You're making a great point for why the conservatives should attack higher education as part of a larger strategy to shift national politics to the right. They don't even have to be mean about it, just point out that the student loan crisis is the fault of greedy colleges raising rates off the back of the taxpayers who funded the government takeover and continued maintenance of federal student loans. Make the colleges and universities "pay their fair share," which would bankrupt many and in 20 years shift politics at a national level to the right. Win/win.
At the risk of sounding like an elitist, there is no question that many people with limited education lean towards Trump and his boot lickers. From my experience, these pople live in silos with narrow walls and a limited view of the sky. If you don't agree with their world view you are the enemy and must be shunned at all costs. Instead of reaching out to those who feel ignored, the Democrats left the field to the Republicans - it is no wonder we have lost so many in rural areas.
There is anither group who follow Trump and these are the people who are only in it for the money and the power. I'm thinking of Fox News personalities, certain Supreme Court judges, and some prominent business people who have good educations, but the desire for more wealth overcomes any thoughts they may have about treating people with any consideration or compassion.
Of course, no one actually knows what is in the mind of another person, but when wealthy people talk about cutting social programs, saying we can't afford these programs, one is forced to believe all they care about is their money and to the Hell with anyone else.
From my limited and admittedly unscientific perspective, the younger generation is more open to change, more accepting of different life-styles, and is very aware of the danagers of global warming. As a long-time Democrat, I am very concerned about the leadership of the Democratic Party. There are far too many old people in charge and in many cases, they lack the mental flexibility to see beyond the immediate future. Many of these people seem to represent the past rather than grasping the future.
Mr. Biden is our best hope of defeating Trump, but I am concerned about his positions on oil and gas drilling. This is sending a bad message to the younger generation that the old people don't care about their worries. I understand that a President has certain political realities to deal with, but this reaching across the aisle, only to have your hand slapped, is sending the wrong message to the younger generation that we desparately need to get out and vote. Many younger people feel it is "Just politics as usual" and there is nothing they can do to change this. I think they are wrong, but the Democrats are doing a poor job of selling their concerns about the future, about restoring women's rights over their own bodies, and trying to bring younger people into psotions of power.
Where is the grass roots effort to energize people, explain what is happening and what they can do about it? The Republicans have worked for years politicising school boards, county election boards, and other local officals. They haven't come into power over night, but have filled the vacuum left by Democratic inaction.
We can reverse these trends, but it is getting late in the game. The Democratic Party needs to act now - not in 2024 when it might be too late.
You write: “In 1940, 76% of the population hadn’t graduated [from] high school....” I assume that you mean that 76% of the *adult* population (i.e., the population aged 25 and over) hadn’t graduated from high school. Is my assumption correct?
Another huge factor is simply how policies are presented and thus the affective choices voters are presented with. In particular, I strongly suspect a huge part of why democrats are moving left is that the only solutions their pitched about problems they care about as democrats are leftist ones.
It scares me because I feel like actual policy is playing a smaller and smaller role in driving our affiliations. And sure, most ppl never choose how to vote by analyzing policy ideas but it's really important that, at the margin, the political incentives favor moving toward the better policy and I worry we are leaving that domain.
I largely blame primaries, the need to differentiate induced by both social media and the orange man.
--
For instance, In this world, if you look around and see climate change as a real threat it pushes you to lefty rhetoric about reducing waste, living in concert with nature etc.
in another world where the people worried about global warming had an antagonistic split from traditional environmentalists early on over the role of nuclear power the same concern over changing climate might be making you warmer to pro-market ideas bc the rhetoric emphasized the superiority of carbon over income taxes and rather than placing more importance on living in harmony with nature you might emphasize the importance of tameing it with advances in science and tech.
