One thing missing here is that if all you are is a tactical moderate, then 1) eventually that will come out and 2) that burns the credibility of any True Believers. I know “politicians lie” is not some grand revelation, but it hits harder when your main argument is electability. After all, electability only matters until you get elected
If Matt's goal is to scare the living Bejesus out of independents who are trying to figure out which or if either of our political parties offer a sane path forward, he has succeeded.
Yesterday we learned that, despite their name, the Progressive Establishment is a close-minded set of made-up-minds that will never change and expect nothing less than complete agreement and submission from everyone else. And that these creatures are the core of the party except when they are not which is when the anything but Democratic but very Socialists of America stick their oar in the water.
IOW, the core of the Democratic Party is the Progressives and the animating voice of dissent within the party thinks the Constitution would make an above average birdcage liner.
And then there are the so-called moderates whose agenda rational people can understand. But these brave souls can't actually be moderate because the base thinks Fidel Castro was a great man and that base demands insanity from its representatives.
And then we have Trump, who has defeated Iran at least 32 times and who will make Greenland, Venezuela and North Korea the 51st, 52nd and 53rd states.
I think it was actually on the Politix podcast, but someone interviewed an aide to Roy Cooper who talked about how he handled the "bathroom bill" fiasco in North Carolina. The thesis was that he was able to move past the superficial culture-war issues by (apparently correctly) stating that big companies who might otherwise expand into the state will be reticent if this is the kind of legislation the state produces.
The clever part was that he argued that it wasn't the bosses of the companies that were repelled, it was their employees. And as she tells it, Cooper was able to make the state Republicans look petty and foolish for scaring away badly-needed jobs while perhaps taking a subtle jab at those West Coast liberal snowflakes without tarring the big important CEO who must have pulled himself up by his bootstraps and worked super hard to become so rich and important.
To the extent that parable is true, that is the kind of moderation that I like and look for in a politician.
In Mexico the left views deficits as capitalist and right wing as they enrich bondholders who are wealthier. That framework is interesting but doesn't seem to exist in America or Europe.
Yesterday’s article and today’s were meh and they share a common flaw- they are trying to describe political types. This is very easy to do badly and very hard to do well, the string version of typology doesn’t just describe politicians accurately, it isolates the functional differences. Given the intractability of counter factuals, isolating functional differences is very hard or impossible.
I do think today’s article would have been better is it focused deeply on one or two archetypes — Case and Manchin would have made good anchor cases, rather than dribbling out tantalizing but superficial paragraphs.
[isolating functional differences is very hard or impossible]
I thought this way through a lot of the article, but then at the end Matt lays out specifically what he thinks an ideologically moderate agenda on the merits would be. I appreciate that.
Man I don't have any interest in the NBA, W or otherwise, but know of Sophie Cunningham because my super-woke-progressive direct super always makes sure to preface any mention of her with "transphobic". And I'm like cmon, you know I'm trans, you know I'm moderate-to-right on a bunch of stuff, you know I don't care about sportsball, where do you think my views on this issue lie. Tired: Tactical Moderation by biting my tongue. Wired: use standpoint theory to argue against dying on this particular deeply unpopular hill. Inspired: lose teacher's-pet favoured position at work, maybe lose job entirely if True Believer political disagreement not handled delicately. My boss is exactly the sort of leftist who tells Trumpers (including former friends and family) that the world will be a better place once they're dead. Don't you want to express yourself, Joanna?
As below, so above. Why would I expect politicians to stick their necks out when I won't? I'll reward the ones that actually do so (yay futile Mahan vote!), but it seems very difficult to stand by the courage of our convictions. The shadow of Woke 1.0 looms large, and the Progressive Establishment keeps moving left, and the Insurgents have all the energy and charisma and "fight". Can we turn this factional frown upside down by just having more True Believers pay the Church of the SubstackGenius to know what they really think? I mean, I'll be happy if it happens, but colour me skeptical! Like my favourite reelection ad says, you don't change horses in the middle of a stream.
I hope your efforts to encourage and support "moderate True Believers" as you describe is successful. I want those policies.
