"What I *do* think is knowable is that the GOP will struggle to maintain its non-college gains if it goes back to austerity politics."
I think this line, and your analysis, overestimates the extent to which the modern GOP base votes on policy, and underestimates the extent to which politicians are comfortable with cognitive dissonance. If the GOP pursues a wildly unpopular austerity campaign, they'll just tell their base it's because the Democrats spent all your money on healthcare for transgender immigrants or whatever. The marching orders are "animate the base with culture war chum" and I don't expect that to change based on policy outcomes or reality.
Counterpoint: Obama's 2012 results. Fox News said Obama was a socialist who was going to take away conservatives' guns and put gay marriage above family values. And yet, despite all that, Obama campaigned against Romney's austerity politics and performed very well with non-southern whites compared to Hillary or Biden, especially in the industrial midwest.
Just look at the results: Obama crushed Romney in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. He even won Ohio, albeit by a narrower margin. He outright won many rural, white counties in the region, and even in the rural counties he lost he still received >40% in most. To take a random example, look at Pike County, Ohio. Obama received 48.9% of the vote there in 2012, but in 2020 Biden only won 25.1% of the vote. The point is, 2012 shows many of these voters are winnable, and 2012 wasn't that long ago.
You might be right, but I think a commenter above me made a good point about media polarization/enclosure over the last few years. In 2012, a Republican would at least see what Obama was saying on Fox News - OAN doesn't even air Biden's speeches. If the left media is better about this, it's not better by much. This tribal redefinition of "journalism" will only improve if it stops being profitable, and I'm not optimistic.
How long, though, till Republican primary voters realize they can have their cake and eat it too? Culture war populism -and- more friendly economic policies? That seems like part of the lesson of Trump - he was the only primary candidate in 2016 willing to say things that broke with Paul Ryan economic orthodoxy.
If they could do that, it would be a great thing for the country (the culture war stuff would suck, but darn it, we need somebody to cut spending, especially on the elderly. (They might never cut spending on the elderly, but ah well.))
This would be stronger if you also noted that progressives have won the popular culture as well as the educational culture. U.S. culture kicks regressive values in the gut -- for example, fires Jon Gruden. Sorry cultural laggards are pissed, but they deserve to be.
I think it is a fair observation that basically Republicans have stopped trying to do anything to roll back the welfare state. That said, Democrats have seriously trimmed their sails on what they believe can actually be done. Across all issue areas, Democratic ideas basically down come down to "issue more subsidies" or "blame systemic inequality."
*For university education, the big idea is to just get rid of tuition and fees. This doesn't do anything to create more university spots or make the economy more just.
*The big healthcare debate was about "Medicare for All," which was basically a plan to reform the payments structure of the industry but didn't do anything to touch services themselves.
*There is a lot of smart work being done on public transportation but Biden's plan seems to be mostly to throw money at it rather than tackle the actual issues. Many activists also seem more concerned with getting rid of fares/fees than making the product better.
*On K12 education, Democrats seem to have basically given up on the idea that schools can be made better. While it is perhaps true that our school outcomes are mostly a result of socio-economic status of the parents, we could of course make the schools better too (and have done this in the past many times).
So while there's a lot of stuff to like in the BIF/Reconciliation bills and other Democratic propsoals I do not unfortunately see much that is transformative for the real economy. It is true that many provisions would make people's lives easier which is really important and I do not want to downplay it. But when you compare to what the US government was doing in the 50s or 60s it's mostly just shifting money around rather than actual transformative stuff... so in that way progressives have sort of lost.
I think when the political system is split 50/50 and folks are energized to distrust the other side, the chances for transformative action -- by either side -- decline rapidly to zero.
The leftward bias in the media has been a problem for decades. That's one of the main reasons that right leaning media like Rush and Fox News took off. I'll grant that its gotten worse lately.
As for the leftward bias in education. It's not just with the professors, it's also with the administration. Basically all of your universities have large diversity and inclusion departments now.
In addition, this starts before university, in particular at your top prep schools. They are all likely to have woke outreach as well.
“The leftward bias in the media has been a problem for decades.”
This bit made me chuckle:
“Conservatives, of course, have been whining about liberal media bias since long before I was born, and for the longest time these complaints struck me as almost pure bullshit. But that’s become markedly less true in recent years.”
It doesn’t occur to him, apparently, that he used to be wrong *and* it’s worse now.
Interesting observations. One I did not see is how well college educated people vs non college educated people are at understanding the tradeoffs -- particularly the trade-off between pareto-improving and income distribution (and for whom) harming policies and vice versa. Coming down to earth, a problem (according to my POV) with non-college educated people is that they do not support Pareto improving policies that do not have large or obvious downward distribution policies -- freer trade, massive immigration of high skilled workers, a net tax on CO2 emissions. Unfortunately the college-educated are not much better.
As for the fact that many researchers now are on the left of center, I think another big factor is that most of the American Right just ceded that ideas ground and became more intransigent, and that's true for both MAGA folks and Never Trumpers, even the light ones. Many ideas current being sold as center or center-left could easily fit a reasonable definition of a center-right agenda, which is why in many respects Boris Johnson's agenda is closer to Biden's than to most conservatives in America.
For instance, I was struck by how relatively little tribute conservatives paid at the death of Brent Scowcroft a few years ago. The guy was a Republican and is generally recognized as one of the greatest minds in modern foreign policy, a Bismarck of our times, etc,etc....and alas, he wrote op-eds both opposing the Iraq War and defending the JCPOA. In different proportions I see similar stuff with Republicans like Jay Powell and John Roberts.....
The window for what is "true" conservatism in America today is just too narrow, so naturally some intellectuals today would rather be out of it than conform.
There is the additional factor that right-leaning audiences have a complete, self-reinforcing media ecosystem to lure them away from the mainstream. Every defenestration at the NY Times or Facebook suppression of a story about Hunter Biden shunts more right-of-center media consumers to Earth 2.0. That phenomenon is working in the same direction as educational polarization.
I am currently in the only Republican congressional district in a blue state and it is very, very Trumpy. Very Trumpy. Like, sub-contractors go out of their way to tell you how Trumpy they are when they show up for a job, you know, just that's clear to my ECCO-wearing ass up front.
IMHO mainstream media outlets are totally unaware of just how alienating they can be to non-urban, non-diehard-liberals. (For the own-the-libs side of the coin, The Fox News Cinematic Universe, that is a feature, not a bug.) On paper, I am the exact demographic that the NY Times et al. is pursuing, yet I don't read it at all because it feels like a liberal echo chamber where city-dwelling millennials with liberal arts degrees vigorously inhale their own farts and then write condescending articles about how I am a bad person because I don't understand the subtle bouquet of artisanal fart-smell.
I read my local paper and a few substacks of differing ideological viewpoints. So, to me, there is no upside of education polarization because it isn't translating to cultural power, it is just empowering bad ideas from the left the way right-wing media translates into virtue-signalling legislation in Texas.
A recent example: Andrew Sullivan interviewed Brihana Joy on his podcast and it was delightful to hear two ridiculously intelligent people bat ideas around. That is the cultural hegemony I want; core liberal values of empiricism, debate and free speech. But when Andrew pointed out that 'defund the police' was a brilliant slogan to sweep Trumpy Republicans into power, Joy sternly lectured him, asserting that 'defund the police' actually means 'increase police funding and reallocate resources to better serve the community' and that he was willfully misunderstanding 'the movement'. Then she played the race card. In other words, fuck you for not adopting our faculty lounge lexicon of literal irony where words mean their opposite; also, you're racist.
