coincide with generational change. A pause while those too young to be involved in the prior fight came of age and many opposed died out.
Yeah - the stall out on marijuana happened at a time when it was less salient in politics. So it's a good counter-example to the Shor gay marriage chart.
I think tax policy is the ultimate negotiable policy within limits. Increasing the tax rates by 5-10% would generate huge talking points, but I don't it generates the passion that any of the culture war issues like gun rights or abortion does. If you moved it 40% maybe, but even then I suspect not.
How do you explain the TEA Party movement of the early Obama era?
On the whole, I would say that it was about fear. Much of what animates both parties in part, but especially conservatives, is the fear of loss. They feel they should have good lives in a good country and progressives want to destroy that. Some of the fear is bound up in racism, but I think its a smaller part than I've read you to believe. More of it is built up in a broader cultural understanding of how the country should work with regards to jobs, family, religion, etc. Its also an incredibly power motivator that politicians have used to drive votes.
Idk, the tea party got started after the bailouts were done proposed, and before a lot of the social fears were stoked. Obama hadn't really even taken charge yet (Santelli's Tea Party screed on CNBC was Feb 19, 2009, only a month after Obama was inaugurated) and Obama campaigned as kind of a moderate....he got lots of WWC votes. Are you reading 2021 politics into 2009?
"They feel they should have good lives in a good country and progressives want to destroy that."
Are you saying that you feel this way or that other people who are conservative feel this way?
Do you think that I want to destroy your good life and country?
A major underlying contention is that conservatives believe things are pretty good and we shouldn't change very much - aka conserve things the way they are. Progressives think things could be much better if we changed some stuff and progressed forward.
There is undeniable tension in these perspectives and its easy for Conservatives to believe that Progressives want to destroy their good life and its easy for Progressives to believe that Conservatives want to keep the bad things.
I think they are both right. Relative to history - things are amazing right now for more people than ever before. We should be careful not to mess that up. We also didn't get here by conserving what was, we got here by progressing forward and there are still many things that could be better. I try very hard (not always successfully) to see the best in both perspectives as I think they can both be valuable. That doesn't mean that on any particular issue both are right, one perspective is more right than the other on any specific issue.
TL;DR - I don't think you want to destroy a good life or country. You might advance specific policies I think will make things better or worse though...
“…conservatives believe things are pretty good and we shouldn't change very much…”
That’s a facile understanding of conservatism.
Lincoln may have explained it best when he said, “What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?”
"The ultimate success is something like gay marriage, where the other side eventually capitulated, though that it is very rare."
That kind of depends on the standard for "rare." Social Security, Medicare, universal suffrage, Civil Rights, Obamacare, gay marriage, and legal weed were all super unpopular and unpassable until they weren't.
And none of those things happened because we did them "in secret."