Florida had our primary last night. For the Senate, a DSA candidate (Angie Nixon) defeated Alex Vindman (yes, THAT Alex Vindman), which says less about her strength than his ineffectiveness. So count that seat as a hold for Republicans in the fall.
David Jolly won the Democratic primary for Governor and I think he will have a good chance against Byron Donalds. Florida Republicans cleared the lowest of all low bars by rejecting James Fishback (think Nick Fuentes level racist) and nominating Donalds. But Donalds is still a MAGA whack job. I hope Jolly mounts a good campaign.
Some people were discussing how regerrymandering in Florida made this seat unwinnable and how this DSA win means Democrats won't waste resources on this house race.
Just based on the vibes you pick up on in Florida, was a significant part of Vindman's ineffectiveness is that he was... how to put this... basically catapulted into electoral politics by Pod Save America during his fifteen minutes? I have a morbid fascination with people who enter politics by striking it rich in the attention economy because deep down I am an institutionalist who believes in professionalization and my unscientific theory is that they are usually ineffective as politicians.
He is stiff and wooden. Only moved to Florida a couple of years ago. Raised a lot of money from outside Florida then didn't spend enough in the primary (thought he was a shoe-in against Nixon). He's just not much of a politician.
Think about how in 2016 everyone was like MAGA was racist right-wing extremists. Now it’s like MAGA is moderate against the Groypers. Perhaps in another 20 years the Groypers will look moderate too. Or the future of the Republican Party will be something like Fine v. Bilzerian, everyone is a racist and just differs in their target of their racism (and maybe how explicit they are in supporting state violence against the targets of their racism, just looking at Bilzerian’s Twitter feed, he is very racist but unlike Fine doesn’t explicitly call for killing or deporting anyone).
Memo to you: since your kind has overused and cheapened the term “racist” that has now been replaced by “fascist”. Just want you to be up with the times when virtue signaling. You’re welcome!
Classes aren't in session yet, so counting Republican votes near college campuses isn't really very relevant. You are extrapolating from very, very small numbers.
Addendum: in the precinct near FSU, Fishman got 28 votes. So your "analysis" is pretty flawed, Nik.
I think MY is on to something with his distinction between tactical pragmatists and true believers. However, I think this article needs some rethinking.
He starts talking about the faction landscape, and then uses Manchin and Case as his two examples of these two factions. Yet Manchin and Case are in some ways one-offs (deep red state moderate and deep-blue district moderate), so I’m not sure it’s convincing that they are reflections of whole factions. Plus, MY admitted that it’s hard to think of someone in Manchin’s position taking his stances for purely tactical reasons.
I thought where he was going was between moderates who advocate timid incremental changes and moderates who advocate a bold vision just rooted in a centrist ideological position. But that was not quite it.
It’s well taken that moderates challenging ideas from Leftist Insurgents is insufficient to being truly moderate and will take challenging some ideas from the Progressive Establishment.
However, I think the article is a bit unclear about the actual factional dynamics between the True Believers and the Pragmatists, and who is included beyond two of the most idiosyncratic Democrats.
There are three kinds of Democrats; they generally come from three different places. There are the urban coastal Democrats, the suburbanish ones, and those further away from the coastal suburbanites and urbanites. That is a geographical explanation. This is differentiates Democrats.
Thinking about it as a policy distinction is wrong IMHO. Remember I’m not in the Democratic Tribe. I am politically homeless, as I feel both parties are filled with loons.
The great Urban cities like NYC have had socialists on their city councils for some time. Seattle is another one. They are the most radical. They are populist havens, filled with minorities and immigrants. The Democratic candidates turn themselves into champions against capitalism, income disparity, and freebies/subsidies paid for by taxing large corporations and the wealthy because they are evil.
The ones who represent suburbanites have small, medium, and large businesses, and infrastructure needs. Their Districts are bigger in terms of area. They may encompass a super-large employer whose employees depend on for their livelihoods. They have parents who go to BOE meetings. High School sports may be all-encompassing.
My point is that they have different constituencies with different needs. The residents in the “burbs" may not need the same social services in the same amount that those in the cities do.
Their politicians typically do not want to fundamentally change America's economy.