To me, that is what the cultural hegemony of education polarization is delivering; a lefty purity spiral that aggressively and gleefully sics the Thought Police on anyone who deviates even slightly from The Party. That is the highly-educated mirror image of the dumb righty purity spiral that demands absolute fealty to the alternate reality where Trump won in 2020 and Democrats are a whisker from implementing full-blown socialist totalitarianism using Jewish space lasers and Italian satellites.
Wow, you said everything I wanted in that comment with wit and the right touch of polemic.
I would just add the controlling the commanding heights of the culture only goes so far. It doesn't actually control the culture.
And self-assured arrogance always - always - causes a reactionary response. And a big part of that reactionary response can be boiled down to the lyrical refrain in Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the name" - "fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me"
I partially agree, but you can and do hear from the NYT that what most people mean by "defund the police" or more generally who want to see policing changed (I'll bet "defund the Police" has been uttered more times on Fox that in the NYT) IS "'increase police funding and reallocate resources to better serve the community." You would never hear that on Fox.
But if you need to have a NYT subscription to understand what a slogan "really means" then it's probably a bad slogan. Especially if the true meaning is in some ways the exact opposite of a literal reading.
True. DFP is a bad slogan. MY point was that most (not, unfortunately 100%) NYT readers a) probably knew all along what it meant and b) read things "explaining" what it meant. No one viewing Fox ever saw it explained.
Anytime your slogan needs a detailed explanation for what it actually means...you've picked a bad slogan and should pick a new one. I've never understood why they didn't coop the pledge and choose "with liberty and justice for all" or even just "justice for all." Would have tied Fox hosts in knots trying to explain how the pledge was now bad.
They can say what they want, but when proggo bastions like San Francisco can’t keep Walgreens open because they have no will to police “victimless property crimes”, people will call BS.
I lived in a social democratic country for over a decade. It had it all; super high taxes, robust social programs, excellent public transportation, universal health care... and one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world, partly because they decriminalized petty crimes. In fact, if someone breaks into your home, you are supposed to let them take what they want and then file an insurance claim. (It will be denied if you didn't maintain your locks property.) If you try to interfere, you can be charged with assault. Ditto for shoplifting; ask them to put back the merchandise and if they don't, report it to the police, but do not intervene.
Now, I'm not saying those policies would work in the US, particularly because of the vast difference in gun laws, but not policing victimless property crimes can actually work just fine as a policy. It is not as crazy as Fox News makes it out to be. Nor is it as frictionless as they make it sound in 'proggo bastions'.
Once, an American friend of mine came home (to the house that he owned) and found his girlfriend (who didn't live with him) in bed with another man. He told the guy to get out of his house before he beat the shit out of him. The guy refused and said it was his right to be there. My friend proceeded to remove him from his home, with violence. The guy called the cops, who arrested my friend for assault and began deportation proceedings. It is quite a bit different than the "I can shoot you in the face if you knock on my door in a way I don't like" American attitude towards private property!
Was his "visitor" correct in that he had a legal right to be there? Or was the expectation that your friend would call the police to have a trespasser removed?
Well, the type of crime is important in that comparison. Petty crimes like burglary, vandalism and pickpocketing are rampant. But where I was, there was virtually no violent crime. In the 12 years I was there, the entire province had zero murders. And in the cities (and this is true of much of Western Europe) violent crime mostly happens in the immigrant ghettos, i.e., the neighborhoods next to train tracks that are covered in satellite dishes all pointing the same direction.
You are 100% correctly that social democratic policy only works in homogeneous populations, which is a key detail that American socialists do not understand. People are only ok paying super-high taxes for super-great social benefits if they see those benefits as going to "people like me". (Those uber-progressive social policies also came with a very conservative and coercive culture, which is a byproduct of homogeneity.) The influx of Muslim and African immigrants into Europe—something mostly homogeneous modern Europe is not accustomed to—is jet fuel for the far-right populists parties that are gaining traction.
Personally, I did like being an "other" in such a homogeneous place and I found the culture paradoxically very tolerant and very constraining. But Singapore really creeps me out, especially when random people start professing their love of the quasi-dictator to you for no apparent reason. I like the American way of doing things.
Oh, to be sure, I agree with Joy completely and fully understand and support what 'the defund movement' is all about. But I'm not the one who needs to be persuaded!
People in under-policed neighborhoods forwarding bath-faith memes and chain emails about how Democrats want to abolish their police department are not likely to read a think piece in the NY Times. And yet, there is no shortage of liberals wagging their fingers and lecturing people who can't be bothered to dive into nuanced, long-form articles about municipal police budgets.
The commitment to using the right language rather than delivering the right results seems like the natural conclusion to the Twitterification of left-of-center society. It can be very challenging and require a lot of nuance to explain how some desirable individual outcome (say, a college degree, or home ownership) is seeing increased representation among some historically disadvantaged demographic.
Using the new in-term "equity" rather than "equality", and shouting at those who don't know the current correct codeword, correctly signals to those you want to signal to, and it fits easily into 140 characters.
I find that phenomenon deeply frustrating. If you really want to advocate for a cause, then you should use whatever language is necessary to build broad public support, not retweets. You know, like calling deficit-financed tax-cuts for the rich "The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act". It isn't hard! And once the public experiences good policy, they will start punishing the party that wants to take it away. But no, we don't want to stick a fake horn on a pony, we want an actual unicorn and we're totally fine with pony genocide if we don't get our way, because the pony blood will be on your hands, you gendered-pronoun-using monster!
The GOP is a lost cost, for sure. The question is not whether or not Democrats can work with Republicans, it is whether they can deliver sufficient electoral shellackings that the GOP throws Trumpism overboard.
I totally agree that, in order to do that, Democrats need to figure out how to convey their commitment to pluralism and a broad-based middle class economy to voters. Right now the opposite is happening.
Tucker Carlson is branding the Democratic Party as foot soldiers for The Squad every night while social media reinforces that narrative with no push-back because liberals are too busy fighting with each other about when the country was founded. Meanwhile, elected Democrats are having public fights over SALT deductions—not exactly a great look to working-class voters—while beltway media vilifies centrists Democrats and attacks the Biden Administration for not reversing every, single policy enacted by the Trump Administration, no matter how popular they are with non-college educated / working-class / minority voters. And their messaging? "Nevermind the bi-partisan bill we already passed to fix roads and bridges, we're going to spend $3.5 trillion on asdlkjhasfiounwacv!"
"We'll make drugs more available to historically marginalized populations" perfectly captures the seemingly deliberate effort of Democrats and liberals to write attack ads against their own policies by injecting virtue signalling into absolutely everything. And I blame the Twitter Thought Police for that.
Republicans and conservatives are super good at this game—they routinely sponsor legislation that is nothing but virtue signalling. The difference is that the "Democrats want to raise your taxes so they can kill babies" energizes their base, while "historically marginalized people" drives a wedge between white college-educated liberals and historically marginalized people. How many focus groups do they need to figure out that the latter group tends to finds that language pointless and condescending?
I cannot wrap my head around the zeal with which Democrats and liberals rush to make own-goals with their messaging. Worse, when they get booed for it, they escort the dissenting fans from the stadium and tell them that they are part of the problem.