I'm sorry but I really didn't think this was any good at all, and I say this as someone who has enjoyed Milan and Maya's writing previously. This is a pretty lazy remix of stuff that Matt has already written, and worse, it jumbles stuff up in a way that creates some unsavory implications. I mean the accidental throughline of this argument is that the every liberalising democrats ended up with Trump, and therefore such liberalisation was a mistake. Which given that Milan nor hopefully anyone else here actually wants the South to be segregationist or for Black people to not be President, is not the inference you want to leave in your article like a smoking gun. It massively simplifies the actual history of the fifth party system which was placed under significant strain before the Civil Rights Act (that Storm Thurmond guy...yeah 1964 wasn't the first time he ran against the Democrats in a Presidential year, and the whole reason LBJ was put on the ticket was because the South had stopped being solid in the 50s) and that the South secured Carter the election in 1976. Matt's articles in the past better explained that the coalition was impossible to keep together and the Democrats were forced to choose. This would have been a much better article if it had stuck to Minnesota and explore the two contrasting Democratic trifectas - did the more moderate one achieve change that stuck, is the more radical one making changes that will be easy to unpick, are the polls suggesting that the democrats are inviting a backlash?
Really disappointing article, and I do think if we're going to get more regular articles from the interns, more quality control needs to be exercised, lest you want people attacking them or the site on twitter for stuff they've accidentally said
I didn't say you said it was a mistake, I said the structure of your article accidentally implies it. By concluding an article by saying that the Democratic Party is becoming too liberal and should consider moderating to win over conservative voters that began by talking about the Democrats started liberalising with the end of Jim Crow, you create the linkages in the readers mind. It ignores that actually the New Deal is the decisive move towards liberalism that begins the process of organising America more clearly on left/right lines (conservatives become the dominant faction in the Republican Party, Southern Democrats start working with them). The fifth party system is an interbellum period that was never a sustainable system - the Democrats couldn't be both the Northern Liberalism Party and the Southern Catch-All Party any more that the Republicans could continue to be the Northern Conservativism Party and the Western Catch-All Party. The North's new ideological division was always going to conquer the rest of the country.
I just think the article would have made a lot more sense if you hadn't do the remix of the various historical articles Matt has done, and instead either use the Minnesota trifectas jutxaposition to explore which tactics are better, or explore your memories of the Trump victory and the rollback of things of things the Democrats achieved. The stuff on the 1964 election is not only overly simplistic but badly confuses your messages
Is passing bold policies worth losing your majority and having the other side come to power and undo your bold policies in 2-4 years, while also passing bold policies of their own that go against everything you believe in?
Good post. One anomaly you didn't discuss: Nixon was arguably to Biden's left. His admin saw OSHA & EPA created, he supported a guarantied personal income & nat'l health care, & announced, "We're all Keynesians now."
"strategically moderating on salient issues to keep the GOP out of power."
Interesting, because I also wish moderation, but that's just because I am centrist (on that note, I also wish the GOP would moderate to the left, selfishly, because I would love to be able to vote for them without abandoning a couple dozen moral principles. And because I generally think if everyone would calm the hell down with the extremism, we'd all be better off, on both sides). If I were advising someone to the left of me, though, I would tell them to burn that capital now.
I think your reasoning is flawed, because "keeping the GOP out of power" is not an attainable goal. The Democrats could shift entirely to right-of-center policy positions, and the GOP will still win back power. That's just part of democracy, one side cannot retain power indefinitely. So, you can use the time when you are in power to effect change, or you can waste your time trying to appeal to people who will abandon you at the polls anyway.
You cite the very example yourself; that 2012 Minnesota government chose to be moderate in order to remain in power, and it didn't work.
A major limitation and drawback of this excellent post and comments it elicited lies in the muddled and fuzzy terms "liberal", "conservative", "left" and "right." All these terms are historically problematic, and have morphed so many times since 1789 that it's unclear what we're even talking about. We've all become really lazy and are using these terms as shorthand for a wide range of attitudes and beliefs that often lack all coherence. Why is supporting the medical gender transition of children "liberal?" Why is supporting fracking and oil drilling in national forests "conservative?"
I'm as guilty as anyone else, and I don't know what the solution is, except possible to define and specify as we go along.
For those wondering why Mississippi was an outlier for Obama, remember that in 2010,the state's black population was nearly 40%. If most of that group went to Obama, it didn't take many whites to tip the state in his favor.