Those in the cities tend to be far more extreme and speak a different language. Once you get off the coasts, where almost all of the money is, the rural Democrats who win are equally different from the coastal Democrats; they are mostly concerned with survival for the residents in their districts. Are there jobs? Can the hospital stay open on the shitty reimbursements Medicaid provides?
Their concerns are more prosaic because their needs are not to join the glorious workers of the world in some socialist nirvana. It is to keep the one large employer open and make sure the one facility that provides abortions doesn’t close. You look at the price of corn on the commodity exchange. You listen to the weather to see if some hellscape of tornado activity is about to wreak havoc on some mobile home park in your district. You really care about the price of Diesel fuel for all your constituents who drive Ford 250s. For the farmers whose harvest machines eat it up like ribs in KC.
This is your Democratic Party. Moderates are the ones who read the Farm Report or have a scandal or a shooting at a local suburban high school. The wacko, Lefty, progressive types that can come up with 6 different genders and talk about the oligarchs living in the cities. Different issues, different luxuries, that turn on their constituents.
Democrats in the coastal cities are social warriors. They live and work in towns with TV stations, the state's major newspaper, and an airport for getting to Florida in winter. It has a two-star restaurant; it has wealthy people the city's museum depends on; it has a nascent theater; perhaps a college or two.
The only thing that excites and unites them is their hatred, dislike, and disgust of Trump.
A lot of “burb” residents are people who were priced out of central cities (which can be crazy expensive even in LCOL areas if you want a suburban-quality house and schools) and would prefer to live in the cities if perhaps their one monopsony employer paid them better or there was less family wealth bidding up the price of housing in cities.
I think Matt's list is a pretty good one, if too technocratic in that it's a list of issue and policy positions. A real ethos of "people who work hard and play by the rules" should be able to get ahead would go a long way tying things together.
Clearly there's a tactical case for that kind of rhetoric and ethos, but I it can tie together the kind of Ossoff-ian anti-corruption push, crime enforcement, housing abundance, and even school reform.
> Both parties’ decision to just write off huge swaths of the country as unwinnable is bad for America
Not that I would expect Matt to disagree, but a real 50 state strategy needs to be even more radical than simple moderation. It would require building a genuinely conservative wing of the party, and a moderate wing that is willing to collaborate with and defend those conservatives for the good of the party (and by extension country).
The Republicans need to work on this too, both parties should put up decent unobjectionable candidates in all major races. Find a local lawyer or doctor with no disciplinary issues and give him $50,000 in every congressional seat or major mayoral race.
Deficit reduction is a foolish thing to pursue at this point because it would be highly unpopular and just give fiscal space for the next Republican administration to throw it all away on doing more wars anyway.
If you wanted to do deficit reduction you’d have to do it in a way that somehow binds future Republican administrations too.
Otherwise, money-printing and inflation is probably the “lesser evil” way of dealing with the deficit. It’s also unpopular but it would at least have the positive side effects of strengthening the job market like we saw in 2021-22. It would also operate as a natural wealth tax on financial wealth that doesn’t run into any of the administration problems of an actual wealth tax.
I’ll leave aside the merits of prioritizing new spending vs deficit reduction given we have more than two years to go before we know what state the economy, inflation and the defect are in but I’ll just note that the bond market is headed to a place right now where President Ossoff’s hands may be pretty tied on this front.
The more important thing I’d say is an argument that “we shouldn’t do X because the other side will just undo X” is an argument to literally not do anything. Because technically that’s true of literally every policy. Why pass environmental rules, next GOP administration will just undo it? Why pass social security privatization, the next Dem administration will just undo it?
Not advocating for the latter just making the point this logic can be applied to anything.
This is also where we have to remember people are not in general as dumb or spiteful and straight up bad as DJT. The reality is most politicians will keep stuff in place if they see it’s actually good policy that’s helpful or if they recognize it’s bad politics. Like I feel fairly certain if Marco Rubio is unnecessarily canceling grants for windmills. But DJT is an unbelievably spiteful human so he’s doing it anyway because he has this pathological need to destroy anything Biden did.
As usual. A whole lot of stuff really can be whittled down to “Orange Man bad” as far as why things are happening the way they are.
Suppose in four years you are required to give all of your net worth to a serial killer who uses money to kill people every time he has money. How much money would you save in this scenario?