My expertise is in esoteric science stuff that was rarely reported on. That was before the pandemic. Now I encounter the same phenomenon as you—every time I see a good-faith journalistic effort to explain science to the masses, key details are missing, misunderstood or totally wrong. But that's ok, because they get the contours right and I'm not the target audience. What I don't like is how some substacks then use those journalistic efforts to criticize the liberal-media-industrial-complex by ascribing some nefarious purpose to the uneven spots in what is very difficult reporting.
There's a weird asymmetry there. Every crazy thing uttered by any self-proclaimed liberal or Democrat gets sucked into the right-wing media vortex, glowered about ad nauseum and irrevocably associated with the "D" next to a politician's name. I am always astonished by the ability of your median Trumper to rattle off the same, exact set of "ten crazy things liberals believe" at the drop of a hat.
For some reason, when Republicans—all the way up to His Orangeness—say completely batshit crazy stuff, up to and including direct threats of violence against individual voters, it gets repeated everywhere from late night to podcasts to newspapers to cable news to exactly zero effect.
The marginal voters who decide elections now seem to weigh "that one time AOC wore a dress that said 'Tax The Rich'" against literal threats to overthrow the government violently and decide that they'll just stay home on election day because they didn't get a pony. And I think that Matt's post gets at the reason for that. The mainstream media / discourse / national conversation / etc. is increasingly college-educated liberals talking to each other. They are just incapable of talking in a way that the median democratic voter that Matt always talks about (the non-college-educated white guy in his 50's) takes seriously.
I actually never realized that so many journalists were, in fact, trust fund kids trying to find themselves. It used to be the opposite—journalists used to be hungry and needed to do good reporting to, you know, earn a paycheck and keep the lights on. But through the magic of podcasts, I get glimpses into the backgrounds of journalists (many of whom I respect a great deal). It seems that they come in three flavors; the gruff old reporter who worked their way up from the mail room, the trust fund kid trying to prove something to mom and dad and the sad-sack millennial who can barely make rent and resents the other two flavors.
My Karl Popper alarm is ringing. I’ve been reading these essays on education and they end up explaining too much. Dems win elections because of their education base. Dems lose elections because they can’t reach beyond their education base. Nice journalistic boiler plate. (This is common. Earlier this week at the start of the day the investment media was writing stocks rally on West Texas crude then at the end of the day it was stocks fell because of the same thing.) We ask people in exit polls lots of questions and our regressions have shown the education variable has a sig coefficient, but ed today is not the same as 40 years ago and neither are college classes or college students; employers are not using BAs to screen in the same ways, and political parties are very different. This smells like a sampling issue to me where we landed on a variable that is correlated with something simply because it is so big and noisy that something in it is jumping up and down with the voting variable. Until we know more what education means we are using it to over explain. We need a testable hypothesis and education is just too broad. It explains everything and is therefore … kinda useless.
I was a follower of the Free State Project, the libertarian effort to first identify a target and then get libertarians to move there and swing the state's politics to being a laboratory for libertarianism. They ended up picking New Hampshire and ran into some problems, such as bears, but it's an interesting idea.
So what about the liberal, high education utopia project? The Scandinavia of the United States? You can handwave at California and New York being larger than Finland, but would you really pick those large states?
Perhaps kill two birds with one stone and identify a small red state that still has some appeal to upscale liberals, and like with the Free State Project encourage liberals to move there so that you can both turn it into Scandinavia as well as swing a state blue?
Depending on your flavor of liberalism, Alaska already has a UBI, just funded by oil, so you could build on that.
I think Utah is the most highly educated consistently red state?
Btw, an aside about the Free State Project - the problem with the bears wasn’t that, in the absence of government they couldn’t do anything about them. The problem was that the federal government made it a felony to shoot em, and they couldn’t do anything about that.
Even if this all came to pass, and enough liberal progressives moved to a small state (Idaho? Vermont? ) that they could run its politics however they pleased, does anyone think that would actually satisfy anybody? Why wouldn't the next generation of young liberals decide that it wasn't enough in various ways, it wasn't truly progressive, etc.
Fair point, but then what's the point of the move if everyone in the future is just as dissatisfied as they are today, regardless of whether or not this "bluing of Montana" project happened?
The state politics of one state with much less than 1% of the population of the country has shifted leftward at the cost of half a million people moving to a place that wouldn't have been ideal for their lives otherwise. And so what? It better actually be a utopia that residents of nearby states really do want to imitate, otherwise I don't think it achieves much.
I'm not even sure it's guaranteed the moves would change the politics of the state, rather than the move changing the politics of the mover, as they may come to appreciate at least a few political points of view they didn't like when they were living in NYC or SF.
"Without extensive subsidy, rural populations are going to continue to implode. Everyone will be living together in the suburbs and cities, and there's going to be a lot less scope for political self-segregation than is the case today."
What is the definition of rural here? I think its very possible that small to medium size towns across the country enjoy a bit of revival due to
1) increased WFH expanding the number of jobs available
2) housing costs continuing to rise dramatically in large urban areas
I'm only talking about "bluing" a red state through migration b/c that's what how I understood Harrison's original post. And I've seen the idea mentioned a few other times on this site, alongside the related idea of Black people trying to concentrate in a few states for political reasons.
To put it mildly, I think they are both ridiculous ideas. And it was a ridiculous idea when Libertarians tried it with Vermont but also sort of on brand for the US Libertarian party. I agree that organic growth is always how these things happen. Unless Biden can convince more Elon Musk's to move to Texas or the Federal Government starts moving major agencies to flyover country. Normal people don't move hundreds of miles for their political party.
I get what you're saying about rural areas. It's a very slow process, and just like the current political alignment, it could change at some point in the next couple decades for unforeseen reasons. So I'm not sure it guarantees a realignment anytime soon. Although demographics suggest to me the "rural implosion" trend may accelerate in 10 years or so.
My parents retired to NH for tax reasons from 2006-2012. They were perfectly suited politically... it's just a very insular state. Distrustful of newcomers. Also ridiculously cold and snowy (144 inches of snowfall their first year).
They ended up in FL like the rest of their generation.
I think you'd get a lot more young liberals to move to this hypothetical red state if you made one of its cities into a really nice place to live with cool amenities and media buzz. Most people aren't *that* political, even young people who are automatic D votes. In their subjective minds, flipping a state is less of a priority than living in a city with a cool "scene" and good brunch.
So start with a city that's already reasonably cool in a hypothetically small red state. I think a lot of Rocky Mountain cities would already be on that list.
I would argue that what makes Nordic systems "work" is a homogenous society with a lot of trust in each other and in the government. Not to mention a very high cultural work ethic.
I think I saw Alan Cole making the argument on twitter that while privatizing social security is anathema to voters, current retirees would have benefitted from the massive run-up in stock prices that have occurred since the great recession.
The well-supported overwhelming-big-picture IS that the Trump phenomenon is about white panic. It is NOT a narrative, progressive or otherwise. The now 2021 standard click-bait contrarian-pundit's obsession with a small marginal difference in the difficult to measure Hispanic vote pattern in last election, a marginal difference well within historic variation of this difficult to measure thing between R and D national candidates - is much closer to a 'narrative.'
And by 'narrative' I mean "lie that this is objectively real for sure and WAY more important than the big big numbers that still say this is a white panic phenomenon."
