Appreciate the overview, but feels like we're missing the punchline. If I can infer:
The median American voter wants:
- moderation on cultural issues, especially salient trans issues such as parental consent and notification, trans athletics, and some degree of caution in the treatment of minors.
- a strong commitment to public order, namely a controlled southern border and a return to a more 90s style "tough on crime" approach
- an "all of the above" energy strategy that embraces and does not demonize the American fossil fuel industry
- a sense that they can "get ahead" economically, especially with housing and healthcare costs taking up painfully large proportions of household budgets
- a foreign policy that is clearly positioned as something in our interests (not on high minded appeals to "the global order" or JUST democracy/freedom), one that pushes our allies to be more obviously muscular, and otherwise avoids the excesses/debacles of the GWOT.
- a president that speaks in their vernacular and comes across as fundamentally authentic
More or less. But I do also want to admit that opinion can sometimes change. It seemed to many people in the winter of 2004-2005 that Democrats faced an insuperable obstacle around gay marriage in a highly religious society, but actually views shifted pretty rapidly (and America has become less religious). I think it's understandable that this gave a cohort of progressives excessive optimism about the plasticity of public opinion on other issues.
I think gay marriage shifted because advocates did the work of meeting public opinion where it was - the faces of gay marriage were aggressively normie gay and lesbian couples, in many cases with happy kids, just asking for the rights that come with marriage, especially around family issues like death benefits/pension transfers and end of life healthcare decisionmaking. And being gay/lesbian is relatively common, most people know a few. It wasn't a screechy pitch, it was a very small c-conservstive one that succeeded by making the anti-gay marriage crowd seem cruel. Yes a decline in religiosity was part, but I think the decline was already much further along than most people were willing to admit to pollsters between 2008 and 2012.
I recently spoke with a high level organizer who implied that every left cause should be treated like gay marriage. And if you keep pushing, the public will eventually accept the left position.
I think it kind of depends on what they mean by that. If it means to produce the equivalent of Will and Grace and Queer Eye (popular mainstream media where gay people are shown being fun and relatable without preachiness) then, yeah that probably won't get you there on every issue but I bet it would help.
But there's also a contingent that sees Stonewall as not just an important historical moment but actually the key to LGBT success and thinks if you just throw bricks at cop cars in support of a just cause you will win over voters.
Another key thing about the movement for gay marriage was the willingness to accept incremental advances and not cancel people for supporting half-measures like civil unions if it kept things moving forward. I remember seeing the comedian Guy Branham on a talk show once saying "I can get married now because Barack Obama lied about not supporting gay marriage."
I generally agree with this point. But also, I wouldn't exactly say there's a Queer Eye of gun control. There's a lot of media about how guns are bad and conservatives are ghouls for liking them, but it's no surprise that's not persuasive. And it's backed up by a lot of media where guns are cool.
So yeah, I agree we're not going to see a shift on on guns in the same way as gay marriage. But also I do think a similar approach probably pushes things in that direction.
That is a bunch of Overton window nonsense I keep seeing pushed by people who hold wildly unpopular opinions. It’s an excuse for them not even to try to understand others or communicate the merits of their position.
How does this person rationalize away polling that shows that Americans are *more* anti-trans than ever before? Pew has shown that fewer and fewer Americans see sex as mutable.
The messaging on gay marriage was GREAT. The Party got away from "we're here, we're queer, deal with it" and followed Andrew Sullivan's argument and argued gays were "virtually normal". The gay rights movement was the most brilliant American social movement of my lifetime.
But at the same time, there was a structural change. I think it was the Internet that caused it, by finally exposing much of middle American youth to the devastating arguments that organized religions were false, which only were encountered in the past by very few people in college philosophy courses. (Even now, the mainstream media publishes VERY few pieces arguing that stuff in the Bible didn't happen or didn't make sense and plenty of pieces that assume Biblical narratives are true.)
But whatever the reason,, America became more secular (and thus less accepting of Biblical claims that homosexuality was an abomination) at the exact same time the gay rights movement was doing its brilliant work.
And that's tough to replicate. (Although I would argue the trans movement should stop what it is currently doing and try it.)
To me the most critical and understated aspect of the gay rights movement's success is that at the end of the day it asked very little of people. Leave us alone also had a pretty strong foundation in the American character in a way affirm and accommodate just doesn't.
I think this is a little simplistic. "Leave us alone" certainly bars enforcing bans on gay sex, but long before Lawrence v. Texas those laws had little to no enforcement. Asking for civil rights laws to protect LGBT people from discrimination requires something of other people (e.g., you have to extend spousal benefits to same-sex spouses, a place of public accommodation might sometimes have to host a same-sex wedding if it hosts different-sex weddings) and marriage itself requires affirmative acts of licensing and recognition from the government. It's not solely a libertarian issue.
All the more so when we move beyond strictly legal demands: it was (and is) important to the gay rights movement that parents affirm their gay kids, that religious institutions perform same-sex weddings (which they successfully persuaded most mainline Protestant and non-Orthodox Jewish denominations to do), that media move away from negative portrayals of gay people, etc. Every bit of this, legal and non-legal, was intensely controversial at the time (some of it still is) and lots of conservatives objected on the ground that it moved past "leave us alone" to "affirm and accommodate." Gay rights advocates still mostly won. It really was an ideological shift; most people just don't buy the premises of anti-gay ideology anymore.
I still disagree. I think the stuff you include in paragraph one all falls firmly into the 'leave us alone' camp. No one had to build or restructure any of the state and/or court administrative stuff to give licenses to married gay couples. The discrimination in employment or in commerce or what have you also did not require any affirmative action by anyone; it just said you can't fire and/or not serve people over this aspect of their personal lives. Maybe it codified not caring about something people were slowly becoming less inclined to care about to begin with but there's no law requiring anyone to take any particular position on the morality of gay relationships.
Now, I agree with you that there is a separate cultural project, parts of which remain controversial. But that is fundamentally separate from something like a state law requiring churches to perform and/or recognize gay marriages. I am quite certain that would still be unconstitutional and I see no path to changing that.
Yes, I always thought that calling for same sex marriage was too much “affirm and accommodate” to succeed. Particularly through a SCOTUS decision, it would be inviting the kind of backlash that occurred with Roe. I thought the better approach would have been “Get government out of the sacrament of marriage” and just redefine existing legal aspects of marriage as civil unions for everybody. It surprised me that a wasn’t necessary to take that approach.
I don’t think it was important to the gay *rights* movement that churches perform gay weddings, though this continues to be important to individual gay people and fought for by liberal wings of the mainline denominations. The gay rights movement was pretty clear that it was about civil rights not religious practice.
There's also a potentially interesting thread in there about the Internet leading arguments generally confined to academia to break contain and enter the broader public (without the necessary context to evaluate them correctly).
This is related to the point that Matt makes about his theory being simpler than the alternative. There’s always something appealing about learning that a simple theory other people believe is wrong. But as they say, a little learning is a dangerous thing, and it’s very common for people who first learn about complexity to think these second order effects are much more common and significant than they actually are.
There's a ton of soft atheism. People don't like the term, but if they functionally don't believe or even if they believe in something amorphous but think Christianity is BS, they are functionally nonbelievers for purpose of the gay marriage issue. You need doctrinal Christianity to think that homosexuality is an abomination.
I'm going to agree with the soft atheism although I would frame it is modernist materialism. Part of the reaction to Christian views on social issue.
The problem is you don't need Christianity to be anti-gay. Parents want grandchildren; not all but enough. There is also a natural fear of homosexual predation among vulnerable men. I'm not saying this justifies discrimination against homosexuals, rather there are basic human intuitions that can lead to less accepting cultures without specific doctrine. You could make materialist, evolutionary arguments for both sides. This is where soft atheism let's you down, we can disagree on the correct ethics for a materialist framing and you're left with tribal politics.
Atheists as best I can tell tend to deny the spiritual world exists. While the irreligious will say I don't believe in Christianity/Islam/etc. but my dead grandma is definitely watching over me and I think tried to tell me I was making a mistake when I made this bad decision last year. I should have listened to her. Or the even more common, I'm not religious because I believe that organized religion is trying to hide the truth that all religions proclaim about love and instead they are just trying to control people.
It's tangential to your overall point, but I don't think it's right that the mainstream media doesn't run pieces that counter Biblical narratives. Mainstream outlets constantly run stories about human origins and the history of the universe that presume that science, not religion, is the right lens for these questions. It's also not difficult to find pieces about the history and sociology of religion that take for granted that the internal narratives those religions have are not true. For example, you can find mainstream stories asking questions like "why are catastrophic floods so common in religious texts?" or "was the bright star mentioned in the Nativity story a real cosmic event?" and these will be framed in historical, scientific or cultural terms, not religious ones. They won't come out and say "the Noah's Ark story was made up" because it's taken for granted the reader already thinks that.
That's not really what I mean. Obviously, for instance, the media runs stories that assume evolution is true or the fossil record is accurate.
But they also run stories like "what was Jesus' life like" (to which the only honest answer is we don't know, as we barely know that he existed) and "this archeologist found evidence of the Biblical flood" and especially the stuff in the newsmagazines every Easter about the resurrection.
And they DON'T run stories like "the Christian narrative that God is good is completely contradicted by the notion of Hell" or "Jesus could have appeared in our modern era and proved God's existence but doesn't do so" or "it is highly unlikely that St. Peter ever went to Rome". Because even though more and more of America is nonbelievers, the religious audience would throw a fit if they did.
Hm, do you have an example of those kinds of articles? We must be reading different outlets, because I can't think of an example from a mainstream outlet that presumes that Christianity is true.
In case you aren't a subscriber, here's the relevant bit:
"Modern Christians often look to the Bible for clear answers to sexual questions. But clear answers are impossible to find... The problem is that the Bible, which comprises 60-odd books composed over a period of a millennium and more, is less a book than a library—and displays a correspondingly broad range of sexual attitudes. Its pages offer monogamous marriages, polygamous ones, rape, racy poetry, fulminations about homosexuality and tender descriptions of a man’s passion for his male lover... Not that such an inconvenient truth has ever stopped Christians from claiming that there is—or getting cross with those they see as deviating from it. From those who burned “sodomites” at the stake in the 12th century to those who flame “deviants” on social media today, Christians have a habit of getting angry about this stuff."
I'm not sure you'd expect pieces like "Jesus could have appeared in our modern era and proved God's existence but doesn't do so" or "it is highly unlikely that St. Peter ever went to Rome" to run since these aren't really *news*. If something like that does come up, it'd be more likely to be in the form of a book review or interview with an academic. But news media outlets aren't generally in the business of weighing in on abstract philosophical questions in general, so I wouldn't take their lack of explicit criticism of Christian doctrine as cover for any deeper agenda.
"'Smithers goes from "might be gay" to "obviously is gay'"
And there were two steps before this as well: turning Smithers into a yes man for Mr. Burns, then turning him into being attracted only to Mr. Burns. It was a long journey for the writers before they could completely get Smithers out the closet.
I think "abolish the police" (at the level of "reform the police," not literal abolition) via a cultural shift could potentially happen. I believe there's actual research showing watching police procedurals and other sorts of entertainment of that sort correlates with viewers adopting more pro-police attitudes, so producing more stuff with critical/negative portrayals of police should plausibly have an inverse effect.
I guess the question then is what "reform the police" means in practice. Even people who view their police department negatively generally want more and better police. They want the version of police that exists in affluent neighborhoods: cops are visible, responsive, trustworthy and take your safety seriously. I think media could persuade people that most police departments fall short of this ideal, but I don't really see that ideal changing.
The flipside of the big tent approach to gay marriage is that that tent included a lot of people who, to be blunt, were comfortable with gay marriage but still quietly thought LGBT people were kind of weird, and I think we're seeing that dynamic play out now.
Or an alternate explanation would be that it's not about LGBT vs. straight per se, but about normie vibes vs. alternative vibes. LGBT people getting traditional marriages is a conservative idea. Most people want to get married and understand why other people would want to get married. Having to announce your pronouns is weird for most people, and I think the kind of person who is annoyed by these things would also be annoyed by, say, hetero polyamorous people.
Totally. The gay marriage fight wasn't about trying to tear down values that Americans held dear, it was about persuading Americans that gay marriage was consistent with values they already held.
The plasticity of public opinion seems to have been really over-estimated. The first black President and legalisation of gay marriage made it seems like America was in a new era of public acceptance for cultural change. But in fact it seems to have been to some degree the other way, many people wanted a rest from, or even reversal of, cultural change.
The misread of broad pluralistic/libertarian impulses on race and sexual orientation as support for identitarian redistributive "justice" policies by the "woke" left has been disastrously counter-productive.
But I also think there's an aspect of 'we gave on all the most important things legally in the 60s, and all the most important things culturally in the 70s-90s, yet there are still people lecturing us like Plessy versus Ferguson just came down yesterday.'
I think there's some truth to that. I think the bigger picture driver might be something more like the iron law of bureacracies. I do not fully buy the way a Chris Rufo or Richard Hanania type of conservative looks at this issue, and I'm not on board with the way they'd approach changing it.
However I think there is something to the idea that we set up a bunch of state institutions to deal with a situation at a specific moment in time and under very particular conditions that have changed quite a lot in the subsequent decades. My hope for a silver lining for a SCOTUS that could be conservative dominated for decades is that they look at some of this stuff and say 'no, we aren't letting you do that now/anymore' in a similar manner to what they did in Students for Fair Admissions.
It's also just that the message has to be optimistic. The message coming from the left in 2020 was that white people and America itself are irredeemably racist, and there's nothing really to be done about it other than to flagellate oneself and "make space" for BIPOC people, i.e. leave them alone.
Whereas a message like "America is a great place with good values that we sometimes fail to perfectly uphold, here are some ways we can do better" tends to land for most people.
Just yesterday I found myself in an Obama-Bernie-Bernie vs Obama-Hillary-Harris debate on Twitter, me being the first thing and the other guy being the second thing. His whole theory of politics was that we are 60 years into the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement, nothing else matters, and the most effective thing you can do for any policy goal is diversify the elite. His theory of the Obama-Trump swing was that the Obama-Hillary-Harris finally diversified the White House and threatened to do more of it, threatened to finally "win" so that other things could be the issue of the day, so we got Trump as a backlash.
I was honestly completely astounded to hear someone say he honestly, truly believed there had never been any other issue than diversifying the elite for six decades, that everything else rested on doing that first.
Let’s not diminish the idea that it matters what the change is. Legalization of gay marriage and enthusiastically affirming a 12 year old girl’s socially influenced thoughts that she is a boy are different and that matter’s.
It's so wild how much that issue was tied up with religion, and how quickly it changed as people became less religious. It still has me thinking that the anti-abortionists could end up being the dog that caught the car some time in the near future.
"Liked," because of your first sentence. I remain convinced that religion is less relevant to anti-abortion sentiment than is popularly believed (polling on support for pro-choice/pro-life positions over the past 50 years doesn't have much of a correlation with religiosity, AFAICS).
Intriguing--I certainly agree that one doesn't have to be religious to be against abortion, but the grand majority of people that I've seen opposing it tend to be.
But support for abortion rights actually fell for part of that period and, while it's risen in recent years, it's not actually that much higher than when a much larger share of the population identified as being religious (again, you can find plenty of other polling showing similar *trends* over the period, even if the exact wording of the questions changes the overall *level* of support): https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/#views-on-abortion-1995-2024
@Matt, do you have any criticism in store over the liberal overestimation of Dobbs' potential to move the electorate?
Asking because you allude to Trump "neutralizing" the Dobbs backlash, but I think we as a party are owed a LOT more of an apology from the elites for betting the farm on the Dobbs Effect.
Did their "betting the farm" (I don't know what that means) wind up *hurting* the Democrats? Would they have done better if, say, Harris had come out for a nationwide 15 week ban? I'm guessing "no."
In re "betting the farm," I saw a fair number of progressives post-Dobbs dismiss the idea that Democrats needed to move toward the center on anything because the pro-choice backlash was going to be so significant.
It seems like they were wrong when it came to presidential voting though? Pro-choice referenda got majorities of the vote in five states that Trump won (Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Montana, and Nevada) and missed getting a majority by one percent in a sixth (Nebraska)!
American views around marriage did not in fact change rapidly at all. Marriage, at least in the Christian understanding popular in the West for like a thousand years, is a life-long, exclusive, total partnership for the purpose of raising children. You can argue as to where exactly the change started, but it was the work of many decades, if not centuries, to change the public understanding of marriage to be basically just an especially close friendship. After that, extending it to same-sex couples was simply the natural last step: The answer to the question "can two men have a baby" is obviously no, the answer to "can two men be friends" is obviously yes.
"Marriage...[wa]s a life-long, exclusive, total partnership for the purpose of raising children....The answer to the question 'can two men have a baby' is obviously no"
Yes, but bearing a fetus is different from "raising children"; indeed one of the main reasons the gay community pushed for marriage legalization is because it made it easier for gay couples to adopt.
There's certainly a plausible case that the government should be involved in vetting or encouraging people who intend to obtain children, but the US's current marriage laws and norms are manifestly not that system. Plenty of couples get married while declaring themselves "child-free" and announcing their intention to avoid children.
I so badly want the "all of the above" energy strategy that, ironically, could at least push coal power out of the picture for good. Just have to really throw the kitchen sink at all clean(er) energy sources.
11+DC of 50 states legalized gay marriage via legislation or initiative/referendum. Every other legalization was done by the courts, either state or federal.
Reducing CO2 emissions globally to reach zero and eventually negative net emissions should never be about which activities (except emitting CO2) are "good" and "bad." "All of the above" is not right, just less wrong than "no fossil fuels now and forever."
I feel like this speaks to both what was attractive about Warren and what went wrong with Warrenism.
Warren and Bernie shared a lot in the sense that their followings grew MUCH more toxic and dysfunctional than their relatively sane-yet-ambitious original political projects started out as.
Warren came out of the gate with a LOT of good ideas. But right around that same time, the groups and staffers had likewise just escaped the Veal Pen, and neither Warren nor Bernie had the fortitude to resist the tidal waves. Instead, they just let the staffers and movement activists run the show and take their ideologies in ever-more-bizarre directions. (ironic that being the staffers' favorite word at the time)
So this is why it feels wierd when Matt criticizes "Warrenism" as having been particularly unpopular. The Warrenites ended up barely resembling Warren's actual ideology, and Warren herself got twisted by their relentless accusations of all kinds of bigotry against anyone who tried to push an economic narrative.
Personally, I think it makes more sense to think of this "Warrenism" as actually a Zombie Hillaryism. I wouldn't be surprised if (A) many of the supposedly "Warrenite" staffers came up through the original Bill Clinton/2000's Hillary pipeline, or (B) alternatively, many of them came up in the 2016 Clinton campaign and overlearned from her hard pivot to bash Bernie on social issues.
This seems both incredibly damning of Warren (she has no willpower of her own) and allows her to escape responsibility for her own evolution. Warren 2012 was interesting, but by 2016 she was getting out over her skis and by 2020 was offering very radical proposals.
Exactly! I don't think she was led to the crazy ideas by groups and staffers who escaped the veal pen. I think she was leading them out of the pen either because she believe in it with them, or more likely wanted to gain their backing and so got in front of harnessing their momentum.
I mean, it’s not a particularly noble pursuit, but for every Liz Warren there’s gotta be at least some crusader or another who manages to lead the mob in the right direction every once in a while…
Before the Groups got involved, the real Warren vs Bernie fight was antitrust/regulatory populism vs social democracy. After, it was an intramural fight over the precise identitarian content of wokeness.
Is social issues what cost her in the primary? The only thing I remember about Warren's campaign is that she campaigned on the wealth tax to prove that she was more economically left than Bernie, which is also when my support for her ("Bernie but smarter!") evaporated.
Come on Casey, you are making way too much sense right now.
/s obviously.
But you are right on, I'm still appalled that people think Trump was going to deliver on anything that wasn't "tough on crime" however I think the message above would've resonated with more people, especially in light of where we are realistically economically, politically and socially. Something I think Clinton, Obama and Biden understood is that you need to be able to win elections in order to get things done. Progressives and super left leaning people don't understand that. They aren't quite at the burn the government down stage that the MAGA or Alt Right people are, but they'd gladly see society fail if it means that they get to virtue signal and wax poetic about their moral superiority in my opinion.
There is a reason why people respect Pete Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Andy Kim, Abigail Spanberger and Jared Golden and these people can also win tough elections. The Dem party needs to get more people like this to be the ones talking about policy and getting in front of people. As long as the super progressive left cares more about complaining instead of appreciating their outsized seat at the table that they currently have, then we will continue to lose winnable elections, and it increases the odds that someone like Trump will irrevocably have a negative impact to not just our country but our allies.
Also, A trade policy that is clearly positioned as something in our interests (not just high minded trade liberation or foreign aid by other means) Trade not aid is probably the worst free trade argument out there, and yet it is heard everytime trade policy comes up with non-European or Japan countries. The framing is basically the same as Trump's that we're doing those countries a favor with the liberalization of trade, but that we should do it.
> Trade is like immigration, mutually beneficial that somehow gets misunderstood as a favor we do to immigrants and foreign exporters.
Mutually beneficial to whom? "Our" middle class and upper class benefit, yes, but they often do sacrifice the interests of "our" lower/working class to do it. Just because on average the "whole country" benefits, doesn't mean any class or person lives that "average" economic life.
I was not claiming that every single person benefits but many people do just like anything else that allow more market transactions among consenting adults.
I feel like trade policy is usually presented as you’ll pay lower prices and you probably don’t make shit for a living. How is this not positioned as in our interests?
Right, but the "then you lose your job" argument shouldn't matter the slightest to the 90% of adults in this country who don't even work in manufacturing.
I am not for these policies but (as is mentioned in the article) I would not underestimate the chance that Trump/MAGA will implode making it possible for the progressive wing of the Dems to make a roaring comeback in the mid terms and later the presidential election.
This is not my preferred outcome but based on things like the current H1B fights, the general chaos and Rep in fighting I see this as very possible. If the Reps make a complete mess of things my sense would be all bets are off for the next four years.
