I think the issue here is there *are* things Republican voters want, but they’re mostly things that cannot be achieved through legislation.
What Republican voters want is a more conservative culture. They want Evangelical propaganda movies to get Oscars. They want kid’s cartoons and TV ads to stop featuring positive portrayals of gay people. They want there to be fewer accommodations for non-English speakers. They want people to stop talking about certain negative aspects of American history like slavery or genocide against Native Americans. They want contraception to be considered shameful instead of widely accepted. They want zero acceptance in society of religious groups other than Christians and Jews.
You can’t deliver much on those except on the margins through a President or Congress. But they’re real things that motivate conservatives and their main tool to try to express that is by voting. So they vote for trolls who will “fight” for those cultural values.
But the actual policy is mostly handled by the people who have easily delivered goals, which is the business community that wants low taxes and less regulation.
That being said, there are two areas where rank and file conservatives want concrete policy change: immigration and abortion.
You're framing is both accurate and misses the point entirely. Progressives are typically much younger and so I don't think quite understand just how crazy the radical culture change seems to an older person and why that could lead them to be more conservative. 50 years ago, being homosexual was illegal in most of the country and immoral to 90%+ of the population. Matt mentions in the early aughts that gay marriage was so unpopular that not even leading democrats would support it. Today you should be cancelled on twitter because you want to define a women as someone who has a ovaries/vagina much less suggest that homosexuality is wrong.
That last part really bites too, the people who were so outside the mainstream that they were essentially cancelled are now wanting to cancel you. How could that not generate enormous political power for a party willing to leverage the resulting resentment...
The psychological effect of the failed culture wars of the aughts is something that I think plenty of people fail to understand about the conservative mindset.
The idea that gay people would be fully integrated into society, that religion would be shoved aside, ect. was so unthinkable to them, that they’ll honesty believe that we’re on verge of full-blown socialism or whatever implausible scenarios they fear. It’s like conservatives over the age of 50 were the victims of some mass atrocity.
I'm as liberal as they come, but as I approach 40 I've started to be able to see how disorienting and unpleasant some of these changes must be for social conservatives. The other day I saw that there's a Pixar short on Disney+ about coming out of the closet; my daughter's school's holiday concert for second grade included no songs about Christmas per se, but did include "Imagine" by John Lennon, which is explicitly anti-religious. I'm not against the Pixar thing, and the Christmas thing is silly but I think harmless; at the same time, I think I can understand how feeling like your values are actively frowned upon by the mainstream culture would be alienating and push people towards extremes.
One thing relevant here is that most parents of school age children these days are millennials, and millennials are a socially progressive generation.
Which is one reason why so much kid-friendly media is counter-intuitively so often at the forefront of progressive ideas in media, especially regarding LGBT representation. Today’s parents want their kids to see positive portrayals of LGBT people.
And so do I, and I like that (for instance) there are so many portrayals of people in hijabs, wheelchairs, etc. in children's books and entertainment today…at the same time, I'm uncomfortably aware that putting a cross necklace on a character in those same books and shows would be enough to spark an outcry, so it isn't done.
Per the greatest source of all - Wikipedia, 4.5% of adult American's identify as LGBT. 25% of the US population identify as Evangelicals. I don't watch that much media, but would your observation match that representation?
I think that the observation that kids' entertainment is basically marketed toward their parents is key here, as is the flip side that as a parent of small children your perception of 'the culture' is constrained by that fact.
Entertainment for old people (including "entertainment" like a lot of cable news) definitely skews more conservative than kids stuff, because the producers understand that they are selling to a more conservative set of people. But we don't code that stuff as part of the culture, for whatever reason.
I understand it, but I can't sympathize. I'm roughly your age and grew up in a very conservative rural community. I saw the things they did and said to us as children. Cry me a river.
Are they wrong? Conservatives argued slippery slope constantly on cultural issues and were told repeatedly they were wrong by Progressives...then the Conservatives were proven right by Progressives moving forward on their agenda culturally and legally. Why would a conservative expect economic issues be any different?
As a progressive, I think they’re wrong because I, and the people I know in the Democratic Party, don’t want actual socialism, ect. Whereas, in the aughts I, and every other progressive I knew absolutely wanted gay rights, ect. We just tolerated the ole “denial with a wink” from Democratic politicians.
That makes sense...but now there is an increasing segment of the Democratic party and its left adjacent population that support socialism, etc. In the aughts there were people who wanted decriminalization but not legalization of marriage. You were further left of the center then than you are now. But what's to say that you won't move along to socialism just like Obama, Clinton, etc. did on gay marriage? Even more so, if you were a conservative, how much would you believe such reassurances?
Can you define what you mean by socialism? With the exception of single-payer health care I don't see any serious push to nationalize key industries. And even health care would still be serviced overwhelmingly by private companies and nonprofits.
Let me explain it they way I explained it to my Republican father this fall: I live in a Midwestern neighborhood where the home values are $800K+ 75% of the houses have Democratic signs out front. Do you really think all these lawyers, doctors and business persons are going to become socialists?
Yes, cultural change can cause backlash. Just like Republicans did extremely well after the Civil Rights Movement successfully changed our society and culture.
Even as recently as the mid-1990’s most people were uncomfortable with if not outright opposed to interracial marriage according to polls.
Good point... it’s kind of ironic that each “side” wants the power that the other side seems to have- liberals want political power to enact policy change, conservatives want cultural power to return their traditional values to the mainstream. Both sides feel powerless because neither side recognizes their power or wins.
One important distinction to this is that there is a distinction between conservative control of politics and progressive control of culture. Politics is controlled by the Republican Party, a mess of an organization but a singular organization nonetheless. Progressives control of *culture*, whatever that actually means, has no structure or organization.
Universities seems pretty structured and organized by me. Conservatives are not wrong about the influence of education in this regard - they used to own this.
I think students are 10x more influenced by their peers than professors. Even at places like Liberty University there has been pushback on some policies and it's not from the faculty.
I'm not sure - if there were an organized structure for universities, we would be able to make the broad change that nearly everyone wants to get the general education math requirement to focus more on basic statistics than on calculus. While versions of this formulation have percolated through academia, there's no organized way that it has happened. (It's possible that the AMS or MAA has made a formal statement about what they think a math requirement should look like, but I don't know how many universities or even accreditation institutions have followed any centralized organizer like this.)
However cultural stuff works among universities is far less structured and organized than how general education math requirements work.
Lol liberals would not want to lose the cultural stuff. Could you even imagine a to box office movie about finding faith? Superman finds god, Wonder Woman marries him and stays at home baking cookies.
At the time, conservatives who cared about cultural issues (mostly the religious right, but also some Jordan Peterson-esque intellectual types such as Allan Bloom) did not approve of those movies, or of much of contemporary pop culture in general. If they feel "conservative" now, that's simply because they reflect the values of their era.
I think it is interesting how this power switched hands in America over the past 50 years or so. Democrats ruled politics after the New Deal, but mainstream culture was so conservative that Lucy and Ricky had to sleep in separate beds!
I agree that conservatism is largely cultural. This is probably a bit of an exaggeration (most conservatives definitely don't care about condoms: https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/public-attitudes-about-birth-control), but I think it's largely correct. Doesn't that spell out exactly how Democrats can win, though? Especially in red states? Why not just campaign on the economic stuff and leave cultural liberalism completely out of it? If your theory is correct that Democrats have economic ambitions and conservatives have cultural ones (and I think it is), then we should be able to win just like as I described. It's too bad no Democrats ever really try this
Well, Democrats have cultural views too, and some policy choices cut against cultural conservatism.
Culturally conservative Democrats can work sometimes but they fall into a trap of demoralizing and alienating Democratic voters while simultaneously being unable to outbid an actual Republican on vehement social conservatism.
My comparison for the Trump years is the Carter presidency. Trump is no Carter (he does not even have the ounce of good character). But, I think he represents a disastrous current state that will require a return to "normality" in the future.
I believe the bleeding of the suburbs will end up being instrumental in the 12-16 year wilderness Republicans are walking into. The old donors will leave the scene. The "rising stars" are do-nothing maniacs like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Much more interested in prosecuting fictional deep-state wars than governing. They will lose purple districts. Because incumbent, moderate politicians will get primaried. Meanwhile, the bench will get crazier and crazier. This will repel donors, and the vicious cycle continues.