The debt situation is different because it’s inherently a sacrifice of present well-being for future payoff. If you pass environmental law that’s repealed later, you still get to enjoy a few years of a nice environment in the meantime. Meanwhile, debt reduction means you take the pain and unpopularity now, and in exchange Republicans get to kill more people later and you never get to enjoy the benefits of the debt reduction. Like you said, President Ossoff will have his hands tied by the bond market. We’d be in a lot better shape today if Trump’s hands had been similarly tied by the bond market when he had taken office.
Lol I am a self-made millionaire despite starting with negative net worth, mostly from investment gains which are mostly from simple index funds. I understand financial issues and math very well. It is not that hard.
That's a politically insane position given how unpopular inflation is.
It's also not even a good way to get rid of the debt as 1/3 is held in short term treasuries, 1/3 in 2 to 5 year and only 1/3 in longer term bonds. So if you're going to try to engineer a two year hyperinflation and then stop it, you're going to need a very big recession at the end of it.
Do you not understand that the US is not a third-world country but has the global reserve currency and hegemony? It’s why we’ve been able to run huge consistent trade deficits for 50+ years that would’ve bankrupted a third-world country and yet we still have net positive foreign factor income because foreigners are just holding cash and low-interest treasuries while we buy all their assets!
It’s not good, just better than the alternatives, and what will probably happen if we can’t agree on alternatives. And you can see that the big inflation in 2021-22 did in fact start shrinking the debt-to-GDP ratio after peaking in FY 2020 since nominal GDP was growing so fast and debt is in nominal dollars: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-debt/
The most painless way to explicitly cut the deficit would be to cut military spending (we could cut most of it and still be spending more than all our adversary countries combined) and tax the super-rich (as in people with so much money more taxes wouldn’t reduce their consumption). Are moderates willing to do this?
Anything else would be even more unpopular than inflation—you want to cut entitlements or tax the middle class?
I've been thinking about this a lot. I hate the term moderate. I think it sounds weak or lacking conviction. I think it makes voters feel like you are going to do nothing or protect the status quo.
What we need more of is Radical Pragmatists. I feel like Ossoff and Talarico are sort of striving to be this. They are radically anti-status quo, but not ideologues. They talk about making America better and fixing things that are wrong, but they aren't grounding this in political theory.
I think we need more of a shift to radical pragmatism. We can call them Pragicals. Or RadPrags.
But I think you need a belief structure that tells you what are the “things that are wrong“ that need to be fixed. And then how you articulate that matters.
"It would be an agenda that balances the need for an inclusive economy with a healthy respect for the virtues of free markets."
There are huge swathes of policy in which this requires no balance at all: YIMBY-ism, VAT finance of social insurance, EITC for minimum wage, attracting immigrants with high income-erning potential. NEPA reform, less restriction on imports (= less tax of exports).
I think "worst way" is too strong but corp tax is comparatively inefficient
Note: most people do not understand this but most companies are *not* corporations but, well non-corp companies. LLCs, Partnerships [everything from Mom&Pop to professional services like lawyers, Drs etc] (and S-Corps which are corporations but use "flow through taxation" so essentially like Partnerships): they are what is called "tax transparent" to the owner, typically a real person - and that ends up being taxed at Personal Income tax level, rather than a separate taxation at the Corp entity level (but on other hand such entities do not have Retained Earnings)
Broadly speaking most of businesses are not Corps (although the very visible Publicly Listed [stock exchange(s)) companies are Corps and thus are very overweight in visibility which also tends to deform broad popular understanding of the entire subject area.
One thing missing here is that if all you are is a tactical moderate, then 1) eventually that will come out and 2) that burns the credibility of any True Believers. I know “politicians lie” is not some grand revelation, but it hits harder when your main argument is electability. After all, electability only matters until you get elected
If Matt's goal is to scare the living Bejesus out of independents who are trying to figure out which or if either of our political parties offer a sane path forward, he has succeeded.
Yesterday we learned that, despite their name, the Progressive Establishment is a close-minded set of made-up-minds that will never change and expect nothing less than complete agreement and submission from everyone else. And that these creatures are the core of the party except when they are not which is when the anything but Democratic but very Socialists of America stick their oar in the water.