Good piece. Two parallels that struck me from the UK:
1) Coal shows energy really matters over the long-term. The Tories still have not made the kind of gains in former coal mining seats that the Republicans have in Appalachia, because it was Thatcher who crushed the coal industry and broke the back of the National Union of Mineworkers almost fifty years ago and this is still remembered today.
There are these two sides of the equation for energy - almost all working class voters nationally rely on cheap energy consumption for their households and employment, so it matters everywhere. But there are also specific places and regions where cheap energy production is the only route to high wage and high status working class employment. These latter regions are very aware of this and swing on this politically. Both together mean energy has outsize scale, efficiency, and persistence in voter memories as a election policy issue.
2) Iraq was still politically central in 2010s UK too. Corbyn's election to Leader of Labour in 2015 and its turn to the Hard Left was only possible because he was seen to have integrity on Iraq and his opponents were discredited.
If not for Iraq, then I think Tony Blair would clearly be seen as a huge success even if Labour narrowly lost power in the wake of the financial crisis. But Iraq both led to defections to the Lib Dems and also supercharged Corbyn.
Unfortunately I think internationally it served as proof that we were who a lot of people deeply suspected we were and domestically as proof that there was truth to a lot of the worst suspicions the broader public has about the competence of our government, including the parts that are supposed to be thought of even by conservatives as working well i.e. the national security establishment. For all of its fading from public discourse I think it's going to be huge in the history books as the instance in which we prematurely ended the unipolar moment.
It also shapes the UK political memory. Mention Blair and most UK political observers and commentators will think of 'Iraq' next (or vice versa) - it's what he, and therefore the 97 - 10 Labour government, are remembered for more than any other policy. Even though of course it took forward many major domestic social and economic policies. And as mentioned, this is especially true of the millennial generation.
Blair gets presented like he invaded Iraq single-handedly by some of his opponents. In reality if Britain didn't join the overwhelmingly likely outcome is that the invasion goes ahead. So I'm really not sure it was a particularly consequential decision by him.
From the perspective of UK voters, it's pretty much correct that he was singlehandedly responsible. UK voters aren't upset that Iraq was a shitshow. They're upset that Iraq was a shitshow and _the UK was a part of it_. An Iraq invasion without the UK is a significant improvement from the perspective of Britons.
A position which I think many here will agree with is that this sort of "clean-hands" approach to politics is foolhardy.
A part of the story is that Blair pressured Bush to exhaust all attempts at taking the Iraq invasion through the UN process, but that Bush required Blair to be fully on board before doing so. That is plausibly the correct utilitarian call from Blair, but vanishingly few British voters care (or, in fairness, are aware of it at all).
Are we interested in *popularism* or not? In the UK, unlike the US, the Iraq War was unpopular pretty much from the start, it didn't take years for opinion to flip. Even in the earliest stages when you could just about find a polling majority to say they supported it, it was clear it wouldn't last.
I remember when French fries in the Capitol were renamed "Freedom fries" to protest France's refusal to go along with the US on Iraq.
I don't know whether the UK could have tolerated being ostracized by the US like that, and my guess is that the UK would have lost significant international influence if it had given up on the "Special Relationship."
Apologies if my message was slightly unclear. I mean that the people who feel that way are silly, but I believe in popularism and think we should definitely make decisions that capitulate to people's silly views when necessary.
This is wrong. He was viewed as very necessary to provide at least some international support for the US position. You forget how many countries opposed it.
Partially yes. If Blair had come out against the Iraq war, it would have been the US alone and would have been very different, both domestically and internationally. Lots of people trusted Blair more than Bush. Would it have stopped the war? Impossible to say.
I don't think it stops the war, but I think Blair was a big believer in "the special relationship" and if he had opposed Iraq it's very possible the American right would have turned against the special relationship (which is based on extremely tenuous historical grounds-- Britain actually spent the first 100 years of our history trying to undermine us over and over!).
I'm an American who'd been living in Britain during the two preceding (UK) elections. Tony Blair and Colin Powell persuaded me that the Iraq war was a good idea.
I also doubt Blair's opposition would have made a difference, but unless he actually, really, truly believed what he was saying (always in question with Blair) then I wish he'd let the US make their own mistakes on their own. The UK, as the junior partner, always had more to lose from being wrong.
I don't know if it would have moved that many, but I was in law school during 2002-03 (i.e., I was surrounded by people substantially to the left of the median American voter) and I routinely encountered people who supported launching the Iraq War with some variation of, "I don't trust anything George W. Bush says, but Tony Blair says there's something there . . . ."
Japan's sending PlayStations. Stankonia says they're willing to drop bombs over Baghdad. Riggity Row is coming. Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation...
Blair spends a lot of his domestic political capital on not just participating in the war but presenting it as a dual American-British invasion. Whether this was necessary for the war to happen or not it's very costly for Blair's reputation and his allies in the Labour Party.
As you say, trying to summarize 25 years of American politics in 2,500 words is going to leave out a lot. So I appreciate the attempt. But as an overarching narrative I think you’re missing the boat here. The key dynamic really my entire life is the following; do swing voters think of you as an “outsider” or “insider”.
2000 is probably the first election I have strong memories of. And you know what sticks out most to me besides Florida?* “Strategery”. But as much as SNL poked fun at Bush’s malapropisms in retrospect it helped him places like West Virginia; he didn’t talk like a stiff Senator (a la Gore), he talked like a”one of us”, he seemed line someone you “wanted to have a beer with” (remember that?).
And so it goes with an interesting exception of 2020. In 2004, Kerry is the indecisive wind surfer who in classic senate insider tradition doesn’t even know what he believes (remember key phrase from that time period “I voted for it before I voted against it”.).
And so it goes. Obama by virtue of his background and by virtue of not staying in the senate long is the fresh faced outsider. And in 2012, Romney was “Bain Capital” and then made the mistake of nominating the symbol of GOP insider politics Paul Ryan.
2016 is the place I really depart from you. I remember that campaign and that primary. Iraq war was not at all in an issue. But you know what I remember most? Clinton getting raked over the coals for speaking fees to Goldman Sachs. The fees didn’t matter. It was an ultimate symbol that she was for the ultimate elite “vampire squid”, she was the ultimate “insider”.
2020 is the outlier I think because Trump is the ultimate outlier. He is such a scumbag that just not being Trump was enough to win. Also, as I’ve repeated many times; COVID is going to be seen as the ultimate black swan event for everything; crime, job loss, traffic fatalities and yes inflation. And because of that last one + people having the memories of fly, swing voters turn to the outsider…again.
Lesson for 2028 Dems. Don’t nominate a sitting senator or former VP!
*I should say we are making a lot of narrative calls here based on a handful of votes. Given there is a real possibility that if recount could actually have gone forward, Gore wins, it upends narrative. Just like a handful of votes in Ohio in 2004, handful of votes in Michigan, PA and Wisconsin in 2016. Heck Trump’s final margin is less that 1% in 2024. That’s not high! Be careful of overreaching narratives based on very close margins.
All the stuff about insider/outside and vibes and charisma and personality I do agree is in play, but also a lot of this stuff is post hoc rationalizations. If Obama had lost, then people would have attributed that to his aloofness. Because he won, people attribute it to his charisma.
If Obama had lost, his aloofness would not have been anyone's explanation. It would have been the conventional wisdom that America wasn't ready for a Black President.
His election now seems like an ordinary and expected thing, but at the time it was genuinely shocking and amazing even to people who voted for him, even though the polls said it was going to happen.
I was born in 1983. My mother likes to tell me there were three things that she thought impossible when I was born; peace in Northern Ireland, fall of the Berlin Wall and a black President. I would surmise that she though number 3 least likely. And my mother is a pretty progressive person (I don't say that to say she was against having a black president, quite the opposite. More that she was someone who probably more than most believed in society being able to change for the better).
I also bring this up as my lodestar as far as why a) I call myself a Progressive and b) why I'm still fundamentally hopeful for the long term despite my fear of Orange man part deux. All sorts of things we think so impossible or unlikely today are going to seem normal in 10-20 years if last 40 years of history is any guide. Tell someone in 2000 (to bring it back to this post) that gay marriage would be a) law of the land and b) accepted by majority of society (although with an underrated large minority still opposed) and that person would ask what drugs you're taking and if they could have some.
I was 46 in '08. The morning after the election I met my Black next door neighbor, who was probably 10 years older than me, as we were both getting our mail. I asked her if she ever thought that would happen in her life time, and she almost cried, and said "I hoped it would happen in my grandchildren's'."
Taking nothing away from your comment, but 2000 was a little late for shock on gay marriage. That year Vermont legalized civil unions, so you're maybe off by just a decade or so.
I will forever hold on to my belief in hope and change.
I think we largely agree. But I should unpack my 2000 comment a bit.
I went to undergrad at William & Mary. At the time VA was still solidly red. And definitely SE VA (though student body was disproportionately from NoVa DC suburbs and definitely leaned democratic. Harbinger of VA’s blue turn). So local area, local tv, local everything had a pretty heavy evangelical influence. Throw in GWB running (and governing) as an out and out “Born again” Christian (I remember some particularly cringe worthy David Brooks columns about how mega churches were the future and how rights should be based on family not individual (not kidding). Yeah the terribleness that’s “Bobos in Paradise” didn’t come out of nowhere) and you can see why the idea of gay marriage being accepted as much as it is now is a surprise from the vantage of 2000-2001 me.
I should mention. I grew up in Massachusetts so hardly like I’m unfamiliar with lefty cultural views. If anything going away for school was a cultural shock in learning how conservative large swaths of this country truly was.
See my comment below. I actually agree with you on policy. I disagree with your Obama comment because he didn’t just win he won big.
And how is “this policy is what mattered” also not 20/20 hindsight. Your former boss is doing this now claiming 2024 was all about transgender issues and Kamala being too woke citing the campaign commercial Trump ran. I’m like “this is not how commercials work. Please listen to Kristen soltis Anderson. It’s not like millions of voters suddenly became concerned about sports issues. It was a signal that Kamala was a super leftist and supposedly still was.” Some true “pundit fallacy” stuff if I ever saw it.
"I disagree with your Obama comment because he didn’t just win he won big."
Isn't the size of his victory almost entirely due to the economic meltdown that happened in Summer/fall 2008?
As recently as early September before the election, McCain was polling ahead. But after Lehman Brothers, Obama surges ahead. If that happens in December instead of September, its a much closer election.
I think you're forgetting that McCain surge was just after the RNC convention. It was really only recently that conventions stopped having any "bounce" in polling. And it was Nat Silver who back before he got famous first informed me that polling bounces from convention was likely statistical noise due to polling response bias (either you're super pumped from the convention or temporarily depressed as the convention was a 3-day infomercial putting the best face forward of the candidate). It was also part of the Palin surge in August. She's a joke figure now (and in retrospect a canary in the coal mine figure), but she really did bring a lot of initial excitement to the ticket especially among socially conservative voters not super enthused by a pro-choice nominee.
Just a lot to suggest that even absent Lehman, Obama is likely winning by 4-5 points. Lehman, likely pushed it to the 8 point victory.
That being said, you don’t get modern Republican governance without a major crisis that they royally fuck up, so we should probably factor that into predictions for the future. The Great Recession, COVID, what’s next? If we still have democracy in 28, the Dems will win because the Republicans can’t govern for shit.
If you look at the polling before the conventions, then they are separated by 2-3%. Obama gets a polling bounce at the end of August that pushes him to be up 6%. McCain gets a post convention bounce that pushes him ahead. I think absent Lehman brothers et al. that it settles back down to being a 2-3% and Obama likely wins by that amount. But once Lehman brothers happens, the spread widens dramatically. Probably doesn't change the results in the Presidential election, but I think it makes a big difference down ballot in Senate and House races.
FWIW, I think there's actually a lot of evidence going back a long way (all the way to Martin Van Buren) as to "don't nominate the sitting Veep". Which is interesting because parties over and over again nominate the sitting Veep.
Since 1900, the sitting VPs who were nominated were Nixon 1960 (lost narrowly, probably due to election fraud), Humphrey 1968 (again, very close, in a chaotic period), not Mondale (wasn't a sitting Veep), Bush 1988 (won convincingly), Gore 2000 (lost super narrowly, probably actually won), Harris 2024 (very short campaign, very narrow popular vote loss).
So on the face of it, your rule would seem to hold, but this is still a pretty small N and the cases are idiosyncratic enough to suggest that they could have gone the other way. And also it may be that the sitting VP is the strongest candidate and you have done worse with someone else (I'd argue that for Harris, and Humphrey post-RFK assassination).
It might have revealed that they were not strong candidates otherwise, but I don't think Bush, Gore, or Harris win a primary battle without being a sitting VP so being one helped them.
I think maybe Dilan is saying that, as the party's candidate, they were weaker for being associated (as VP) with basically all of their predecessor's policies (for better or worse). I agree that the individual benefits from deference by other party figures to the VP, to the party's detriment.
In addition to what what Marc noted, there are four cases of VPs who took over due to the president's death and got their party's nomination. They all won reelection.
You could say the VP got incumbency advantage, but AFAIK the entirety of the incumbency advantage effect is due to incumbents being strong candidates (which is why they got elected in the first place). Kamala would not have been a meaningfully stronger candidate if Biden had resigned or died in July.
I think Harris would have been a stronger candidate if Biden had died in July - there would still be remaining sympathy vote for Democrats by November.
Uh, what? I don’t think people will forget the death of a president very quickly. Someone shooting at him but causing no significant injury is much easier to forget, because it leaves no lasting trace.
Every single one of Marc's examples was hurt by being sitting Veep. Which is the real point here.
No, they ARE weaker candidates. Parties just tend to justify dumb things they do when the smarter course involves taking on people who have a lot of power.
I don't think it's being VP that makes them weak. It's just that they're someone other than the top-tier guy who could actually win in a competitive primary (as opposed to winning by default as incumbent VP). People who couldn't win the primary tend to suck compared to people who did. It's why they didn't win.
There might also be a thermostatic effect where it's hard to run for your party's third term, but that would apply to most candidates from the incumbent party.
A non-VP could conceivably run really hard against the incumbent administration, but you know who can run even harder against the incumbent? The other party. And by running against the administration you fracture and demotivate your own party.
It's being Veep. You have the worst of all possible worlds-- responsibility for all the dumb stuff and bad outcomes your boss' tenure produced, with no ability to actually do anything about it or to say your boss was wrong.
It's a terrible job for a presidential candidate and parties should get smart about this and stop nominating sitting veeps.
I attribute his inability to build a lasting coalition off of his victory in part to his aloofness (though mostly to the inadequacy of ARRA and the disarray and complexity in passing Obamacare)
Howard Dean pursued the 50-state strategy in 2006 and 2008, and ran candidates in a lot of red seats, a small fraction of whom were able to benefit from surprising events. I forget who took over from Dean for 2010, but they dismantled a lot of that operation, and this was related to Obama’s aloofness.
It also should not be underestimated how well the Republican/conservative machine planned a strategy to prepare for and exploit the 2010 census set up for extreme gerrymandering in the states.
Nor overestimated. The redistricting allowed the Republicans to turn a very narrow loss in the 2012 popular vote into a fairly slim House majority. Apart from 2012, every election resulted in the winner of the national House vote winning a majority of seats. Gerrymandering doesn't mean much if you can't get the voters to support your party.
I don't think that holds on the state level. The Brennan center, which I don't think is terrible partisan listed a net 16 seat Republican gerrymandered advantage going into this year's election. And I didn't look up the stats, but I believe the result is worse at the state legislature level.
That was a pretty bad prediction the Brennan Center made going into the election. A 16 seat advantage? The Republicans wound up with 51.5% of the two party vote for the House, and 50.5% of the seats. In other words if gerrymandering had any impact (it didn't), it hurt the Republicans.
A lot of stuff amounts to post-hoc rationalizations but you've also got to admit that the larger structural/historical moment plays a role in whether an election becomes a policy debate (good times) or a "throw the bums out" referendum (bad times). Both Obama 2008 and Biden 2020 got a lot of tailwind from a "throw the bums out" environment surrounding, respectively, the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID pandemic.
Iraq came up prominently in the GOP primary. IIRC Trump was the one willing to say it was a mistake and basically ended Jeb's candidacy. I also think it has been a larger albatross on the neck of the establishment than plugged in political junkies appreciate. We had two back to back elite driven policy catastrophes in the form of the Iraq invasion and the 2008 financial crisis.
My recollection of 2000 is also a bit different than yours. I think the conversation was more like 'Bush and Gore are so similar it's unclear what differences we're voting on.' The oddness of Gore's personality had been a bit of a punchline for a while and there were a lot of post hoc 'people would rather have a beer with Bush' takes but I don't think it was that important in the moment.
Good point about GOP primary (should have noted that was part of my disagreement with Matt on this; it came up but on the other side).
Do agree that in 2000, this was probably the height of "the two candidates don't differentiate all that much on policy". Given this is post 90s glow of growing economy + rising wages + end of cold war, not surprising in retrospect this was the height of the neoliberal consensus.
But that actually buttresses my point. Gore wasn't particularly left wing on policy. One bone to pick with Matt I didn't bring up is his contention that 2000 being the first election climate change was on the ballot was important to 2000 outcome is...really undercooked to me. Citation please. It's not like environmental issues were new. Think Acid rain, think hole in the ozone layer, think clean water and smog levels. There's been a tension between blue collar workers and environmental movement going back really to the late 60s/70s. The idea in 2000 this was new just because of the Kyoto protocols and this caused West Virginia to shift right seems really undercooked as a theory to me. Feels like a place where Matt getting (mostly) unfair heat from super progressive environmental people is affecting his writing a bit.
Very good point on climate change and Kyoto. Gore's championing of (addressing) climate change came after the 2000 election not before. An Inconvenient Truth was... 2006! Excuse me I need to lay down.
You can also see references in his address upon receiving the nomination towards targeting the "big polluters" (which I assume would have been understood to include mining companies). See here:
Yeah. One thing I remember having lived through it is that despite him being nominally from TN, the idea that he is or ever was a TN person is a tenuous political fiction, and he was widely hated in our neck of the woods by the time 2000 came around.
Agree that her Goldman speeches were a bigger deal than her Iraq war vote - lots of other Democrats voted with her on that, after all. The speeches are mystifying - she gave them when she knew she wanted to remain a major player in national politics, and she should have known that while lucrative would be a major hindrance to future political ambitions (at least beyond the state of New York). So why did she do it? It’s not like she needed the money. It speaks to a level of entitlement that borders on political malpractice.
The money was part of it. But the bigger part is that *they are her people*. She has always been part of that cultural and economic milieu, ever since her days as a young attorney. Even Arkansas has its share of rich and connected people -- Waltons, Stephens, Hunts, Tysons -- and she was in that circle from an early age.
She was talking to Goldman because they liked her and she liked them.
And what's wrong with that? It's basically missionary work to persuade rich people not to fall for Republican "tax cuts for the rich and deficits" policy. We need more of it. There was no reason for Democrats to have "lost" Silicon Valley. Anyone that is pro-growth (really, not a claim as a cover for redistributing wealth upwards) should be welcome.
I think in light of the Great Recession peoples perception of high finance is not a good one. Remember, they got bailed out, the public got austerity.
None of that needed to have morphed into the anti Silocon Valley sentiments it has but I think there was an unwillingness to decouple the bankers and the people who liquidated your factory from the people who run successful businesses that employ Americans.
I don't think the anti Silicon Valley sentiment is that directly tied to the great recession/banking. It's that SV was supposed to be different from the big business that doesn't care about you. It was supposed to be fun and life affirming—"Don't be evil." People felt working for Facebook, Google, etc., was a moral good. Then people started to realize these companies would do anything they could to spy on you and manipulate you as their products became worse and worse. Nobody works for Google anymore because they think it's a social good anymore.
I hear what you're saying from a 40,000 foot perspective but I don't think 'we under stimulated' comes close to capturing what people went through. I also think a lot of the ongoing ripples from that failure in terms of how it delayed people from reaching adult milestones is the cause of the cultural rebellions we're still dealing with on right and left.
As a very Slow Boring position in the middle: the public likely experienced the failure to keep the construction industry afloat in 2008 as a kind of "housing austerity" that dug us deeper into what became the housing crisis of the 2010s and 2020s.
Key provision "July 29, 2011: The Budget Control Act of 2011 S. 627, a Republican bill that immediately raised the debt ceiling by $900 billion and reduced spending by $917 billion, passed in the House on a vote of 218–210."
I agree that is an effect of the Great Recession, but the mechanism is more indirect.
a) Financial firms’ stockholders and managers should not have been bailed out; it creates bad incentives going forward.
b) But bailing out the liability holders of those firms would have required very vigorous Fed action to accomplish and more to prevent inflation expectations from falling below target. The “bailout” did not lead to the fall in real income; that was just a Fed mistake.
c) “Finance” is also the intermediary for
i) the increased competition from abroad for some firms and industries resulting mainly from the fall in shipping and international communications costs and
ii) the exchange rate consequences of the US shift from being a capital exporting to a capital importing country partly becasue of rising fiscal deficits.
The Left’s list of usual suspects — “financialization” and “trade liberalization” are in fact, not guilty.
Yeah, and also the negative coverage on the speeches, and emails, and clinton foundation... it was all pretty normal stuff but unfortunately I think it got traction mostly because she had been around for so long and so much stuff had piled up.
I liked Matt's piece, but I think the paid speeches to large banks were a bigger problem for Clinton than the Iraq war. For the Millennials who bore the brunt of the bad labor market of the great recession, it was instrumental to them turning toward more radical anti-establishment politics, a visceral demonstration that the establishment was corrupt, and did not take their problems seriously. Bernie Sanders taking college debt as a first tier economic issue also earned a lot of loyalty from the same generation. That more than anything else was the genie that never got put back in the bottle.
Well, I think this is kind of the very base-level political disagreement: do vibes and personality matter more than policy positioning, or does policy matter more than vibes and personality? It's clear that Matt fundamentally believes that policy positioning is more important than things like whether the person you nominate is an insider or an outsider or whatever.
