Great essay! I think we underestimate, too, just how big a deal the Great Recession was, particularly the phenomenon of the OBAMA-TRUMP VOTER, which is what heralded the realignment that now everybody talks about.
As Matt does a great job of highlighting, progressives are not correct on the merits about every single policy issue across the board.
But there are a handful of issues where progressive are clearly correct, but where the American people simply aren't with them. I can see the dilemma for a highly-educated clearly talented political figure or policy wonk. Can we really run on misinformation? How do we pander without coming off as incredibly insincere?
I think this is the underdeveloped aspect of Yglesias thought. But I think recognizing the dilemma is the first step, and I see a couple different strategies.
1) Real Moderation. Method-act to get in touch with voters concerns. Get yourself into a headspace where "chaos at the border" and "invasive multiculturalism" is more important the actual impact of immigration on the economy or the lives of immigrants. Or better yet practice actual working class political empowerment. Find normal people and elevate them rather than finding elites and teaching them to act normal. Don't worry about important things you can't do, accept that some ideas you will just have to wait until their time comes.
2) Secret Congress. Do boring technical stuff without really talking to voters about or only using the vaguest upbeat terms for what you are working on it. If you make voters lives better they might notice, and if they don't you will still have done the right thing and not paid any cost for it. The real task of politics is building about building a lowkey policy consensus among elites, politicians, and government bureaucrats while elections can be about symbolic cultural wars.
3) Vibes and Populism. Change your rhetoric and vibes above all. You are probably already pandering, but this time pander to voters not the groups. Maybe throw in some bombastic (i.e. marginally deceptive) rhetoric from time to time. Get in with the nontraditional media channels and the social media influencers. Change the subject when you don't like the question and construct your own reality of which issues should be salient. You may have a real policy platform for the more wonky voters, but popularism compels you to do whatever works politically - it's the voters choice about how carefully-informed they want their vote to be, but you have to communicate to all voters where they are.
4) Educate the Voters. Validate your voters values and opinions, but then carefully explain why you are actually right. Pick your battles and decide what you are willing to spend political capital on and what you are willing to take a dive on. Its okay to explain a delta between your personal views and what "this campaign is about". Your platform should be very narrow and targeted only to what you can actually communicate and accomplish on your term. In some cases, like Obama and the Iraq war, you can call your shot as a wonk or low-level politician and then get elevated after events vindicate you.
I've heightened these strategies for contrast, but I do think at various times Yglesias has endorsed some version of each of these. I think we can have a productive conversation about which mix of these strategies is appropriate and under what circumstances.
I feel like the article contradicts itself. First it implies that Obama was able to win without moderating because Republicans had overseen the start of a massive recession. Then he says the primary factor in allowing Democrats to win without moderating in 2008 was Iraq.
Re foreign policy, it’s not just Iraq. Hilary to Obama’s right on foreign policy. The only thing she criticized Obama in her book was him not willing to bomb Syria more. I think accommodation of national security anti-trump hawks has also moved the party to Obama’s right on foreign policy. And I rlly don’t understand why. While the public obv finds pro-pal protest types annoying, is it rlly popular among the masses to send money to foreign countries? It seems like an elite driven consensus, and I think it’s bad that Dems moved to the right where the masses probably agree with the left or non-interventionist side more.
There’s a reason why the former republican hawks were discredited and I don’t understand why Dems have embraced them. Almost all Republicans voted for Iraq, while a significant majority of Dems didn’t. Instead of taking the win and getting rid of Dems who voted incorrectly, Dems embraced the discredited hawks from the Republican side when Trump pushed them out! Just absolutely baffling.
I’m delighted with your description of Trump in 2016. While I agree that “In 2016, they nominated a lying asshole and scumbag in the form of Donald Trump”, I am convinced that the Democrats did precisely the same thing in nominating Hillary Clinton.
I'm about Matt's age, and when I reflect on the same time period all I think about it is how annoying it has been to have had my entire adult life guided by the whims of low information voters of PA and WI.
In terms of perceptions of the economy I saw two stories in the WSJ, one below the other, basically everything is terrible in America because of high housing prices and then the article below saying everything is terrible in China because prices are too low.
I was watching one of my economic YouTubers and he said he does, as a matter of principle, some positive stories and the views are dramatically lower than videos with a negative slant.
VP running mates don't matter. And recall that she did the best in the Midwest swing states, so it's not clear that Walz hurt her at all; maybe he helped her.
But I do ruminate on what might have happened had she picked Mark Cuban. My darkhorse 2028 candidate.
There is no argument in this piece. In fact, its barely coherent. It is just trauma laden screed that mentions the word Iraq over and over again. It serves mostly as evidence of the long shadow of that era to certain thinkers.