I think as a matter of history it is important to remember that LBJ was wrong. Twelve years after he signed the civil rights act, Jimmy Carter won both the black vote and the entire South.
In a very large sense it is maybe true that civil rights cost the Democrats the South, but the plenty of the people who voted for Wallace voted for Clinton and Carter and for liberal senators like Sam Nunn or Al Gore. It is their children and grandchildren - people who will tell pollsters they approve of interracial marriage - who won't vote for Democrats. It wasn't written in the stars that Democrats would lose the South as completely as they have.
He didn't say "in fifty years, we will lose the South for a lifetime."
There was a gradual realignment that had already started in the 50s, with Eisenhower winning a few southern states. Then there was a sudden realignment where the Southern states supported Goldwater and Nixon, something similar to what Johnson predicted. Jimmy Carter completely undid that realignment, and two generations of recognizably modern Democrats came from the post-segregationist South.
Democrats didn't lose the South not because of civil rights laws, which were bipartisan and are very old news. They've lost it because of the gradual "education polarization" dynamic you describe, which you see in rural Minnesota (and exurban Toronto) just as much as in the South. Of course racism and the legacy of Jim Crow are a huge part of why the white South is so culturally conservative in the first place.
I think that liberal Democrats who were around for the 70s and 80s (not Milan) often want to explain the whole Regan phenomenon, or all of American conservatism, as an extension of segregationist politics.
It gives a flattering explanation of why New Deal / Great Society liberalism collapsed in the 1970s: racism! But since the equivalent left-of-center / social democratic movements ran into trouble everywhere in the developed world at that time the explanation doesn't wash.
Reagan was well-liked because his policies helped the broad middle class, which is called broad because it way outnumbers both the wealthy and the poor. Maybe it is less moral to help the middle class than the poor, but when the vast majority of the country benefits from policies that majority will generally reward the person or people who enacted those policies.
I think there is a large and growing cohort of socially liberal (or more liberal than we used to be) but remain pro-capitalism. We don’t really like either the MAGA folks who took over the Republican Party or the coastal elites who have taken over the Democratic Party. My hope that when I divorced myself from the Republicans because of Trump, I would find a home in being a Democrat. However, I feel the only thing we completely agree on is that we hate Trump. I’ll vote for Biden in 2024, but eventually there will be some sort of moderate revolt. You can’t leave so many people feel unrepresented and unheard. The saddest thing of all is the death of meaningful debate in this country. You are either red or blue, and both colors are getting brighter.
The “openness to experience” point I have always thought tells us more about the psychologists designing the survey than the studied population. If you had right wingers design the survey, the main fact about political liberals might be labeled “prone to heresy“ instead
Prioritization is a conundrum for slim majorities or the need for supermajorities, but I feel like there needs to be another layer besides popular polling. Maybe it's economic conditions that allow you to broaden. But feel like the next big hurdle for national politics is the one that's been talked about for like 20 or 30 years and it's really hard for me to project how it plays out.
“I’m very averse to the risk of losing elections to Republicans who will take us backward on policy, so I’m more inclined toward strategically moderating on salient issues to keep the GOP out of power.”
I am also very averse to the risk of losing elections, but at the national level it doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible that we could have one-party rule for any sustained period of time. There will be a Republican President again some day.
If your primary goal is “don’t lose the next election” and you never set out to solve any of the hard problems we face, at some point you’ll lose anyway and then you’ll have failed at your only governing objective.
Like all things, it’s a trade off. Winning elections is really important! But at some point we will lose. Governing with this in mind seems prudent.
The downside of losing in 2024 seems abnormally high. To the extent that people take their rhetoric about the threat Trump poses to the republic seriously (I do) they should put a greater premium on winning.
You're making a great point for why the conservatives should attack higher education as part of a larger strategy to shift national politics to the right. They don't even have to be mean about it, just point out that the student loan crisis is the fault of greedy colleges raising rates off the back of the taxpayers who funded the government takeover and continued maintenance of federal student loans. Make the colleges and universities "pay their fair share," which would bankrupt many and in 20 years shift politics at a national level to the right. Win/win.