Like, I'm sure that Matt would concede that personality, vibes, communication style, personal positioning all matter on the margin, but his very-often-stated belief is that fundamentally they're less important than policy position-taking. For example, he's very consistently stated that he thinks that Trump won in 2016 largely by taking a moderate policy position on social security and healthcare (and being relatively hardline on immigration, while the Republican orthodoxy was vice versa, and Matt thinks that the Republican orthodox position was politically unpopular).
I should note that while I’ve been a little critical of Matt from a left perspective in general I agree that moderating on policy probably matters. It’s why I had that footnote; a lot of any narrative of the last 25 years changes with the shift of an extremely small number of votes.
I think the sweet spot is clearly Barack Obama in 2008. He won in part because of Bush fatigue and is final margin was likely boosted by the market crash. But having said that he still likely wins by at least 5% in popular vote. And that’s likely because he was both the fresh faced outsider AND as Matt notes he took a decent number of moderate positions (there is a reason Andrew Sullivan loves him and considers him temperamentally “conservative”. The latter observation is probably correct.
Obama is the “slow and steady progress, but let’s not smash the machine” voice. It’s little c conservative that is popular in the absolute sense, but which encounters difficulties in a world of hyper-partisanship for Republicans (40% of the country won’t see the conservatism before their very eyes) and factional fighting amongst Democrats (the young progressives refusing to accept that little c conservatism isn’t the same as Republicanism and preferring to rule over the ashes of a failed Democratic campaign than winning with a centrist).
I think this is a bit of revisionism, based on 6 years of a divided Congress that tried very hard to reign him in. In 2008, Obama was the guy of "Hope and Change." The campaign was able to deftly sell their talking points as 'common sense', which was helped by Bush's incredibly low approval rating. However, I think that this speaks to the outsider dynamic that Collin is talking about.
Name one statutory proposal endorsed by Obama that you consider radical? Affordable Care Act?
Republicans ran on and spent their political capital wisely on creating that narrative, using other Democrats (usually not elected Democrats) and some thinly veiled racism. But on the whole, Obama governed as a centrist Democrat.
What's probably hard to determine, long-run, is whether Obama came across as progressive because he was secretly intending to inaugurate 2020s progressivism as we know it, or because the Bush Administration was the height of movement conservatism and practically anything would have looked progressive in that context.
My view is that Obama did the second one intentionally and the first one unintentionally: today's progressivism is a movement that started forming in backlash against the Bush years.
Thanks for the correction. I think my point stands; 1.5% margin is not by historical standards particularly large. But worth being correct about these things.
"2016 is the place I really depart from you. I remember that campaign and that primary. Iraq war was not at all in an issue."
I think the Iraq War was a huge issue for a certain slice of voters in 2016 even if it wasn't a major issue in the overall campaign. One of my great frustrations was dealing with anti-interventionist conservatives and libertarians who were convinced to the point of hysteria that they had to vote for Trump because Clinton would launch a war against Iran and/or start WW3 by declaring a no-fly zone over Syria and shooting down Russian aircraft.
Worth remembering that the Obama admin was looking for approval for a much more serious intervention in Syria in 2013 and only backed down when it became clear the votes weren't there in Congress.
If you don't want to intervene, the easiest way to insure that you don't have to is to go to Congress and demand that they get on board for an intervention.
I'll allow the "9/11 and Pearl Harbor" exceptions to my rule. Maybe the William Randolph Hearst yellow newspaper exception as well. But that's it. No more exceptions to my rule. None.
This reads like a post-hoc rationalization. If some outcomes had been different, it wouldn't be hard to argue that Kerry was more an outsider than Bush, that the "Maverick" McCain or businessman Romney were more outsiders than life-time politician and "organizer" Obama, or that hasn't-had-a-real-job-in-12-years Biden was more of an outsider than current-sitting-president Trump. I'm not saying you're completely wrong, just that I don't think it's a strong argument.
And FWIW, I remember Iraq coming up frequently in 2016 during both primaries and the general.
" I also think Democrats’ read of Sanders’s relative success underplayed the extent to which his best issues were mainstream Teens Democratic issues like Iraq and LGBT rights. "
One other nit. I think it's time, in 2025, to stop saying "LGBT" unless we are talking about an issue where the trans and gay aspects are really congruent.
In 2016, the issue was still GAY rights. GAY rights had become popular. Almost nobody in mainstream politics was even talking about trans people. When trans issues gained salience, it turns out they are far less popular than gay issues.
The theory of LGBT groups (there, the designation is appropriate) is to assume that trans and gay rights are bundled together because that was convenient for their activism. But they obviously raise very different substantive issues (prisons! children! sports!) but just as obviously the public doesn't see them as one muddled mass.
Sanders' success had something to do with the fact one of his best issues was gay rights. But it had nothing to do with trans rights. So saying it was "LGBT rights" is inaccurate.
Mainstream politicians definitely were talking about trans rights in 2016? The bathroom bill in North Carolina happened that year and not only was that a major news story that mainstream politicians responded to, I'd argue the political effect was an example of the public basically treating it the same way they were treating gay rights at that point. The business boycotts led to backlash against the state government and not the businesses, the only two Republicans in North Carolina who lost statewide in the general election were associated with the bill, Kasich and Trump (the main two GOP candidates who were signaling some distance with the religious right) both said they thought it was overreach. Things have changed since; I'd argue that as gay marriage is more distant as a political issue, people don't default to the same "Republicans are too extreme on these issues and we should live and let live" starting point (though even now, trans issues have proven less effective at winning elections for Republicans as they've hoped). But arguing that the "LGBT" lumping was just about elite coalitional politics and didn't impact public opinion is clearly an overstatement.
The bathroom bills were definitely an issue, but they weren't what was driving support for Bernie Sanders. Gay rights, on the other hand, and the recently won fights on marriage, were.
I think LGBT is OBVIOUSLY about elite coalitional politics and the tethering of issues. Think about this-- it started as gay, then gay and lesbian. Why? Lesbians, after all, called themselves gay. But they had to be separated out. Then GLBT. Trans people are different than gays. Then LGBT. Have to mention lesbians first. Then LGBTQ. Because lots of straight young people want to falsely identify with less boring sexual orientations than they have. Than LGBTQIA2S+. Etc.
It's clear this is elite driven activism and coalitionism, just like BIPOC and Latinx are. And it conflates very different issues (and in the case of Q and A, things that are mostly BS).
At the time of the first bathroom bills, trans activists hadn’t really been perceived as overreaching. I hadn’t even heard of puberty blockers or they/them pronouns in 2016 and I’m pretty plugged in!
Matt mentions, but does not center, the turn toward identity politics and -- to be blunt -- an anti-white and anti-male set of policies beginning with the 2nd Obama term. This movement continued through the Clinton campaign and the Biden administration, leading (IMO) to a stronger showing by Trump than his policy moderation alone would explain.
Not sure what you are referring to in Obama’s 2nd term here exactly. My sense was always that Obama was always extremely careful not to do exactly that.
Thus began the pivot from "No Black America, No White America" to "Black Lives." You can call the earlier slogan "merely aspirational," but it was the very vision that gave us our first Black President -- and to many voters, the pivot looked like a bait-and-switch.
I think very few voters have any idea about it but that it is what super charged the 'woke' (or whatever) administrative apparatus in universities that then spread into the larger culture and peaked (hopefully) in 2020. That's the difference between the women's studies professor has some radical takes and various non professor deans and administrators are going to try to implement her radical takes through an often directly or indirectly publicly funded bureaucracy.
Lots of people voted for Obama to put an end to notions of "Black America" and "White America." How do you think they felt about then being lectured on "Black Lives"? In voting for Obama, they were voting to be done with "race."
Have you also wondered why affirmative action keeps losing (despite Democratic Party support) when put to a vote in deep-blue, "majority-minority" California?
I mean, Trayvon Martin was killed by a self-appointed neighborhood watch guy with a gun, not a police officer. I don't think expressing sympathy for this case is the kind of woke "Black Lives" lecturing that really exploded in 2020. It happened a few years before BLM, which began in Ferguson in 2015.
The die was cast with Trayvon, and people started to notice the subtle shift (the resurgent importance of whether someone "looks like me").
Obama was still President when BLM began in Ferguson in 2015 -- and when people saw that photo of Mike Brown slugging the (Asian-American) convenience-store clerk (and then the flames), many began thinking, "This isn't what I voted for" -- all the more so when they realized that "Hands up, don't shoot" likely was a lie.
I remember seeing a banner on a march through Oakland back then, reading, "Ferguson, Gaza, Worldwide Intifada!" Talk about foreshadowing!
(FWIW, I voted twice [enthusiastically!] for Obama -- and no, I didn't vote for Trump. In 2016, I cast a California write-in for Bernie, then voted for Biden, and then for Harris -- but [along with others in landslide proportions] in 2024, I wish I could have voted "None of the above." As we pick each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," the oligarchs [playing both ends against the middle] keep laughing all the way to the bank!)
IIRC during Obama's second term he tried to get some stuff done by executive order because Congress was full of obstructionist Republicans. It turned out the problem with governance by executive order is that the administrative state does a lot of bureaucratic fuckery nobody likes. You try to mildly improve civil rights law for certain protected categories via EO and you get a bunch of woke bureaucratic fuckery nobody likes.
As an exercise in curve-fitting, your focus on policy does a decent job of explaining the trajectory of the vote over the last 25 years.
But as an explanation of the vote, it seems inconsistent with the fact that polls and surveys routinely show that voters are shockingly ignorant about the policies and positions of the parties and candidates. Even directionally: consider the many Americans who blamed Biden for ending Row v Wade.
Your argument seems to be that the voters’ general appraisal of the parties’ positions is accurate, and explains their votes. But their grasp of policy details is so bad!! How do you square this?
Is this like a “wisdom of the crowd” phenomenon for low-info voters?
Its trickle down information theory DT. People interested in politics get a lot of information about the candidates and share that with people less interested. Certain things get repeated over and over again and stick. *Most* of the things that get repeated over and over, have *some* truth to them.
I think this rings especially true re Hillary. Low info voters weren’t tracking her voting record that long ago! And I believe she tacked to the center for the general.
I'm Matt's age, so this was a perfectly overlapping trip down memory lane for me to read. I definitely won't write 2,500 words on the subject, but I thought that I would write my own journey through this time in my adult political history:
--2000: Voted for Harry Browne. Don't remember who I voted for downballot. I was attending a hippie college that was fiercely debating the merits between Gore and Nader, and thought that Bush was History's Greatest Monster. I was taking an Everyone Sucks Here mentality, which of course is a very susceptible way to vote for a Libertarian candidate. Was, very, very mildly OK with Bush winning, which did not make me popular on some sectors of campus.
--2004: I regained popularity, though, after September 11th happened, because I became very, very antiwar. Was extremely pissed off at Bush, and voted for Kerry with no regret. However, I voted for Republicans in Congress as a desire to keep government divided, so that no one's agenda could get out of control.
--2008: Voted for McCain, but this time Democrats in Congress. I actually liked Barack Obama considerably, I even saw him speak in person in Boise that year, but I still thought that divided government was essential, and that the Democrats were highly likely to make gains in Congress (I was correct about that).
--2012: Flip flopped everything this time: Obama for president, Republicans for Congress, to maintain the status quo. Like Obama in 2008, I didn't have a lot of problems with Romney in 2012, but you had to vote against one of the major party candidates.
--2016-present: ...Donald Trump? Are you fucking kidding me? How on earth did this guy even win the nomination? And he's making me vote for Hillary Clinton? Ugh. I have never been so wrong about an election than I was about 2016. I still think at how shocking that year was to me. Been voting a straight line Democratic ticket ever since, except for an occasional vote for Mike Simpson here or there, as at least he's a bog standard normie Republican, and I don't need to see my district turn into the shitshow that's the one to the west of me.
--Onward: The Common Sense Democratic Manifesto sounds like common sense to me, make it so. Even while I anticipate that it's going to call for a position on immigration that's much out of line with what I think is correct on the merits--I hate how defeated I feel that what I think is the correct take is super unpopular.
This is very interesting to see someone who deliberately votes for gridlock and ineffective government. Do you ever vote on foreign policy, or is domestic policy always paramount?
Many people don't like the biggest proposals either side has. What if you don't want to ban abortion, but also don't want universal single payer healthcare. Realize capping credit care rates at 10% means that you won't get a credit card, but think that the CFPB needs to be out there stopping scams. Don't think that student loans should be forgiven, but also want student loans to continue being subsidized by the government. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point.
Lot of voters with mixed ideological views on what government should do regarding different things.
I agree! Which is why you get many people deciding that divided government is the best so that only stuff that both parties agree on move forward. It stops the radical stuff from either party happening. It also makes basic governance challenging as well, and people get upset about that and switch presidential votes.
CoT comes off as the median American voter who almost certainly prefers a deadlocked to a hyper-productive government. Americans in general don't like it when the government does stuff, except in crises and emergencies. (Once stuff gets passed, though, they tend to like it after a while. Just not at first.)
Voted, in the past tense. I'm different now then I was in my 20s and early 30s, when I was distrustful of the agendas of both major parties. Granted, the Trump era has been an aggravating factor.
Effective for what? I think it really depends on what your goals are. Divided government in that respect may reduce spending, but limited spending isn't the right call in all situations.
Not in all situations no. But given our current debt load and imminent entitlement crisis it certainly is.
I also strongly maintain that any big changes to laws need to be bi-partisan.
That tends to result in better thought out laws were we take the other sides criticisms into account and are more likely to avoid unintended consequences.
I don't think it is actually that simple. Right now we don't have divided government. We have a Republican congress and Republican president. So it's very likely that we will have large increases in debt and more spending.
Yes that's my point. The only time in the last couple of decades where we've seen spending controlled at all is divided government. Republicans in control of congress and Dems with the presidency.
Every time Republicans control everything they forget all about fiscal control (not that I expected any from Trump)
The split the ticket to keep government divided makes no sense to me. It's a heavy bet that your choice for President is a guaranteed winner, because if not, all you're doing is supercharging the Presidential winner.
It seems closer to me like a refusal to acknowledge there are only two choices and you have to decide which is better and worse.
1. This is too sanguine about the prospects for the Senate, which is somewhat surprising since that's a theme. If we brought back Byron Dorgan and Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nighthorse Campbell (naming some guys for elder millennial political junkies) they would lose today, with their 2006 positions. This is about changes in the issue environment, changes in political knowledge and communication, changes in demographics, etc.
2. One thing that's underrated here is the way that the issue environment can change in a way that's bad for Democrats and makes them seem to have moved left without that being something they did. For example, climate and trans rights have both increased in prominence over the last 20 years, but a lot of that is about changes in the climate and changes in the information environment respectively. The world is changing faster than many people want it to, which leads them to conservatism, but that's not actually something that Democrats can stop.
"If we brought back Byron Dorgan and Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nighthorse Campbell (naming some guys for elder millennial political junkies) they would lose today, with their 2006 positions. This is about changes in the issue environment, changes in political knowledge and communication, changes in demographics, etc"
I don't think this is true. People just forget how conservative those guys were!
In 2006 Ben Nelson got the endorsement of the NRA, the Chamber of Commerce, and National Right to Life. I am deeply skeptical that they would endorse him if he ran again with the same positions as in 2006 (even leaving aside the vote for the ACA which anti-abortion people were very mad about). Notably, Joe Manchin did not get endorsements from those groups in 2018, and they did endorse his opponent.
The decline of ticket-splitting is a part of the general trend toward polarization which is mostly about voters making _more rational_ decisions according to their own preferences. That's a very hard cat to put back in the bag.
Rationally speaking, we're not that far off from a world where each party's leader in the House and Senate calls all the shots and the role of the individual members is simply to elect the leader. If you think of it that way, the choice of who to vote has nothing to do with what stances an individual candidate takes on specific issues, and everything to do with which party they represent and which stance the party takes.
Not surprising that more and more people on both sides are wising up to this.
Right, ticket splitting is usually a bad idea if you have actual public policy preferences. It's just that our political system basically doesn't work if everyone realizes this.
Agree with this, and the point about voters becoming better informed about the downstream consequences of their vote, the decline in ticket-splitting, greater awareness of the importance of confirming judges etc etc is all stuff that Matt has (correctly IMO) argued in other posts.
Sorry Matt but I don't think you're being realistic here. Pryor and Lincoln lost, and pretty badly too, in 2014 and 2010, respectively. As did Mary Landrieu in 2014, and Heidi Heitkamp in 2018. Byron Dorgan would have lost in 2010 had he run for reelection (Hoeven, the Republican who replaced him, was leading in the polls before Dorgan said he wouldn't run for reelection).* Heck, Manchin almost lost in 2018 despite it being a strong Democratic year.
I don't know if it would be possible to reassemble the conservative wing of the democrats that existed in the south essentially as a historical artifact of the civil war but it's worth a shot because what would the alternative be?
I don’t think this is true. Consider the issue from an inverted perspective: look at a completely dominant state Republican Party such as Texas. Are there significant fissures within the party? Yes! Many elected state Rs were ready to throw Paxton out. The question might then be, what would it take for someone like eg former TX House speaker Ben Strauss to run as a Democrat? That’s the shape of the problem.
My thought is that even in a place like Texas there is an array of positions along the (oversimplified) axis, and we can see presently that there is a substantial degree of disagreement within the seemingly impregnable Republican majority. Moreover, the type of "dispossessed R" politicos Strauss exemplifies (or exemplified at one point) are not far removed from folks that were not so long ago conservative or even centrist Democrats. I don't think (agreeing with you here) that some cryogenic resuscitation of Mark Pryor would do the trick here, but the question is could someone else, certainly barely recognizable as a caucus colleague of AOC or Elizabeth Warren, sneak in there? What made Democratic candidates that were active just 15 years acceptable to majorities of Arkansas voters?
The "issue space" seems to me just a way to say that "no Democrats can ever deemphasize these issues", but I may be misunderstanding. If the issue space has its own inescapable dynamic, a party that consistently loses the Senate 60-40 will have an existential impulse to reposition on the issues themselves to avoid that.
1. Arkansas voters 15 years ago were less informed about how to translate their views into vote choices and/or they chose their votes with other aims in mind (such as institutional loyalty).
2. The parties were less polarized across the issue space in general so it was less easy to just pick the party you're closest to.
3. The issues that were important in national debates divided people in Arkansas more closely.
He's part Native American and received "Nighthorse" as part of a Cheyenne tribal naming ceremony. (I met him long ago and he's a very personable guy, probably similar to what I've been told speaking one-on-one with Bill Clinton was like.)
The flaw in this analysis is to ignore 2006. Bush was wildly unpopular by 2006. Kay Hagan was elected senator from North Carolina by a six point margin. Congress went heavily Democratic over all--that's why Obama could pass his health care bill in 2009. McCain was facing a huge headwind even without the economic meltdown of fall 2008. Iraq and Katrina had done huge damage to the Republican brand.
“[Hillary] was defeated because by 2016, mainstream Democrats thought her 2003 vote for the Iraq War and her husband’s 1990s support for things like the Defense of Marriage Act were dumb.”
Hillary did as well with Democratic voters as a generic Democrat. She won 90% of Bernie primary voters, which is right about average for supporters of a defeated primary opponent candidate.
Hillary lost because she got crushed with the white working class. Harris also lost because she got crushed with the white working class. Yes, Harris also did poorly with Latinos, but there are 3 or 4 white working class voters for every Latino voter and white working class voters dominate swing states.
Matt seems reluctant to admit that female coastal elites have alot of trouble with white working class voters in swing states. I suspect female candidates have to pander just as hard as Obama to succeed with this demographic. A dude who lives in Redding Pennsylvania and drives a truck might vote for a cool girl who shows some affinity for working class culture, but neither Hillary nor Harris came close to doing so.
"Matt seems reluctant to admit that female coastal elites have alot of trouble with white working class voters in swing states."
I'm not reluctant to admit it at all.
But what I think is the conventional wisdom overstates the extent to which this trouble connecting is about vibes and personality versus position-taking on issues.
I think Waltz fails on vibes as well. Both Tim’s seemed to be female coastal elites idea of who middle America should like and not actually the real thing.
I appreciate the clarification. Yet I still don’t think Hillary lost because Democrats were disaffected with her support for the Iraq war or her husband’s support for DOMA.
She likely lost a few votes to Trump over Iraq -- but her husband's support for DOMA (contrasted with his own pecadillos and her support for gay marriage) reflected the Clintons' lack of authenticity rather than a matter of policy per se.
My intuition, supported by looking at where Bernie did well in primaries, is the Bernie voters Clinton lost were populist, anti-elitist sorts, not the kind of highly engaged person who held grudges over the Iraq war 13 years later.
My first election was 1996, so I am right there with you and think you nailed it, with one gap:
The missing theme is globalization (along with the financialization of the US economy and the general ascent of unrestrained monopoly, all under the theory that the only issue that matters is lower prices for consumers. "The Walmart Effect", in a nutshell.
These views were all ascendant in the Reagan era and the Democratic Party's view was still, at the time, "buy American". (I was a kid, but we were a union household in NYC, which also tended to be out ahead of the rest of the country because its manufacturing base was gutted and sent south in the 60s and 70s, an experience that the rest of the country got to start experiencing in the late 90s).
There was a debate to be had in the late 90s on whether this was all a good idea: NAFTA, China WTO / Preferred Nation status, offshoring, outsourcing, Glass Steagall, etc. However Clinton decided not to have that debate and when he got out ahead on accelerating Democratic adoption of these policies, he may have helped himself with in 1996 when people were still excited about Walmart Prices (and so shortly after global Communism was defeated), but he opened the door for the cries of "the parties are the same!" and gave 2016 Trump an opportunity to make Democrats own these issues through political amnesia.
People could interpret "Hope and Change" in 2008 however they wanted (the same type of thing we are seeing with "Make America Great Again" now between the tech bros and the red hats). Many (myself included) expected a repudiation, or at least a debate, on globalization and financialization, especially considering the financial crash. We never got it. The democrats punted on the MOST salient political issue. This plus Iraq is why Hillary lost the primary, IMO.
Then in 2016 Dems nominated Hillary and punted again on the big debate of our time, the one everyone really wanted to talk about. The thing that should have been the big division between the parties since the early 2000s which they were instead completely aligned on even as the US population as a whole slowly got more and more against it.