In 2032, they'll be ready for a Larry Hogan / Charlie Baker like figure to do their version of a Clintonian pivot and win back the suburbs. You can't run a party on a downwardly-mobile base and the most reactionary billionaire types. You are going to need a bench of mid-level elites (i.e. well-educated people, sub-ten-millionaires) to drive substantive agenda items.
There is so much conversation about the "working class future" of the GOP. But it will have no chance if they can't get some actual elite firepower from Nassau County and Northern Virginia. The working class voters will be lower propensity when they have to vote for personality-bankrupt cowards like Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton. Trump is an ignorant, lazy fool of the highest order. But at least he knows how to play the hits. His successors are as exciting as the warm ham sandwiches they eat for lunch. This "coalition" will have a short life.
For the Democrats: Support "broadly popular" policies. Display competence in governing. Have a strategy for how to handle the known tradeoffs that come with a broad coalition. If they can do this, the next 16 years belong to them.
Do you think Trump supporters see Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz as "personality-bankrupt cowards"? I think they see them as principle ideological conservatives who are willing to make unpopular stands for things these unhinged voters think are important.
The way that everyone eventually fails Trump and publicly loses his good graces (as Sessions did in 2017 and as Pence is about to do tomorrow) doesn't speak well to Hawley, Cotton, and Cruz's prospects of picking up Trump's crown.
I agree that the path to a clean inheritance for any of these people is hard to see now. Eventually someone will be the new face (no one lives forever), but I doubt it will be a clean inheritance when it comes to that. I do rate the chance of a Trump 2024 primary win as below 50, but mostly because there are many exits (financial ruin, infirmary/death, a republican 24 hopeful discovering they have a spine and hidden wellsprings of charisma or leadership), and still only a bit below, maybe 40, at that. I'd put higher odds on Jr in 24 than any republican senator.
I half agree. I do think it's possible for trumpy voters to see these folks as principled idealogues and also see them as personality bankrupt. I enjoyed the first several Sarah cooper videos and agree with Josh Barro's analysis that part of what made cooper's videos funny is the fact that they allow people who otherwise wouldn't to take Trump less seriously which unlocks parts of his appeal. That charisma, that Mark Burnett (among others) saw as a vehicle to fame and riches, is real with Trump. But I don't think hawley, cotton, pompeo, cruz have any of that kind of energy, personally. Of course it would be more meaningful to heat that from a trumpy voter whose perspective I can't claim to emulate that well.
They're also try-hards. Something Trump supporters love about him is he is the same whiny New York developer idiot that he always was. The old "Donny from Queens" aspect. Ted Cruz is like that guy you knew who changed his personality with each new girlfriend or friend group. He is an empty slate with no natural constituency. People put up with him because they hate the other side, but don't expect any of these people to carry Twitter water for him.
Yes, someone said that Trump skillfully projects the idea that the truth doesn't matter and that both of you are in on the joke, whereas Cruz always seems like someone who's trying to trick you, someone who's acting sincere but really isn't.
People like you and I don't - but as a professor at Texas A&M University, I have seen many undergrads who seem genuinely enthusiastic about him, in a way that I rarely ever did with Trump.
A scary part of living in a democracy, imho, is that I think a non trivial number of voters do actually believe this....prob far from a majority of those who vote for him, but I'm less confident about it being 'no one', unfortunately...
Yeah, there is a core % that would agree on that. But I presume the rustbelt swing voters are less friendly to these guys. Not ever sure why they liked Trump, but he definitely had a distinct, recognizable brand. These guys are the wet noodles of charisma.
I think this is a little to rosy a picture for dems. Sure this may be true in terms of national popularity, but political power is not remotely distributed fairly. So maybe the generic republican is only liked/voted for by 40% of the population nationally (even that number is a little low) but given the results of the 2020 elections, there will not be any changes to the political system, so republicans are gonna gerrymander everything they can to hell, and keep having power. Also even if the new-age GOP adopts less corporate friendly policy, that would not mean they lose their rich donors. Those donors still have to chose between the two parties, and a more corporation hawkish GOP is still much better than the Dems who like the welfare-state, like regulations, and believe climate change is an issue we should do something about. Those donors still hate all that stuff.
3) Republicans lose Texas, and are effectively shut out of the presidency unless they moderate on actual behavior (not just issues).
4) Democrats will need to moderate on tech regulation, because that will be the big thing that the next crop of elite donors are interested in. The far left already accuses them of being too friendly to big tech.
When Reagan won in 1980, the idea of Republicans controlling congress seemed crazy. I think the Democrats find themselves in a similar position now. They can capture a broad coalition, and with Texas, are the de-facto presidential winners. They'll have headwinds in congress. But if they can have a few generations of competent lawmakers, they will easily outflank the Marjorie Taylor Greene party with the vast swathe of voters.
The GOP is behaving like a party that wants a ceiling at 30%. They haven't arrived yet, but I believe they are headed there if they persist.
I'm waiting for someone to make the case that the Dems aren't friendly enough to Big Tech.
Like, having the most powerful and innovative tech companies in the world headquartered here is a good thing, and people are weirdly reluctant (on both sides) to admit that. (I mean, would anyone have a problem with Amazon running our vaccine distribution right now?)
Yeah, I tend to agree. It's fashionable to hate big companies in public. Economists talk about revealed preference, and almost every big city mayor / governor in this country wants Amazon to come and build HQ 3 in their city.
I don't think 1 and 2 are happening any time soon. The "gerrymandering backfire" only happens when you design a bunch of 55-45 safe seats, and 8 years of population redistribution turns them into 49-51 losses. I suppose it's possible that the next decade will have population changes that are more unpredictable than the ones of previous decades, but you can also avoid it just by being a tiny bit less greedy (draw nine 57-43 seats and two 20-80 seats rather than ten 55-45 seats and one 3-97 seat) or by having the courts allow sneakier map-drawing methods that are safer against predicted demographic changes. And I would be surprised if remote worker trends do much to change the blue-urban/red-rural trend (though perhaps it'll allow St. Louis and Detroit to get more tech workers that want urban amenities without New York/San Francisco prices).
Kenny. I appreciate your thorough gravity, and bringing me back to earth on this one.
I think there are a couple rural states that could really see the remote worker opinion shifts (if I am going to go all the way on my idea). Here goes: Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. It's not huge, but massively changes the senate trajectory. Here are the cases:
1) Montana, nice rural getaway, has been "in-play" for liberals here and there.
2) Idaho, scooping up California tech refugees. Boise has changed quite a bit.
3) Wyoming. Obvious choice when Colorado gets too expensive.
My general thought on all this is that the geography shapes partisanship more than partisanship drawing people to the geography. When you walk past your neighbor (and a dozen strangers) every single day on the way to get coffee and go to work, you think about them (and the shared infrastructure you just used) very differently than if you only see people through the windshield of a car, and can't rely on police or firefighters or paramedics to help you within 45 minutes. An individual's partisanship will survive for a while when they're in a new place, but over time it will likely be gradually shaped by their environment. (I suppose it's theoretically possible that at a certain point, identity becomes more shaped by online environment than by the experience of the physical body - but the physical body is the one that is in the geography subject to government jurisdiction, while the online environment isn't so connected to local or regional electoral politics.)
I think the case for Montana and Idaho is quite interesting - Boise really does seem to be shaping up to be the new Portland (though we'll have to see how much dense urban development is liberalized to allow it to become that); and Montana, as you note, has been close to being a swing state several times. I'd be very skeptical about Wyoming, given that it's one of the reddest states currently, but I suppose Wyoming is in fact the state where two of my blue-voting friends have relocated for the duration of the pandemic (from Texas and New Hampshire).
I think that for GOP to go whole hog populism they have to start to find ways to send out the checks, and also to find some way of financing them. Deficit financing works for a while, but at some point you need revenue as well. One possibility is to go after tech money, as there is a lot of it and it is typically associated with social liberals. The GOP has a real conundrum, as you can be fake populist for a while, but you need to deliver. In some ways the pandemic has given them breathing space, as they can claim CARES and the latest stimulus. But Trump has shown that although celebrity and fake populism don’t quite cut it at the polls, populism has real legs as a vote getter.