At the risk of sounding like an elitist, there is no question that many people with limited education lean towards Trump and his boot lickers. From my experience, these pople live in silos with narrow walls and a limited view of the sky. If you don't agree with their world view you are the enemy and must be shunned at all costs. Instead of reaching out to those who feel ignored, the Democrats left the field to the Republicans - it is no wonder we have lost so many in rural areas.
There is anither group who follow Trump and these are the people who are only in it for the money and the power. I'm thinking of Fox News personalities, certain Supreme Court judges, and some prominent business people who have good educations, but the desire for more wealth overcomes any thoughts they may have about treating people with any consideration or compassion.
Of course, no one actually knows what is in the mind of another person, but when wealthy people talk about cutting social programs, saying we can't afford these programs, one is forced to believe all they care about is their money and to the Hell with anyone else.
From my limited and admittedly unscientific perspective, the younger generation is more open to change, more accepting of different life-styles, and is very aware of the danagers of global warming. As a long-time Democrat, I am very concerned about the leadership of the Democratic Party. There are far too many old people in charge and in many cases, they lack the mental flexibility to see beyond the immediate future. Many of these people seem to represent the past rather than grasping the future.
Mr. Biden is our best hope of defeating Trump, but I am concerned about his positions on oil and gas drilling. This is sending a bad message to the younger generation that the old people don't care about their worries. I understand that a President has certain political realities to deal with, but this reaching across the aisle, only to have your hand slapped, is sending the wrong message to the younger generation that we desparately need to get out and vote. Many younger people feel it is "Just politics as usual" and there is nothing they can do to change this. I think they are wrong, but the Democrats are doing a poor job of selling their concerns about the future, about restoring women's rights over their own bodies, and trying to bring younger people into psotions of power.
Where is the grass roots effort to energize people, explain what is happening and what they can do about it? The Republicans have worked for years politicising school boards, county election boards, and other local officals. They haven't come into power over night, but have filled the vacuum left by Democratic inaction.
We can reverse these trends, but it is getting late in the game. The Democratic Party needs to act now - not in 2024 when it might be too late.
Hey Milan!
Great piece!
You write: “In 1940, 76% of the population hadn’t graduated [from] high school....” I assume that you mean that 76% of the *adult* population (i.e., the population aged 25 and over) hadn’t graduated from high school. Is my assumption correct?
Many thanks! <3
Another huge factor is simply how policies are presented and thus the affective choices voters are presented with. In particular, I strongly suspect a huge part of why democrats are moving left is that the only solutions their pitched about problems they care about as democrats are leftist ones.
It scares me because I feel like actual policy is playing a smaller and smaller role in driving our affiliations. And sure, most ppl never choose how to vote by analyzing policy ideas but it's really important that, at the margin, the political incentives favor moving toward the better policy and I worry we are leaving that domain.
I largely blame primaries, the need to differentiate induced by both social media and the orange man.
--
For instance, In this world, if you look around and see climate change as a real threat it pushes you to lefty rhetoric about reducing waste, living in concert with nature etc.
in another world where the people worried about global warming had an antagonistic split from traditional environmentalists early on over the role of nuclear power the same concern over changing climate might be making you warmer to pro-market ideas bc the rhetoric emphasized the superiority of carbon over income taxes and rather than placing more importance on living in harmony with nature you might emphasize the importance of tameing it with advances in science and tech.
I'm sorry but I really didn't think this was any good at all, and I say this as someone who has enjoyed Milan and Maya's writing previously. This is a pretty lazy remix of stuff that Matt has already written, and worse, it jumbles stuff up in a way that creates some unsavory implications. I mean the accidental throughline of this argument is that the every liberalising democrats ended up with Trump, and therefore such liberalisation was a mistake. Which given that Milan nor hopefully anyone else here actually wants the South to be segregationist or for Black people to not be President, is not the inference you want to leave in your article like a smoking gun. It massively simplifies the actual history of the fifth party system which was placed under significant strain before the Civil Rights Act (that Storm Thurmond guy...yeah 1964 wasn't the first time he ran against the Democrats in a Presidential year, and the whole reason LBJ was put on the ticket was because the South had stopped being solid in the 50s) and that the South secured Carter the election in 1976. Matt's articles in the past better explained that the coalition was impossible to keep together and the Democrats were forced to choose. This would have been a much better article if it had stuck to Minnesota and explore the two contrasting Democratic trifectas - did the more moderate one achieve change that stuck, is the more radical one making changes that will be easy to unpick, are the polls suggesting that the democrats are inviting a backlash?