Then came Trump. The first candidate to truly bring salience to the issue. He did so obliquely instead of head-on, but he was anti-China, and anti-Immigration (NAFTA / globalization).
Now China and deglobalization are THE questions of the day because we are suddenly realizing that we went way too far even from a basic national security standpoint.
Trump set aside popular fights with Social Security and Medical, neutralized the debate on abortion, and continued to be the only candidate talking about things even tangentially related to The Big Debate.
Yeah, I think this part of the political economy explains more of it than we'd like to admit. America, and the whole world really, is reckoning with its creation of the consumer economy that is at the underlying logic of basically all financialization and trade in the world.
It's not really a "good" or "bad" thing exactly, but it seems like no one really wants to talk about it. I always tell my friends, the South Park "THEY TOOK OUR JORBS" joke is funny, but it's also...like just true? The American capitalist, with full support from the American government, basically committed to exporting the American manufacturing sector out of the country.
And it's been sort of good? For some many Americans who have easy access to Dollars and cheap goods, definitely. For the Chinese worker, obviously. But there's been a concentrated harm amongst the American population. That population probably wouldn't even really care about the history, or political-economy, or whatever, but I think it's at the heart of about 20 years of American politics.
I always thought the South Park "TURKER JERBS!" thing was supposed to be sympathetic with the flannel-wearing redneck right up until 2017 when it morphed into "YOU WILL NOT REPLACE US!" with Nazi flags. Even then, South Park had the best take on the issue, accurately highlighting that the real issue was how to deal with technology and industrial automation.
It was a bad thing. One thing Trump has right is that America has a responsibility to put America first. Chinese people shouldn’t factor into our moral calculus at all, they sure don’t give af about us!
(I think we owe Latin America something, though, but we didn’t do shit to China except liberate them from the Japanese and they should pay tribute not be our competitor)
“The American capitalist, with full support from the American government, basically committed to exporting the American manufacturing sector out of the country”
That shows that the US Manufacturing sector has maintained its productivity. That's a great thing, but not really what my point is.
The manufacturing sector has fallen from around 31% of private sector employment to around 9.9% today. That's for a lot of reasons, and a lot of Americans benefit from the consumer economy today. Is anyone disputing that form low-value/low-tech manufacturing jobs have moved away from our shores to other nations. Our economy has become more "efficient."
I guess your comment drives at the OPs point. No smart people in either party want to really reckon with it.
I don't think I advocated the return of every low value or low-tech manufacturing job to return to America.
But if it happened, I think America would have a lower unemployment rate, you'd have less private and government debt, and you'd have lower real wages in aggregate as goods became more expensive.
I think you would also have a much more rational materialist politics in the United States. I also believe that consumers in other nations would generally be slightly richer. As with all things, it's trade off.
The current unemployment rate is 4.2% with a employment population ratio for ages 25-54 being over 80%. It hasn't been that high since the late 90s boom. How much lower do you think unemployment could go?
How would we have less private and government debt? Almost everything would be more expensive?
I also don't understand how you would have consumers in other countries be richer? Selling to the US drives a great deal of the world economy, and in turn allows them to buy goods and services from us.
If someone disputes that, they're an idiot. But if someone claims you can bring those jobs back, they're a con-man: even China doesn't have those jobs anymore because manufacturing is once again upgrading technologically. The problem is, and has been since the 19th century, how to empower workers to bargain for higher-tech, better-paying jobs.
Agree 100%! I was not referring to deglobalizing ALL manufacturing. Let H&M and Nike continue to manufacture wherever they do now. It's the high-end intermediate technologies that we need to bring within our borders. The CHIPS act was spot-on, but sold poorly amid a raft of everything bagel.
The actual reality of how this is going to play out is likely to be the GOP stumbling into it through tariffs or through conflict with China on Taiwan, and it will be ugly and inflationary. This is why Democrats need to position themselves TODAY as the "rebalance global capitalism" party.
Finally, RE: Obama from comments lower down: I never said he was unpopular. He was a cipher that promised change and brought the ACA. People were still itching for change after decades of dynastic neoliberalism, and the next Dem up was... Hillary. Obama had a window and he left wall street and Amazon and China alone and this is how Trump was able to flip the script to make the Dems the party of the Elite. Post-presidency Obama is also clearly invested in the elite status he earned his way into.
He was not unpopular but he left open a vacuum that Trump filled for many of his own voters.
The Golden Path was probably that Obama won the intra-Party struggles earlier in his first term and was allowed to fully rebuild the Party in his own image. What we got instead was that he was stymied in that project, leaving the Party all ready and set for a return to dynastic neoliberalism in Hillary 2016 once the uppity black man from Harvard and the socialist Jew from Vermont were out of the way.
I’ve said it here before, but Bernie’s too nice. The correct response was: “Hillary has a plan to end racism! That’s amazing! Hillary, what’s your plan to *end* racism?”
Instead, Bernie accepted that his supporters were a bunch of meanies, and signed up for hardcore identity politics. Hillary may as well have dropped a nuke on the Democratic Party.
But then shouldn’t Biden have been more popular with the working class? He had continued and even pushed forward more aggressive policies against China, and has supported big industrial policy initiatives around electric cars and semiconductors.
He never really got at the central issue though. He just nibbled around some of the issues on matters of policy. Lord knows he was no great communicator.
The theme needs to be managed deglobalization at all levels. That hits on national security, pro-market, competitive investments, pro-manufacturing, pro-border, anti-finance, better for wages, better for the environment... all winning themes of it's picked up as THE big central narrative. The big narrative football in 2024 was instead "Trump is a fascist."
Of course, now that the Dems are financed by big money they are scared to come out with any of these messages, but did out-fundraising Trump help at all? Only in the swing states.
If the Democrats want to win they need to stop fighting swing state by swing state and take a swing that puts counties everywhere back into play without laser-guided electoral campaigns. They need to put forth an agenda of abundance so that people feel a little less pressure and a lot more hope.
Forget figuring out why people voted for Trump or Biden. Figure out why people voted for OBAMA. What did they think was going to change and where did he let them down? This delayed debate over the role of global capital and globalization is what the country has been craving for 20 years.
"The theme needs to be managed deglobalization at all levels."
What does this mean in practice?
Voters just demonstrated that they really hate prices increasing, but deglobalization almost certainly means pretty dramatic price increases and generally an overall reduction of goods available the US citizens. You think that's going to be popular?
You say people felt let down by Obama, but he had approval ratings nearing 60% when he left office, and he probably would have won decisively in 2016 if he could have run for a third term. And he never really campaigned as a full-throated anti-globalist, though he was somewhat critical of finance and had populist, anti-corruption themes.
But anyway, I do agree that more populism and nationalism would be beneficial. That said, to put on my neoliberal hat, "managed deglobalization" would almost certain cause prices to go up, which as we've seen is politically disastrous. How is that overcome?
"This meant Obama’s second term disappointed progressives on substance, and progressive funders went about breaking down the veal pen and creating the groups."
One minor nit. The Groups have existed for as long as I have been politically aware. They certainly existed in the 1990's. One of my favorite stories about Bill Clinton is about how "the era of big government is over" became his big pull-quote-- well, the original quote was "the era of big government is over, but the era of every man for himself must never return". Which would have been VERY memorable but also very different. The second half got pulled out by Ann Lewis (Barney Frank's sister), a connected Dem operator who told Bill Clinton that the feminist groups would scream if he used that "sexist" language. Just a gift to the right wing over a stupid language issue.
But also-- yes, the Groups were powerful in the 1990's. The difference is they weren't ALL powerful. Bill Clinton DID bowdlerize his SOTU to keep the Groups happy, but he also did Sister Souljah, signed the crime bill, and pushed and enacted welfare reform.
The difference in the Biden-Harris era is it went from "the Groups are people we consult with and work with and sometimes do what they want while expecting they get behind our decisions" to "it's perfectly OK for the Groups to lie and call us racists and transphobes and climate deniers whenever we make a political decision they don't like, but we will still give them a seat at the table anyway".
I have this half baked thought that a major missing piece is Obama entering office as the "anti-war candidate" and leaving it as the "drone striker in chief." Seems like it poured a lot of fuel on the "America first" fires when he got UBL and then failed to declare victory and leave Afghanistan. A bunch of people formerly sympathetic to the anti-war left seem to now be affiliating with Trumpian nationalist/isolationist/protectionist agenda.
Maybe just even more broadly the arc of Obama's presidency being incredibly disappointing in a bunch of directions. Primary candidate Obama in 07/08 sold himself as so drastically different from actual President Obama it severely undermined the credibility of the Dems as a party. And then to top it all off they went and actually nominated Hillary to just finally put the last nail in the coffin of Obama-ism. A ton of people got behind candidate Obama in the first place because he wasn't Hillary, just like how they got behind Trump 2016. Still just an unfathomable failure to learn from what the voters were telling them.
I don't think that's right, people liked and continue to like Obama. In June 2016, Obama's net approval rating was +10. I think you're right that people disliked Hillary Clinton both in 2008 and 2016, but I don't think they soured on Obama like you're saying.
Obama's legacy is important to the narrative precisely because it's kinda weird. He came into office unusually popular by taking popular positions as a candidate and theoretically breaking the party away from the uniquely toxic continuity embodied by Hillary Clinton. He then tanked a lot of that good will by disappointing/antagonizing various constituencies that were energized by the break in continuity. Then, after losing the new car smell, he rebuilt some base of support as a much more establishment/continuity Dem in a manner that really locked in the realignment that gave us the Trump era. 2015/2016 Obama was more popular than 2011 Obama but had a much harder ceiling on his popularity that 2007/2008 Obama, and the party alignment he left behind has largely been a catastrophe.
Yea, anyone who thinks Don Junior is gonna be a thing is laughably out to lunch, but if anything RFK would be less relevant than Alex Jones if he wasn't a Kennedy, so I'm not really sure what the irony is supposed to be.
I heard Niall Ferguson on a podcast predicting the cementing of two families into a dominant political dynasty when Barron Trump weds one of Elon Musk’s daughters. Pretty sure he was joking.
I'm talking about Joseph Kennedy III losing a Senate seat in Massachusetts and the fact that there are, as far as I know, no Kennedys currently in elective office. He's now the Special Envoy to Northern Ireland. RFK Jr also can't win an election. Lara Trump just turned down the Senate appointment. This is very different from every Bush in creation turning up in office.
'Every Bush in creation' was like 4 right? Yeah ok Prescott Bush in the 50s but in the era we're talking about only Papa, Dubya, JEB, and George P? Am I forgetting one?
I think Neil Bush ran for a Texas house seat in 2022 but didn't make it to the primary runoff.
I understand the temptation of this opinion but empirically, very few people vote on foreign policy. I do think Iraq was to a large extent an exception to that, because it directly affected so many more people than most foreign policy issues, but the whole point of the shift toward drones is it allows countries to pursue their military aims in a less domestically unpopular way (because average voters don't really know it's happening).
The perceived failure of Obama to coherently/successfully depart from Bush era foreign policy is a substantial component of the Trump era party realignment. It's neatly slots in to the anti-globalist grievances of the working class white voters Dems have shed.
What does being "anti-war" mean in this context? Being anti-war on Iraq means that invading sovereign nations is bad. Being anti-war on Ukraine clearly means something else.
I'd like to see the same person who consistently argued against American involvement in WWI and Ukraine both; I imagine they'd be dead right now. In practice this is a lot of disparate groups, many of which weren't progressive at all.
The anti-intervention position was certainly considered progressive in Korea / Vietnam / other Cold War conflicts, because the anti-wars were accused of sympathezing with the enemy, which at the time was communists. But it wasn't true in WWII because the primary anti-interventionists were the America Firsters, who were (correctly) pegged as having been pro-fascist. Now that the Cold War is over and Russia is engaging in simple imperialist expansion, the anti-war people are lumped in with enemy sympathizers - same as ever.
"Primary Biden was still clearly visible on foreign policy, especially Israel, but on domestic issue, he wasn’t just more left-wing than swing voters were expecting — he was more left-wing than primary voters had voted for. I still don’t think we really know why any of that happened. But we saw quite quickly that sticking the Biden face on Warrenism wasn’t popular. "
I think we will find, as more people begin speaking freely about what went on in the White House, that the reason this happened is that Biden — a man who knew very well how to position himself at the ideological center of the Democratic Party — was less and less in control of his own administration. Individual staffers were able to drive the agenda with less oversight and they were not as adept at steering a steady, center-left course as the old man was.
Fascinating how central a small-ish Middle Eastern country (Iraq) was to our politics for so many cycles. And here’s the kicker- ask yourself which country - Iraq or Afghanistan - is better off now than at the turn of the 21st century? Pretty clearly Iraq right? Which is NOT to say that it was all worthwhile - that war had HUGE financial and more importantly human costs for the US and especially for the Iraqis. But I remember living through years of frustration that we were expending resources on the Iraq war while Afghanistan - “the good war” seemed to be languishing. I guess one rejoinder might be “well, we shouldn’t have fought either” but I really don’t think that was realistic- a hypothetical world where Gore wins but 9/11 still happens (the hijackers had been planning it for years, after all) still would have seen an Afghanistan war, but almost certainly not an Iraq one. Focused solely on outcomes for Afghanistan and Iraq, would that world have actually been better? I used to think so but now I’m not so sure.
Iraq has been better off economically and socially than Afghanistan, on average, for at least 500 years. I don’t think you can argue anything from that directly.
Kill OBL during the Tora Bora or Anaconda operations and get the hell out. Recreating Afghanistan as a modern 21st century nation was not in the cards and it was ridiculous that we ever thought that was our mission.
And, of course, never go into Iraq in the first place.
If you ask which was better off in 1985, Iraq or Afghanistan, it was also pretty clearly Iraq. And as James L adds, this advantage goes back for a long time, because Mesopotamia is a cradle of civilization that remained a center for millennia, and has had urban educated populations for centuries, while the mountains of Central Asia have basically always been frontier - even the Mughals moved their capital to the Ganges plain when they had a chance.
My point (which I guess I didn’t get across very well) was that in 20 years the US was able to make things better in Iraq (removing Hussein, stabilizing the society) and made no progress at all in Afghanistan.
I don't think the US "made no progress" in Afghanistan. It's just that getting to a stable government in Afghanistan is much, much harder than in Iraq for many deep-seated reasons that go back hundreds of years.
With hindsight, I think it's clear the right decision was to still invade Afghanistan, but then devote all the money that would have gone into Iraq into Afghanistan instead. Also crackdown more on corruption.
I'm trying to imagine what it would take for you to acknowledge that globalization writ large caused real and deep economic devastation in pockets of the American economy that was not remotely ameliorated by the division safety net, which produced understandable and unpredictable political resentment that has had lasting consequences.
I'd be interested to read whether you think uplifting of hundreds of millions of non Americans out of poverty was worth real and deep economic devastation in pockets of the American economy?
Leftists in general and communists specifically typically downplay nationalism for the good of the universal working class. There is no doubt that globalization has been good for the latter at the expense of some of the former. Do you support that?
I don't understand this. American workers are voters. They choose politicians who act on their behalf. For 90% of voters/workers, this has been a good thing. Should those 90% have been poorer because it wasn't great for 10%?
It hasn’t been a good thing that we’ve lost our state capacity and our social trust, even with marginally cheaper consumer goods for the 50-70% (not 90%) of folks that live in places that didn’t lose industry to China and Mexico.
We did not vote to deindustrialize and become a nation of service workers from a nation of producers - it was done to us, and people are rightly pissed about it.
What a crock of shit. People want contradictory things. They need to take some responsibility for their own lives. The government's not your fucking parent.
americans hate inflation though. I understand the critiques of the deregulatory program from basically 1975-2000 and the trade liberalization regime from 1990-about 2015 (when TPP got killed) but the critics have really not explained an alternative that would be better.
What Matt misses is the anxiety that blue collar manufacturing workers feel when they see their companies opening facilities in China and Mexico. Trump beat Clinton because Bill signed NAFTA and Obama was trying to push through TPP.
Trump could become deeply unpopular where anyone put up by Democrats wins in 2028, but the more likely outcome is that he becomes unpopular with the working class voters who thought he was going to do something for them. Aggressively going after his ties to Silicon Valley and Wall Street with an authentic blue collar candidate who’s somewhat economically populist would be the clearest path to victory in my opinion.
I think that's true. And if you go back further than Matt does, that had something to do with Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan (and has something to do with Trump as well).
But it doesn't work as a General Theory of the American Electorate, because the thermostatic stuff that Matt is talking about obviously had a major influence.
Appreciate the overview, but feels like we're missing the punchline. If I can infer:
The median American voter wants:
- moderation on cultural issues, especially salient trans issues such as parental consent and notification, trans athletics, and some degree of caution in the treatment of minors.
- a strong commitment to public order, namely a controlled southern border and a return to a more 90s style "tough on crime" approach
- an "all of the above" energy strategy that embraces and does not demonize the American fossil fuel industry
- a sense that they can "get ahead" economically, especially with housing and healthcare costs taking up painfully large proportions of household budgets
- a foreign policy that is clearly positioned as something in our interests (not on high minded appeals to "the global order" or JUST democracy/freedom), one that pushes our allies to be more obviously muscular, and otherwise avoids the excesses/debacles of the GWOT.
- a president that speaks in their vernacular and comes across as fundamentally authentic
More or less. But I do also want to admit that opinion can sometimes change. It seemed to many people in the winter of 2004-2005 that Democrats faced an insuperable obstacle around gay marriage in a highly religious society, but actually views shifted pretty rapidly (and America has become less religious). I think it's understandable that this gave a cohort of progressives excessive optimism about the plasticity of public opinion on other issues.
I think gay marriage shifted because advocates did the work of meeting public opinion where it was - the faces of gay marriage were aggressively normie gay and lesbian couples, in many cases with happy kids, just asking for the rights that come with marriage, especially around family issues like death benefits/pension transfers and end of life healthcare decisionmaking. And being gay/lesbian is relatively common, most people know a few. It wasn't a screechy pitch, it was a very small c-conservstive one that succeeded by making the anti-gay marriage crowd seem cruel. Yes a decline in religiosity was part, but I think the decline was already much further along than most people were willing to admit to pollsters between 2008 and 2012.
I recently spoke with a high level organizer who implied that every left cause should be treated like gay marriage. And if you keep pushing, the public will eventually accept the left position.
Such a dangerously wrong sentiment.
I think it kind of depends on what they mean by that. If it means to produce the equivalent of Will and Grace and Queer Eye (popular mainstream media where gay people are shown being fun and relatable without preachiness) then, yeah that probably won't get you there on every issue but I bet it would help.
But there's also a contingent that sees Stonewall as not just an important historical moment but actually the key to LGBT success and thinks if you just throw bricks at cop cars in support of a just cause you will win over voters.
Another key thing about the movement for gay marriage was the willingness to accept incremental advances and not cancel people for supporting half-measures like civil unions if it kept things moving forward. I remember seeing the comedian Guy Branham on a talk show once saying "I can get married now because Barack Obama lied about not supporting gay marriage."
But even then it won’t work with, for instance, guns, or else it would have worked by now.
I generally agree with this point. But also, I wouldn't exactly say there's a Queer Eye of gun control. There's a lot of media about how guns are bad and conservatives are ghouls for liking them, but it's no surprise that's not persuasive. And it's backed up by a lot of media where guns are cool.
So yeah, I agree we're not going to see a shift on on guns in the same way as gay marriage. But also I do think a similar approach probably pushes things in that direction.
That is a bunch of Overton window nonsense I keep seeing pushed by people who hold wildly unpopular opinions. It’s an excuse for them not even to try to understand others or communicate the merits of their position.
How does this person rationalize away polling that shows that Americans are *more* anti-trans than ever before? Pew has shown that fewer and fewer Americans see sex as mutable.
Seriously. And I just want to remind everyone to read the story about the plaintiffs in Obergeffell. Makes you weepy.
I think you are both right.
The messaging on gay marriage was GREAT. The Party got away from "we're here, we're queer, deal with it" and followed Andrew Sullivan's argument and argued gays were "virtually normal". The gay rights movement was the most brilliant American social movement of my lifetime.
But at the same time, there was a structural change. I think it was the Internet that caused it, by finally exposing much of middle American youth to the devastating arguments that organized religions were false, which only were encountered in the past by very few people in college philosophy courses. (Even now, the mainstream media publishes VERY few pieces arguing that stuff in the Bible didn't happen or didn't make sense and plenty of pieces that assume Biblical narratives are true.)
But whatever the reason,, America became more secular (and thus less accepting of Biblical claims that homosexuality was an abomination) at the exact same time the gay rights movement was doing its brilliant work.
And that's tough to replicate. (Although I would argue the trans movement should stop what it is currently doing and try it.)
To me the most critical and understated aspect of the gay rights movement's success is that at the end of the day it asked very little of people. Leave us alone also had a pretty strong foundation in the American character in a way affirm and accommodate just doesn't.
I think the distinction between "just leave them alone" and "affirm and accommodate" is perfect here, and for many civil rights generally. Well said.
I think this is a little simplistic. "Leave us alone" certainly bars enforcing bans on gay sex, but long before Lawrence v. Texas those laws had little to no enforcement. Asking for civil rights laws to protect LGBT people from discrimination requires something of other people (e.g., you have to extend spousal benefits to same-sex spouses, a place of public accommodation might sometimes have to host a same-sex wedding if it hosts different-sex weddings) and marriage itself requires affirmative acts of licensing and recognition from the government. It's not solely a libertarian issue.
All the more so when we move beyond strictly legal demands: it was (and is) important to the gay rights movement that parents affirm their gay kids, that religious institutions perform same-sex weddings (which they successfully persuaded most mainline Protestant and non-Orthodox Jewish denominations to do), that media move away from negative portrayals of gay people, etc. Every bit of this, legal and non-legal, was intensely controversial at the time (some of it still is) and lots of conservatives objected on the ground that it moved past "leave us alone" to "affirm and accommodate." Gay rights advocates still mostly won. It really was an ideological shift; most people just don't buy the premises of anti-gay ideology anymore.