Democrats have the problem of having good policies with a shit brand. Celebrity would probably be all it takes for them to be dominant. Obama is kind of proof of concept. He can’t be reduced to celebrity only, but it was a big part of his appeal, no question. Even the Nobel committee fell for it.
What does it take to be a "celebrity"? If Obama counts, I would think that both Sanders and Buttigieg should count, because they have the similar trait of inspiring their followers (and share with Trump the ability to get totally over-the-top opposition).
Obama kind of counts because he clearly has star power that transcends his role as a politician. But Schwarzenegger (and Trump) are better examples, since they are not really politicians. Bernie and Mayor Pete are c-list at best - but Mayor Pete has potential. If Mayor Pete would be part of a hit reality series like The real Parks and Recs for a couple of years, then he would qualify.
I would have a close look at AOC though, she groks this.
This sort of thought makes me wonder whether I should be more worried that Republicans continue to be an austerity in the face of less than fill employment party, or that someone will convince the party (once it is in power again, or course) to get religion on MTFC, or even just deficit spending that isn't just tax cuts, and lead them to durable governing majorities. I guess I hope they become profligate, but I do worry about that eventual profligacy supporting white ethnonationalism in a scary way. Guess it's a bit of a frying pan/fire situation.
I think an analysis like this isn’t complete without taking an outside look at the movement of Democratic policy proposals. Bernie and crew have absolutely been successful at pushing the Overton Window dramatically left. This gives Republicans a huge advantage- they don’t have to propose doing anything because a wide range of voters just want them to fill a seat and vote No on everything coming from the left. If you look at the GA senate campaign, the GOP slogan is “Save America.” They have framed this as an existential battle for preventing America’s “descent” into Venezuelan-style socialism. When the Dems move boldly left and brush off any concerns as racist, the right doesn’t have to propose doing jack except standing in the way.
To be fair though, a large portion of Democratic voters were/do vote just to stop the *conspiratorial, racist, sexist, etc. republicans*. We just have polarized politics and super big messy parties that are basically forms of opposition to the other party. Maybe dem voters care a bit more about policy but I don't know if the difference is really substantial.
Totally true...if you talk to a non-Trumper conservative these days, it's all about stopping the left from doing stuff. In that framing, just filling a seat is enough - the fighting on twitter is all gravy. :-)
Yes. I watched Corey Booker being interviewed during the primaries and he was frustrated by Bernie and Co. Bernie wanted people in prison to be able to vote. So candidates were questioned on this policy. Normal people in swing states don’t want imprisoned felons voting. While right wing framed it as democrats wanting prisoners who rape and murder children to be able to vote.
I wonder if Democrats had pushed back on BLM, riots and such if we would have kept more seats in the house. If Ted wheeler had actually done sometime to stop the riot, would things be different? We all know that if Biden wasn’t the one on top of the ticket, we would have lost. AZ,GA and WI would have gone to Trump.
But you’re right, all republicans have to do is hold their crazy base with conspiracy theories and highlight far lefties insane proposals. They don’t have to do anything else and they get their tax cuts and judges. For republican donors, that’s all they want.
"I see a lot of people “predicting” future GOP election theft or a slip back into a Jim Crow-esque collapse of democracy primarily as a way of expressing the normative view that what Republicans are doing is bad."
These kinds of predictions in popular media make the thing they're predicting less likely to happen. Then when it starts happening reporters report on it and scuttle the plan before it executes.
This has happened multiple times over the past 4 years and some people use that as evidence that Trump isn't as bad as the media claim and others rightly point out that he only stopped because he was caught.
I've wondered how much of the "edge" in both parties seems to be like everyone is losing.
Economic liberals have watched inequality rise and almost all economic gains for the last generation be captured by the top 10%.
Social Liberals have had the most success in changing culture and law, but felt like they had (and still have) the most distance to go to equality and justice.
Economic conservatives have watched government at almost all levels grow larger and more intrusive for a generation.
Social conservatives have seen their views go from being mainstream to being considered outrageous and illegitimate.
Ezra Klein describes part of the current problem as people being unable to actually accomplish their policy aims, but change is happening, its just not the change that the majority wants.
I like this, but I also feel like believing you’re losing is one of the marks of being politically committed—“The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Maybe it’s partly that way more people are politically committed today?
I haven’t done the research nationwide, but, living in a red state with a Republican-controlled legislature, I don’t get the sense that the Republicans are less policy focused. There is still anti-abortion legislation, anti-renewable energy legislation, anti-LGBT policy, ect.
I think you’re being duped a bit by the nature and discipline of conservative media and the obvious lack of Republican policy making in Democrat-controlled states.
Which state are you in? As someone who lives in Texas, I have the sense that this sort of thing was really big in the 2013, 2015, and maybe 2017 sessions of the legislature, but not really in 2019.
What's an example of the anti-renewable energy legislation and the anti-LGBT policy? I'm wondering. The latter is interesting because I think Matt is right that this anti-LGBT policy is significantly to the left of where it was before. Anti-LGBT used to be saying you couldn't marry someone of the same sex. Now it's about sports? Bathrooms?
I agree with Corey Robin that The Republican Party do not have policy ambitions because Reaganism have already won on the Political-economy. A good example of this is Joe Biden's policy of not raising income taxes of people making less than $400,000, which is to the right of Obama's policy of not raising income taxes of people making less than $250,000. America is the only country I am aware of where it is considered progressive to oppose raising the taxes on a person making $399,000. America is a very right-wing country.
It may be right wing on that specific issue but on abortion and immigration, the two issues (along with guns) the GOP is most united on, we’re quite left-wing compared to Europe. So there certainly is more for them to achieve, in theory.
America is much more pro-gun rights than Europe, and pro-immigration is also a libertarian virtue. Most European countries, especially western europe, provide greater access to abortion than the United States.
I don't think you're correct about abortion in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law#Europe. "After the first trimester, abortion is generally allowed only under certain circumstances, such as risk to woman's life or health, fetal defects or other specific situations that may be related to the circumstances of the conception or the woman's age."
Calling immigration a "libertarian virtue" is all very well, but libertarianism isn't an dominant political force anywhere, and the fact is that the right-wing parties in Europe are universally (and virulently) opposed to abortion, and also that European countries have much stricter immigration policies than the United States does.
In the UK, abortion is legal up to 24 weeks. More importantly, there is no significant movement to ban abortion or any scenario where someone would have to drive hundreds of miles to get one.
A lot of European countries have stricter abortion laws than the United States on paper, but in reality, access to abortion in those countries is easier
Depends on which state, but the point is that the Republicans clearly haven't won everything they could win, if the US abortion laws are to the left of Europe's. They could in theory take the abortion restrictions that have passed muster with the Supreme Court and apply them nationwide, but do they have any plans to do so?
It’s a bit hard to directly compare abortion policy internationally because it’s also connected to healthcare policy in general.
My understanding is that in many European countries with strict abortion regulations on paper, abortions are free or very low cost because of universal healthcare coverage.
If an abortion is free then time based limits are less burdensome. One reason people delay getting an abortion in America is because they don’t have health insurance or the insurance that they do have doesn’t cover abortion.
The bit that this analysis is missing is looking at the long term trend of interest rates, and how they differ between nations.
There's now a wide acknowledgment in the democratic party that interest rates on US government debt are insanely low, that those lows have been maintained across wildly different fiscal postures and even in the face of increasingly lower unemployment. In that context it just doesn't make sense to prioritize raising taxes on anyone that can even conceivably be called middle class. So the democrats stopped telling everyone they had to eat their vegetables when they plainly didn't need to.
In Europe you have a combination of genuinely less borrowing capacity from states, German debt phobia, and EU fiscal rules reflecting that phobia. In that context finding ways to pay for policy out of current year tax receipts is inherently more necessary, so yes, they're going to be more willing to do that than in a country where it's unnecessary.
Low-interest rate is an ex post-facto excuse for the Democrats right-ward shift on taxes. The reality is that the Democratic Party has gradually been moving rightward on economics every year since the late 1970s, and even during the New Deal and the Great Society, the Democratic Party was to the right of most center-left parties in Europe.
The Clintonian New Democrat phenomenon is a real thing that really happened. 25 years ago.
Your previous comment was about changes between the Obama agenda and the Biden one. The differences between those two are lower taxes, and (critically) *higher social spending* in Biden's agenda - that's best understood as less concern about deficits rather than moving rightward.