IOW, the core of the Democratic Party is the Progressives and the animating voice of dissent within the party thinks the Constitution would make an above average birdcage liner.
And then there are the so-called moderates whose agenda rational people can understand. But these brave souls can't actually be moderate because the base thinks Fidel Castro was a great man and that base demands insanity from its representatives.
And then we have Trump, who has defeated Iran at least 32 times and who will make Greenland, Venezuela and North Korea the 51st, 52nd and 53rd states.
We are screwed.
"It’s really shameful for New York and California to be worse at teaching kids to read than Mississippi"
I'm amazed that the experience of being a big booster of the illusory "Texas miracle" had not... moderated your belief in the "Mississippi miracle"
I think it was actually on the Politix podcast, but someone interviewed an aide to Roy Cooper who talked about how he handled the "bathroom bill" fiasco in North Carolina. The thesis was that he was able to move past the superficial culture-war issues by (apparently correctly) stating that big companies who might otherwise expand into the state will be reticent if this is the kind of legislation the state produces.
The clever part was that he argued that it wasn't the bosses of the companies that were repelled, it was their employees. And as she tells it, Cooper was able to make the state Republicans look petty and foolish for scaring away badly-needed jobs while perhaps taking a subtle jab at those West Coast liberal snowflakes without tarring the big important CEO who must have pulled himself up by his bootstraps and worked super hard to become so rich and important.
To the extent that parable is true, that is the kind of moderation that I like and look for in a politician.
In Mexico the left views deficits as capitalist and right wing as they enrich bondholders who are wealthier. That framework is interesting but doesn't seem to exist in America or Europe.
Yesterday’s article and today’s were meh and they share a common flaw- they are trying to describe political types. This is very easy to do badly and very hard to do well, the string version of typology doesn’t just describe politicians accurately, it isolates the functional differences. Given the intractability of counter factuals, isolating functional differences is very hard or impossible.
I do think today’s article would have been better is it focused deeply on one or two archetypes — Case and Manchin would have made good anchor cases, rather than dribbling out tantalizing but superficial paragraphs.
[isolating functional differences is very hard or impossible]
I thought this way through a lot of the article, but then at the end Matt lays out specifically what he thinks an ideologically moderate agenda on the merits would be. I appreciate that.
Man I don't have any interest in the NBA, W or otherwise, but know of Sophie Cunningham because my super-woke-progressive direct super always makes sure to preface any mention of her with "transphobic". And I'm like cmon, you know I'm trans, you know I'm moderate-to-right on a bunch of stuff, you know I don't care about sportsball, where do you think my views on this issue lie. Tired: Tactical Moderation by biting my tongue. Wired: use standpoint theory to argue against dying on this particular deeply unpopular hill. Inspired: lose teacher's-pet favoured position at work, maybe lose job entirely if True Believer political disagreement not handled delicately. My boss is exactly the sort of leftist who tells Trumpers (including former friends and family) that the world will be a better place once they're dead. Don't you want to express yourself, Joanna?
As below, so above. Why would I expect politicians to stick their necks out when I won't? I'll reward the ones that actually do so (yay futile Mahan vote!), but it seems very difficult to stand by the courage of our convictions. The shadow of Woke 1.0 looms large, and the Progressive Establishment keeps moving left, and the Insurgents have all the energy and charisma and "fight". Can we turn this factional frown upside down by just having more True Believers pay the Church of the SubstackGenius to know what they really think? I mean, I'll be happy if it happens, but colour me skeptical! Like my favourite reelection ad says, you don't change horses in the middle of a stream.
I hope your efforts to encourage and support "moderate True Believers" as you describe is successful. I want those policies.
Florida had our primary last night. For the Senate, a DSA candidate (Angie Nixon) defeated Alex Vindman (yes, THAT Alex Vindman), which says less about her strength than his ineffectiveness. So count that seat as a hold for Republicans in the fall.
David Jolly won the Democratic primary for Governor and I think he will have a good chance against Byron Donalds. Florida Republicans cleared the lowest of all low bars by rejecting James Fishback (think Nick Fuentes level racist) and nominating Donalds. But Donalds is still a MAGA whack job. I hope Jolly mounts a good campaign.