I still disagree. I think the stuff you include in paragraph one all falls firmly into the 'leave us alone' camp. No one had to build or restructure any of the state and/or court administrative stuff to give licenses to married gay couples. The discrimination in employment or in commerce or what have you also did not require any affirmative action by anyone; it just said you can't fire and/or not serve people over this aspect of their personal lives. Maybe it codified not caring about something people were slowly becoming less inclined to care about to begin with but there's no law requiring anyone to take any particular position on the morality of gay relationships.
Now, I agree with you that there is a separate cultural project, parts of which remain controversial. But that is fundamentally separate from something like a state law requiring churches to perform and/or recognize gay marriages. I am quite certain that would still be unconstitutional and I see no path to changing that.
Yes, I always thought that calling for same sex marriage was too much “affirm and accommodate” to succeed. Particularly through a SCOTUS decision, it would be inviting the kind of backlash that occurred with Roe. I thought the better approach would have been “Get government out of the sacrament of marriage” and just redefine existing legal aspects of marriage as civil unions for everybody. It surprised me that a wasn’t necessary to take that approach.
I don’t think it was important to the gay *rights* movement that churches perform gay weddings, though this continues to be important to individual gay people and fought for by liberal wings of the mainline denominations. The gay rights movement was pretty clear that it was about civil rights not religious practice.
There's also a potentially interesting thread in there about the Internet leading arguments generally confined to academia to break contain and enter the broader public (without the necessary context to evaluate them correctly).
This is related to the point that Matt makes about his theory being simpler than the alternative. There’s always something appealing about learning that a simple theory other people believe is wrong. But as they say, a little learning is a dangerous thing, and it’s very common for people who first learn about complexity to think these second order effects are much more common and significant than they actually are.
https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf
The number of people reporting to be atheist changed from 2% to 5% from the 90's to the 2020's.
Instead there has been a massive fall off from people being part of "organized religions" to people being "spiritual."
And if you look at atheist demographics, they are dominated by younger white childless men. A notoriously leftish cohort for sure.
All to say, I don't think atheism has the explanatory power here.
There's a ton of soft atheism. People don't like the term, but if they functionally don't believe or even if they believe in something amorphous but think Christianity is BS, they are functionally nonbelievers for purpose of the gay marriage issue. You need doctrinal Christianity to think that homosexuality is an abomination.
"You need doctrinal Christianity to think that homosexuality is an abomination."
Have you looked at a map of the countries the ban gay marriage recently?
I'm going to agree with the soft atheism although I would frame it is modernist materialism. Part of the reaction to Christian views on social issue.
The problem is you don't need Christianity to be anti-gay. Parents want grandchildren; not all but enough. There is also a natural fear of homosexual predation among vulnerable men. I'm not saying this justifies discrimination against homosexuals, rather there are basic human intuitions that can lead to less accepting cultures without specific doctrine. You could make materialist, evolutionary arguments for both sides. This is where soft atheism let's you down, we can disagree on the correct ethics for a materialist framing and you're left with tribal politics.
Well, then we get into the whole "atheist vs. irreligious" thing. I think this is a distinction without a difference, but plenty of others do not.
Atheists as best I can tell tend to deny the spiritual world exists. While the irreligious will say I don't believe in Christianity/Islam/etc. but my dead grandma is definitely watching over me and I think tried to tell me I was making a mistake when I made this bad decision last year. I should have listened to her. Or the even more common, I'm not religious because I believe that organized religion is trying to hide the truth that all religions proclaim about love and instead they are just trying to control people.
It's tangential to your overall point, but I don't think it's right that the mainstream media doesn't run pieces that counter Biblical narratives. Mainstream outlets constantly run stories about human origins and the history of the universe that presume that science, not religion, is the right lens for these questions. It's also not difficult to find pieces about the history and sociology of religion that take for granted that the internal narratives those religions have are not true. For example, you can find mainstream stories asking questions like "why are catastrophic floods so common in religious texts?" or "was the bright star mentioned in the Nativity story a real cosmic event?" and these will be framed in historical, scientific or cultural terms, not religious ones. They won't come out and say "the Noah's Ark story was made up" because it's taken for granted the reader already thinks that.
That's not really what I mean. Obviously, for instance, the media runs stories that assume evolution is true or the fossil record is accurate.
But they also run stories like "what was Jesus' life like" (to which the only honest answer is we don't know, as we barely know that he existed) and "this archeologist found evidence of the Biblical flood" and especially the stuff in the newsmagazines every Easter about the resurrection.
And they DON'T run stories like "the Christian narrative that God is good is completely contradicted by the notion of Hell" or "Jesus could have appeared in our modern era and proved God's existence but doesn't do so" or "it is highly unlikely that St. Peter ever went to Rome". Because even though more and more of America is nonbelievers, the religious audience would throw a fit if they did.
Hm, do you have an example of those kinds of articles? We must be reading different outlets, because I can't think of an example from a mainstream outlet that presumes that Christianity is true.
By contrast, here is a book review from the most recent issue of The Economist, which does reference inconsistencies in the Bible. https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/09/13/how-odd-christian-beliefs-about-sex-shape-the-world
In case you aren't a subscriber, here's the relevant bit:
"Modern Christians often look to the Bible for clear answers to sexual questions. But clear answers are impossible to find... The problem is that the Bible, which comprises 60-odd books composed over a period of a millennium and more, is less a book than a library—and displays a correspondingly broad range of sexual attitudes. Its pages offer monogamous marriages, polygamous ones, rape, racy poetry, fulminations about homosexuality and tender descriptions of a man’s passion for his male lover... Not that such an inconvenient truth has ever stopped Christians from claiming that there is—or getting cross with those they see as deviating from it. From those who burned “sodomites” at the stake in the 12th century to those who flame “deviants” on social media today, Christians have a habit of getting angry about this stuff."
I'm not sure you'd expect pieces like "Jesus could have appeared in our modern era and proved God's existence but doesn't do so" or "it is highly unlikely that St. Peter ever went to Rome" to run since these aren't really *news*. If something like that does come up, it'd be more likely to be in the form of a book review or interview with an academic. But news media outlets aren't generally in the business of weighing in on abstract philosophical questions in general, so I wouldn't take their lack of explicit criticism of Christian doctrine as cover for any deeper agenda.
“ the Christian narrative that God is good is completely contradicted by the notion of Hell”
Should be taught in kindergarten
A key point IMO was the the cultural change wasn't led by politicians or even activist types but by pop culture. Take the 90's early aughts:
-Off broadway musical becomes the international phenomenon that is Rent
-Ellen comes out in her show and in real life
-Philadelphia is a big hit was the lovable everyman Tom Hanks and a soundtrack done by The Boss
-Will and Grace (hardly a great sitcom) is a top 10 sitcom for years
-"Not that there's anything wrong with that!"
-Homer has to wrestle with his own anti-gay bias.
-Smithers goes from "might be gay" to "obviously is gay"
I could go on
None of this stuff was masterminded by the DNC or GLADD, it was the culture itself that changed.
I don't see anything like this happening with "abolish the police" or "single payer" or whatever.
"'Smithers goes from "might be gay" to "obviously is gay'"
And there were two steps before this as well: turning Smithers into a yes man for Mr. Burns, then turning him into being attracted only to Mr. Burns. It was a long journey for the writers before they could completely get Smithers out the closet.
I think "abolish the police" (at the level of "reform the police," not literal abolition) via a cultural shift could potentially happen. I believe there's actual research showing watching police procedurals and other sorts of entertainment of that sort correlates with viewers adopting more pro-police attitudes, so producing more stuff with critical/negative portrayals of police should plausibly have an inverse effect.
I guess the question then is what "reform the police" means in practice. Even people who view their police department negatively generally want more and better police. They want the version of police that exists in affluent neighborhoods: cops are visible, responsive, trustworthy and take your safety seriously. I think media could persuade people that most police departments fall short of this ideal, but I don't really see that ideal changing.
We really just want all city cops to be Stabler and Benson and all feds to be Gibbs, McGee, Ziva, and DiNozzo…
The flipside of the big tent approach to gay marriage is that that tent included a lot of people who, to be blunt, were comfortable with gay marriage but still quietly thought LGBT people were kind of weird, and I think we're seeing that dynamic play out now.
Or an alternate explanation would be that it's not about LGBT vs. straight per se, but about normie vibes vs. alternative vibes. LGBT people getting traditional marriages is a conservative idea. Most people want to get married and understand why other people would want to get married. Having to announce your pronouns is weird for most people, and I think the kind of person who is annoyed by these things would also be annoyed by, say, hetero polyamorous people.
Totally. The gay marriage fight wasn't about trying to tear down values that Americans held dear, it was about persuading Americans that gay marriage was consistent with values they already held.
I think this is the real answer. Change comes not from electing left-wing politicians, but by convincing the American people.
The plasticity of public opinion seems to have been really over-estimated. The first black President and legalisation of gay marriage made it seems like America was in a new era of public acceptance for cultural change. But in fact it seems to have been to some degree the other way, many people wanted a rest from, or even reversal of, cultural change.
The misread of broad pluralistic/libertarian impulses on race and sexual orientation as support for identitarian redistributive "justice" policies by the "woke" left has been disastrously counter-productive.
“… many people wanted a rest from, or even reversal of, cultural change.”
“I voted for the black guy, okay? So can we just stop talking about racism, like ever again?”
I think there's an aspect of that.
But I also think there's an aspect of 'we gave on all the most important things legally in the 60s, and all the most important things culturally in the 70s-90s, yet there are still people lecturing us like Plessy versus Ferguson just came down yesterday.'
Yes, I've described this before as the American left being unable to be gracious winners.
I think there's some truth to that. I think the bigger picture driver might be something more like the iron law of bureacracies. I do not fully buy the way a Chris Rufo or Richard Hanania type of conservative looks at this issue, and I'm not on board with the way they'd approach changing it.
However I think there is something to the idea that we set up a bunch of state institutions to deal with a situation at a specific moment in time and under very particular conditions that have changed quite a lot in the subsequent decades. My hope for a silver lining for a SCOTUS that could be conservative dominated for decades is that they look at some of this stuff and say 'no, we aren't letting you do that now/anymore' in a similar manner to what they did in Students for Fair Admissions.
It's also just that the message has to be optimistic. The message coming from the left in 2020 was that white people and America itself are irredeemably racist, and there's nothing really to be done about it other than to flagellate oneself and "make space" for BIPOC people, i.e. leave them alone.
Whereas a message like "America is a great place with good values that we sometimes fail to perfectly uphold, here are some ways we can do better" tends to land for most people.
Just yesterday I found myself in an Obama-Bernie-Bernie vs Obama-Hillary-Harris debate on Twitter, me being the first thing and the other guy being the second thing. His whole theory of politics was that we are 60 years into the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement, nothing else matters, and the most effective thing you can do for any policy goal is diversify the elite. His theory of the Obama-Trump swing was that the Obama-Hillary-Harris finally diversified the White House and threatened to do more of it, threatened to finally "win" so that other things could be the issue of the day, so we got Trump as a backlash.
I was honestly completely astounded to hear someone say he honestly, truly believed there had never been any other issue than diversifying the elite for six decades, that everything else rested on doing that first.
I have seen similar kinds of arguments and also find them unconvincing.
Let’s not diminish the idea that it matters what the change is. Legalization of gay marriage and enthusiastically affirming a 12 year old girl’s socially influenced thoughts that she is a boy are different and that matter’s.
It's so wild how much that issue was tied up with religion, and how quickly it changed as people became less religious. It still has me thinking that the anti-abortionists could end up being the dog that caught the car some time in the near future.
"Liked," because of your first sentence. I remain convinced that religion is less relevant to anti-abortion sentiment than is popularly believed (polling on support for pro-choice/pro-life positions over the past 50 years doesn't have much of a correlation with religiosity, AFAICS).
Intriguing--I certainly agree that one doesn't have to be religious to be against abortion, but the grand majority of people that I've seen opposing it tend to be.
I agree it's not intuitive, but it's pretty clearly what the polling shows:
American religiosity has trended almost continually downward year-over-year since 1990. See, e.g. (but you can find lots of other studies corroborating this): https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/pf_2022-09-13_religious-projections_01-01-png/
But support for abortion rights actually fell for part of that period and, while it's risen in recent years, it's not actually that much higher than when a much larger share of the population identified as being religious (again, you can find plenty of other polling showing similar *trends* over the period, even if the exact wording of the questions changes the overall *level* of support): https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/#views-on-abortion-1995-2024
Anecdotal, but I note Latinas in my classroom tend to be ok with gay marriage but not abortion, and they are a growing slice of the US.
@Matt, do you have any criticism in store over the liberal overestimation of Dobbs' potential to move the electorate?
Asking because you allude to Trump "neutralizing" the Dobbs backlash, but I think we as a party are owed a LOT more of an apology from the elites for betting the farm on the Dobbs Effect.
Did their "betting the farm" (I don't know what that means) wind up *hurting* the Democrats? Would they have done better if, say, Harris had come out for a nationwide 15 week ban? I'm guessing "no."
In re "betting the farm," I saw a fair number of progressives post-Dobbs dismiss the idea that Democrats needed to move toward the center on anything because the pro-choice backlash was going to be so significant.
I’m not sure they’re wrong. Super high valence issue.
It seems like they were wrong when it came to presidential voting though? Pro-choice referenda got majorities of the vote in five states that Trump won (Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Montana, and Nevada) and missed getting a majority by one percent in a sixth (Nebraska)!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-11-06/how-abortion-motivated-votes-in-the-us-presidential-election
https://ballotpedia.org/2023_and_2024_abortion-related_ballot_measures
American views around marriage did not in fact change rapidly at all. Marriage, at least in the Christian understanding popular in the West for like a thousand years, is a life-long, exclusive, total partnership for the purpose of raising children. You can argue as to where exactly the change started, but it was the work of many decades, if not centuries, to change the public understanding of marriage to be basically just an especially close friendship. After that, extending it to same-sex couples was simply the natural last step: The answer to the question "can two men have a baby" is obviously no, the answer to "can two men be friends" is obviously yes.
"Marriage...[wa]s a life-long, exclusive, total partnership for the purpose of raising children....The answer to the question 'can two men have a baby' is obviously no"
Yes, but bearing a fetus is different from "raising children"; indeed one of the main reasons the gay community pushed for marriage legalization is because it made it easier for gay couples to adopt.
There's certainly a plausible case that the government should be involved in vetting or encouraging people who intend to obtain children, but the US's current marriage laws and norms are manifestly not that system. Plenty of couples get married while declaring themselves "child-free" and announcing their intention to avoid children.
I so badly want the "all of the above" energy strategy that, ironically, could at least push coal power out of the picture for good. Just have to really throw the kitchen sink at all clean(er) energy sources.
Yes exactly
I think it's worth recalling that before 2016, many states had already legalized gay marriage.
11+DC of 50 states legalized gay marriage via legislation or initiative/referendum. Every other legalization was done by the courts, either state or federal.
Reducing CO2 emissions globally to reach zero and eventually negative net emissions should never be about which activities (except emitting CO2) are "good" and "bad." "All of the above" is not right, just less wrong than "no fossil fuels now and forever."
Is PA still a coal state?
I think it's now a fracking state.
It is the internet. You can swear here without needing to substitute "fracking".
I think the Cylons would have solved climate change, but I think they would also be pro-life.
They did so with nuclear winter
"Can we fucking please get going with fracking?"
Turns out John from FL is really John from NJ.
I feel like this speaks to both what was attractive about Warren and what went wrong with Warrenism.
Warren and Bernie shared a lot in the sense that their followings grew MUCH more toxic and dysfunctional than their relatively sane-yet-ambitious original political projects started out as.
Warren came out of the gate with a LOT of good ideas. But right around that same time, the groups and staffers had likewise just escaped the Veal Pen, and neither Warren nor Bernie had the fortitude to resist the tidal waves. Instead, they just let the staffers and movement activists run the show and take their ideologies in ever-more-bizarre directions. (ironic that being the staffers' favorite word at the time)
So this is why it feels wierd when Matt criticizes "Warrenism" as having been particularly unpopular. The Warrenites ended up barely resembling Warren's actual ideology, and Warren herself got twisted by their relentless accusations of all kinds of bigotry against anyone who tried to push an economic narrative.
Personally, I think it makes more sense to think of this "Warrenism" as actually a Zombie Hillaryism. I wouldn't be surprised if (A) many of the supposedly "Warrenite" staffers came up through the original Bill Clinton/2000's Hillary pipeline, or (B) alternatively, many of them came up in the 2016 Clinton campaign and overlearned from her hard pivot to bash Bernie on social issues.
> The Warrenites ended up barely resembling Warren's actual ideology
Warren barely resembles her original ideology.
True Warrenism has never been tried?
That was my point later when I said she got “twisted”.
This seems both incredibly damning of Warren (she has no willpower of her own) and allows her to escape responsibility for her own evolution. Warren 2012 was interesting, but by 2016 she was getting out over her skis and by 2020 was offering very radical proposals.
I think it’s really easy for us to sit here saying she should have had more of a spine.
But even setting aside whether that’s an accurate judgment or not, I see little evidence she saw it as a capitulation.
Exactly! I don't think she was led to the crazy ideas by groups and staffers who escaped the veal pen. I think she was leading them out of the pen either because she believe in it with them, or more likely wanted to gain their backing and so got in front of harnessing their momentum.
I mean, it’s not a particularly noble pursuit, but for every Liz Warren there’s gotta be at least some crusader or another who manages to lead the mob in the right direction every once in a while…
Who comes to mind?
Before the Groups got involved, the real Warren vs Bernie fight was antitrust/regulatory populism vs social democracy. After, it was an intramural fight over the precise identitarian content of wokeness.
“Warren came out of the gate with a LOT of good ideas.” Like what?
All of her economic ideas
This seems right and important.
I agree and believe this applies to everything I say ;-D
Is social issues what cost her in the primary? The only thing I remember about Warren's campaign is that she campaigned on the wealth tax to prove that she was more economically left than Bernie, which is also when my support for her ("Bernie but smarter!") evaporated.
For me it was when she was talking about giving companies' workers 40% of the board seats.
Ironically, you've described how the median Trump voter views the man they voted for.
Come on Casey, you are making way too much sense right now.
/s obviously.
But you are right on, I'm still appalled that people think Trump was going to deliver on anything that wasn't "tough on crime" however I think the message above would've resonated with more people, especially in light of where we are realistically economically, politically and socially. Something I think Clinton, Obama and Biden understood is that you need to be able to win elections in order to get things done. Progressives and super left leaning people don't understand that. They aren't quite at the burn the government down stage that the MAGA or Alt Right people are, but they'd gladly see society fail if it means that they get to virtue signal and wax poetic about their moral superiority in my opinion.
There is a reason why people respect Pete Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Andy Kim, Abigail Spanberger and Jared Golden and these people can also win tough elections. The Dem party needs to get more people like this to be the ones talking about policy and getting in front of people. As long as the super progressive left cares more about complaining instead of appreciating their outsized seat at the table that they currently have, then we will continue to lose winnable elections, and it increases the odds that someone like Trump will irrevocably have a negative impact to not just our country but our allies.
Also, A trade policy that is clearly positioned as something in our interests (not just high minded trade liberation or foreign aid by other means) Trade not aid is probably the worst free trade argument out there, and yet it is heard everytime trade policy comes up with non-European or Japan countries. The framing is basically the same as Trump's that we're doing those countries a favor with the liberalization of trade, but that we should do it.
That WAS the standard Republican and to a lesser extent Democratic position (opposition to NAFTA and TPP came from the LEFT) until a few seconds ago.
Trade is like immigration, mutually beneficial that somehow gets misunderstood as a favor we do to immigrants and foreign exporters.
[If one had to choose between trade and aid, trade _is_ more beneficial to poor countries than aid, but aid is good too.]
> Trade is like immigration, mutually beneficial that somehow gets misunderstood as a favor we do to immigrants and foreign exporters.
Mutually beneficial to whom? "Our" middle class and upper class benefit, yes, but they often do sacrifice the interests of "our" lower/working class to do it. Just because on average the "whole country" benefits, doesn't mean any class or person lives that "average" economic life.
Lower/working class people are highly sensitive to prices and inflation. Free trade helps keep prices down. Is that not sufficient?
I was not claiming that every single person benefits but many people do just like anything else that allow more market transactions among consenting adults.
I feel like trade policy is usually presented as you’ll pay lower prices and you probably don’t make shit for a living. How is this not positioned as in our interests?
It’s presented as that, but then you lose your job and your country loses its state capacity
Right, but the "then you lose your job" argument shouldn't matter the slightest to the 90% of adults in this country who don't even work in manufacturing.
If you live in a town like Cleveland and work in a stable job, you still lost. Even if you no longer live there but care if it’s healthy.
I want all of these things and would vote for any candidate of any party that offered it.
I am not for these policies but (as is mentioned in the article) I would not underestimate the chance that Trump/MAGA will implode making it possible for the progressive wing of the Dems to make a roaring comeback in the mid terms and later the presidential election.
This is not my preferred outcome but based on things like the current H1B fights, the general chaos and Rep in fighting I see this as very possible. If the Reps make a complete mess of things my sense would be all bets are off for the next four years.
Good piece. Two parallels that struck me from the UK:
1) Coal shows energy really matters over the long-term. The Tories still have not made the kind of gains in former coal mining seats that the Republicans have in Appalachia, because it was Thatcher who crushed the coal industry and broke the back of the National Union of Mineworkers almost fifty years ago and this is still remembered today.
There are these two sides of the equation for energy - almost all working class voters nationally rely on cheap energy consumption for their households and employment, so it matters everywhere. But there are also specific places and regions where cheap energy production is the only route to high wage and high status working class employment. These latter regions are very aware of this and swing on this politically. Both together mean energy has outsize scale, efficiency, and persistence in voter memories as a election policy issue.
2) Iraq was still politically central in 2010s UK too. Corbyn's election to Leader of Labour in 2015 and its turn to the Hard Left was only possible because he was seen to have integrity on Iraq and his opponents were discredited.
It's a great point about Corbyn and Iraq.