My point is that the United States is and has always been more right-wing on economics than most of Europe. I used the difference between Biden and Obama on income taxes to show just how abnormally right-wing USA is on economics. Not counting the countries with populations smaller than 1 million,Switzerland and Ireland are the only European countries more right wing on economics than the United States.
When I say United States is very right-wing, I mean very libertarian. Your passport in Europe example could never happen in USA due to USA being very libertarian.
Democrats can win the Whitehouse in 2024, but it will largely depend on how voters see us and not our policies. Even the “trans rights” issue is being framed as conservatives being against “trans rights”. In reality they are speaking about biological sex and sports, as well as minor children medically transitioning. The argument for gay marriage was that it affected no outside the marriage, just like heterosexual marriage. Republican politicians don’t actually care about the trans debates, but voters in AZ and WI do. It becomes a wedge issue, because democrats make it so and this time the science is not on their side.
The immigration issue is more difficult. Democrats should back eliminating chain migration for extended family, support universal use of e-verify, and immigration limits. We also should help Mexico protect their border. I don’t mean say this openly, but actually create legislation and give house members a vote on it. Send it to Mitch McConnell
I Would like to see legislation on nuclear energy, increase in pell grants and income levels that qualify, expansion of Obamacare and expansion of internet in rural areas. Democrat seem to always pivot to the most unpopular issues coastal elites support.
At the risk of engaging in motivated reasoning, is it possible that the Republican Party has fallen below a critical mass of policy professionals willing to work for them and lack the institutional capacity to coordinate a comprehensive policy agenda anymore? It’s clearly not *zero* capacity yet to be fair but the combination of the professional class’s liberalism, traditional conservatives’ belief that governing should be a part-time civic service rather than a lifelong career, and the base’s demand for Republicans to constantly engage with media-driven outrages that are probably pretty limited in their policy implications all seem like they’d be driving potential serious-reformer officeholders, staffers, and non-hack pundits away. That’s got to have some kind of effect.
I think there is some loss of professionalism specific to the Trump administration - people who would normally not have it that far into the white house have a lot more influence; loyalty is valued, professionalism and experience are not.
But I thought Ezra Klein's analysis might be right: "do virtually nothing" is the intersection that a number of conflicting conservative constituencies can agree on, so that's what happens - more so with Trump.
I don't think the current state of politics is comprehensible without looking at our information environment, which is, to put it mildly, polluted.
(Inevitable plug or the Social Dilemma - I do think it's one of the most coherent descriptions of how social media contributed to now. https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/)
In the 50s: public discourse was coherent and narrow - the really important question was which candidate was really going to contain communism. Secretly, behind closed doors, the CIA was giving people LSD without their consent to develop mind control.
Now: public discourse is incoherent and unconstrained - there's a secret pedo ring, the Earth is flat, and Hugo Chavez rigged the voting machines. Secretly, behind closed doors, the parties work together to move toward greener energy production.
Re: the Republicans moving to the left, I view this as a "shadow" of two other phenomena:
- Not doing stuff. The lack of Republicans doing stuff from 2016-2018 is kind of amazing, but I'd be nervous about calling it the new normal until it happens without Trump. Trump is uniquely bad at doing executive things, and this may have really impacted the process.
- Movement away from neoliberalism. I see this as orthogonal to a simple left-right axis, so parts of it seem like being more conservative (harsher on immigration) and parts of it seem more liberal (welfare spending isn't evil). Again, we need to see it without Trump, as the things Republicans voted on from 2016-2018 looked more conventional than the things that came out of Trump's mouth.
It might be true that within the GOP there are no big legislative things that make up an agenda. From within my agency, it looked to me like the Trump administration was making sweeping changes via regulatory, budget, and workplace decisions. Many pieces of that project stand partially complete today, and four more years would have seen many more pieces of that finished.
Basically, a phenomenon called "polarized pluralism" (coined to describe Italian politics in the 60-80s) is creating a four-way dynamic with the more extreme wings of the parties fighting endless wars over ideology or culture, while the moderate factions focus on stable governance, with minimal disruption to prevent the extremes from getting power. But we'll see whether this is as true of the Democrats as it is of the Republicans.
Great article, thanks Matt. It's all a little crazy making. I wish I knew what real conservatives think, but when I talk to them everything is whataboutism's. Even when you're purely asking. It's almost impossible for a conservative to stake a claim in anything right now, except immigration. I loved that point bc I see it anecdotally all over.
It's pretty similar to the policy-preferences of those who describe themselves as "neo-reactionary". I can't for the life of me figure out where the tax break for nannies figures into it, though.
I could see a case if you call nannies "childcare". The weird bit is "Tax break for hiring nannies" directly after "remove all tariffs and subsidies." Tax breaks are inherently subsidies. Maybe "remove most" or "remove all tariffs and subsidies on trade" is what this person meant.
What? No. Neoliberalism is steeped in free trade, open markets and competition. Many of these things are not neoliberal minus the tariffs and subsidies. Forced savings is extremely anti neoliberal as well as capping immigration.
On a separately note, I deeply worry about misrepresentations in liberalism and neoliberalism. I see them everywhere. It's like when people talk about "capitalism". Almost no one seems to have the same definition. Neoliberalism is similar because you and I have a different definition and at least we're reading both reading Slow Boring.
One through-line in your thinking (to me) is that crime is a huge problem in society. Drugs especially (a-la Singapore). Many drugs like marijuana are extremely common, even among law and order supporters. Would you legalize marijuana? (Psilocybin mushrooms, ketamine?) High punishment for drug offenses would put many decent people in jail. Lots of people serving them (drug dealers) to death. That's extraordinarily harsh for many recreational, low-harm drugs. Care to clarify your stance on drug policy?
Oh ya definitely. It sounds very ideal. At the same time, I do not think I want to live in a complete surveillance state. While I have had my bike stolen twice bc I live in cities, I also have a fancy bike lock now.
Overall, my tendency is not to fear crime too much. Sort of the opposite of you, but I understand where you come from. Not having to worry could free up many economic and societal gains, that is for sure.
Except our economy actually NEEDS some low skilled workers for things like farm labor - having higher skilled immigrants isn’t necessarily better for the economy. It just depends on what a particular economy needs.
I hadn't heard of Demeny voting before - it sounds interesting. However, I was also intrigued by the essay Kelsey Piper wrote a year or two ago for Vox arguing for voting age 0 - if a kid can physically use the voting machine, their vote can count (though with most young kids, they'd probably spoil their ballot, and a good fraction of kids would either vote effectively randomly or in line with their parents; it would be hard for a candidate to succeed with compelling advertising in children's cartoons, since adults are still the majority of the electorate).
Children actually voting seems much more reasonable to me. I'm thinking about the demeny thing and envisioning apocalyptic matrix style vote(r) farms. :/
I think the issue here is there *are* things Republican voters want, but they’re mostly things that cannot be achieved through legislation.
What Republican voters want is a more conservative culture. They want Evangelical propaganda movies to get Oscars. They want kid’s cartoons and TV ads to stop featuring positive portrayals of gay people. They want there to be fewer accommodations for non-English speakers. They want people to stop talking about certain negative aspects of American history like slavery or genocide against Native Americans. They want contraception to be considered shameful instead of widely accepted. They want zero acceptance in society of religious groups other than Christians and Jews.
You can’t deliver much on those except on the margins through a President or Congress. But they’re real things that motivate conservatives and their main tool to try to express that is by voting. So they vote for trolls who will “fight” for those cultural values.
But the actual policy is mostly handled by the people who have easily delivered goals, which is the business community that wants low taxes and less regulation.
That being said, there are two areas where rank and file conservatives want concrete policy change: immigration and abortion.
You're framing is both accurate and misses the point entirely. Progressives are typically much younger and so I don't think quite understand just how crazy the radical culture change seems to an older person and why that could lead them to be more conservative. 50 years ago, being homosexual was illegal in most of the country and immoral to 90%+ of the population. Matt mentions in the early aughts that gay marriage was so unpopular that not even leading democrats would support it. Today you should be cancelled on twitter because you want to define a women as someone who has a ovaries/vagina much less suggest that homosexuality is wrong.
That last part really bites too, the people who were so outside the mainstream that they were essentially cancelled are now wanting to cancel you. How could that not generate enormous political power for a party willing to leverage the resulting resentment...