What you're describing as a small marginal difference was something like 14-17 percent decline in Democrat margin among Hispanic voters and a 1-6 percent decline among Black voters.
The latter, especially, may seem small but don't forget that the electorate as a whole moved 2 points to the left. So relative to other voters Hispanic margins shifted 16-19 % right and Black margins went 3-8% to the right of the average voter. You can call those margins small, I suppose, but in a polarized era with fewer and fewer swing voters I'd call it a big margin and a very worrying one for Democrats. Another marginal shift like that will guarantee big losses unless white voters continue to move 3 points to the left.
Not to mention that these shifts (again, 16-19% and 3-8% rightward) followed a summer where a racial justice movement, designed specifically to benefit Black people, and Hispanics to a lesser extent, was the 1st or 2nd biggest news item. And the R candidate was a president that liberals said is the most obviously racist of modern times.
If your narrative was accurate, don't you think we'd at least see some movement in the opposite direction?
What is the support for the narrative of white panic?
No. Trump being candidate and the lack of much movement away from the big numbers of ~60% white people voting for him just highlights that this has been the big story for -decades. Hispanic vote also no big moves. Black vote ZERO move ("1-6%", given the ability to measure this, is no move.) The ability of ~60% of white people to vote for Trump eliminates ambiguity. Your ability to pretend otherwise tells me volumes about you.
I am -accurately- describing a small marginal difference, well within historic trends, compared to ability to measure such a thing and dwarfed by the overall Hispanic vote that is somewhere in the 60-70% (D) range and shows no long term trends.
Your 1-6 'decline' in AA vote is a lie and total bullshit. You can't measure such a thing to that degree accuracy.
My support for white panic is all legitimate study of the question.
It's fair to say that a 1-6 move is within the margin of error. But it's not fair to call it a lie or total bullshit. It's the data and it is what it is. It's persuasive to me because it's very consistant across polling. But calling bullshit on the polling data is QAnon-MAGA territory. And ad-hominem attacks are usually resorted to when the person delivering them has nothing of substance to say on the actual subject.
But once again, it's not just that there was a little movement, it's that this small movement happened in the context of so many other things that progressives have been telling me should bring more voters to their side.
But If it's not persuasive to you because of other ways of looking at it, that's fair enough. But you're not giving me much of a counter arguments. If you have factual, substantial arguments or evidence then I'm all ears.
The only substantive argument I'm hearing from you is that the Hispanic vote is within historical margins. But you also seem to be saying that even smaller moves from white voters towards Trump are "white panic". You can't have it both ways here.
Catalyst has "2 way" (meaning 3rd parties are dropped from the calculation) support for Trump from White voters as 59% in 2016 and 56% in 2020. The pew research link puts the "one-way" White vote as 54% and 55%.
Historically, going back to 1976 the "one-way" white vote has ranged from 41% to 66% for the Republicans. In the Obama/GWB years the white R vote ranged from 55-59%. On the face of it, white voters actually moved away from Trump. And by your reasoning this is just a measurement error in any case. So where is the white panic? And if this is not measurement error, then how can larger moves from other ethnic groups be illegitimate lies?
It is not 'fair' to say it. It is obvious and true. Your and MY's and other pundits' focus on that non-existent nothingness - is bullshit. Your calling it 'data' rather than nothingness - is bullshit.
The only important take away is that even though a hateful-piece-of-shit-evil-clown-human, who is the boiled-down essence of white panic over demographic trends, ran for president, nothing much changed. That just exposes what all the voting has been about for a long time.
It is one thing for you folks to say "We have to pretend this obvious truth is not true to trick the hateful freaked-out rubes into voting for candidates who will also pretend at all times this is not true - to get a bit of incremental improvement in policy here and there." (Since these folks are not rubes and all know at some level why they vote the way they do, my best guess is you would all be selling your souls for nothing.)
But MY - and his followers here - always take it a step further and want to deny the obvious. You want to pretend you aren't selling your souls in an attempt at incremental improvement. But you really are. You aren't costing the path you have chosen properly.
This view, often vehemently asserted on the internet, is a major oversimplification and oblivious to the rest of the world. Conservative cultural populism, which is what Trump is, does not only exist in the United States; it's a phenomenon in many places. Of course there are differences that reflect the conditions of each country, including in the US, post-Civil Rights era racial politics. But there are also similarities across countries, that map onto educational/class differences, and as we get further away from the Civil Rights movement and its particular resentments, it's likely that educational polarization will move more obviously to the foreground.
Whether that happens will partly depend on whether politicians in both parties decide their personal electoral fortunes are better served by non-raced-based messages, or by divisive race-based messages that try to divide and appeal to voters on the basis of race rather than other characteristics. Currently, it's the Democratic Party that has a more explicitly race-based message than the Republican Party, setting questions of intent aside.
Somethings are simple. ~60% of white voters' ability to vote for Trump for president provides simplicity and clarity about voting in the US. Sure lots of other Western democracies have issues with brown people and global migration. That doesn't prevent the US targeted context-analysis from being kinda simple right now.
It's one thing for you MY supporters to say "We must lie to US voters about why things are as they are so we can win elections." It's another thing to claim that the lies are true.
We are were we are in US because of race issues. That is obvious and true. Your "trick to rubes" plan of how to address it is not only immoral. It will fail because they aren't really rubes. They know why they feel as they do. You aren't going to trick them.
I am listening, but unconvinced, that a segment of the left is interested in cultural hegemony even among their notional political allies. We can argue about how many of these people there are, but there definitely are people who have a sizeable personal stake in identifying just how liberal/progressive/left they are. Many of them do this in part by contrasting themselves with boring normie Democrats who don't know what DEI stands for, or still use the gross gendered "latino/latina", or aren't up to date with the latest inclusions in whatever LGBTQ has grown into.
These people could be safely ignored if they didn't appear to represent a dangerous fraction of low-level Congressional staffers.
Increasing factionalization just seems like a weird lift for a party that used to celebrate MLK's dream of a future where people would be valued by the content of their character rather than other demographic info. Alas.
Progressives' cultural hegemony is way more useful than electoral majorities at getting their agenda enacted. They control the institutions that actually have power in the country. Consider how they won on transgender ideology, gay marriage, DACA, affirmative action, etc. Chris Caldwell explains in The Age of Entitlement:
Elites want something.
They use the institutions they control to advocate for that thing. One way they do this is having corporations or nonprofits they control sponsor a court case.
Federal judges, who are progressive elites, rule that civil rights law must be applied in a new way and the unpopular policy elites wanted is now the law.
Corporations, educators, and the media manufacture consent afterwards and it becomes normal.
"What I *do* think is knowable is that the GOP will struggle to maintain its non-college gains if it goes back to austerity politics."
I think this line, and your analysis, overestimates the extent to which the modern GOP base votes on policy, and underestimates the extent to which politicians are comfortable with cognitive dissonance. If the GOP pursues a wildly unpopular austerity campaign, they'll just tell their base it's because the Democrats spent all your money on healthcare for transgender immigrants or whatever. The marching orders are "animate the base with culture war chum" and I don't expect that to change based on policy outcomes or reality.
Counterpoint: Obama's 2012 results. Fox News said Obama was a socialist who was going to take away conservatives' guns and put gay marriage above family values. And yet, despite all that, Obama campaigned against Romney's austerity politics and performed very well with non-southern whites compared to Hillary or Biden, especially in the industrial midwest.