I also think that a survey of the last 25 years is incomplete without addressing the changes in public communication. The collapse of the network television monoculture, the collapse of print newspaper, the rise and fragmentation of cable news, the beginning of social media networks and the transition to algorithmically presented social media. Definitely over my head but I'd like to hear Matt's overview.
I don't really see much mention of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 here, nor even of the COVID pandemic, the lockdowns, the BLM riots of summer 2020, and the ensuing economic crash.
Do you seriously think macroeconomic trends just don't matter?
I want to go back to that post-2004 era and note that it wasn't just a window where Democrats stopped talking about gun control, but there was a very specific way in which the 2005/2006 rebound from the Bush reelection had Democrats trying to sort through a lot of position taking with branding as a more tough guy libertarian bent--Paul Hackett, Jim Webb, other 2006 recruits by Rahm, all were trying to tie together moderation on the 2nd Amendment alongside criticism of the Bush Administration's excesses in Iraq and the War On Terror (Patriot Act linked to the government wanting to know what books you checked out in the library) to explaining the sympathies to the gay marriage position as "I don't want government in the bedroom."
There's something to be said for how this messaging works today as well in the post-Dobbs environment in appealing to Barstool Conservative men, a way to take a position on abortion that explains enough about the individual politician that could resonant not just with women but men.
If the Trump Administration goes after abortion access by mail, it's a window for Democrats to revisit their older libertarian instincts on social and cultural issues.
Barney Frank back during the GOP crackdown on online gambling, which Nate Silver recently noted was one of his few periods of political awareness before getting more into modeling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-UpI1Ct-dg
I feel like I've said this a million times, but I guess I have to say it again: you are overrating the effect of the Iraq war on the 2016 election, which is due to your generational bias. You claim "Iraq is why Hillary felt unacceptably right-wing to young Democrats in 2016", but I think you're counting yourself as a "young Democrat" as a Gen X here and you're totally missing the perspective of the Z/Millennial Democrat here.
I was 23 in 2016, and I watched a lot of my friends get into politics for the first time because of the Bernie wave, and it had absolutely nothing to do with Clinton's 2003 vote for the Iraq war. They were genuinely swayed by Bernie as a politician. Now that's not to say that they were hardcore democratic socialists, but there was something there that really made people believe in him. I'm talking about kids who voted in 2012 for Romney at 19 years old because their parents told them to, who told me in 2016 that they "believed in Bernie in a way they've never felt for a politician before". They truly didn't care about Clinton's vote for Iraq, and I'm willing to bet that most people in your generation didn't care either.
You're a politics blogger. You remember votes, but can you honestly say that you think most voters cared about Clinton's vote 13 years prior? The Iraq war was simply not a salient issue in the 2016 election. I think it *contributed* to the sense that Clinton was a flip-flopper and Bernie was an idealist who was always right, but that was just a single factor.
Yes I fully agree that it was *part* of her being the status quo candidate, but Matt likes to write as if that was the single defining vote that tanked her entire candidacy for president.
I am sure people have different views on this and 8 years is also a long time but the Iraq war thread is really that Iraq was the central issue of the '08 Dem primary, so it seemed odd that she would continue to be a central player in D politics after her stance on the central issue of the day had been refuted.
I agree with the general thrust of this but you only touch on the issue of race, and I think it had a larger distortion in the Obama era than even now is appreciated. Obama's extreme moderation was misread as left wing from Iowa on, by both left wing and right wing media, BECAUSE of his identity as a Black academic. If you go back to the primary that year, one of the main wedges between Clinton and Obama was his moderate approach to health care reform, which is ultimately reflected in the spirit of the ACA, but on college campuses like mine he was seen as the liberal torchbearer (and only in part because of Iraq).
On the right, racial and cultural backlash was quite real and gave rise to the Tea Party, nativism, and Trump. There's just no way of looking back on the last 25 years without this (this is WHY Romney ran as so right wing in 2012). But on the left, the backlash to the backlash gave way a wedge between those who viewed his presidency as liberal enough and dogged only by racist resistance that could be eroded by demographics and obliterated by diversity education, and those who viewed his presidency as a centrist betrayal of what they thought they were voting for. It's exceedingly hard to hold those two camps together in a coalition, especially when they're the governing party and ESPECIALLY when there are real economic headwinds.
Great essay! I think we underestimate, too, just how big a deal the Great Recession was, particularly the phenomenon of the OBAMA-TRUMP VOTER, which is what heralded the realignment that now everybody talks about.
As Matt does a great job of highlighting, progressives are not correct on the merits about every single policy issue across the board.
But there are a handful of issues where progressive are clearly correct, but where the American people simply aren't with them. I can see the dilemma for a highly-educated clearly talented political figure or policy wonk. Can we really run on misinformation? How do we pander without coming off as incredibly insincere?