Really disappointing article, and I do think if we're going to get more regular articles from the interns, more quality control needs to be exercised, lest you want people attacking them or the site on twitter for stuff they've accidentally said
Where did I say that it was a mistake?
I didn't say you said it was a mistake, I said the structure of your article accidentally implies it. By concluding an article by saying that the Democratic Party is becoming too liberal and should consider moderating to win over conservative voters that began by talking about the Democrats started liberalising with the end of Jim Crow, you create the linkages in the readers mind. It ignores that actually the New Deal is the decisive move towards liberalism that begins the process of organising America more clearly on left/right lines (conservatives become the dominant faction in the Republican Party, Southern Democrats start working with them). The fifth party system is an interbellum period that was never a sustainable system - the Democrats couldn't be both the Northern Liberalism Party and the Southern Catch-All Party any more that the Republicans could continue to be the Northern Conservativism Party and the Western Catch-All Party. The North's new ideological division was always going to conquer the rest of the country.
I just think the article would have made a lot more sense if you hadn't do the remix of the various historical articles Matt has done, and instead either use the Minnesota trifectas jutxaposition to explore which tactics are better, or explore your memories of the Trump victory and the rollback of things of things the Democrats achieved. The stuff on the 1964 election is not only overly simplistic but badly confuses your messages
Is passing bold policies worth losing your majority and having the other side come to power and undo your bold policies in 2-4 years, while also passing bold policies of their own that go against everything you believe in?
Answer: no.
Good post. One anomaly you didn't discuss: Nixon was arguably to Biden's left. His admin saw OSHA & EPA created, he supported a guarantied personal income & nat'l health care, & announced, "We're all Keynesians now."
"strategically moderating on salient issues to keep the GOP out of power."
Interesting, because I also wish moderation, but that's just because I am centrist (on that note, I also wish the GOP would moderate to the left, selfishly, because I would love to be able to vote for them without abandoning a couple dozen moral principles. And because I generally think if everyone would calm the hell down with the extremism, we'd all be better off, on both sides). If I were advising someone to the left of me, though, I would tell them to burn that capital now.
I think your reasoning is flawed, because "keeping the GOP out of power" is not an attainable goal. The Democrats could shift entirely to right-of-center policy positions, and the GOP will still win back power. That's just part of democracy, one side cannot retain power indefinitely. So, you can use the time when you are in power to effect change, or you can waste your time trying to appeal to people who will abandon you at the polls anyway.
You cite the very example yourself; that 2012 Minnesota government chose to be moderate in order to remain in power, and it didn't work.
A major limitation and drawback of this excellent post and comments it elicited lies in the muddled and fuzzy terms "liberal", "conservative", "left" and "right." All these terms are historically problematic, and have morphed so many times since 1789 that it's unclear what we're even talking about. We've all become really lazy and are using these terms as shorthand for a wide range of attitudes and beliefs that often lack all coherence. Why is supporting the medical gender transition of children "liberal?" Why is supporting fracking and oil drilling in national forests "conservative?"
I'm as guilty as anyone else, and I don't know what the solution is, except possible to define and specify as we go along.
For those wondering why Mississippi was an outlier for Obama, remember that in 2010,the state's black population was nearly 40%. If most of that group went to Obama, it didn't take many whites to tip the state in his favor.
But Louisiana and Mississippi have almost identical demographics
I think this Census map explains it: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/racial-and-ethnic-diversity-in-the-united-states-2010-and-2020-census.html
I don't really see a functional distinction between "liberal vs conservative" and "democrat versus republican".