Just look at the results: Obama crushed Romney in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. He even won Ohio, albeit by a narrower margin. He outright won many rural, white counties in the region, and even in the rural counties he lost he still received >40% in most. To take a random example, look at Pike County, Ohio. Obama received 48.9% of the vote there in 2012, but in 2020 Biden only won 25.1% of the vote. The point is, 2012 shows many of these voters are winnable, and 2012 wasn't that long ago.
You might be right, but I think a commenter above me made a good point about media polarization/enclosure over the last few years. In 2012, a Republican would at least see what Obama was saying on Fox News - OAN doesn't even air Biden's speeches. If the left media is better about this, it's not better by much. This tribal redefinition of "journalism" will only improve if it stops being profitable, and I'm not optimistic.
How long, though, till Republican primary voters realize they can have their cake and eat it too? Culture war populism -and- more friendly economic policies? That seems like part of the lesson of Trump - he was the only primary candidate in 2016 willing to say things that broke with Paul Ryan economic orthodoxy.
If they could do that, it would be a great thing for the country (the culture war stuff would suck, but darn it, we need somebody to cut spending, especially on the elderly. (They might never cut spending on the elderly, but ah well.))
This one is easy. You are right.
This would be stronger if you also noted that progressives have won the popular culture as well as the educational culture. U.S. culture kicks regressive values in the gut -- for example, fires Jon Gruden. Sorry cultural laggards are pissed, but they deserve to be.
I think it is a fair observation that basically Republicans have stopped trying to do anything to roll back the welfare state. That said, Democrats have seriously trimmed their sails on what they believe can actually be done. Across all issue areas, Democratic ideas basically down come down to "issue more subsidies" or "blame systemic inequality."
*For university education, the big idea is to just get rid of tuition and fees. This doesn't do anything to create more university spots or make the economy more just.
*The big healthcare debate was about "Medicare for All," which was basically a plan to reform the payments structure of the industry but didn't do anything to touch services themselves.
*There is a lot of smart work being done on public transportation but Biden's plan seems to be mostly to throw money at it rather than tackle the actual issues. Many activists also seem more concerned with getting rid of fares/fees than making the product better.
*On K12 education, Democrats seem to have basically given up on the idea that schools can be made better. While it is perhaps true that our school outcomes are mostly a result of socio-economic status of the parents, we could of course make the schools better too (and have done this in the past many times).
So while there's a lot of stuff to like in the BIF/Reconciliation bills and other Democratic propsoals I do not unfortunately see much that is transformative for the real economy. It is true that many provisions would make people's lives easier which is really important and I do not want to downplay it. But when you compare to what the US government was doing in the 50s or 60s it's mostly just shifting money around rather than actual transformative stuff... so in that way progressives have sort of lost.
I think when the political system is split 50/50 and folks are energized to distrust the other side, the chances for transformative action -- by either side -- decline rapidly to zero.
The leftward bias in the media has been a problem for decades. That's one of the main reasons that right leaning media like Rush and Fox News took off. I'll grant that its gotten worse lately.
As for the leftward bias in education. It's not just with the professors, it's also with the administration. Basically all of your universities have large diversity and inclusion departments now.
In addition, this starts before university, in particular at your top prep schools. They are all likely to have woke outreach as well.
“The leftward bias in the media has been a problem for decades.”
This bit made me chuckle:
“Conservatives, of course, have been whining about liberal media bias since long before I was born, and for the longest time these complaints struck me as almost pure bullshit. But that’s become markedly less true in recent years.”
It doesn’t occur to him, apparently, that he used to be wrong *and* it’s worse now.
Interesting observations. One I did not see is how well college educated people vs non college educated people are at understanding the tradeoffs -- particularly the trade-off between pareto-improving and income distribution (and for whom) harming policies and vice versa. Coming down to earth, a problem (according to my POV) with non-college educated people is that they do not support Pareto improving policies that do not have large or obvious downward distribution policies -- freer trade, massive immigration of high skilled workers, a net tax on CO2 emissions. Unfortunately the college-educated are not much better.
As for the fact that many researchers now are on the left of center, I think another big factor is that most of the American Right just ceded that ideas ground and became more intransigent, and that's true for both MAGA folks and Never Trumpers, even the light ones. Many ideas current being sold as center or center-left could easily fit a reasonable definition of a center-right agenda, which is why in many respects Boris Johnson's agenda is closer to Biden's than to most conservatives in America.
For instance, I was struck by how relatively little tribute conservatives paid at the death of Brent Scowcroft a few years ago. The guy was a Republican and is generally recognized as one of the greatest minds in modern foreign policy, a Bismarck of our times, etc,etc....and alas, he wrote op-eds both opposing the Iraq War and defending the JCPOA. In different proportions I see similar stuff with Republicans like Jay Powell and John Roberts.....
The window for what is "true" conservatism in America today is just too narrow, so naturally some intellectuals today would rather be out of it than conform.
Inter-elite conflict between the HVAC contractors and the PhD baristas incoming.
There is the additional factor that right-leaning audiences have a complete, self-reinforcing media ecosystem to lure them away from the mainstream. Every defenestration at the NY Times or Facebook suppression of a story about Hunter Biden shunts more right-of-center media consumers to Earth 2.0. That phenomenon is working in the same direction as educational polarization.
I am currently in the only Republican congressional district in a blue state and it is very, very Trumpy. Very Trumpy. Like, sub-contractors go out of their way to tell you how Trumpy they are when they show up for a job, you know, just that's clear to my ECCO-wearing ass up front.
IMHO mainstream media outlets are totally unaware of just how alienating they can be to non-urban, non-diehard-liberals. (For the own-the-libs side of the coin, The Fox News Cinematic Universe, that is a feature, not a bug.) On paper, I am the exact demographic that the NY Times et al. is pursuing, yet I don't read it at all because it feels like a liberal echo chamber where city-dwelling millennials with liberal arts degrees vigorously inhale their own farts and then write condescending articles about how I am a bad person because I don't understand the subtle bouquet of artisanal fart-smell.
I read my local paper and a few substacks of differing ideological viewpoints. So, to me, there is no upside of education polarization because it isn't translating to cultural power, it is just empowering bad ideas from the left the way right-wing media translates into virtue-signalling legislation in Texas.
A recent example: Andrew Sullivan interviewed Brihana Joy on his podcast and it was delightful to hear two ridiculously intelligent people bat ideas around. That is the cultural hegemony I want; core liberal values of empiricism, debate and free speech. But when Andrew pointed out that 'defund the police' was a brilliant slogan to sweep Trumpy Republicans into power, Joy sternly lectured him, asserting that 'defund the police' actually means 'increase police funding and reallocate resources to better serve the community' and that he was willfully misunderstanding 'the movement'. Then she played the race card. In other words, fuck you for not adopting our faculty lounge lexicon of literal irony where words mean their opposite; also, you're racist.
To me, that is what the cultural hegemony of education polarization is delivering; a lefty purity spiral that aggressively and gleefully sics the Thought Police on anyone who deviates even slightly from The Party. That is the highly-educated mirror image of the dumb righty purity spiral that demands absolute fealty to the alternate reality where Trump won in 2020 and Democrats are a whisker from implementing full-blown socialist totalitarianism using Jewish space lasers and Italian satellites.
Wow, you said everything I wanted in that comment with wit and the right touch of polemic.