The psychological effect of the failed culture wars of the aughts is something that I think plenty of people fail to understand about the conservative mindset.
The idea that gay people would be fully integrated into society, that religion would be shoved aside, ect. was so unthinkable to them, that they’ll honesty believe that we’re on verge of full-blown socialism or whatever implausible scenarios they fear. It’s like conservatives over the age of 50 were the victims of some mass atrocity.
I'm as liberal as they come, but as I approach 40 I've started to be able to see how disorienting and unpleasant some of these changes must be for social conservatives. The other day I saw that there's a Pixar short on Disney+ about coming out of the closet; my daughter's school's holiday concert for second grade included no songs about Christmas per se, but did include "Imagine" by John Lennon, which is explicitly anti-religious. I'm not against the Pixar thing, and the Christmas thing is silly but I think harmless; at the same time, I think I can understand how feeling like your values are actively frowned upon by the mainstream culture would be alienating and push people towards extremes.
One thing relevant here is that most parents of school age children these days are millennials, and millennials are a socially progressive generation.
Which is one reason why so much kid-friendly media is counter-intuitively so often at the forefront of progressive ideas in media, especially regarding LGBT representation. Today’s parents want their kids to see positive portrayals of LGBT people.
And so do I, and I like that (for instance) there are so many portrayals of people in hijabs, wheelchairs, etc. in children's books and entertainment today…at the same time, I'm uncomfortably aware that putting a cross necklace on a character in those same books and shows would be enough to spark an outcry, so it isn't done.
Per the greatest source of all - Wikipedia, 4.5% of adult American's identify as LGBT. 25% of the US population identify as Evangelicals. I don't watch that much media, but would your observation match that representation?
I think that the observation that kids' entertainment is basically marketed toward their parents is key here, as is the flip side that as a parent of small children your perception of 'the culture' is constrained by that fact.
Entertainment for old people (including "entertainment" like a lot of cable news) definitely skews more conservative than kids stuff, because the producers understand that they are selling to a more conservative set of people. But we don't code that stuff as part of the culture, for whatever reason.
I understand it, but I can't sympathize. I'm roughly your age and grew up in a very conservative rural community. I saw the things they did and said to us as children. Cry me a river.
Are they wrong? Conservatives argued slippery slope constantly on cultural issues and were told repeatedly they were wrong by Progressives...then the Conservatives were proven right by Progressives moving forward on their agenda culturally and legally. Why would a conservative expect economic issues be any different?
As a progressive, I think they’re wrong because I, and the people I know in the Democratic Party, don’t want actual socialism, ect. Whereas, in the aughts I, and every other progressive I knew absolutely wanted gay rights, ect. We just tolerated the ole “denial with a wink” from Democratic politicians.
That makes sense...but now there is an increasing segment of the Democratic party and its left adjacent population that support socialism, etc. In the aughts there were people who wanted decriminalization but not legalization of marriage. You were further left of the center then than you are now. But what's to say that you won't move along to socialism just like Obama, Clinton, etc. did on gay marriage? Even more so, if you were a conservative, how much would you believe such reassurances?
Can you define what you mean by socialism? With the exception of single-payer health care I don't see any serious push to nationalize key industries. And even health care would still be serviced overwhelmingly by private companies and nonprofits.
Let me explain it they way I explained it to my Republican father this fall: I live in a Midwestern neighborhood where the home values are $800K+ 75% of the houses have Democratic signs out front. Do you really think all these lawyers, doctors and business persons are going to become socialists?
Yes, cultural change can cause backlash. Just like Republicans did extremely well after the Civil Rights Movement successfully changed our society and culture.
Even as recently as the mid-1990’s most people were uncomfortable with if not outright opposed to interracial marriage according to polls.
Good point... it’s kind of ironic that each “side” wants the power that the other side seems to have- liberals want political power to enact policy change, conservatives want cultural power to return their traditional values to the mainstream. Both sides feel powerless because neither side recognizes their power or wins.
My conservative co-worker in 2017: the left is taking over everything.
Me: You have the white house, both houses of Congress and the supreme court!
If only we cold arrange a swap. :-)
And each side feels justified in monopolizing the power they do have to fight off the other side.
One important distinction to this is that there is a distinction between conservative control of politics and progressive control of culture. Politics is controlled by the Republican Party, a mess of an organization but a singular organization nonetheless. Progressives control of *culture*, whatever that actually means, has no structure or organization.
Universities seems pretty structured and organized by me. Conservatives are not wrong about the influence of education in this regard - they used to own this.
I think students are 10x more influenced by their peers than professors. Even at places like Liberty University there has been pushback on some policies and it's not from the faculty.
I'm not sure - if there were an organized structure for universities, we would be able to make the broad change that nearly everyone wants to get the general education math requirement to focus more on basic statistics than on calculus. While versions of this formulation have percolated through academia, there's no organized way that it has happened. (It's possible that the AMS or MAA has made a formal statement about what they think a math requirement should look like, but I don't know how many universities or even accreditation institutions have followed any centralized organizer like this.)
However cultural stuff works among universities is far less structured and organized than how general education math requirements work.
Lol liberals would not want to lose the cultural stuff. Could you even imagine a to box office movie about finding faith? Superman finds god, Wonder Woman marries him and stays at home baking cookies.
It's called the Hallmark Channel.
At the time, conservatives who cared about cultural issues (mostly the religious right, but also some Jordan Peterson-esque intellectual types such as Allan Bloom) did not approve of those movies, or of much of contemporary pop culture in general. If they feel "conservative" now, that's simply because they reflect the values of their era.
Yep, can’t stand 80s action movies for that very reason
I think it is interesting how this power switched hands in America over the past 50 years or so. Democrats ruled politics after the New Deal, but mainstream culture was so conservative that Lucy and Ricky had to sleep in separate beds!
I agree that conservatism is largely cultural. This is probably a bit of an exaggeration (most conservatives definitely don't care about condoms: https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/public-attitudes-about-birth-control), but I think it's largely correct. Doesn't that spell out exactly how Democrats can win, though? Especially in red states? Why not just campaign on the economic stuff and leave cultural liberalism completely out of it? If your theory is correct that Democrats have economic ambitions and conservatives have cultural ones (and I think it is), then we should be able to win just like as I described. It's too bad no Democrats ever really try this
Well, Democrats have cultural views too, and some policy choices cut against cultural conservatism.
Culturally conservative Democrats can work sometimes but they fall into a trap of demoralizing and alienating Democratic voters while simultaneously being unable to outbid an actual Republican on vehement social conservatism.
Exactly - you’d lose from both flanks that way. Also, to many, many Democrats (including myself) the cultural issues are as if not more important.
"Banana Republicans" what a brilliant formulation! It deserves to become very widespread.
My comparison for the Trump years is the Carter presidency. Trump is no Carter (he does not even have the ounce of good character). But, I think he represents a disastrous current state that will require a return to "normality" in the future.
I believe the bleeding of the suburbs will end up being instrumental in the 12-16 year wilderness Republicans are walking into. The old donors will leave the scene. The "rising stars" are do-nothing maniacs like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Much more interested in prosecuting fictional deep-state wars than governing. They will lose purple districts. Because incumbent, moderate politicians will get primaried. Meanwhile, the bench will get crazier and crazier. This will repel donors, and the vicious cycle continues.
In 2032, they'll be ready for a Larry Hogan / Charlie Baker like figure to do their version of a Clintonian pivot and win back the suburbs. You can't run a party on a downwardly-mobile base and the most reactionary billionaire types. You are going to need a bench of mid-level elites (i.e. well-educated people, sub-ten-millionaires) to drive substantive agenda items.
There is so much conversation about the "working class future" of the GOP. But it will have no chance if they can't get some actual elite firepower from Nassau County and Northern Virginia. The working class voters will be lower propensity when they have to vote for personality-bankrupt cowards like Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton. Trump is an ignorant, lazy fool of the highest order. But at least he knows how to play the hits. His successors are as exciting as the warm ham sandwiches they eat for lunch. This "coalition" will have a short life.
For the Democrats: Support "broadly popular" policies. Display competence in governing. Have a strategy for how to handle the known tradeoffs that come with a broad coalition. If they can do this, the next 16 years belong to them.