If not for Iraq, then I think Tony Blair would clearly be seen as a huge success even if Labour narrowly lost power in the wake of the financial crisis. But Iraq both led to defections to the Lib Dems and also supercharged Corbyn.
I agree that the Iraq war had huge implications and not just in the US. It drives a lot of international antipathy to the US and UK to this day.
Unfortunately I think internationally it served as proof that we were who a lot of people deeply suspected we were and domestically as proof that there was truth to a lot of the worst suspicions the broader public has about the competence of our government, including the parts that are supposed to be thought of even by conservatives as working well i.e. the national security establishment. For all of its fading from public discourse I think it's going to be huge in the history books as the instance in which we prematurely ended the unipolar moment.
It also shapes the UK political memory. Mention Blair and most UK political observers and commentators will think of 'Iraq' next (or vice versa) - it's what he, and therefore the 97 - 10 Labour government, are remembered for more than any other policy. Even though of course it took forward many major domestic social and economic policies. And as mentioned, this is especially true of the millennial generation.
Blair gets presented like he invaded Iraq single-handedly by some of his opponents. In reality if Britain didn't join the overwhelmingly likely outcome is that the invasion goes ahead. So I'm really not sure it was a particularly consequential decision by him.
From the perspective of UK voters, it's pretty much correct that he was singlehandedly responsible. UK voters aren't upset that Iraq was a shitshow. They're upset that Iraq was a shitshow and _the UK was a part of it_. An Iraq invasion without the UK is a significant improvement from the perspective of Britons.
A position which I think many here will agree with is that this sort of "clean-hands" approach to politics is foolhardy.
A part of the story is that Blair pressured Bush to exhaust all attempts at taking the Iraq invasion through the UN process, but that Bush required Blair to be fully on board before doing so. That is plausibly the correct utilitarian call from Blair, but vanishingly few British voters care (or, in fairness, are aware of it at all).
Are we interested in *popularism* or not? In the UK, unlike the US, the Iraq War was unpopular pretty much from the start, it didn't take years for opinion to flip. Even in the earliest stages when you could just about find a polling majority to say they supported it, it was clear it wouldn't last.
I remember when French fries in the Capitol were renamed "Freedom fries" to protest France's refusal to go along with the US on Iraq.
I don't know whether the UK could have tolerated being ostracized by the US like that, and my guess is that the UK would have lost significant international influence if it had given up on the "Special Relationship."
I think France managed to recover from that epic diss to be honest.
Apologies if my message was slightly unclear. I mean that the people who feel that way are silly, but I believe in popularism and think we should definitely make decisions that capitulate to people's silly views when necessary.
This is wrong. He was viewed as very necessary to provide at least some international support for the US position. You forget how many countries opposed it.
So 80+ Representatives and 28 Senators would've switched their vote if Britain wasn't along for the ride?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002
Partially yes. If Blair had come out against the Iraq war, it would have been the US alone and would have been very different, both domestically and internationally. Lots of people trusted Blair more than Bush. Would it have stopped the war? Impossible to say.
I don't think it stops the war, but I think Blair was a big believer in "the special relationship" and if he had opposed Iraq it's very possible the American right would have turned against the special relationship (which is based on extremely tenuous historical grounds-- Britain actually spent the first 100 years of our history trying to undermine us over and over!).
I worked for the UK government at the time and this take seems right to me.
> Lots of people trusted Blair more than Bush.
I'm an American who'd been living in Britain during the two preceding (UK) elections. Tony Blair and Colin Powell persuaded me that the Iraq war was a good idea.
I also doubt Blair's opposition would have made a difference, but unless he actually, really, truly believed what he was saying (always in question with Blair) then I wish he'd let the US make their own mistakes on their own. The UK, as the junior partner, always had more to lose from being wrong.
I don't know if it would have moved that many, but I was in law school during 2002-03 (i.e., I was surrounded by people substantially to the left of the median American voter) and I routinely encountered people who supported launching the Iraq War with some variation of, "I don't trust anything George W. Bush says, but Tony Blair says there's something there . . . ."
It was just the US, UK, Australia, and sort of Poland. That’s it.
Japan's sending PlayStations. Stankonia says they're willing to drop bombs over Baghdad. Riggity Row is coming. Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation...
Blair spends a lot of his domestic political capital on not just participating in the war but presenting it as a dual American-British invasion. Whether this was necessary for the war to happen or not it's very costly for Blair's reputation and his allies in the Labour Party.
Exactly. He was all in, on purpose.
I've joked before that Elian Gonzales is why Brexit happened.
As you say, trying to summarize 25 years of American politics in 2,500 words is going to leave out a lot. So I appreciate the attempt. But as an overarching narrative I think you’re missing the boat here. The key dynamic really my entire life is the following; do swing voters think of you as an “outsider” or “insider”.
2000 is probably the first election I have strong memories of. And you know what sticks out most to me besides Florida?* “Strategery”. But as much as SNL poked fun at Bush’s malapropisms in retrospect it helped him places like West Virginia; he didn’t talk like a stiff Senator (a la Gore), he talked like a”one of us”, he seemed line someone you “wanted to have a beer with” (remember that?).
And so it goes with an interesting exception of 2020. In 2004, Kerry is the indecisive wind surfer who in classic senate insider tradition doesn’t even know what he believes (remember key phrase from that time period “I voted for it before I voted against it”.).
And so it goes. Obama by virtue of his background and by virtue of not staying in the senate long is the fresh faced outsider. And in 2012, Romney was “Bain Capital” and then made the mistake of nominating the symbol of GOP insider politics Paul Ryan.
2016 is the place I really depart from you. I remember that campaign and that primary. Iraq war was not at all in an issue. But you know what I remember most? Clinton getting raked over the coals for speaking fees to Goldman Sachs. The fees didn’t matter. It was an ultimate symbol that she was for the ultimate elite “vampire squid”, she was the ultimate “insider”.
2020 is the outlier I think because Trump is the ultimate outlier. He is such a scumbag that just not being Trump was enough to win. Also, as I’ve repeated many times; COVID is going to be seen as the ultimate black swan event for everything; crime, job loss, traffic fatalities and yes inflation. And because of that last one + people having the memories of fly, swing voters turn to the outsider…again.
Lesson for 2028 Dems. Don’t nominate a sitting senator or former VP!
*I should say we are making a lot of narrative calls here based on a handful of votes. Given there is a real possibility that if recount could actually have gone forward, Gore wins, it upends narrative. Just like a handful of votes in Ohio in 2004, handful of votes in Michigan, PA and Wisconsin in 2016. Heck Trump’s final margin is less that 1% in 2024. That’s not high! Be careful of overreaching narratives based on very close margins.
All the stuff about insider/outside and vibes and charisma and personality I do agree is in play, but also a lot of this stuff is post hoc rationalizations. If Obama had lost, then people would have attributed that to his aloofness. Because he won, people attribute it to his charisma.
If Obama had lost, his aloofness would not have been anyone's explanation. It would have been the conventional wisdom that America wasn't ready for a Black President.
His election now seems like an ordinary and expected thing, but at the time it was genuinely shocking and amazing even to people who voted for him, even though the polls said it was going to happen.
I was born in 1983. My mother likes to tell me there were three things that she thought impossible when I was born; peace in Northern Ireland, fall of the Berlin Wall and a black President. I would surmise that she though number 3 least likely. And my mother is a pretty progressive person (I don't say that to say she was against having a black president, quite the opposite. More that she was someone who probably more than most believed in society being able to change for the better).
I also bring this up as my lodestar as far as why a) I call myself a Progressive and b) why I'm still fundamentally hopeful for the long term despite my fear of Orange man part deux. All sorts of things we think so impossible or unlikely today are going to seem normal in 10-20 years if last 40 years of history is any guide. Tell someone in 2000 (to bring it back to this post) that gay marriage would be a) law of the land and b) accepted by majority of society (although with an underrated large minority still opposed) and that person would ask what drugs you're taking and if they could have some.
I was 46 in '08. The morning after the election I met my Black next door neighbor, who was probably 10 years older than me, as we were both getting our mail. I asked her if she ever thought that would happen in her life time, and she almost cried, and said "I hoped it would happen in my grandchildren's'."
Taking nothing away from your comment, but 2000 was a little late for shock on gay marriage. That year Vermont legalized civil unions, so you're maybe off by just a decade or so.
I will forever hold on to my belief in hope and change.
I think we largely agree. But I should unpack my 2000 comment a bit.
I went to undergrad at William & Mary. At the time VA was still solidly red. And definitely SE VA (though student body was disproportionately from NoVa DC suburbs and definitely leaned democratic. Harbinger of VA’s blue turn). So local area, local tv, local everything had a pretty heavy evangelical influence. Throw in GWB running (and governing) as an out and out “Born again” Christian (I remember some particularly cringe worthy David Brooks columns about how mega churches were the future and how rights should be based on family not individual (not kidding). Yeah the terribleness that’s “Bobos in Paradise” didn’t come out of nowhere) and you can see why the idea of gay marriage being accepted as much as it is now is a surprise from the vantage of 2000-2001 me.
I should mention. I grew up in Massachusetts so hardly like I’m unfamiliar with lefty cultural views. If anything going away for school was a cultural shock in learning how conservative large swaths of this country truly was.
See my comment below. I actually agree with you on policy. I disagree with your Obama comment because he didn’t just win he won big.
And how is “this policy is what mattered” also not 20/20 hindsight. Your former boss is doing this now claiming 2024 was all about transgender issues and Kamala being too woke citing the campaign commercial Trump ran. I’m like “this is not how commercials work. Please listen to Kristen soltis Anderson. It’s not like millions of voters suddenly became concerned about sports issues. It was a signal that Kamala was a super leftist and supposedly still was.” Some true “pundit fallacy” stuff if I ever saw it.
"I disagree with your Obama comment because he didn’t just win he won big."
Isn't the size of his victory almost entirely due to the economic meltdown that happened in Summer/fall 2008?
As recently as early September before the election, McCain was polling ahead. But after Lehman Brothers, Obama surges ahead. If that happens in December instead of September, its a much closer election.
I think you're forgetting that McCain surge was just after the RNC convention. It was really only recently that conventions stopped having any "bounce" in polling. And it was Nat Silver who back before he got famous first informed me that polling bounces from convention was likely statistical noise due to polling response bias (either you're super pumped from the convention or temporarily depressed as the convention was a 3-day infomercial putting the best face forward of the candidate). It was also part of the Palin surge in August. She's a joke figure now (and in retrospect a canary in the coal mine figure), but she really did bring a lot of initial excitement to the ticket especially among socially conservative voters not super enthused by a pro-choice nominee.
Just a lot to suggest that even absent Lehman, Obama is likely winning by 4-5 points. Lehman, likely pushed it to the 8 point victory.
That being said, you don’t get modern Republican governance without a major crisis that they royally fuck up, so we should probably factor that into predictions for the future. The Great Recession, COVID, what’s next? If we still have democracy in 28, the Dems will win because the Republicans can’t govern for shit.
If you look at the polling before the conventions, then they are separated by 2-3%. Obama gets a polling bounce at the end of August that pushes him to be up 6%. McCain gets a post convention bounce that pushes him ahead. I think absent Lehman brothers et al. that it settles back down to being a 2-3% and Obama likely wins by that amount. But once Lehman brothers happens, the spread widens dramatically. Probably doesn't change the results in the Presidential election, but I think it makes a big difference down ballot in Senate and House races.
His campaign messaging (Hope and Change) was also well positioned for a world where all money was on fire and everyone hated Bush.
FWIW, I think there's actually a lot of evidence going back a long way (all the way to Martin Van Buren) as to "don't nominate the sitting Veep". Which is interesting because parties over and over again nominate the sitting Veep.
Since 1900, the sitting VPs who were nominated were Nixon 1960 (lost narrowly, probably due to election fraud), Humphrey 1968 (again, very close, in a chaotic period), not Mondale (wasn't a sitting Veep), Bush 1988 (won convincingly), Gore 2000 (lost super narrowly, probably actually won), Harris 2024 (very short campaign, very narrow popular vote loss).
So on the face of it, your rule would seem to hold, but this is still a pretty small N and the cases are idiosyncratic enough to suggest that they could have gone the other way. And also it may be that the sitting VP is the strongest candidate and you have done worse with someone else (I'd argue that for Harris, and Humphrey post-RFK assassination).
That doesn't tell you anything. The question is whether being sitting Veep hurt them.
And in fact it hurt every one of them, even Bush (the one who won).
Why did being a sitting VP hurt them?
It might have revealed that they were not strong candidates otherwise, but I don't think Bush, Gore, or Harris win a primary battle without being a sitting VP so being one helped them.
I think maybe Dilan is saying that, as the party's candidate, they were weaker for being associated (as VP) with basically all of their predecessor's policies (for better or worse). I agree that the individual benefits from deference by other party figures to the VP, to the party's detriment.
I think you forgot Harry Truman.
Different case since he took over mid term and was therefore running as the sitting President, not VP.
Not a sitting VP in 1948.
VPs are not intrinsically weak candidates.
In addition to what what Marc noted, there are four cases of VPs who took over due to the president's death and got their party's nomination. They all won reelection.
You could say the VP got incumbency advantage, but AFAIK the entirety of the incumbency advantage effect is due to incumbents being strong candidates (which is why they got elected in the first place). Kamala would not have been a meaningfully stronger candidate if Biden had resigned or died in July.
I think Harris would have been a stronger candidate if Biden had died in July - there would still be remaining sympathy vote for Democrats by November.
Trump almost got assassinated around then and it was totally forgotten by November. People would've forgotten Biden's death too.
Uh, what? I don’t think people will forget the death of a president very quickly. Someone shooting at him but causing no significant injury is much easier to forget, because it leaves no lasting trace.
Every single one of Marc's examples was hurt by being sitting Veep. Which is the real point here.
No, they ARE weaker candidates. Parties just tend to justify dumb things they do when the smarter course involves taking on people who have a lot of power.
When you have power you play it safe, when you don't you take more risks.
100%
I don't think it's being VP that makes them weak. It's just that they're someone other than the top-tier guy who could actually win in a competitive primary (as opposed to winning by default as incumbent VP). People who couldn't win the primary tend to suck compared to people who did. It's why they didn't win.
There might also be a thermostatic effect where it's hard to run for your party's third term, but that would apply to most candidates from the incumbent party.
A non-VP could conceivably run really hard against the incumbent administration, but you know who can run even harder against the incumbent? The other party. And by running against the administration you fracture and demotivate your own party.
It's being Veep. You have the worst of all possible worlds-- responsibility for all the dumb stuff and bad outcomes your boss' tenure produced, with no ability to actually do anything about it or to say your boss was wrong.
It's a terrible job for a presidential candidate and parties should get smart about this and stop nominating sitting veeps.
I attribute his inability to build a lasting coalition off of his victory in part to his aloofness (though mostly to the inadequacy of ARRA and the disarray and complexity in passing Obamacare)
Howard Dean pursued the 50-state strategy in 2006 and 2008, and ran candidates in a lot of red seats, a small fraction of whom were able to benefit from surprising events. I forget who took over from Dean for 2010, but they dismantled a lot of that operation, and this was related to Obama’s aloofness.
It also should not be underestimated how well the Republican/conservative machine planned a strategy to prepare for and exploit the 2010 census set up for extreme gerrymandering in the states.
Nor overestimated. The redistricting allowed the Republicans to turn a very narrow loss in the 2012 popular vote into a fairly slim House majority. Apart from 2012, every election resulted in the winner of the national House vote winning a majority of seats. Gerrymandering doesn't mean much if you can't get the voters to support your party.
I don't think that holds on the state level. The Brennan center, which I don't think is terrible partisan listed a net 16 seat Republican gerrymandered advantage going into this year's election. And I didn't look up the stats, but I believe the result is worse at the state legislature level.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-gerrymandering-tilts-2024-race-house
That was a pretty bad prediction the Brennan Center made going into the election. A 16 seat advantage? The Republicans wound up with 51.5% of the two party vote for the House, and 50.5% of the seats. In other words if gerrymandering had any impact (it didn't), it hurt the Republicans.
A lot of stuff amounts to post-hoc rationalizations but you've also got to admit that the larger structural/historical moment plays a role in whether an election becomes a policy debate (good times) or a "throw the bums out" referendum (bad times). Both Obama 2008 and Biden 2020 got a lot of tailwind from a "throw the bums out" environment surrounding, respectively, the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID pandemic.
Iraq came up prominently in the GOP primary. IIRC Trump was the one willing to say it was a mistake and basically ended Jeb's candidacy. I also think it has been a larger albatross on the neck of the establishment than plugged in political junkies appreciate. We had two back to back elite driven policy catastrophes in the form of the Iraq invasion and the 2008 financial crisis.
My recollection of 2000 is also a bit different than yours. I think the conversation was more like 'Bush and Gore are so similar it's unclear what differences we're voting on.' The oddness of Gore's personality had been a bit of a punchline for a while and there were a lot of post hoc 'people would rather have a beer with Bush' takes but I don't think it was that important in the moment.
Good point about GOP primary (should have noted that was part of my disagreement with Matt on this; it came up but on the other side).
Do agree that in 2000, this was probably the height of "the two candidates don't differentiate all that much on policy". Given this is post 90s glow of growing economy + rising wages + end of cold war, not surprising in retrospect this was the height of the neoliberal consensus.
But that actually buttresses my point. Gore wasn't particularly left wing on policy. One bone to pick with Matt I didn't bring up is his contention that 2000 being the first election climate change was on the ballot was important to 2000 outcome is...really undercooked to me. Citation please. It's not like environmental issues were new. Think Acid rain, think hole in the ozone layer, think clean water and smog levels. There's been a tension between blue collar workers and environmental movement going back really to the late 60s/70s. The idea in 2000 this was new just because of the Kyoto protocols and this caused West Virginia to shift right seems really undercooked as a theory to me. Feels like a place where Matt getting (mostly) unfair heat from super progressive environmental people is affecting his writing a bit.
Very good point on climate change and Kyoto. Gore's championing of (addressing) climate change came after the 2000 election not before. An Inconvenient Truth was... 2006! Excuse me I need to lay down.
There's some contemporaneous evidence below that Gore's environmental policies were an issue in the WV campaign in 2000. E.g.:
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/05/us/2000-campaign-west-virginia-gore-trying-catch-up-democrat-dominated-state.html
You can also see references in his address upon receiving the nomination towards targeting the "big polluters" (which I assume would have been understood to include mining companies). See here:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-accepting-the-presidential-nomination-the-democratic-national-convention-los
Gore was identified as a very strong climate/environmentalist as early as the 1992 election. Bush Sr would yammer about "Ozone Man."
Yeah. One thing I remember having lived through it is that despite him being nominally from TN, the idea that he is or ever was a TN person is a tenuous political fiction, and he was widely hated in our neck of the woods by the time 2000 came around.
Agree that her Goldman speeches were a bigger deal than her Iraq war vote - lots of other Democrats voted with her on that, after all. The speeches are mystifying - she gave them when she knew she wanted to remain a major player in national politics, and she should have known that while lucrative would be a major hindrance to future political ambitions (at least beyond the state of New York). So why did she do it? It’s not like she needed the money. It speaks to a level of entitlement that borders on political malpractice.
The money was part of it. But the bigger part is that *they are her people*. She has always been part of that cultural and economic milieu, ever since her days as a young attorney. Even Arkansas has its share of rich and connected people -- Waltons, Stephens, Hunts, Tysons -- and she was in that circle from an early age.
She was talking to Goldman because they liked her and she liked them.
And what's wrong with that? It's basically missionary work to persuade rich people not to fall for Republican "tax cuts for the rich and deficits" policy. We need more of it. There was no reason for Democrats to have "lost" Silicon Valley. Anyone that is pro-growth (really, not a claim as a cover for redistributing wealth upwards) should be welcome.
I think in light of the Great Recession peoples perception of high finance is not a good one. Remember, they got bailed out, the public got austerity.
None of that needed to have morphed into the anti Silocon Valley sentiments it has but I think there was an unwillingness to decouple the bankers and the people who liquidated your factory from the people who run successful businesses that employ Americans.
I don't think the anti Silicon Valley sentiment is that directly tied to the great recession/banking. It's that SV was supposed to be different from the big business that doesn't care about you. It was supposed to be fun and life affirming—"Don't be evil." People felt working for Facebook, Google, etc., was a moral good. Then people started to realize these companies would do anything they could to spy on you and manipulate you as their products became worse and worse. Nobody works for Google anymore because they think it's a social good anymore.
"the public got austerity."
No they didn't. They didn't get as big of a stimulus as needed, but there was definitely stimulus provided not austerity.
I hear what you're saying from a 40,000 foot perspective but I don't think 'we under stimulated' comes close to capturing what people went through. I also think a lot of the ongoing ripples from that failure in terms of how it delayed people from reaching adult milestones is the cause of the cultural rebellions we're still dealing with on right and left.
As a very Slow Boring position in the middle: the public likely experienced the failure to keep the construction industry afloat in 2008 as a kind of "housing austerity" that dug us deeper into what became the housing crisis of the 2010s and 2020s.
"Austerity" is probably too strong. UK did austerity and look at what that got them.
But undercooked stimulus? Seems definitely yes as the writer of this Substack will attest to.
And it's also very true that we did at least small austerity measures at the worse possible time to do so in 2011, thereby having a min replay of the mistakes made by FDR in 1937. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_States_debt-ceiling_crisis#:~:text=July%2029%2C%202011%3A%20The%20Budget,a%20vote%20of%20218%E2%80%93210.
Key provision "July 29, 2011: The Budget Control Act of 2011 S. 627, a Republican bill that immediately raised the debt ceiling by $900 billion and reduced spending by $917 billion, passed in the House on a vote of 218–210."
I agree that is an effect of the Great Recession, but the mechanism is more indirect.
a) Financial firms’ stockholders and managers should not have been bailed out; it creates bad incentives going forward.
b) But bailing out the liability holders of those firms would have required very vigorous Fed action to accomplish and more to prevent inflation expectations from falling below target. The “bailout” did not lead to the fall in real income; that was just a Fed mistake.
c) “Finance” is also the intermediary for
i) the increased competition from abroad for some firms and industries resulting mainly from the fall in shipping and international communications costs and
ii) the exchange rate consequences of the US shift from being a capital exporting to a capital importing country partly becasue of rising fiscal deficits.