I would just add the controlling the commanding heights of the culture only goes so far. It doesn't actually control the culture.
And self-assured arrogance always - always - causes a reactionary response. And a big part of that reactionary response can be boiled down to the lyrical refrain in Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the name" - "fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me"
I partially agree, but you can and do hear from the NYT that what most people mean by "defund the police" or more generally who want to see policing changed (I'll bet "defund the Police" has been uttered more times on Fox that in the NYT) IS "'increase police funding and reallocate resources to better serve the community." You would never hear that on Fox.
But if you need to have a NYT subscription to understand what a slogan "really means" then it's probably a bad slogan. Especially if the true meaning is in some ways the exact opposite of a literal reading.
True. DFP is a bad slogan. MY point was that most (not, unfortunately 100%) NYT readers a) probably knew all along what it meant and b) read things "explaining" what it meant. No one viewing Fox ever saw it explained.
Anytime your slogan needs a detailed explanation for what it actually means...you've picked a bad slogan and should pick a new one. I've never understood why they didn't coop the pledge and choose "with liberty and justice for all" or even just "justice for all." Would have tied Fox hosts in knots trying to explain how the pledge was now bad.
I agree 100% about it being a bad slogan. "Re-fund the Police" would be closer. :)
They can say what they want, but when proggo bastions like San Francisco can’t keep Walgreens open because they have no will to police “victimless property crimes”, people will call BS.
I lived in a social democratic country for over a decade. It had it all; super high taxes, robust social programs, excellent public transportation, universal health care... and one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world, partly because they decriminalized petty crimes. In fact, if someone breaks into your home, you are supposed to let them take what they want and then file an insurance claim. (It will be denied if you didn't maintain your locks property.) If you try to interfere, you can be charged with assault. Ditto for shoplifting; ask them to put back the merchandise and if they don't, report it to the police, but do not intervene.
Now, I'm not saying those policies would work in the US, particularly because of the vast difference in gun laws, but not policing victimless property crimes can actually work just fine as a policy. It is not as crazy as Fox News makes it out to be. Nor is it as frictionless as they make it sound in 'proggo bastions'.
What did the police do upon being informed that someone was shoplifting or breaking into your home?
Make a report for your insurance claim.
Once, an American friend of mine came home (to the house that he owned) and found his girlfriend (who didn't live with him) in bed with another man. He told the guy to get out of his house before he beat the shit out of him. The guy refused and said it was his right to be there. My friend proceeded to remove him from his home, with violence. The guy called the cops, who arrested my friend for assault and began deportation proceedings. It is quite a bit different than the "I can shoot you in the face if you knock on my door in a way I don't like" American attitude towards private property!
Was his "visitor" correct in that he had a legal right to be there? Or was the expectation that your friend would call the police to have a trespasser removed?
Well, the type of crime is important in that comparison. Petty crimes like burglary, vandalism and pickpocketing are rampant. But where I was, there was virtually no violent crime. In the 12 years I was there, the entire province had zero murders. And in the cities (and this is true of much of Western Europe) violent crime mostly happens in the immigrant ghettos, i.e., the neighborhoods next to train tracks that are covered in satellite dishes all pointing the same direction.
You are 100% correctly that social democratic policy only works in homogeneous populations, which is a key detail that American socialists do not understand. People are only ok paying super-high taxes for super-great social benefits if they see those benefits as going to "people like me". (Those uber-progressive social policies also came with a very conservative and coercive culture, which is a byproduct of homogeneity.) The influx of Muslim and African immigrants into Europe—something mostly homogeneous modern Europe is not accustomed to—is jet fuel for the far-right populists parties that are gaining traction.
Personally, I did like being an "other" in such a homogeneous place and I found the culture paradoxically very tolerant and very constraining. But Singapore really creeps me out, especially when random people start professing their love of the quasi-dictator to you for no apparent reason. I like the American way of doing things.
Oh, to be sure, I agree with Joy completely and fully understand and support what 'the defund movement' is all about. But I'm not the one who needs to be persuaded!
People in under-policed neighborhoods forwarding bath-faith memes and chain emails about how Democrats want to abolish their police department are not likely to read a think piece in the NY Times. And yet, there is no shortage of liberals wagging their fingers and lecturing people who can't be bothered to dive into nuanced, long-form articles about municipal police budgets.
The commitment to using the right language rather than delivering the right results seems like the natural conclusion to the Twitterification of left-of-center society. It can be very challenging and require a lot of nuance to explain how some desirable individual outcome (say, a college degree, or home ownership) is seeing increased representation among some historically disadvantaged demographic.
Using the new in-term "equity" rather than "equality", and shouting at those who don't know the current correct codeword, correctly signals to those you want to signal to, and it fits easily into 140 characters.
I find that phenomenon deeply frustrating. If you really want to advocate for a cause, then you should use whatever language is necessary to build broad public support, not retweets. You know, like calling deficit-financed tax-cuts for the rich "The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act". It isn't hard! And once the public experiences good policy, they will start punishing the party that wants to take it away. But no, we don't want to stick a fake horn on a pony, we want an actual unicorn and we're totally fine with pony genocide if we don't get our way, because the pony blood will be on your hands, you gendered-pronoun-using monster!
The GOP is a lost cost, for sure. The question is not whether or not Democrats can work with Republicans, it is whether they can deliver sufficient electoral shellackings that the GOP throws Trumpism overboard.
I totally agree that, in order to do that, Democrats need to figure out how to convey their commitment to pluralism and a broad-based middle class economy to voters. Right now the opposite is happening.
Tucker Carlson is branding the Democratic Party as foot soldiers for The Squad every night while social media reinforces that narrative with no push-back because liberals are too busy fighting with each other about when the country was founded. Meanwhile, elected Democrats are having public fights over SALT deductions—not exactly a great look to working-class voters—while beltway media vilifies centrists Democrats and attacks the Biden Administration for not reversing every, single policy enacted by the Trump Administration, no matter how popular they are with non-college educated / working-class / minority voters. And their messaging? "Nevermind the bi-partisan bill we already passed to fix roads and bridges, we're going to spend $3.5 trillion on asdlkjhasfiounwacv!"
"We'll make drugs more available to historically marginalized populations" perfectly captures the seemingly deliberate effort of Democrats and liberals to write attack ads against their own policies by injecting virtue signalling into absolutely everything. And I blame the Twitter Thought Police for that.
Republicans and conservatives are super good at this game—they routinely sponsor legislation that is nothing but virtue signalling. The difference is that the "Democrats want to raise your taxes so they can kill babies" energizes their base, while "historically marginalized people" drives a wedge between white college-educated liberals and historically marginalized people. How many focus groups do they need to figure out that the latter group tends to finds that language pointless and condescending?
I cannot wrap my head around the zeal with which Democrats and liberals rush to make own-goals with their messaging. Worse, when they get booed for it, they escort the dissenting fans from the stadium and tell them that they are part of the problem.
My expertise is in esoteric science stuff that was rarely reported on. That was before the pandemic. Now I encounter the same phenomenon as you—every time I see a good-faith journalistic effort to explain science to the masses, key details are missing, misunderstood or totally wrong. But that's ok, because they get the contours right and I'm not the target audience. What I don't like is how some substacks then use those journalistic efforts to criticize the liberal-media-industrial-complex by ascribing some nefarious purpose to the uneven spots in what is very difficult reporting.