Turning a 15% chance into a 2% chance in the Florida senate race seem like a massive mistake by Democrats.
Some people were discussing how regerrymandering in Florida made this seat unwinnable and how this DSA win means Democrats won't waste resources on this house race.
It is a Senate seat so gerrymandering isn't relevant.
Just based on the vibes you pick up on in Florida, was a significant part of Vindman's ineffectiveness is that he was... how to put this... basically catapulted into electoral politics by Pod Save America during his fifteen minutes? I have a morbid fascination with people who enter politics by striking it rich in the attention economy because deep down I am an institutionalist who believes in professionalization and my unscientific theory is that they are usually ineffective as politicians.
He is stiff and wooden. Only moved to Florida a couple of years ago. Raised a lot of money from outside Florida then didn't spend enough in the primary (thought he was a shoe-in against Nixon). He's just not much of a politician.
Didn’t he outspend Nixon 16:1?
Apparently Fishback won college campuses? https://x.com/garrettherrin/status/2089880938994135484
Young Republicans about to get crazy lol.
Think about how in 2016 everyone was like MAGA was racist right-wing extremists. Now it’s like MAGA is moderate against the Groypers. Perhaps in another 20 years the Groypers will look moderate too. Or the future of the Republican Party will be something like Fine v. Bilzerian, everyone is a racist and just differs in their target of their racism (and maybe how explicit they are in supporting state violence against the targets of their racism, just looking at Bilzerian’s Twitter feed, he is very racist but unlike Fine doesn’t explicitly call for killing or deporting anyone).
Memo to you: since your kind has overused and cheapened the term “racist” that has now been replaced by “fascist”. Just want you to be up with the times when virtue signaling. You’re welcome!
Classes aren't in session yet, so counting Republican votes near college campuses isn't really very relevant. You are extrapolating from very, very small numbers.
Addendum: in the precinct near FSU, Fishman got 28 votes. So your "analysis" is pretty flawed, Nik.
I think MY is on to something with his distinction between tactical pragmatists and true believers. However, I think this article needs some rethinking.
He starts talking about the faction landscape, and then uses Manchin and Case as his two examples of these two factions. Yet Manchin and Case are in some ways one-offs (deep red state moderate and deep-blue district moderate), so I’m not sure it’s convincing that they are reflections of whole factions. Plus, MY admitted that it’s hard to think of someone in Manchin’s position taking his stances for purely tactical reasons.
I thought where he was going was between moderates who advocate timid incremental changes and moderates who advocate a bold vision just rooted in a centrist ideological position. But that was not quite it.
It’s well taken that moderates challenging ideas from Leftist Insurgents is insufficient to being truly moderate and will take challenging some ideas from the Progressive Establishment.
However, I think the article is a bit unclear about the actual factional dynamics between the True Believers and the Pragmatists, and who is included beyond two of the most idiosyncratic Democrats.
There are three kinds of Democrats; they generally come from three different places. There are the urban coastal Democrats, the suburbanish ones, and those further away from the coastal suburbanites and urbanites. That is a geographical explanation. This is differentiates Democrats.
Thinking about it as a policy distinction is wrong IMHO. Remember I’m not in the Democratic Tribe. I am politically homeless, as I feel both parties are filled with loons.
The great Urban cities like NYC have had socialists on their city councils for some time. Seattle is another one. They are the most radical. They are populist havens, filled with minorities and immigrants. The Democratic candidates turn themselves into champions against capitalism, income disparity, and freebies/subsidies paid for by taxing large corporations and the wealthy because they are evil.
The ones who represent suburbanites have small, medium, and large businesses, and infrastructure needs. Their Districts are bigger in terms of area. They may encompass a super-large employer whose employees depend on for their livelihoods. They have parents who go to BOE meetings. High School sports may be all-encompassing.
My point is that they have different constituencies with different needs. The residents in the “burbs" may not need the same social services in the same amount that those in the cities do.
Their politicians typically do not want to fundamentally change America's economy.
Those in the cities tend to be far more extreme and speak a different language. Once you get off the coasts, where almost all of the money is, the rural Democrats who win are equally different from the coastal Democrats; they are mostly concerned with survival for the residents in their districts. Are there jobs? Can the hospital stay open on the shitty reimbursements Medicaid provides?