Do you think Trump supporters see Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz as "personality-bankrupt cowards"? I think they see them as principle ideological conservatives who are willing to make unpopular stands for things these unhinged voters think are important.
The way that everyone eventually fails Trump and publicly loses his good graces (as Sessions did in 2017 and as Pence is about to do tomorrow) doesn't speak well to Hawley, Cotton, and Cruz's prospects of picking up Trump's crown.
I agree that the path to a clean inheritance for any of these people is hard to see now. Eventually someone will be the new face (no one lives forever), but I doubt it will be a clean inheritance when it comes to that. I do rate the chance of a Trump 2024 primary win as below 50, but mostly because there are many exits (financial ruin, infirmary/death, a republican 24 hopeful discovering they have a spine and hidden wellsprings of charisma or leadership), and still only a bit below, maybe 40, at that. I'd put higher odds on Jr in 24 than any republican senator.
I half agree. I do think it's possible for trumpy voters to see these folks as principled idealogues and also see them as personality bankrupt. I enjoyed the first several Sarah cooper videos and agree with Josh Barro's analysis that part of what made cooper's videos funny is the fact that they allow people who otherwise wouldn't to take Trump less seriously which unlocks parts of his appeal. That charisma, that Mark Burnett (among others) saw as a vehicle to fame and riches, is real with Trump. But I don't think hawley, cotton, pompeo, cruz have any of that kind of energy, personally. Of course it would be more meaningful to heat that from a trumpy voter whose perspective I can't claim to emulate that well.
They're also try-hards. Something Trump supporters love about him is he is the same whiny New York developer idiot that he always was. The old "Donny from Queens" aspect. Ted Cruz is like that guy you knew who changed his personality with each new girlfriend or friend group. He is an empty slate with no natural constituency. People put up with him because they hate the other side, but don't expect any of these people to carry Twitter water for him.
Yes, someone said that Trump skillfully projects the idea that the truth doesn't matter and that both of you are in on the joke, whereas Cruz always seems like someone who's trying to trick you, someone who's acting sincere but really isn't.
lol. no one thinks Ted Cruz is principled.
People like you and I don't - but as a professor at Texas A&M University, I have seen many undergrads who seem genuinely enthusiastic about him, in a way that I rarely ever did with Trump.
Point taken.
A scary part of living in a democracy, imho, is that I think a non trivial number of voters do actually believe this....prob far from a majority of those who vote for him, but I'm less confident about it being 'no one', unfortunately...
Yeah, there is a core % that would agree on that. But I presume the rustbelt swing voters are less friendly to these guys. Not ever sure why they liked Trump, but he definitely had a distinct, recognizable brand. These guys are the wet noodles of charisma.
I think this is a little to rosy a picture for dems. Sure this may be true in terms of national popularity, but political power is not remotely distributed fairly. So maybe the generic republican is only liked/voted for by 40% of the population nationally (even that number is a little low) but given the results of the 2020 elections, there will not be any changes to the political system, so republicans are gonna gerrymander everything they can to hell, and keep having power. Also even if the new-age GOP adopts less corporate friendly policy, that would not mean they lose their rich donors. Those donors still have to chose between the two parties, and a more corporation hawkish GOP is still much better than the Dems who like the welfare-state, like regulations, and believe climate change is an issue we should do something about. Those donors still hate all that stuff.
Probably true, looking for ways to be optimistic these days. Still, the way I could see this happening:
1) Republican gerrymandering backfires: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/10/gerrymandering-midterms-democrats-house-seats-579890
2) Remote worker trends re-distribute engaged, educated, formerly urban / near suburban voters.
3) Republicans lose Texas, and are effectively shut out of the presidency unless they moderate on actual behavior (not just issues).
4) Democrats will need to moderate on tech regulation, because that will be the big thing that the next crop of elite donors are interested in. The far left already accuses them of being too friendly to big tech.
When Reagan won in 1980, the idea of Republicans controlling congress seemed crazy. I think the Democrats find themselves in a similar position now. They can capture a broad coalition, and with Texas, are the de-facto presidential winners. They'll have headwinds in congress. But if they can have a few generations of competent lawmakers, they will easily outflank the Marjorie Taylor Greene party with the vast swathe of voters.
The GOP is behaving like a party that wants a ceiling at 30%. They haven't arrived yet, but I believe they are headed there if they persist.
I'm waiting for someone to make the case that the Dems aren't friendly enough to Big Tech.
Like, having the most powerful and innovative tech companies in the world headquartered here is a good thing, and people are weirdly reluctant (on both sides) to admit that. (I mean, would anyone have a problem with Amazon running our vaccine distribution right now?)
Yeah, I tend to agree. It's fashionable to hate big companies in public. Economists talk about revealed preference, and almost every big city mayor / governor in this country wants Amazon to come and build HQ 3 in their city.
I don't think 1 and 2 are happening any time soon. The "gerrymandering backfire" only happens when you design a bunch of 55-45 safe seats, and 8 years of population redistribution turns them into 49-51 losses. I suppose it's possible that the next decade will have population changes that are more unpredictable than the ones of previous decades, but you can also avoid it just by being a tiny bit less greedy (draw nine 57-43 seats and two 20-80 seats rather than ten 55-45 seats and one 3-97 seat) or by having the courts allow sneakier map-drawing methods that are safer against predicted demographic changes. And I would be surprised if remote worker trends do much to change the blue-urban/red-rural trend (though perhaps it'll allow St. Louis and Detroit to get more tech workers that want urban amenities without New York/San Francisco prices).
Kenny. I appreciate your thorough gravity, and bringing me back to earth on this one.
I think there are a couple rural states that could really see the remote worker opinion shifts (if I am going to go all the way on my idea). Here goes: Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. It's not huge, but massively changes the senate trajectory. Here are the cases:
1) Montana, nice rural getaway, has been "in-play" for liberals here and there.
2) Idaho, scooping up California tech refugees. Boise has changed quite a bit.
3) Wyoming. Obvious choice when Colorado gets too expensive.
Which do you think will have a greater impact:
1) Tech workers liberalizing the states they move to
2) The culture of the states they move to conservatizing the tech workers who move there?
My general thought on all this is that the geography shapes partisanship more than partisanship drawing people to the geography. When you walk past your neighbor (and a dozen strangers) every single day on the way to get coffee and go to work, you think about them (and the shared infrastructure you just used) very differently than if you only see people through the windshield of a car, and can't rely on police or firefighters or paramedics to help you within 45 minutes. An individual's partisanship will survive for a while when they're in a new place, but over time it will likely be gradually shaped by their environment. (I suppose it's theoretically possible that at a certain point, identity becomes more shaped by online environment than by the experience of the physical body - but the physical body is the one that is in the geography subject to government jurisdiction, while the online environment isn't so connected to local or regional electoral politics.)
I think the case for Montana and Idaho is quite interesting - Boise really does seem to be shaping up to be the new Portland (though we'll have to see how much dense urban development is liberalized to allow it to become that); and Montana, as you note, has been close to being a swing state several times. I'd be very skeptical about Wyoming, given that it's one of the reddest states currently, but I suppose Wyoming is in fact the state where two of my blue-voting friends have relocated for the duration of the pandemic (from Texas and New Hampshire).
I think that for GOP to go whole hog populism they have to start to find ways to send out the checks, and also to find some way of financing them. Deficit financing works for a while, but at some point you need revenue as well. One possibility is to go after tech money, as there is a lot of it and it is typically associated with social liberals. The GOP has a real conundrum, as you can be fake populist for a while, but you need to deliver. In some ways the pandemic has given them breathing space, as they can claim CARES and the latest stimulus. But Trump has shown that although celebrity and fake populism don’t quite cut it at the polls, populism has real legs as a vote getter.
Democrats have the problem of having good policies with a shit brand. Celebrity would probably be all it takes for them to be dominant. Obama is kind of proof of concept. He can’t be reduced to celebrity only, but it was a big part of his appeal, no question. Even the Nobel committee fell for it.
Democrats really should try to get more celebrities to run for office.
What does it take to be a "celebrity"? If Obama counts, I would think that both Sanders and Buttigieg should count, because they have the similar trait of inspiring their followers (and share with Trump the ability to get totally over-the-top opposition).