I think this is the underdeveloped aspect of Yglesias thought. But I think recognizing the dilemma is the first step, and I see a couple different strategies.
1) Real Moderation. Method-act to get in touch with voters concerns. Get yourself into a headspace where "chaos at the border" and "invasive multiculturalism" is more important the actual impact of immigration on the economy or the lives of immigrants. Or better yet practice actual working class political empowerment. Find normal people and elevate them rather than finding elites and teaching them to act normal. Don't worry about important things you can't do, accept that some ideas you will just have to wait until their time comes.
2) Secret Congress. Do boring technical stuff without really talking to voters about or only using the vaguest upbeat terms for what you are working on it. If you make voters lives better they might notice, and if they don't you will still have done the right thing and not paid any cost for it. The real task of politics is building about building a lowkey policy consensus among elites, politicians, and government bureaucrats while elections can be about symbolic cultural wars.
3) Vibes and Populism. Change your rhetoric and vibes above all. You are probably already pandering, but this time pander to voters not the groups. Maybe throw in some bombastic (i.e. marginally deceptive) rhetoric from time to time. Get in with the nontraditional media channels and the social media influencers. Change the subject when you don't like the question and construct your own reality of which issues should be salient. You may have a real policy platform for the more wonky voters, but popularism compels you to do whatever works politically - it's the voters choice about how carefully-informed they want their vote to be, but you have to communicate to all voters where they are.
4) Educate the Voters. Validate your voters values and opinions, but then carefully explain why you are actually right. Pick your battles and decide what you are willing to spend political capital on and what you are willing to take a dive on. Its okay to explain a delta between your personal views and what "this campaign is about". Your platform should be very narrow and targeted only to what you can actually communicate and accomplish on your term. In some cases, like Obama and the Iraq war, you can call your shot as a wonk or low-level politician and then get elevated after events vindicate you.
I've heightened these strategies for contrast, but I do think at various times Yglesias has endorsed some version of each of these. I think we can have a productive conversation about which mix of these strategies is appropriate and under what circumstances.
I feel like the article contradicts itself. First it implies that Obama was able to win without moderating because Republicans had overseen the start of a massive recession. Then he says the primary factor in allowing Democrats to win without moderating in 2008 was Iraq.
Which factor was larger?
I think a better summation of the last 25 years can be made by comparing the two gladiator films.
https://open.substack.com/pub/crumblingcolumn/p/gladiators-gone-wild?r=muw4l&utm_medium=ios
Re foreign policy, it’s not just Iraq. Hilary to Obama’s right on foreign policy. The only thing she criticized Obama in her book was him not willing to bomb Syria more. I think accommodation of national security anti-trump hawks has also moved the party to Obama’s right on foreign policy. And I rlly don’t understand why. While the public obv finds pro-pal protest types annoying, is it rlly popular among the masses to send money to foreign countries? It seems like an elite driven consensus, and I think it’s bad that Dems moved to the right where the masses probably agree with the left or non-interventionist side more.
There’s a reason why the former republican hawks were discredited and I don’t understand why Dems have embraced them. Almost all Republicans voted for Iraq, while a significant majority of Dems didn’t. Instead of taking the win and getting rid of Dems who voted incorrectly, Dems embraced the discredited hawks from the Republican side when Trump pushed them out! Just absolutely baffling.
I’m delighted with your description of Trump in 2016. While I agree that “In 2016, they nominated a lying asshole and scumbag in the form of Donald Trump”, I am convinced that the Democrats did precisely the same thing in nominating Hillary Clinton.
I'm about Matt's age, and when I reflect on the same time period all I think about it is how annoying it has been to have had my entire adult life guided by the whims of low information voters of PA and WI.
I've been told this quirk of elections is meant to ensure moderate, non-polarizing candidates win them.
In terms of perceptions of the economy I saw two stories in the WSJ, one below the other, basically everything is terrible in America because of high housing prices and then the article below saying everything is terrible in China because prices are too low.
I was watching one of my economic YouTubers and he said he does, as a matter of principle, some positive stories and the views are dramatically lower than videos with a negative slant.
VP running mates don't matter. And recall that she did the best in the Midwest swing states, so it's not clear that Walz hurt her at all; maybe he helped her.
But I do ruminate on what might have happened had she picked Mark Cuban. My darkhorse 2028 candidate.
This piece reminds me by this article by Chris Hayes saying that the Democrats should not move to the center because of the Iraq war: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/twitter-pundits-democrats-must-stop-chasing-swing-voters-n1296851
There is no argument in this piece. In fact, its barely coherent. It is just trauma laden screed that mentions the word Iraq over and over again. It serves mostly as evidence of the long shadow of that era to certain thinkers.