Their concerns are more prosaic because their needs are not to join the glorious workers of the world in some socialist nirvana. It is to keep the one large employer open and make sure the one facility that provides abortions doesn’t close. You look at the price of corn on the commodity exchange. You listen to the weather to see if some hellscape of tornado activity is about to wreak havoc on some mobile home park in your district. You really care about the price of Diesel fuel for all your constituents who drive Ford 250s. For the farmers whose harvest machines eat it up like ribs in KC.
This is your Democratic Party. Moderates are the ones who read the Farm Report or have a scandal or a shooting at a local suburban high school. The wacko, Lefty, progressive types that can come up with 6 different genders and talk about the oligarchs living in the cities. Different issues, different luxuries, that turn on their constituents.
Democrats in the coastal cities are social warriors. They live and work in towns with TV stations, the state's major newspaper, and an airport for getting to Florida in winter. It has a two-star restaurant; it has wealthy people the city's museum depends on; it has a nascent theater; perhaps a college or two.
The only thing that excites and unites them is their hatred, dislike, and disgust of Trump.
A lot of “burb” residents are people who were priced out of central cities (which can be crazy expensive even in LCOL areas if you want a suburban-quality house and schools) and would prefer to live in the cities if perhaps their one monopsony employer paid them better or there was less family wealth bidding up the price of housing in cities.
Perhaps, but there are still couples who want children, and for that, they want a single-family home.
I think Matt's list is a pretty good one, if too technocratic in that it's a list of issue and policy positions. A real ethos of "people who work hard and play by the rules" should be able to get ahead would go a long way tying things together.
Clearly there's a tactical case for that kind of rhetoric and ethos, but I it can tie together the kind of Ossoff-ian anti-corruption push, crime enforcement, housing abundance, and even school reform.
> Both parties’ decision to just write off huge swaths of the country as unwinnable is bad for America
Not that I would expect Matt to disagree, but a real 50 state strategy needs to be even more radical than simple moderation. It would require building a genuinely conservative wing of the party, and a moderate wing that is willing to collaborate with and defend those conservatives for the good of the party (and by extension country).
The Republicans need to work on this too, both parties should put up decent unobjectionable candidates in all major races. Find a local lawyer or doctor with no disciplinary issues and give him $50,000 in every congressional seat or major mayoral race.
Deficit reduction is a foolish thing to pursue at this point because it would be highly unpopular and just give fiscal space for the next Republican administration to throw it all away on doing more wars anyway.
If you wanted to do deficit reduction you’d have to do it in a way that somehow binds future Republican administrations too.
Otherwise, money-printing and inflation is probably the “lesser evil” way of dealing with the deficit. It’s also unpopular but it would at least have the positive side effects of strengthening the job market like we saw in 2021-22. It would also operate as a natural wealth tax on financial wealth that doesn’t run into any of the administration problems of an actual wealth tax.
I’ll leave aside the merits of prioritizing new spending vs deficit reduction given we have more than two years to go before we know what state the economy, inflation and the defect are in but I’ll just note that the bond market is headed to a place right now where President Ossoff’s hands may be pretty tied on this front.
The more important thing I’d say is an argument that “we shouldn’t do X because the other side will just undo X” is an argument to literally not do anything. Because technically that’s true of literally every policy. Why pass environmental rules, next GOP administration will just undo it? Why pass social security privatization, the next Dem administration will just undo it?
Not advocating for the latter just making the point this logic can be applied to anything.
This is also where we have to remember people are not in general as dumb or spiteful and straight up bad as DJT. The reality is most politicians will keep stuff in place if they see it’s actually good policy that’s helpful or if they recognize it’s bad politics. Like I feel fairly certain if Marco Rubio is unnecessarily canceling grants for windmills. But DJT is an unbelievably spiteful human so he’s doing it anyway because he has this pathological need to destroy anything Biden did.
As usual. A whole lot of stuff really can be whittled down to “Orange Man bad” as far as why things are happening the way they are.
The joys of adhoc thinking (that to which you are replying).
But indeed Not Doing X because The People I dislike may do Y in future is mere paralysis.