In reality, "taxing the rich" is at best orthogonal to liberty.
I don't think there is any real salience of liberal self-idenitifcation. All I see is drift in the meaning of a word.
I think as a matter of history it is important to remember that LBJ was wrong. Twelve years after he signed the civil rights act, Jimmy Carter won both the black vote and the entire South.
In a very large sense it is maybe true that civil rights cost the Democrats the South, but the plenty of the people who voted for Wallace voted for Clinton and Carter and for liberal senators like Sam Nunn or Al Gore. It is their children and grandchildren - people who will tell pollsters they approve of interracial marriage - who won't vote for Democrats. It wasn't written in the stars that Democrats would lose the South as completely as they have.
That sounds more like realignment taking time than LBJ being wrong.
He didn't say "in fifty years, we will lose the South for a lifetime."
There was a gradual realignment that had already started in the 50s, with Eisenhower winning a few southern states. Then there was a sudden realignment where the Southern states supported Goldwater and Nixon, something similar to what Johnson predicted. Jimmy Carter completely undid that realignment, and two generations of recognizably modern Democrats came from the post-segregationist South.
Democrats didn't lose the South not because of civil rights laws, which were bipartisan and are very old news. They've lost it because of the gradual "education polarization" dynamic you describe, which you see in rural Minnesota (and exurban Toronto) just as much as in the South. Of course racism and the legacy of Jim Crow are a huge part of why the white South is so culturally conservative in the first place.
Yeah extending the prediction timeline out 50 years makes just about any prediction look prescient
I think that liberal Democrats who were around for the 70s and 80s (not Milan) often want to explain the whole Regan phenomenon, or all of American conservatism, as an extension of segregationist politics.
It gives a flattering explanation of why New Deal / Great Society liberalism collapsed in the 1970s: racism! But since the equivalent left-of-center / social democratic movements ran into trouble everywhere in the developed world at that time the explanation doesn't wash.
Reagan was well-liked because his policies helped the broad middle class, which is called broad because it way outnumbers both the wealthy and the poor. Maybe it is less moral to help the middle class than the poor, but when the vast majority of the country benefits from policies that majority will generally reward the person or people who enacted those policies.
I think there is a large and growing cohort of socially liberal (or more liberal than we used to be) but remain pro-capitalism. We don’t really like either the MAGA folks who took over the Republican Party or the coastal elites who have taken over the Democratic Party. My hope that when I divorced myself from the Republicans because of Trump, I would find a home in being a Democrat. However, I feel the only thing we completely agree on is that we hate Trump. I’ll vote for Biden in 2024, but eventually there will be some sort of moderate revolt. You can’t leave so many people feel unrepresented and unheard. The saddest thing of all is the death of meaningful debate in this country. You are either red or blue, and both colors are getting brighter.
The “openness to experience” point I have always thought tells us more about the psychologists designing the survey than the studied population. If you had right wingers design the survey, the main fact about political liberals might be labeled “prone to heresy“ instead
Prioritization is a conundrum for slim majorities or the need for supermajorities, but I feel like there needs to be another layer besides popular polling. Maybe it's economic conditions that allow you to broaden. But feel like the next big hurdle for national politics is the one that's been talked about for like 20 or 30 years and it's really hard for me to project how it plays out.
I struggle with this:
“I’m very averse to the risk of losing elections to Republicans who will take us backward on policy, so I’m more inclined toward strategically moderating on salient issues to keep the GOP out of power.”
I am also very averse to the risk of losing elections, but at the national level it doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible that we could have one-party rule for any sustained period of time. There will be a Republican President again some day.
If your primary goal is “don’t lose the next election” and you never set out to solve any of the hard problems we face, at some point you’ll lose anyway and then you’ll have failed at your only governing objective.
Like all things, it’s a trade off. Winning elections is really important! But at some point we will lose. Governing with this in mind seems prudent.
The downside of losing in 2024 seems abnormally high. To the extent that people take their rhetoric about the threat Trump poses to the republic seriously (I do) they should put a greater premium on winning.
Agreed! This year it’s worth doing almost anything to win.