There's a weird asymmetry there. Every crazy thing uttered by any self-proclaimed liberal or Democrat gets sucked into the right-wing media vortex, glowered about ad nauseum and irrevocably associated with the "D" next to a politician's name. I am always astonished by the ability of your median Trumper to rattle off the same, exact set of "ten crazy things liberals believe" at the drop of a hat.
For some reason, when Republicans—all the way up to His Orangeness—say completely batshit crazy stuff, up to and including direct threats of violence against individual voters, it gets repeated everywhere from late night to podcasts to newspapers to cable news to exactly zero effect.
The marginal voters who decide elections now seem to weigh "that one time AOC wore a dress that said 'Tax The Rich'" against literal threats to overthrow the government violently and decide that they'll just stay home on election day because they didn't get a pony. And I think that Matt's post gets at the reason for that. The mainstream media / discourse / national conversation / etc. is increasingly college-educated liberals talking to each other. They are just incapable of talking in a way that the median democratic voter that Matt always talks about (the non-college-educated white guy in his 50's) takes seriously.
I actually never realized that so many journalists were, in fact, trust fund kids trying to find themselves. It used to be the opposite—journalists used to be hungry and needed to do good reporting to, you know, earn a paycheck and keep the lights on. But through the magic of podcasts, I get glimpses into the backgrounds of journalists (many of whom I respect a great deal). It seems that they come in three flavors; the gruff old reporter who worked their way up from the mail room, the trust fund kid trying to prove something to mom and dad and the sad-sack millennial who can barely make rent and resents the other two flavors.
My Karl Popper alarm is ringing. I’ve been reading these essays on education and they end up explaining too much. Dems win elections because of their education base. Dems lose elections because they can’t reach beyond their education base. Nice journalistic boiler plate. (This is common. Earlier this week at the start of the day the investment media was writing stocks rally on West Texas crude then at the end of the day it was stocks fell because of the same thing.) We ask people in exit polls lots of questions and our regressions have shown the education variable has a sig coefficient, but ed today is not the same as 40 years ago and neither are college classes or college students; employers are not using BAs to screen in the same ways, and political parties are very different. This smells like a sampling issue to me where we landed on a variable that is correlated with something simply because it is so big and noisy that something in it is jumping up and down with the voting variable. Until we know more what education means we are using it to over explain. We need a testable hypothesis and education is just too broad. It explains everything and is therefore … kinda useless.
I was a follower of the Free State Project, the libertarian effort to first identify a target and then get libertarians to move there and swing the state's politics to being a laboratory for libertarianism. They ended up picking New Hampshire and ran into some problems, such as bears, but it's an interesting idea.
So what about the liberal, high education utopia project? The Scandinavia of the United States? You can handwave at California and New York being larger than Finland, but would you really pick those large states?
Perhaps kill two birds with one stone and identify a small red state that still has some appeal to upscale liberals, and like with the Free State Project encourage liberals to move there so that you can both turn it into Scandinavia as well as swing a state blue?
Depending on your flavor of liberalism, Alaska already has a UBI, just funded by oil, so you could build on that.
I think Utah is the most highly educated consistently red state?
Btw, an aside about the Free State Project - the problem with the bears wasn’t that, in the absence of government they couldn’t do anything about them. The problem was that the federal government made it a felony to shoot em, and they couldn’t do anything about that.
As I recall, an earlier Slow Boring post made the argument for offering up Maine to play this role.
Even if this all came to pass, and enough liberal progressives moved to a small state (Idaho? Vermont? ) that they could run its politics however they pleased, does anyone think that would actually satisfy anybody? Why wouldn't the next generation of young liberals decide that it wasn't enough in various ways, it wasn't truly progressive, etc.
Fair point, but then what's the point of the move if everyone in the future is just as dissatisfied as they are today, regardless of whether or not this "bluing of Montana" project happened?
The state politics of one state with much less than 1% of the population of the country has shifted leftward at the cost of half a million people moving to a place that wouldn't have been ideal for their lives otherwise. And so what? It better actually be a utopia that residents of nearby states really do want to imitate, otherwise I don't think it achieves much.
I'm not even sure it's guaranteed the moves would change the politics of the state, rather than the move changing the politics of the mover, as they may come to appreciate at least a few political points of view they didn't like when they were living in NYC or SF.
"Without extensive subsidy, rural populations are going to continue to implode. Everyone will be living together in the suburbs and cities, and there's going to be a lot less scope for political self-segregation than is the case today."
What is the definition of rural here? I think its very possible that small to medium size towns across the country enjoy a bit of revival due to
1) increased WFH expanding the number of jobs available
2) housing costs continuing to rise dramatically in large urban areas
I'm only talking about "bluing" a red state through migration b/c that's what how I understood Harrison's original post. And I've seen the idea mentioned a few other times on this site, alongside the related idea of Black people trying to concentrate in a few states for political reasons.
To put it mildly, I think they are both ridiculous ideas. And it was a ridiculous idea when Libertarians tried it with Vermont but also sort of on brand for the US Libertarian party. I agree that organic growth is always how these things happen. Unless Biden can convince more Elon Musk's to move to Texas or the Federal Government starts moving major agencies to flyover country. Normal people don't move hundreds of miles for their political party.
I get what you're saying about rural areas. It's a very slow process, and just like the current political alignment, it could change at some point in the next couple decades for unforeseen reasons. So I'm not sure it guarantees a realignment anytime soon. Although demographics suggest to me the "rural implosion" trend may accelerate in 10 years or so.
My parents retired to NH for tax reasons from 2006-2012. They were perfectly suited politically... it's just a very insular state. Distrustful of newcomers. Also ridiculously cold and snowy (144 inches of snowfall their first year).
They ended up in FL like the rest of their generation.
Isn't California already this state? I see them making their own rules all the time.
You could argue California is a little too large and unwieldy, and it's recall provisions are pretty problematic.
I think you'd get a lot more young liberals to move to this hypothetical red state if you made one of its cities into a really nice place to live with cool amenities and media buzz. Most people aren't *that* political, even young people who are automatic D votes. In their subjective minds, flipping a state is less of a priority than living in a city with a cool "scene" and good brunch.
So start with a city that's already reasonably cool in a hypothetically small red state. I think a lot of Rocky Mountain cities would already be on that list.
Isn't this essentially what has happened to Colorado over the last couple of decades? Denver is a reasonably cool city, and you have skiing as well.
So we've already demonstrated it works in principle! Now invade Idaho!
It's already happening!
https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/growing-idaho/idaho-attracts-californians-migration-growing/277-5c2a35b2-d3be-46fa-8565-faf024a16f7c
I'm pretty sure that most of those Californians are Republicans fleeing the state though.
I would argue that what makes Nordic systems "work" is a homogenous society with a lot of trust in each other and in the government. Not to mention a very high cultural work ethic.
Sure, add implementing multiparty democracy to the to do list when taking over the state.
I think I saw Alan Cole making the argument on twitter that while privatizing social security is anathema to voters, current retirees would have benefitted from the massive run-up in stock prices that have occurred since the great recession.
that's a fun use of hindsight.
Shocking that we didn't buy that dip for our retirees
The well-supported overwhelming-big-picture IS that the Trump phenomenon is about white panic. It is NOT a narrative, progressive or otherwise. The now 2021 standard click-bait contrarian-pundit's obsession with a small marginal difference in the difficult to measure Hispanic vote pattern in last election, a marginal difference well within historic variation of this difficult to measure thing between R and D national candidates - is much closer to a 'narrative.'