Suppose in four years you are required to give all of your net worth to a serial killer who uses money to kill people every time he has money. How much money would you save in this scenario?
The debt situation is different because it’s inherently a sacrifice of present well-being for future payoff. If you pass environmental law that’s repealed later, you still get to enjoy a few years of a nice environment in the meantime. Meanwhile, debt reduction means you take the pain and unpopularity now, and in exchange Republicans get to kill more people later and you never get to enjoy the benefits of the debt reduction. Like you said, President Ossoff will have his hands tied by the bond market. We’d be in a lot better shape today if Trump’s hands had been similarly tied by the bond market when he had taken office.
Your complete innumeracy on issues financial is always a source of entertainment for me.
Lol I am a self-made millionaire despite starting with negative net worth, mostly from investment gains which are mostly from simple index funds. I understand financial issues and math very well. It is not that hard.
That's a politically insane position given how unpopular inflation is.
It's also not even a good way to get rid of the debt as 1/3 is held in short term treasuries, 1/3 in 2 to 5 year and only 1/3 in longer term bonds. So if you're going to try to engineer a two year hyperinflation and then stop it, you're going to need a very big recession at the end of it.
It is however Classic Third World Banana Republic thinking.
Of course Nikkie wants to play Argentina or other Banana republic games.
Do you not understand that the US is not a third-world country but has the global reserve currency and hegemony? It’s why we’ve been able to run huge consistent trade deficits for 50+ years that would’ve bankrupted a third-world country and yet we still have net positive foreign factor income because foreigners are just holding cash and low-interest treasuries while we buy all their assets!
It’s not good, just better than the alternatives, and what will probably happen if we can’t agree on alternatives. And you can see that the big inflation in 2021-22 did in fact start shrinking the debt-to-GDP ratio after peaking in FY 2020 since nominal GDP was growing so fast and debt is in nominal dollars: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-debt/
The most painless way to explicitly cut the deficit would be to cut military spending (we could cut most of it and still be spending more than all our adversary countries combined) and tax the super-rich (as in people with so much money more taxes wouldn’t reduce their consumption). Are moderates willing to do this?
Anything else would be even more unpopular than inflation—you want to cut entitlements or tax the middle class?
I've been thinking about this a lot. I hate the term moderate. I think it sounds weak or lacking conviction. I think it makes voters feel like you are going to do nothing or protect the status quo.
What we need more of is Radical Pragmatists. I feel like Ossoff and Talarico are sort of striving to be this. They are radically anti-status quo, but not ideologues. They talk about making America better and fixing things that are wrong, but they aren't grounding this in political theory.
I think we need more of a shift to radical pragmatism. We can call them Pragicals. Or RadPrags.
But I think you need a belief structure that tells you what are the “things that are wrong“ that need to be fixed. And then how you articulate that matters.
“Radical pragmatist” sounds like someone with no morals who just believes the ends always justify the means.
"It would be an agenda that balances the need for an inclusive economy with a healthy respect for the virtues of free markets."
There are huge swathes of policy in which this requires no balance at all: YIMBY-ism, VAT finance of social insurance, EITC for minimum wage, attracting immigrants with high income-erning potential. NEPA reform, less restriction on imports (= less tax of exports).
"It would emphasize deficit reduction to put downward pressure on inflation and interest rates"
"to increase growth and put downward pressue on ineret rates," the latter being the mechanism fothe former.
And BTW increasing the corporte tax rate is about the worst way to reduce the deficit one can come up with short of tariffs or a wealth tax.
explain please
I think "worst way" is too strong but corp tax is comparatively inefficient
Note: most people do not understand this but most companies are *not* corporations but, well non-corp companies. LLCs, Partnerships [everything from Mom&Pop to professional services like lawyers, Drs etc] (and S-Corps which are corporations but use "flow through taxation" so essentially like Partnerships): they are what is called "tax transparent" to the owner, typically a real person - and that ends up being taxed at Personal Income tax level, rather than a separate taxation at the Corp entity level (but on other hand such entities do not have Retained Earnings)
Broadly speaking most of businesses are not Corps (although the very visible Publicly Listed [stock exchange(s)) companies are Corps and thus are very overweight in visibility which also tends to deform broad popular understanding of the entire subject area.