The Left’s list of usual suspects — “financialization” and “trade liberalization” are in fact, not guilty.
Yeah, and also the negative coverage on the speeches, and emails, and clinton foundation... it was all pretty normal stuff but unfortunately I think it got traction mostly because she had been around for so long and so much stuff had piled up.
I liked Matt's piece, but I think the paid speeches to large banks were a bigger problem for Clinton than the Iraq war. For the Millennials who bore the brunt of the bad labor market of the great recession, it was instrumental to them turning toward more radical anti-establishment politics, a visceral demonstration that the establishment was corrupt, and did not take their problems seriously. Bernie Sanders taking college debt as a first tier economic issue also earned a lot of loyalty from the same generation. That more than anything else was the genie that never got put back in the bottle.
Yep! We all read Taibbi before he became Putin’s stooge!
"It speaks to a level of entitlement that borders on political malpractice." The Clintons in a nutshell.
She did it because she is a greedy, disingenuous, opportunistic, megalomaniac grifter.
Well, I think this is kind of the very base-level political disagreement: do vibes and personality matter more than policy positioning, or does policy matter more than vibes and personality? It's clear that Matt fundamentally believes that policy positioning is more important than things like whether the person you nominate is an insider or an outsider or whatever.
Like, I'm sure that Matt would concede that personality, vibes, communication style, personal positioning all matter on the margin, but his very-often-stated belief is that fundamentally they're less important than policy position-taking. For example, he's very consistently stated that he thinks that Trump won in 2016 largely by taking a moderate policy position on social security and healthcare (and being relatively hardline on immigration, while the Republican orthodoxy was vice versa, and Matt thinks that the Republican orthodox position was politically unpopular).
I should note that while I’ve been a little critical of Matt from a left perspective in general I agree that moderating on policy probably matters. It’s why I had that footnote; a lot of any narrative of the last 25 years changes with the shift of an extremely small number of votes.
I think the sweet spot is clearly Barack Obama in 2008. He won in part because of Bush fatigue and is final margin was likely boosted by the market crash. But having said that he still likely wins by at least 5% in popular vote. And that’s likely because he was both the fresh faced outsider AND as Matt notes he took a decent number of moderate positions (there is a reason Andrew Sullivan loves him and considers him temperamentally “conservative”. The latter observation is probably correct.
Obama is the “slow and steady progress, but let’s not smash the machine” voice. It’s little c conservative that is popular in the absolute sense, but which encounters difficulties in a world of hyper-partisanship for Republicans (40% of the country won’t see the conservatism before their very eyes) and factional fighting amongst Democrats (the young progressives refusing to accept that little c conservatism isn’t the same as Republicanism and preferring to rule over the ashes of a failed Democratic campaign than winning with a centrist).
I think this is a bit of revisionism, based on 6 years of a divided Congress that tried very hard to reign him in. In 2008, Obama was the guy of "Hope and Change." The campaign was able to deftly sell their talking points as 'common sense', which was helped by Bush's incredibly low approval rating. However, I think that this speaks to the outsider dynamic that Collin is talking about.
Name one statutory proposal endorsed by Obama that you consider radical? Affordable Care Act?
Republicans ran on and spent their political capital wisely on creating that narrative, using other Democrats (usually not elected Democrats) and some thinly veiled racism. But on the whole, Obama governed as a centrist Democrat.
What's probably hard to determine, long-run, is whether Obama came across as progressive because he was secretly intending to inaugurate 2020s progressivism as we know it, or because the Bush Administration was the height of movement conservatism and practically anything would have looked progressive in that context.
My view is that Obama did the second one intentionally and the first one unintentionally: today's progressivism is a movement that started forming in backlash against the Bush years.
As a separate note, I don't think you're correct that Trump's final margin is less than 1% in 2024, it looks like it's about 1.5% to me. For example: https://www.cookpolitical.com/vote-tracker/2024/electoral-college and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election
Thanks for the correction. I think my point stands; 1.5% margin is not by historical standards particularly large. But worth being correct about these things.
ok, while we're at it then Obama's 2008 margin of victory was *only* 7(.2)% and McCain was never pro-choice: https://www.factcheck.org/2008/09/mccains-position-on-abortion/
"2016 is the place I really depart from you. I remember that campaign and that primary. Iraq war was not at all in an issue."
I think the Iraq War was a huge issue for a certain slice of voters in 2016 even if it wasn't a major issue in the overall campaign. One of my great frustrations was dealing with anti-interventionist conservatives and libertarians who were convinced to the point of hysteria that they had to vote for Trump because Clinton would launch a war against Iran and/or start WW3 by declaring a no-fly zone over Syria and shooting down Russian aircraft.
Worth remembering that the Obama admin was looking for approval for a much more serious intervention in Syria in 2013 and only backed down when it became clear the votes weren't there in Congress.
If you don't want to intervene, the easiest way to insure that you don't have to is to go to Congress and demand that they get on board for an intervention.
Didn’t work with Iraq.
I'll allow the "9/11 and Pearl Harbor" exceptions to my rule. Maybe the William Randolph Hearst yellow newspaper exception as well. But that's it. No more exceptions to my rule. None.
Yeah, I think the Iraq War was an issue, but in swinging votes to Trump more so than the intraparty fight.
This reads like a post-hoc rationalization. If some outcomes had been different, it wouldn't be hard to argue that Kerry was more an outsider than Bush, that the "Maverick" McCain or businessman Romney were more outsiders than life-time politician and "organizer" Obama, or that hasn't-had-a-real-job-in-12-years Biden was more of an outsider than current-sitting-president Trump. I'm not saying you're completely wrong, just that I don't think it's a strong argument.
And FWIW, I remember Iraq coming up frequently in 2016 during both primaries and the general.
How was the hand Kerry was dealt worse than McCain's?
If voters always prefer outsiders, then how do incumbent Presidents get reelected?
It’s not about “always” - it’s about a growing tendency in recent decades.
" I also think Democrats’ read of Sanders’s relative success underplayed the extent to which his best issues were mainstream Teens Democratic issues like Iraq and LGBT rights. "
One other nit. I think it's time, in 2025, to stop saying "LGBT" unless we are talking about an issue where the trans and gay aspects are really congruent.
In 2016, the issue was still GAY rights. GAY rights had become popular. Almost nobody in mainstream politics was even talking about trans people. When trans issues gained salience, it turns out they are far less popular than gay issues.
The theory of LGBT groups (there, the designation is appropriate) is to assume that trans and gay rights are bundled together because that was convenient for their activism. But they obviously raise very different substantive issues (prisons! children! sports!) but just as obviously the public doesn't see them as one muddled mass.
Sanders' success had something to do with the fact one of his best issues was gay rights. But it had nothing to do with trans rights. So saying it was "LGBT rights" is inaccurate.
Mainstream politicians definitely were talking about trans rights in 2016? The bathroom bill in North Carolina happened that year and not only was that a major news story that mainstream politicians responded to, I'd argue the political effect was an example of the public basically treating it the same way they were treating gay rights at that point. The business boycotts led to backlash against the state government and not the businesses, the only two Republicans in North Carolina who lost statewide in the general election were associated with the bill, Kasich and Trump (the main two GOP candidates who were signaling some distance with the religious right) both said they thought it was overreach. Things have changed since; I'd argue that as gay marriage is more distant as a political issue, people don't default to the same "Republicans are too extreme on these issues and we should live and let live" starting point (though even now, trans issues have proven less effective at winning elections for Republicans as they've hoped). But arguing that the "LGBT" lumping was just about elite coalitional politics and didn't impact public opinion is clearly an overstatement.
The bathroom bills were definitely an issue, but they weren't what was driving support for Bernie Sanders. Gay rights, on the other hand, and the recently won fights on marriage, were.
I think LGBT is OBVIOUSLY about elite coalitional politics and the tethering of issues. Think about this-- it started as gay, then gay and lesbian. Why? Lesbians, after all, called themselves gay. But they had to be separated out. Then GLBT. Trans people are different than gays. Then LGBT. Have to mention lesbians first. Then LGBTQ. Because lots of straight young people want to falsely identify with less boring sexual orientations than they have. Than LGBTQIA2S+. Etc.
It's clear this is elite driven activism and coalitionism, just like BIPOC and Latinx are. And it conflates very different issues (and in the case of Q and A, things that are mostly BS).
At the time of the first bathroom bills, trans activists hadn’t really been perceived as overreaching. I hadn’t even heard of puberty blockers or they/them pronouns in 2016 and I’m pretty plugged in!
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Um actually it’s LGBTQIA++
Matt mentions, but does not center, the turn toward identity politics and -- to be blunt -- an anti-white and anti-male set of policies beginning with the 2nd Obama term. This movement continued through the Clinton campaign and the Biden administration, leading (IMO) to a stronger showing by Trump than his policy moderation alone would explain.
Not sure what you are referring to in Obama’s 2nd term here exactly. My sense was always that Obama was always extremely careful not to do exactly that.
"Trayvon Martin could have been me"?
Thus began the pivot from "No Black America, No White America" to "Black Lives." You can call the earlier slogan "merely aspirational," but it was the very vision that gave us our first Black President -- and to many voters, the pivot looked like a bait-and-switch.
I think the more important one was the 'Dear Colleague' letter from Department of Education on dealing with allegations of rape on campus.
Important to whom? Voters generally?
I think very few voters have any idea about it but that it is what super charged the 'woke' (or whatever) administrative apparatus in universities that then spread into the larger culture and peaked (hopefully) in 2020. That's the difference between the women's studies professor has some radical takes and various non professor deans and administrators are going to try to implement her radical takes through an often directly or indirectly publicly funded bureaucracy.
That was a pretty heinous murder. Maybe it actually shocked Obama.
Why exactly did it look like a bait and switch? I’d like to understand this better.
Lots of people voted for Obama to put an end to notions of "Black America" and "White America." How do you think they felt about then being lectured on "Black Lives"? In voting for Obama, they were voting to be done with "race."
Have you also wondered why affirmative action keeps losing (despite Democratic Party support) when put to a vote in deep-blue, "majority-minority" California?
I mean, Trayvon Martin was killed by a self-appointed neighborhood watch guy with a gun, not a police officer. I don't think expressing sympathy for this case is the kind of woke "Black Lives" lecturing that really exploded in 2020. It happened a few years before BLM, which began in Ferguson in 2015.
The die was cast with Trayvon, and people started to notice the subtle shift (the resurgent importance of whether someone "looks like me").
Obama was still President when BLM began in Ferguson in 2015 -- and when people saw that photo of Mike Brown slugging the (Asian-American) convenience-store clerk (and then the flames), many began thinking, "This isn't what I voted for" -- all the more so when they realized that "Hands up, don't shoot" likely was a lie.
I remember seeing a banner on a march through Oakland back then, reading, "Ferguson, Gaza, Worldwide Intifada!" Talk about foreshadowing!
(FWIW, I voted twice [enthusiastically!] for Obama -- and no, I didn't vote for Trump. In 2016, I cast a California write-in for Bernie, then voted for Biden, and then for Harris -- but [along with others in landslide proportions] in 2024, I wish I could have voted "None of the above." As we pick each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," the oligarchs [playing both ends against the middle] keep laughing all the way to the bank!)
IIRC during Obama's second term he tried to get some stuff done by executive order because Congress was full of obstructionist Republicans. It turned out the problem with governance by executive order is that the administrative state does a lot of bureaucratic fuckery nobody likes. You try to mildly improve civil rights law for certain protected categories via EO and you get a bunch of woke bureaucratic fuckery nobody likes.
As an exercise in curve-fitting, your focus on policy does a decent job of explaining the trajectory of the vote over the last 25 years.
But as an explanation of the vote, it seems inconsistent with the fact that polls and surveys routinely show that voters are shockingly ignorant about the policies and positions of the parties and candidates. Even directionally: consider the many Americans who blamed Biden for ending Row v Wade.
Your argument seems to be that the voters’ general appraisal of the parties’ positions is accurate, and explains their votes. But their grasp of policy details is so bad!! How do you square this?
Is this like a “wisdom of the crowd” phenomenon for low-info voters?
When it comes to getting the voat back to shore, I'm definitely on the side of "Row" vs "Wade" especially if the water is pretty deep.
“…getting the voat back to shore….”
No love for David Shor? He was right there, waiting for you to call on him.
Only if he changes his first name to Michael.
Well, I guess I can go with "Michael, Row the voat to Shor."
Its trickle down information theory DT. People interested in politics get a lot of information about the candidates and share that with people less interested. Certain things get repeated over and over again and stick. *Most* of the things that get repeated over and over, have *some* truth to them.
I think this rings especially true re Hillary. Low info voters weren’t tracking her voting record that long ago! And I believe she tacked to the center for the general.
I'm Matt's age, so this was a perfectly overlapping trip down memory lane for me to read. I definitely won't write 2,500 words on the subject, but I thought that I would write my own journey through this time in my adult political history:
--2000: Voted for Harry Browne. Don't remember who I voted for downballot. I was attending a hippie college that was fiercely debating the merits between Gore and Nader, and thought that Bush was History's Greatest Monster. I was taking an Everyone Sucks Here mentality, which of course is a very susceptible way to vote for a Libertarian candidate. Was, very, very mildly OK with Bush winning, which did not make me popular on some sectors of campus.
--2004: I regained popularity, though, after September 11th happened, because I became very, very antiwar. Was extremely pissed off at Bush, and voted for Kerry with no regret. However, I voted for Republicans in Congress as a desire to keep government divided, so that no one's agenda could get out of control.
--2008: Voted for McCain, but this time Democrats in Congress. I actually liked Barack Obama considerably, I even saw him speak in person in Boise that year, but I still thought that divided government was essential, and that the Democrats were highly likely to make gains in Congress (I was correct about that).
--2012: Flip flopped everything this time: Obama for president, Republicans for Congress, to maintain the status quo. Like Obama in 2008, I didn't have a lot of problems with Romney in 2012, but you had to vote against one of the major party candidates.
--2016-present: ...Donald Trump? Are you fucking kidding me? How on earth did this guy even win the nomination? And he's making me vote for Hillary Clinton? Ugh. I have never been so wrong about an election than I was about 2016. I still think at how shocking that year was to me. Been voting a straight line Democratic ticket ever since, except for an occasional vote for Mike Simpson here or there, as at least he's a bog standard normie Republican, and I don't need to see my district turn into the shitshow that's the one to the west of me.
--Onward: The Common Sense Democratic Manifesto sounds like common sense to me, make it so. Even while I anticipate that it's going to call for a position on immigration that's much out of line with what I think is correct on the merits--I hate how defeated I feel that what I think is the correct take is super unpopular.
This is very interesting to see someone who deliberately votes for gridlock and ineffective government. Do you ever vote on foreign policy, or is domestic policy always paramount?
In the 2000s and early teens, "vote for gridlock" was a pretty common view. There were lots of bumper stickers with that phrase.
Did you think this was a good idea?
Many people don't like the biggest proposals either side has. What if you don't want to ban abortion, but also don't want universal single payer healthcare. Realize capping credit care rates at 10% means that you won't get a credit card, but think that the CFPB needs to be out there stopping scams. Don't think that student loans should be forgiven, but also want student loans to continue being subsidized by the government. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point.
Lot of voters with mixed ideological views on what government should do regarding different things.
Yes, but this requires a relatively finely tuned "active control" feedback to government that seems to be difficult for a single voter to pull off.
I agree! Which is why you get many people deciding that divided government is the best so that only stuff that both parties agree on move forward. It stops the radical stuff from either party happening. It also makes basic governance challenging as well, and people get upset about that and switch presidential votes.
CoT comes off as the median American voter who almost certainly prefers a deadlocked to a hyper-productive government. Americans in general don't like it when the government does stuff, except in crises and emergencies. (Once stuff gets passed, though, they tend to like it after a while. Just not at first.)
Voted, in the past tense. I'm different now then I was in my 20s and early 30s, when I was distrustful of the agendas of both major parties. Granted, the Trump era has been an aggravating factor.
Gridlock doesn’t necessarily mean ineffective government.
Divided government is almost always the most effective government
In particular, democratic presidents with republican congress they have been the only thing to reduce spending in the deficit
Effective for what? I think it really depends on what your goals are. Divided government in that respect may reduce spending, but limited spending isn't the right call in all situations.
Not in all situations no. But given our current debt load and imminent entitlement crisis it certainly is.
I also strongly maintain that any big changes to laws need to be bi-partisan.
That tends to result in better thought out laws were we take the other sides criticisms into account and are more likely to avoid unintended consequences.
I don't think it is actually that simple. Right now we don't have divided government. We have a Republican congress and Republican president. So it's very likely that we will have large increases in debt and more spending.
Yes that's my point. The only time in the last couple of decades where we've seen spending controlled at all is divided government. Republicans in control of congress and Dems with the presidency.
Every time Republicans control everything they forget all about fiscal control (not that I expected any from Trump)
And of course Dems are even worse
The split the ticket to keep government divided makes no sense to me. It's a heavy bet that your choice for President is a guaranteed winner, because if not, all you're doing is supercharging the Presidential winner.
It seems closer to me like a refusal to acknowledge there are only two choices and you have to decide which is better and worse.
I definitely had a "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos" strain in my younger years.
1. This is too sanguine about the prospects for the Senate, which is somewhat surprising since that's a theme. If we brought back Byron Dorgan and Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nighthorse Campbell (naming some guys for elder millennial political junkies) they would lose today, with their 2006 positions. This is about changes in the issue environment, changes in political knowledge and communication, changes in demographics, etc.
2. One thing that's underrated here is the way that the issue environment can change in a way that's bad for Democrats and makes them seem to have moved left without that being something they did. For example, climate and trans rights have both increased in prominence over the last 20 years, but a lot of that is about changes in the climate and changes in the information environment respectively. The world is changing faster than many people want it to, which leads them to conservatism, but that's not actually something that Democrats can stop.
"If we brought back Byron Dorgan and Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nighthorse Campbell (naming some guys for elder millennial political junkies) they would lose today, with their 2006 positions. This is about changes in the issue environment, changes in political knowledge and communication, changes in demographics, etc"
I don't think this is true. People just forget how conservative those guys were!
In 2006 Ben Nelson got the endorsement of the NRA, the Chamber of Commerce, and National Right to Life. I am deeply skeptical that they would endorse him if he ran again with the same positions as in 2006 (even leaving aside the vote for the ACA which anti-abortion people were very mad about). Notably, Joe Manchin did not get endorsements from those groups in 2018, and they did endorse his opponent.
The decline of ticket-splitting is a part of the general trend toward polarization which is mostly about voters making _more rational_ decisions according to their own preferences. That's a very hard cat to put back in the bag.
Rationally speaking, we're not that far off from a world where each party's leader in the House and Senate calls all the shots and the role of the individual members is simply to elect the leader. If you think of it that way, the choice of who to vote has nothing to do with what stances an individual candidate takes on specific issues, and everything to do with which party they represent and which stance the party takes.
Not surprising that more and more people on both sides are wising up to this.
Right, ticket splitting is usually a bad idea if you have actual public policy preferences. It's just that our political system basically doesn't work if everyone realizes this.
Agree with this, and the point about voters becoming better informed about the downstream consequences of their vote, the decline in ticket-splitting, greater awareness of the importance of confirming judges etc etc is all stuff that Matt has (correctly IMO) argued in other posts.
Sorry Matt but I don't think you're being realistic here. Pryor and Lincoln lost, and pretty badly too, in 2014 and 2010, respectively. As did Mary Landrieu in 2014, and Heidi Heitkamp in 2018. Byron Dorgan would have lost in 2010 had he run for reelection (Hoeven, the Republican who replaced him, was leading in the polls before Dorgan said he wouldn't run for reelection).* Heck, Manchin almost lost in 2018 despite it being a strong Democratic year.
*https://www.politico.com/story/2010/01/dorgan-announcement-stuns-dems-031184
I don't know if it would be possible to reassemble the conservative wing of the democrats that existed in the south essentially as a historical artifact of the civil war but it's worth a shot because what would the alternative be?
the Democrats had a majority in the Alabama house until the 2010 midterms!!!
Well, they'd lose the primary.
I don’t think this is true. Consider the issue from an inverted perspective: look at a completely dominant state Republican Party such as Texas. Are there significant fissures within the party? Yes! Many elected state Rs were ready to throw Paxton out. The question might then be, what would it take for someone like eg former TX House speaker Ben Strauss to run as a Democrat? That’s the shape of the problem.
Can you say more about the connection between what you're saying and what I said? I don't quite see it yet.
My thought is that even in a place like Texas there is an array of positions along the (oversimplified) axis, and we can see presently that there is a substantial degree of disagreement within the seemingly impregnable Republican majority. Moreover, the type of "dispossessed R" politicos Strauss exemplifies (or exemplified at one point) are not far removed from folks that were not so long ago conservative or even centrist Democrats. I don't think (agreeing with you here) that some cryogenic resuscitation of Mark Pryor would do the trick here, but the question is could someone else, certainly barely recognizable as a caucus colleague of AOC or Elizabeth Warren, sneak in there? What made Democratic candidates that were active just 15 years acceptable to majorities of Arkansas voters?
The "issue space" seems to me just a way to say that "no Democrats can ever deemphasize these issues", but I may be misunderstanding. If the issue space has its own inescapable dynamic, a party that consistently loses the Senate 60-40 will have an existential impulse to reposition on the issues themselves to avoid that.
1. Arkansas voters 15 years ago were less informed about how to translate their views into vote choices and/or they chose their votes with other aims in mind (such as institutional loyalty).
2. The parties were less polarized across the issue space in general so it was less easy to just pick the party you're closest to.
3. The issues that were important in national debates divided people in Arkansas more closely.
Ben Nighthorse Campbell is a real person? What a name!
He's part Native American and received "Nighthorse" as part of a Cheyenne tribal naming ceremony. (I met him long ago and he's a very personable guy, probably similar to what I've been told speaking one-on-one with Bill Clinton was like.)