Obama kind of counts because he clearly has star power that transcends his role as a politician. But Schwarzenegger (and Trump) are better examples, since they are not really politicians. Bernie and Mayor Pete are c-list at best - but Mayor Pete has potential. If Mayor Pete would be part of a hit reality series like The real Parks and Recs for a couple of years, then he would qualify.
I would have a close look at AOC though, she groks this.
This is exactly what Republicans said and it worked. Sort of...
This sort of thought makes me wonder whether I should be more worried that Republicans continue to be an austerity in the face of less than fill employment party, or that someone will convince the party (once it is in power again, or course) to get religion on MTFC, or even just deficit spending that isn't just tax cuts, and lead them to durable governing majorities. I guess I hope they become profligate, but I do worry about that eventual profligacy supporting white ethnonationalism in a scary way. Guess it's a bit of a frying pan/fire situation.
I think an analysis like this isn’t complete without taking an outside look at the movement of Democratic policy proposals. Bernie and crew have absolutely been successful at pushing the Overton Window dramatically left. This gives Republicans a huge advantage- they don’t have to propose doing anything because a wide range of voters just want them to fill a seat and vote No on everything coming from the left. If you look at the GA senate campaign, the GOP slogan is “Save America.” They have framed this as an existential battle for preventing America’s “descent” into Venezuelan-style socialism. When the Dems move boldly left and brush off any concerns as racist, the right doesn’t have to propose doing jack except standing in the way.
To be fair though, a large portion of Democratic voters were/do vote just to stop the *conspiratorial, racist, sexist, etc. republicans*. We just have polarized politics and super big messy parties that are basically forms of opposition to the other party. Maybe dem voters care a bit more about policy but I don't know if the difference is really substantial.
Totally true...if you talk to a non-Trumper conservative these days, it's all about stopping the left from doing stuff. In that framing, just filling a seat is enough - the fighting on twitter is all gravy. :-)
Yeah, listening to Gabriel Sterling do the mental backflips to justify voting for Loeffler and Perdue make this pretty clear.
Yes. I watched Corey Booker being interviewed during the primaries and he was frustrated by Bernie and Co. Bernie wanted people in prison to be able to vote. So candidates were questioned on this policy. Normal people in swing states don’t want imprisoned felons voting. While right wing framed it as democrats wanting prisoners who rape and murder children to be able to vote.
I wonder if Democrats had pushed back on BLM, riots and such if we would have kept more seats in the house. If Ted wheeler had actually done sometime to stop the riot, would things be different? We all know that if Biden wasn’t the one on top of the ticket, we would have lost. AZ,GA and WI would have gone to Trump.
But you’re right, all republicans have to do is hold their crazy base with conspiracy theories and highlight far lefties insane proposals. They don’t have to do anything else and they get their tax cuts and judges. For republican donors, that’s all they want.
What could Ted Wheeler have done to stop the riot?
What he's finally doing now: pulling in federal, state, and county law enforcement and increasing penalties for repeat offenders.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/532365-portland-mayor-blames-antifa-anarchists-following-nye-riot
Work with governor to call in the national guard and curfews. Pretty much what every other mayor and governor does in those situations.
is there any Democratic policy proposal that will not be framed as socialism by Republicans? See, Obamacare.
You have to have differentiation to support two parties.
"I see a lot of people “predicting” future GOP election theft or a slip back into a Jim Crow-esque collapse of democracy primarily as a way of expressing the normative view that what Republicans are doing is bad."
These kinds of predictions in popular media make the thing they're predicting less likely to happen. Then when it starts happening reporters report on it and scuttle the plan before it executes.
This has happened multiple times over the past 4 years and some people use that as evidence that Trump isn't as bad as the media claim and others rightly point out that he only stopped because he was caught.
Exactly right
I've wondered how much of the "edge" in both parties seems to be like everyone is losing.
Economic liberals have watched inequality rise and almost all economic gains for the last generation be captured by the top 10%.
Social Liberals have had the most success in changing culture and law, but felt like they had (and still have) the most distance to go to equality and justice.
Economic conservatives have watched government at almost all levels grow larger and more intrusive for a generation.
Social conservatives have seen their views go from being mainstream to being considered outrageous and illegitimate.
Ezra Klein describes part of the current problem as people being unable to actually accomplish their policy aims, but change is happening, its just not the change that the majority wants.
I like this, but I also feel like believing you’re losing is one of the marks of being politically committed—“The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Maybe it’s partly that way more people are politically committed today?
The economic conservatives get to celebrate their tax wins tho. Even with a growing deficit, they probably feel ahead.
I haven’t done the research nationwide, but, living in a red state with a Republican-controlled legislature, I don’t get the sense that the Republicans are less policy focused. There is still anti-abortion legislation, anti-renewable energy legislation, anti-LGBT policy, ect.
I think you’re being duped a bit by the nature and discipline of conservative media and the obvious lack of Republican policy making in Democrat-controlled states.
Which state are you in? As someone who lives in Texas, I have the sense that this sort of thing was really big in the 2013, 2015, and maybe 2017 sessions of the legislature, but not really in 2019.
Kansas and Missouri.
Yes, I think this post is correct for national politics, not for state politics in red and purple states
What's an example of the anti-renewable energy legislation and the anti-LGBT policy? I'm wondering. The latter is interesting because I think Matt is right that this anti-LGBT policy is significantly to the left of where it was before. Anti-LGBT used to be saying you couldn't marry someone of the same sex. Now it's about sports? Bathrooms?
This is an interesting point because in blue states country-club Republicans are still around...at the state level the party is localized.
I agree with Corey Robin that The Republican Party do not have policy ambitions because Reaganism have already won on the Political-economy. A good example of this is Joe Biden's policy of not raising income taxes of people making less than $400,000, which is to the right of Obama's policy of not raising income taxes of people making less than $250,000. America is the only country I am aware of where it is considered progressive to oppose raising the taxes on a person making $399,000. America is a very right-wing country.
It may be right wing on that specific issue but on abortion and immigration, the two issues (along with guns) the GOP is most united on, we’re quite left-wing compared to Europe. So there certainly is more for them to achieve, in theory.
America is much more pro-gun rights than Europe, and pro-immigration is also a libertarian virtue. Most European countries, especially western europe, provide greater access to abortion than the United States.
I don't think you're correct about abortion in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law#Europe. "After the first trimester, abortion is generally allowed only under certain circumstances, such as risk to woman's life or health, fetal defects or other specific situations that may be related to the circumstances of the conception or the woman's age."
Calling immigration a "libertarian virtue" is all very well, but libertarianism isn't an dominant political force anywhere, and the fact is that the right-wing parties in Europe are universally (and virulently) opposed to abortion, and also that European countries have much stricter immigration policies than the United States does.
Europe is not homogenous on this.
In the UK, abortion is legal up to 24 weeks. More importantly, there is no significant movement to ban abortion or any scenario where someone would have to drive hundreds of miles to get one.
A lot of European countries have stricter abortion laws than the United States on paper, but in reality, access to abortion in those countries is easier
Depends on which state, but the point is that the Republicans clearly haven't won everything they could win, if the US abortion laws are to the left of Europe's. They could in theory take the abortion restrictions that have passed muster with the Supreme Court and apply them nationwide, but do they have any plans to do so?
It’s a bit hard to directly compare abortion policy internationally because it’s also connected to healthcare policy in general.
My understanding is that in many European countries with strict abortion regulations on paper, abortions are free or very low cost because of universal healthcare coverage.
If an abortion is free then time based limits are less burdensome. One reason people delay getting an abortion in America is because they don’t have health insurance or the insurance that they do have doesn’t cover abortion.
Sure; my point is there is plenty of theoretically winnable ground for Republicans who actually want to advance their aims with legislation.
The bit that this analysis is missing is looking at the long term trend of interest rates, and how they differ between nations.
There's now a wide acknowledgment in the democratic party that interest rates on US government debt are insanely low, that those lows have been maintained across wildly different fiscal postures and even in the face of increasingly lower unemployment. In that context it just doesn't make sense to prioritize raising taxes on anyone that can even conceivably be called middle class. So the democrats stopped telling everyone they had to eat their vegetables when they plainly didn't need to.
In Europe you have a combination of genuinely less borrowing capacity from states, German debt phobia, and EU fiscal rules reflecting that phobia. In that context finding ways to pay for policy out of current year tax receipts is inherently more necessary, so yes, they're going to be more willing to do that than in a country where it's unnecessary.