And by 'narrative' I mean "lie that this is objectively real for sure and WAY more important than the big big numbers that still say this is a white panic phenomenon."
What you're describing as a small marginal difference was something like 14-17 percent decline in Democrat margin among Hispanic voters and a 1-6 percent decline among Black voters.
The latter, especially, may seem small but don't forget that the electorate as a whole moved 2 points to the left. So relative to other voters Hispanic margins shifted 16-19 % right and Black margins went 3-8% to the right of the average voter. You can call those margins small, I suppose, but in a polarized era with fewer and fewer swing voters I'd call it a big margin and a very worrying one for Democrats. Another marginal shift like that will guarantee big losses unless white voters continue to move 3 points to the left.
Not to mention that these shifts (again, 16-19% and 3-8% rightward) followed a summer where a racial justice movement, designed specifically to benefit Black people, and Hispanics to a lesser extent, was the 1st or 2nd biggest news item. And the R candidate was a president that liberals said is the most obviously racist of modern times.
If your narrative was accurate, don't you think we'd at least see some movement in the opposite direction?
What is the support for the narrative of white panic?
Sources:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/
https://catalist.us/wh-national/
No. Trump being candidate and the lack of much movement away from the big numbers of ~60% white people voting for him just highlights that this has been the big story for -decades. Hispanic vote also no big moves. Black vote ZERO move ("1-6%", given the ability to measure this, is no move.) The ability of ~60% of white people to vote for Trump eliminates ambiguity. Your ability to pretend otherwise tells me volumes about you.
I am -accurately- describing a small marginal difference, well within historic trends, compared to ability to measure such a thing and dwarfed by the overall Hispanic vote that is somewhere in the 60-70% (D) range and shows no long term trends.
Your 1-6 'decline' in AA vote is a lie and total bullshit. You can't measure such a thing to that degree accuracy.
My support for white panic is all legitimate study of the question.
It's fair to say that a 1-6 move is within the margin of error. But it's not fair to call it a lie or total bullshit. It's the data and it is what it is. It's persuasive to me because it's very consistant across polling. But calling bullshit on the polling data is QAnon-MAGA territory. And ad-hominem attacks are usually resorted to when the person delivering them has nothing of substance to say on the actual subject.
But once again, it's not just that there was a little movement, it's that this small movement happened in the context of so many other things that progressives have been telling me should bring more voters to their side.
But If it's not persuasive to you because of other ways of looking at it, that's fair enough. But you're not giving me much of a counter arguments. If you have factual, substantial arguments or evidence then I'm all ears.
The only substantive argument I'm hearing from you is that the Hispanic vote is within historical margins. But you also seem to be saying that even smaller moves from white voters towards Trump are "white panic". You can't have it both ways here.
Catalyst has "2 way" (meaning 3rd parties are dropped from the calculation) support for Trump from White voters as 59% in 2016 and 56% in 2020. The pew research link puts the "one-way" White vote as 54% and 55%.
Historically, going back to 1976 the "one-way" white vote has ranged from 41% to 66% for the Republicans. In the Obama/GWB years the white R vote ranged from 55-59%. On the face of it, white voters actually moved away from Trump. And by your reasoning this is just a measurement error in any case. So where is the white panic? And if this is not measurement error, then how can larger moves from other ethnic groups be illegitimate lies?
Source on white vote below:
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2016/02/05/130647/what-about-white-voters/
It is not 'fair' to say it. It is obvious and true. Your and MY's and other pundits' focus on that non-existent nothingness - is bullshit. Your calling it 'data' rather than nothingness - is bullshit.
The only important take away is that even though a hateful-piece-of-shit-evil-clown-human, who is the boiled-down essence of white panic over demographic trends, ran for president, nothing much changed. That just exposes what all the voting has been about for a long time.
It is one thing for you folks to say "We have to pretend this obvious truth is not true to trick the hateful freaked-out rubes into voting for candidates who will also pretend at all times this is not true - to get a bit of incremental improvement in policy here and there." (Since these folks are not rubes and all know at some level why they vote the way they do, my best guess is you would all be selling your souls for nothing.)
But MY - and his followers here - always take it a step further and want to deny the obvious. You want to pretend you aren't selling your souls in an attempt at incremental improvement. But you really are. You aren't costing the path you have chosen properly.
This view, often vehemently asserted on the internet, is a major oversimplification and oblivious to the rest of the world. Conservative cultural populism, which is what Trump is, does not only exist in the United States; it's a phenomenon in many places. Of course there are differences that reflect the conditions of each country, including in the US, post-Civil Rights era racial politics. But there are also similarities across countries, that map onto educational/class differences, and as we get further away from the Civil Rights movement and its particular resentments, it's likely that educational polarization will move more obviously to the foreground.
Whether that happens will partly depend on whether politicians in both parties decide their personal electoral fortunes are better served by non-raced-based messages, or by divisive race-based messages that try to divide and appeal to voters on the basis of race rather than other characteristics. Currently, it's the Democratic Party that has a more explicitly race-based message than the Republican Party, setting questions of intent aside.
Somethings are simple. ~60% of white voters' ability to vote for Trump for president provides simplicity and clarity about voting in the US. Sure lots of other Western democracies have issues with brown people and global migration. That doesn't prevent the US targeted context-analysis from being kinda simple right now.
It's one thing for you MY supporters to say "We must lie to US voters about why things are as they are so we can win elections." It's another thing to claim that the lies are true.
We are were we are in US because of race issues. That is obvious and true. Your "trick to rubes" plan of how to address it is not only immoral. It will fail because they aren't really rubes. They know why they feel as they do. You aren't going to trick them.
I am listening, but unconvinced, that a segment of the left is interested in cultural hegemony even among their notional political allies. We can argue about how many of these people there are, but there definitely are people who have a sizeable personal stake in identifying just how liberal/progressive/left they are. Many of them do this in part by contrasting themselves with boring normie Democrats who don't know what DEI stands for, or still use the gross gendered "latino/latina", or aren't up to date with the latest inclusions in whatever LGBTQ has grown into.
These people could be safely ignored if they didn't appear to represent a dangerous fraction of low-level Congressional staffers.
https://nypost.com/2021/10/07/justin-trudeau-mocked-after-using-2slgbtqqia-acronym/
Hate to agree with the haters at eg the New York Post but . . . 2SLGBTQQIA+?
Increasing factionalization just seems like a weird lift for a party that used to celebrate MLK's dream of a future where people would be valued by the content of their character rather than other demographic info. Alas.
Progressives' cultural hegemony is way more useful than electoral majorities at getting their agenda enacted. They control the institutions that actually have power in the country. Consider how they won on transgender ideology, gay marriage, DACA, affirmative action, etc. Chris Caldwell explains in The Age of Entitlement:
Elites want something.
They use the institutions they control to advocate for that thing. One way they do this is having corporations or nonprofits they control sponsor a court case.
Federal judges, who are progressive elites, rule that civil rights law must be applied in a new way and the unpopular policy elites wanted is now the law.
Corporations, educators, and the media manufacture consent afterwards and it becomes normal.
Some of what you write here is correct, but the majority of current federal judges are Republicans.
Just not being put in the gulag would be amazing at this point.
Excellent, now all we Democrats need is an organic intellectual to wage a war of position and we should be good!