I also think that a survey of the last 25 years is incomplete without addressing the changes in public communication. The collapse of the network television monoculture, the collapse of print newspaper, the rise and fragmentation of cable news, the beginning of social media networks and the transition to algorithmically presented social media. Definitely over my head but I'd like to hear Matt's overview.
I don't really see much mention of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 here, nor even of the COVID pandemic, the lockdowns, the BLM riots of summer 2020, and the ensuing economic crash.
Do you seriously think macroeconomic trends just don't matter?
I want to go back to that post-2004 era and note that it wasn't just a window where Democrats stopped talking about gun control, but there was a very specific way in which the 2005/2006 rebound from the Bush reelection had Democrats trying to sort through a lot of position taking with branding as a more tough guy libertarian bent--Paul Hackett, Jim Webb, other 2006 recruits by Rahm, all were trying to tie together moderation on the 2nd Amendment alongside criticism of the Bush Administration's excesses in Iraq and the War On Terror (Patriot Act linked to the government wanting to know what books you checked out in the library) to explaining the sympathies to the gay marriage position as "I don't want government in the bedroom."
There's something to be said for how this messaging works today as well in the post-Dobbs environment in appealing to Barstool Conservative men, a way to take a position on abortion that explains enough about the individual politician that could resonant not just with women but men.
If the Trump Administration goes after abortion access by mail, it's a window for Democrats to revisit their older libertarian instincts on social and cultural issues.
Barney Frank back during the GOP crackdown on online gambling, which Nate Silver recently noted was one of his few periods of political awareness before getting more into modeling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-UpI1Ct-dg
I feel like I've said this a million times, but I guess I have to say it again: you are overrating the effect of the Iraq war on the 2016 election, which is due to your generational bias. You claim "Iraq is why Hillary felt unacceptably right-wing to young Democrats in 2016", but I think you're counting yourself as a "young Democrat" as a Gen X here and you're totally missing the perspective of the Z/Millennial Democrat here.
I was 23 in 2016, and I watched a lot of my friends get into politics for the first time because of the Bernie wave, and it had absolutely nothing to do with Clinton's 2003 vote for the Iraq war. They were genuinely swayed by Bernie as a politician. Now that's not to say that they were hardcore democratic socialists, but there was something there that really made people believe in him. I'm talking about kids who voted in 2012 for Romney at 19 years old because their parents told them to, who told me in 2016 that they "believed in Bernie in a way they've never felt for a politician before". They truly didn't care about Clinton's vote for Iraq, and I'm willing to bet that most people in your generation didn't care either.
You're a politics blogger. You remember votes, but can you honestly say that you think most voters cared about Clinton's vote 13 years prior? The Iraq war was simply not a salient issue in the 2016 election. I think it *contributed* to the sense that Clinton was a flip-flopper and Bernie was an idealist who was always right, but that was just a single factor.
> I was 23 in 2016, and I watched a lot of my friends get into politics for the first time because of the Bernie wave
How does this give you any insight whatsoever into the median voter?
I think the Iraq vote is just a part of her being the status quo candidate writ large. Hell, she was the status quo candidate in the *2008* primary.
Yes I fully agree that it was *part* of her being the status quo candidate, but Matt likes to write as if that was the single defining vote that tanked her entire candidacy for president.
I am sure people have different views on this and 8 years is also a long time but the Iraq war thread is really that Iraq was the central issue of the '08 Dem primary, so it seemed odd that she would continue to be a central player in D politics after her stance on the central issue of the day had been refuted.
Re: Biden’s left shift, “we don’t know why that happened.” Dementia!
I agree with the general thrust of this but you only touch on the issue of race, and I think it had a larger distortion in the Obama era than even now is appreciated. Obama's extreme moderation was misread as left wing from Iowa on, by both left wing and right wing media, BECAUSE of his identity as a Black academic. If you go back to the primary that year, one of the main wedges between Clinton and Obama was his moderate approach to health care reform, which is ultimately reflected in the spirit of the ACA, but on college campuses like mine he was seen as the liberal torchbearer (and only in part because of Iraq).
On the right, racial and cultural backlash was quite real and gave rise to the Tea Party, nativism, and Trump. There's just no way of looking back on the last 25 years without this (this is WHY Romney ran as so right wing in 2012). But on the left, the backlash to the backlash gave way a wedge between those who viewed his presidency as liberal enough and dogged only by racist resistance that could be eroded by demographics and obliterated by diversity education, and those who viewed his presidency as a centrist betrayal of what they thought they were voting for. It's exceedingly hard to hold those two camps together in a coalition, especially when they're the governing party and ESPECIALLY when there are real economic headwinds.