Low-interest rate is an ex post-facto excuse for the Democrats right-ward shift on taxes. The reality is that the Democratic Party has gradually been moving rightward on economics every year since the late 1970s, and even during the New Deal and the Great Society, the Democratic Party was to the right of most center-left parties in Europe.
The Clintonian New Democrat phenomenon is a real thing that really happened. 25 years ago.
Your previous comment was about changes between the Obama agenda and the Biden one. The differences between those two are lower taxes, and (critically) *higher social spending* in Biden's agenda - that's best understood as less concern about deficits rather than moving rightward.
My point is that the United States is and has always been more right-wing on economics than most of Europe. I used the difference between Biden and Obama on income taxes to show just how abnormally right-wing USA is on economics. Not counting the countries with populations smaller than 1 million,Switzerland and Ireland are the only European countries more right wing on economics than the United States.
When I say United States is very right-wing, I mean very libertarian. Your passport in Europe example could never happen in USA due to USA being very libertarian.
Democrats can win the Whitehouse in 2024, but it will largely depend on how voters see us and not our policies. Even the “trans rights” issue is being framed as conservatives being against “trans rights”. In reality they are speaking about biological sex and sports, as well as minor children medically transitioning. The argument for gay marriage was that it affected no outside the marriage, just like heterosexual marriage. Republican politicians don’t actually care about the trans debates, but voters in AZ and WI do. It becomes a wedge issue, because democrats make it so and this time the science is not on their side.
The immigration issue is more difficult. Democrats should back eliminating chain migration for extended family, support universal use of e-verify, and immigration limits. We also should help Mexico protect their border. I don’t mean say this openly, but actually create legislation and give house members a vote on it. Send it to Mitch McConnell
I Would like to see legislation on nuclear energy, increase in pell grants and income levels that qualify, expansion of Obamacare and expansion of internet in rural areas. Democrat seem to always pivot to the most unpopular issues coastal elites support.
Why in the world should Democrats back eliminating family migration?
At the risk of engaging in motivated reasoning, is it possible that the Republican Party has fallen below a critical mass of policy professionals willing to work for them and lack the institutional capacity to coordinate a comprehensive policy agenda anymore? It’s clearly not *zero* capacity yet to be fair but the combination of the professional class’s liberalism, traditional conservatives’ belief that governing should be a part-time civic service rather than a lifelong career, and the base’s demand for Republicans to constantly engage with media-driven outrages that are probably pretty limited in their policy implications all seem like they’d be driving potential serious-reformer officeholders, staffers, and non-hack pundits away. That’s got to have some kind of effect.
I think there is some loss of professionalism specific to the Trump administration - people who would normally not have it that far into the white house have a lot more influence; loyalty is valued, professionalism and experience are not.
But I thought Ezra Klein's analysis might be right: "do virtually nothing" is the intersection that a number of conflicting conservative constituencies can agree on, so that's what happens - more so with Trump.
I don't think the current state of politics is comprehensible without looking at our information environment, which is, to put it mildly, polluted.
(Inevitable plug or the Social Dilemma - I do think it's one of the most coherent descriptions of how social media contributed to now. https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/)
In the 50s: public discourse was coherent and narrow - the really important question was which candidate was really going to contain communism. Secretly, behind closed doors, the CIA was giving people LSD without their consent to develop mind control.
Now: public discourse is incoherent and unconstrained - there's a secret pedo ring, the Earth is flat, and Hugo Chavez rigged the voting machines. Secretly, behind closed doors, the parties work together to move toward greener energy production.
Re: the Republicans moving to the left, I view this as a "shadow" of two other phenomena:
- Not doing stuff. The lack of Republicans doing stuff from 2016-2018 is kind of amazing, but I'd be nervous about calling it the new normal until it happens without Trump. Trump is uniquely bad at doing executive things, and this may have really impacted the process.
- Movement away from neoliberalism. I see this as orthogonal to a simple left-right axis, so parts of it seem like being more conservative (harsher on immigration) and parts of it seem more liberal (welfare spending isn't evil). Again, we need to see it without Trump, as the things Republicans voted on from 2016-2018 looked more conventional than the things that came out of Trump's mouth.
This was a really thought provoking comment, thanks for adding!
Matt - the Strong Towns podcast link is broken, it links to the NYT instead.
yup, looks like maybe you pasted the NYTimes link twice by accident?
Here's the link: https://www.strongtowns.org/podcast . I'll go fix it in the post
It might be true that within the GOP there are no big legislative things that make up an agenda. From within my agency, it looked to me like the Trump administration was making sweeping changes via regulatory, budget, and workplace decisions. Many pieces of that project stand partially complete today, and four more years would have seen many more pieces of that finished.
Would love to hear more specifics if there are any you could share.
Here is a great analysis on what is happening: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/29/quiet-dangerous-u-s-politics-becoming-europeanized-polarized-pluralism/
Basically, a phenomenon called "polarized pluralism" (coined to describe Italian politics in the 60-80s) is creating a four-way dynamic with the more extreme wings of the parties fighting endless wars over ideology or culture, while the moderate factions focus on stable governance, with minimal disruption to prevent the extremes from getting power. But we'll see whether this is as true of the Democrats as it is of the Republicans.
Great article, thanks Matt. It's all a little crazy making. I wish I knew what real conservatives think, but when I talk to them everything is whataboutism's. Even when you're purely asking. It's almost impossible for a conservative to stake a claim in anything right now, except immigration. I loved that point bc I see it anecdotally all over.
That's all very interesting. What do you call this set of policy ideas? Is there a summation you give?
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May I ask about particular policy ideas and why you believe them?
It's pretty similar to the policy-preferences of those who describe themselves as "neo-reactionary". I can't for the life of me figure out where the tax break for nannies figures into it, though.
I could see a case if you call nannies "childcare". The weird bit is "Tax break for hiring nannies" directly after "remove all tariffs and subsidies." Tax breaks are inherently subsidies. Maybe "remove most" or "remove all tariffs and subsidies on trade" is what this person meant.
What? No. Neoliberalism is steeped in free trade, open markets and competition. Many of these things are not neoliberal minus the tariffs and subsidies. Forced savings is extremely anti neoliberal as well as capping immigration.
On a separately note, I deeply worry about misrepresentations in liberalism and neoliberalism. I see them everywhere. It's like when people talk about "capitalism". Almost no one seems to have the same definition. Neoliberalism is similar because you and I have a different definition and at least we're reading both reading Slow Boring.
30 years ago neoliberalism meant Pinochet. The meaning has shifted, on twitter it basically means 'Obamaism'.
(But I ended up deleting this because it's not quite apt. Point is scf0101 is an authoritarian on a Franco - Beijing Consensus sort of axis)
One through-line in your thinking (to me) is that crime is a huge problem in society. Drugs especially (a-la Singapore). Many drugs like marijuana are extremely common, even among law and order supporters. Would you legalize marijuana? (Psilocybin mushrooms, ketamine?) High punishment for drug offenses would put many decent people in jail. Lots of people serving them (drug dealers) to death. That's extraordinarily harsh for many recreational, low-harm drugs. Care to clarify your stance on drug policy?
Oh ya definitely. It sounds very ideal. At the same time, I do not think I want to live in a complete surveillance state. While I have had my bike stolen twice bc I live in cities, I also have a fancy bike lock now.
Overall, my tendency is not to fear crime too much. Sort of the opposite of you, but I understand where you come from. Not having to worry could free up many economic and societal gains, that is for sure.
Except our economy actually NEEDS some low skilled workers for things like farm labor - having higher skilled immigrants isn’t necessarily better for the economy. It just depends on what a particular economy needs.
I hadn't heard of Demeny voting before - it sounds interesting. However, I was also intrigued by the essay Kelsey Piper wrote a year or two ago for Vox arguing for voting age 0 - if a kid can physically use the voting machine, their vote can count (though with most young kids, they'd probably spoil their ballot, and a good fraction of kids would either vote effectively randomly or in line with their parents; it would be hard for a candidate to succeed with compelling advertising in children's cartoons, since adults are still the majority of the electorate).
Children actually voting seems much more reasonable to me. I'm thinking about the demeny thing and envisioning apocalyptic matrix style vote(r) farms. :/