The flaw in this analysis is to ignore 2006. Bush was wildly unpopular by 2006. Kay Hagan was elected senator from North Carolina by a six point margin. Congress went heavily Democratic over all--that's why Obama could pass his health care bill in 2009. McCain was facing a huge headwind even without the economic meltdown of fall 2008. Iraq and Katrina had done huge damage to the Republican brand.
Great article, but this passage makes no sense:
“[Hillary] was defeated because by 2016, mainstream Democrats thought her 2003 vote for the Iraq War and her husband’s 1990s support for things like the Defense of Marriage Act were dumb.”
Hillary did as well with Democratic voters as a generic Democrat. She won 90% of Bernie primary voters, which is right about average for supporters of a defeated primary opponent candidate.
Hillary lost because she got crushed with the white working class. Harris also lost because she got crushed with the white working class. Yes, Harris also did poorly with Latinos, but there are 3 or 4 white working class voters for every Latino voter and white working class voters dominate swing states.
Matt seems reluctant to admit that female coastal elites have alot of trouble with white working class voters in swing states. I suspect female candidates have to pander just as hard as Obama to succeed with this demographic. A dude who lives in Redding Pennsylvania and drives a truck might vote for a cool girl who shows some affinity for working class culture, but neither Hillary nor Harris came close to doing so.
"Matt seems reluctant to admit that female coastal elites have alot of trouble with white working class voters in swing states."
I'm not reluctant to admit it at all.
But what I think is the conventional wisdom overstates the extent to which this trouble connecting is about vibes and personality versus position-taking on issues.
Yeah Tim Walz wearing flannel matters a lot less than than actually coming out and saying "actually fracking is great and we should do more of it"
I think Waltz fails on vibes as well. Both Tim’s seemed to be female coastal elites idea of who middle America should like and not actually the real thing.
I appreciate the clarification. Yet I still don’t think Hillary lost because Democrats were disaffected with her support for the Iraq war or her husband’s support for DOMA.
Hillary would have been President if she had correctly voted against the Iraq War.
Unfortunately, she isn't the type of person who would ever correctly oppose a war.
I agree with that, and once you say it out loud it becomes hard to deny that it's good that she lost.
Correct, she would have beaten Obama handily in the 2008 primary and the recession would have pushed her to victory.
She likely lost a few votes to Trump over Iraq -- but her husband's support for DOMA (contrasted with his own pecadillos and her support for gay marriage) reflected the Clintons' lack of authenticity rather than a matter of policy per se.
My intuition, supported by looking at where Bernie did well in primaries, is the Bernie voters Clinton lost were populist, anti-elitist sorts, not the kind of highly engaged person who held grudges over the Iraq war 13 years later.
Populist anti-elitists also use Iraq as a symbol.
We’re the voters she lost to Trump over Iraq Democrats?
When does Sydney Sweeney turn 35?
My first election was 1996, so I am right there with you and think you nailed it, with one gap:
The missing theme is globalization (along with the financialization of the US economy and the general ascent of unrestrained monopoly, all under the theory that the only issue that matters is lower prices for consumers. "The Walmart Effect", in a nutshell.
These views were all ascendant in the Reagan era and the Democratic Party's view was still, at the time, "buy American". (I was a kid, but we were a union household in NYC, which also tended to be out ahead of the rest of the country because its manufacturing base was gutted and sent south in the 60s and 70s, an experience that the rest of the country got to start experiencing in the late 90s).
There was a debate to be had in the late 90s on whether this was all a good idea: NAFTA, China WTO / Preferred Nation status, offshoring, outsourcing, Glass Steagall, etc. However Clinton decided not to have that debate and when he got out ahead on accelerating Democratic adoption of these policies, he may have helped himself with in 1996 when people were still excited about Walmart Prices (and so shortly after global Communism was defeated), but he opened the door for the cries of "the parties are the same!" and gave 2016 Trump an opportunity to make Democrats own these issues through political amnesia.
People could interpret "Hope and Change" in 2008 however they wanted (the same type of thing we are seeing with "Make America Great Again" now between the tech bros and the red hats). Many (myself included) expected a repudiation, or at least a debate, on globalization and financialization, especially considering the financial crash. We never got it. The democrats punted on the MOST salient political issue. This plus Iraq is why Hillary lost the primary, IMO.
Then in 2016 Dems nominated Hillary and punted again on the big debate of our time, the one everyone really wanted to talk about. The thing that should have been the big division between the parties since the early 2000s which they were instead completely aligned on even as the US population as a whole slowly got more and more against it.
Then came Trump. The first candidate to truly bring salience to the issue. He did so obliquely instead of head-on, but he was anti-China, and anti-Immigration (NAFTA / globalization).
Now China and deglobalization are THE questions of the day because we are suddenly realizing that we went way too far even from a basic national security standpoint.
Trump set aside popular fights with Social Security and Medical, neutralized the debate on abortion, and continued to be the only candidate talking about things even tangentially related to The Big Debate.
Yeah, I think this part of the political economy explains more of it than we'd like to admit. America, and the whole world really, is reckoning with its creation of the consumer economy that is at the underlying logic of basically all financialization and trade in the world.
It's not really a "good" or "bad" thing exactly, but it seems like no one really wants to talk about it. I always tell my friends, the South Park "THEY TOOK OUR JORBS" joke is funny, but it's also...like just true? The American capitalist, with full support from the American government, basically committed to exporting the American manufacturing sector out of the country.
And it's been sort of good? For some many Americans who have easy access to Dollars and cheap goods, definitely. For the Chinese worker, obviously. But there's been a concentrated harm amongst the American population. That population probably wouldn't even really care about the history, or political-economy, or whatever, but I think it's at the heart of about 20 years of American politics.
I always thought the South Park "TURKER JERBS!" thing was supposed to be sympathetic with the flannel-wearing redneck right up until 2017 when it morphed into "YOU WILL NOT REPLACE US!" with Nazi flags. Even then, South Park had the best take on the issue, accurately highlighting that the real issue was how to deal with technology and industrial automation.
It was a bad thing. One thing Trump has right is that America has a responsibility to put America first. Chinese people shouldn’t factor into our moral calculus at all, they sure don’t give af about us!
(I think we owe Latin America something, though, but we didn’t do shit to China except liberate them from the Japanese and they should pay tribute not be our competitor)
“The American capitalist, with full support from the American government, basically committed to exporting the American manufacturing sector out of the country”
They utterly failed.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS/
That shows that the US Manufacturing sector has maintained its productivity. That's a great thing, but not really what my point is.
The manufacturing sector has fallen from around 31% of private sector employment to around 9.9% today. That's for a lot of reasons, and a lot of Americans benefit from the consumer economy today. Is anyone disputing that form low-value/low-tech manufacturing jobs have moved away from our shores to other nations. Our economy has become more "efficient."
I guess your comment drives at the OPs point. No smart people in either party want to really reckon with it.
EDIT: Sorry that 31% was around 1970
The high value/high tech manufacturing jobs we have currently pay about a 14% premium over service industries.
9% of 171 million workers is 15 million. 31% would be 53 million. A difference of 38 million workers.
What would it look like for the economy if we reallocated 38 million workers to "low-value/low tech manufacturing jobs?"
I don't think I advocated the return of every low value or low-tech manufacturing job to return to America.
But if it happened, I think America would have a lower unemployment rate, you'd have less private and government debt, and you'd have lower real wages in aggregate as goods became more expensive.
I think you would also have a much more rational materialist politics in the United States. I also believe that consumers in other nations would generally be slightly richer. As with all things, it's trade off.
The current unemployment rate is 4.2% with a employment population ratio for ages 25-54 being over 80%. It hasn't been that high since the late 90s boom. How much lower do you think unemployment could go?
How would we have less private and government debt? Almost everything would be more expensive?
I also don't understand how you would have consumers in other countries be richer? Selling to the US drives a great deal of the world economy, and in turn allows them to buy goods and services from us.
If someone disputes that, they're an idiot. But if someone claims you can bring those jobs back, they're a con-man: even China doesn't have those jobs anymore because manufacturing is once again upgrading technologically. The problem is, and has been since the 19th century, how to empower workers to bargain for higher-tech, better-paying jobs.
Agree 100%! I was not referring to deglobalizing ALL manufacturing. Let H&M and Nike continue to manufacture wherever they do now. It's the high-end intermediate technologies that we need to bring within our borders. The CHIPS act was spot-on, but sold poorly amid a raft of everything bagel.
The actual reality of how this is going to play out is likely to be the GOP stumbling into it through tariffs or through conflict with China on Taiwan, and it will be ugly and inflationary. This is why Democrats need to position themselves TODAY as the "rebalance global capitalism" party.
Finally, RE: Obama from comments lower down: I never said he was unpopular. He was a cipher that promised change and brought the ACA. People were still itching for change after decades of dynastic neoliberalism, and the next Dem up was... Hillary. Obama had a window and he left wall street and Amazon and China alone and this is how Trump was able to flip the script to make the Dems the party of the Elite. Post-presidency Obama is also clearly invested in the elite status he earned his way into.
He was not unpopular but he left open a vacuum that Trump filled for many of his own voters.
The Golden Path was probably that Obama won the intra-Party struggles earlier in his first term and was allowed to fully rebuild the Party in his own image. What we got instead was that he was stymied in that project, leaving the Party all ready and set for a return to dynastic neoliberalism in Hillary 2016 once the uppity black man from Harvard and the socialist Jew from Vermont were out of the way.
“Breaking up the banks won’t fix racism” LMFAO
Among the worst political lines in the 21st century.
Sure, but also the priority ordering that Hillary and a lot of her voter base really supported.
I’ve said it here before, but Bernie’s too nice. The correct response was: “Hillary has a plan to end racism! That’s amazing! Hillary, what’s your plan to *end* racism?”
Instead, Bernie accepted that his supporters were a bunch of meanies, and signed up for hardcore identity politics. Hillary may as well have dropped a nuke on the Democratic Party.
Very complementary to “affirmative action won’t fix capitalism”. The Clinton-Sanders primary was basically a fight between these two statements.
And now, Trump goes Tik-Tok! The oligarchs are still getting the last laugh.
But then shouldn’t Biden have been more popular with the working class? He had continued and even pushed forward more aggressive policies against China, and has supported big industrial policy initiatives around electric cars and semiconductors.
He never really got at the central issue though. He just nibbled around some of the issues on matters of policy. Lord knows he was no great communicator.
The theme needs to be managed deglobalization at all levels. That hits on national security, pro-market, competitive investments, pro-manufacturing, pro-border, anti-finance, better for wages, better for the environment... all winning themes of it's picked up as THE big central narrative. The big narrative football in 2024 was instead "Trump is a fascist."
Of course, now that the Dems are financed by big money they are scared to come out with any of these messages, but did out-fundraising Trump help at all? Only in the swing states.
If the Democrats want to win they need to stop fighting swing state by swing state and take a swing that puts counties everywhere back into play without laser-guided electoral campaigns. They need to put forth an agenda of abundance so that people feel a little less pressure and a lot more hope.
Forget figuring out why people voted for Trump or Biden. Figure out why people voted for OBAMA. What did they think was going to change and where did he let them down? This delayed debate over the role of global capital and globalization is what the country has been craving for 20 years.
"The theme needs to be managed deglobalization at all levels."
What does this mean in practice?
Voters just demonstrated that they really hate prices increasing, but deglobalization almost certainly means pretty dramatic price increases and generally an overall reduction of goods available the US citizens. You think that's going to be popular?
You say people felt let down by Obama, but he had approval ratings nearing 60% when he left office, and he probably would have won decisively in 2016 if he could have run for a third term. And he never really campaigned as a full-throated anti-globalist, though he was somewhat critical of finance and had populist, anti-corruption themes.
But anyway, I do agree that more populism and nationalism would be beneficial. That said, to put on my neoliberal hat, "managed deglobalization" would almost certain cause prices to go up, which as we've seen is politically disastrous. How is that overcome?
"This meant Obama’s second term disappointed progressives on substance, and progressive funders went about breaking down the veal pen and creating the groups."
One minor nit. The Groups have existed for as long as I have been politically aware. They certainly existed in the 1990's. One of my favorite stories about Bill Clinton is about how "the era of big government is over" became his big pull-quote-- well, the original quote was "the era of big government is over, but the era of every man for himself must never return". Which would have been VERY memorable but also very different. The second half got pulled out by Ann Lewis (Barney Frank's sister), a connected Dem operator who told Bill Clinton that the feminist groups would scream if he used that "sexist" language. Just a gift to the right wing over a stupid language issue.
But also-- yes, the Groups were powerful in the 1990's. The difference is they weren't ALL powerful. Bill Clinton DID bowdlerize his SOTU to keep the Groups happy, but he also did Sister Souljah, signed the crime bill, and pushed and enacted welfare reform.
The difference in the Biden-Harris era is it went from "the Groups are people we consult with and work with and sometimes do what they want while expecting they get behind our decisions" to "it's perfectly OK for the Groups to lie and call us racists and transphobes and climate deniers whenever we make a political decision they don't like, but we will still give them a seat at the table anyway".
I have this half baked thought that a major missing piece is Obama entering office as the "anti-war candidate" and leaving it as the "drone striker in chief." Seems like it poured a lot of fuel on the "America first" fires when he got UBL and then failed to declare victory and leave Afghanistan. A bunch of people formerly sympathetic to the anti-war left seem to now be affiliating with Trumpian nationalist/isolationist/protectionist agenda.
Maybe just even more broadly the arc of Obama's presidency being incredibly disappointing in a bunch of directions. Primary candidate Obama in 07/08 sold himself as so drastically different from actual President Obama it severely undermined the credibility of the Dems as a party. And then to top it all off they went and actually nominated Hillary to just finally put the last nail in the coffin of Obama-ism. A ton of people got behind candidate Obama in the first place because he wasn't Hillary, just like how they got behind Trump 2016. Still just an unfathomable failure to learn from what the voters were telling them.
I don't think that's right, people liked and continue to like Obama. In June 2016, Obama's net approval rating was +10. I think you're right that people disliked Hillary Clinton both in 2008 and 2016, but I don't think they soured on Obama like you're saying.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-obamas-rising-approval-ratings-compare-with-recent-presidents/
Obama's legacy is important to the narrative precisely because it's kinda weird. He came into office unusually popular by taking popular positions as a candidate and theoretically breaking the party away from the uniquely toxic continuity embodied by Hillary Clinton. He then tanked a lot of that good will by disappointing/antagonizing various constituencies that were energized by the break in continuity. Then, after losing the new car smell, he rebuilt some base of support as a much more establishment/continuity Dem in a manner that really locked in the realignment that gave us the Trump era. 2015/2016 Obama was more popular than 2011 Obama but had a much harder ceiling on his popularity that 2007/2008 Obama, and the party alignment he left behind has largely been a catastrophe.
Americans are definitely hostile to dynastic politics these days. You see it also with the Kennedys and Trumps.
I can't tell if you're being ironic or not?
Yea, anyone who thinks Don Junior is gonna be a thing is laughably out to lunch, but if anything RFK would be less relevant than Alex Jones if he wasn't a Kennedy, so I'm not really sure what the irony is supposed to be.
I heard Niall Ferguson on a podcast predicting the cementing of two families into a dominant political dynasty when Barron Trump weds one of Elon Musk’s daughters. Pretty sure he was joking.
The irony would be suggesting RFK, Jr. as an example of American hostility to dynastic politics.
RFK doesn't do well when he has to face actual voters.
I'm talking about Joseph Kennedy III losing a Senate seat in Massachusetts and the fact that there are, as far as I know, no Kennedys currently in elective office. He's now the Special Envoy to Northern Ireland. RFK Jr also can't win an election. Lara Trump just turned down the Senate appointment. This is very different from every Bush in creation turning up in office.
'Every Bush in creation' was like 4 right? Yeah ok Prescott Bush in the 50s but in the era we're talking about only Papa, Dubya, JEB, and George P? Am I forgetting one?
I think Neil Bush ran for a Texas house seat in 2022 but didn't make it to the primary runoff.
Two presidents within 8 years and coming close to having a third who was governor of a major state seems like a lot to me.
I understand the temptation of this opinion but empirically, very few people vote on foreign policy. I do think Iraq was to a large extent an exception to that, because it directly affected so many more people than most foreign policy issues, but the whole point of the shift toward drones is it allows countries to pursue their military aims in a less domestically unpopular way (because average voters don't really know it's happening).
The perceived failure of Obama to coherently/successfully depart from Bush era foreign policy is a substantial component of the Trump era party realignment. It's neatly slots in to the anti-globalist grievances of the working class white voters Dems have shed.
What does being "anti-war" mean in this context? Being anti-war on Iraq means that invading sovereign nations is bad. Being anti-war on Ukraine clearly means something else.
I'd like to see the same person who consistently argued against American involvement in WWI and Ukraine both; I imagine they'd be dead right now. In practice this is a lot of disparate groups, many of which weren't progressive at all.
The anti-intervention position was certainly considered progressive in Korea / Vietnam / other Cold War conflicts, because the anti-wars were accused of sympathezing with the enemy, which at the time was communists. But it wasn't true in WWII because the primary anti-interventionists were the America Firsters, who were (correctly) pegged as having been pro-fascist. Now that the Cold War is over and Russia is engaging in simple imperialist expansion, the anti-war people are lumped in with enemy sympathizers - same as ever.
"Primary Biden was still clearly visible on foreign policy, especially Israel, but on domestic issue, he wasn’t just more left-wing than swing voters were expecting — he was more left-wing than primary voters had voted for. I still don’t think we really know why any of that happened. But we saw quite quickly that sticking the Biden face on Warrenism wasn’t popular. "
I think we will find, as more people begin speaking freely about what went on in the White House, that the reason this happened is that Biden — a man who knew very well how to position himself at the ideological center of the Democratic Party — was less and less in control of his own administration. Individual staffers were able to drive the agenda with less oversight and they were not as adept at steering a steady, center-left course as the old man was.
Fascinating how central a small-ish Middle Eastern country (Iraq) was to our politics for so many cycles. And here’s the kicker- ask yourself which country - Iraq or Afghanistan - is better off now than at the turn of the 21st century? Pretty clearly Iraq right? Which is NOT to say that it was all worthwhile - that war had HUGE financial and more importantly human costs for the US and especially for the Iraqis. But I remember living through years of frustration that we were expending resources on the Iraq war while Afghanistan - “the good war” seemed to be languishing. I guess one rejoinder might be “well, we shouldn’t have fought either” but I really don’t think that was realistic- a hypothetical world where Gore wins but 9/11 still happens (the hijackers had been planning it for years, after all) still would have seen an Afghanistan war, but almost certainly not an Iraq one. Focused solely on outcomes for Afghanistan and Iraq, would that world have actually been better? I used to think so but now I’m not so sure.
Iraq has been better off economically and socially than Afghanistan, on average, for at least 500 years. I don’t think you can argue anything from that directly.
Kill OBL during the Tora Bora or Anaconda operations and get the hell out. Recreating Afghanistan as a modern 21st century nation was not in the cards and it was ridiculous that we ever thought that was our mission.
And, of course, never go into Iraq in the first place.
If you ask which was better off in 1985, Iraq or Afghanistan, it was also pretty clearly Iraq. And as James L adds, this advantage goes back for a long time, because Mesopotamia is a cradle of civilization that remained a center for millennia, and has had urban educated populations for centuries, while the mountains of Central Asia have basically always been frontier - even the Mughals moved their capital to the Ganges plain when they had a chance.
My point (which I guess I didn’t get across very well) was that in 20 years the US was able to make things better in Iraq (removing Hussein, stabilizing the society) and made no progress at all in Afghanistan.
I don't think the US "made no progress" in Afghanistan. It's just that getting to a stable government in Afghanistan is much, much harder than in Iraq for many deep-seated reasons that go back hundreds of years.
With hindsight, I think it's clear the right decision was to still invade Afghanistan, but then devote all the money that would have gone into Iraq into Afghanistan instead. Also crackdown more on corruption.
It still would require us to spend decades there.
I'm trying to imagine what it would take for you to acknowledge that globalization writ large caused real and deep economic devastation in pockets of the American economy that was not remotely ameliorated by the division safety net, which produced understandable and unpredictable political resentment that has had lasting consequences.
I'd be interested to read whether you think uplifting of hundreds of millions of non Americans out of poverty was worth real and deep economic devastation in pockets of the American economy?
Leftists in general and communists specifically typically downplay nationalism for the good of the universal working class. There is no doubt that globalization has been good for the latter at the expense of some of the former. Do you support that?
Neoliberals sure were happy to have American workers make this sacrifice without their consent, though! With no skin in the game.
I don't understand this. American workers are voters. They choose politicians who act on their behalf. For 90% of voters/workers, this has been a good thing. Should those 90% have been poorer because it wasn't great for 10%?
It hasn’t been a good thing that we’ve lost our state capacity and our social trust, even with marginally cheaper consumer goods for the 50-70% (not 90%) of folks that live in places that didn’t lose industry to China and Mexico.
We did not vote to deindustrialize and become a nation of service workers from a nation of producers - it was done to us, and people are rightly pissed about it.
> it was done to us
What a crock of shit. People want contradictory things. They need to take some responsibility for their own lives. The government's not your fucking parent.
americans hate inflation though. I understand the critiques of the deregulatory program from basically 1975-2000 and the trade liberalization regime from 1990-about 2015 (when TPP got killed) but the critics have really not explained an alternative that would be better.
What Matt misses is the anxiety that blue collar manufacturing workers feel when they see their companies opening facilities in China and Mexico. Trump beat Clinton because Bill signed NAFTA and Obama was trying to push through TPP.
Trump could become deeply unpopular where anyone put up by Democrats wins in 2028, but the more likely outcome is that he becomes unpopular with the working class voters who thought he was going to do something for them. Aggressively going after his ties to Silicon Valley and Wall Street with an authentic blue collar candidate who’s somewhat economically populist would be the clearest path to victory in my opinion.
a younger Bernie would be perfect
I think that's true. And if you go back further than Matt does, that had something to do with Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan (and has something to do with Trump as well).
But it doesn't work as a General Theory of the American Electorate, because the thermostatic stuff that Matt is talking about obviously had a major influence.