"...Right-wing social media ... very rarely consists of telling Trump voters who agree with Republicans about 70 percent of issues... that they are actually secret leftists who love Chuck Schumer...."
Maybe? I seem to recall a lot of Republican intra-party discourse over the decades consisting in calling each other "RINOs" when they were not on board with the most extreme agenda, i.e. if you do not agree about Topic T then you are not a Republican. Has the "RINO" line been retired? When?
Beat me to what was going to be another top level comment by me. I certainly haven't ventured upon places like Truth Social, but it's absolutely true that extreme Republicans have long had a habit of trying to push people out of their tent, to the point that people like Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney are no longer within it!
I think the difference is the cult of personality. If you accept Trump as a great President, probably the greatest ever, then you have a lot of room to disagree on some specific policies without being excommunicated. Especially if they are policies that Trump doesn’t care much about. For example, abortion - there’s lots of room in the GoP currently for hard line pro-lifers and more moderate views.
Trump also reverses course frequently in ways that would never be tolerated from a normal politician, so if Trump changes to your position, all is good.
" If you accept Trump as a great President... then you have a lot of room to disagree on some specific policies...."
That analysis gives him a role that is weirdly like the role of a ceremonial head of state in e.g. the UK-style constitutional monarchy. You swear loyalty to the king or queen, but you don't have to agree with them on policy.
I think that’s the political benefit of having Trump as the undisputed leader of the party. Trump can allow a lot of viewpoints until he decides an issue, then everyone is expected to get onboard. Democrats, by contrast, have no way to decide anything decisively, no leadership figure that speaks for the whole party, so it ends up being unending infighting.
It kinda seems like a lot of the GOP base just doesn't have deeply held views about most issues so this dynamic works. It only goes so far though. Trump tried to declare warp speed a success but the base shouted him down because they genuinely hold anti vax views.
"...he decides an issue, then everyone is expected to get onboard...."
That's a slightly different dynamic from what you described up above: "you have a lot of room to disagree" is not the same as "everyone is expected to get on board."
Maybe you mean by "get on board" merely that you are still required to support Trump, even if you continue to disagree with him. But the two analyses still differ.
This is my theory: Trump isn’t particularly ideological, and he’s unprincipled. Take Ukraine. Lots of people in the GoP support Ukraine and others don’t and each group tries to convince Trump who doesn’t seem to care about Ukraine except for his personal goal of getting a Nobel Prize. No one is being ostracized from the GoP or from Trump’s circle to having a strong opinion on supporting Ukraine or dumping Ukraine. The main thing Trump wants is unconditional support in the moment he when he does something, which he might and often does reverse or roll back. Trump’s superpower is his shamelessness at not ever having to held to any standard or policy and prioritizing optics over substance.
Do the pro-life folks disagree with Trump on abortion policy? They've been awfully quiet for folks who've spent decades trying to outlaw all abortion, only to silently become complacent when Trump (and the Republican Congress!) gives them the back of the hand.
Are they really happy that abortions are totally available in blue states, that pharmaceutical abortions are still easily available? I thought these guys were serious. Surely, winning the abortion fight just in the red states wasn't their ultimate goal. But I hear barely a peep from them.
They are still feverishly working on their issue. Do they disagree with Trump on abortion? Well, first they, and Trump, would have to definitively say what Trump's position is. Trump is always a little slippery about where he actually stands, and they point to Dobbs and other actions and say clearly he's with us. Then they hand wave away anything that seems to contradict that.
Do they in their hearts know he doesn't care about abortion the way they do? Probably, but if by they you mean activists who are trying to effect change, they are strategic thinkers. They figure, probably correctly, that so long as Trump and the Republicans are in power they'll keep chalking up the wins, even if not completely or quickly. They also know that calling Trump out for his inconsistencies or lack of urgency wouldn't help, because he could get mad and their base won't stick with them. So they utter not a word against him, in fact if asked they'll sing his praises highly, and if really pushed they will attribute any deficiency in the pace of change to people other than Trump who are clearly thwarting his efforts.
The latter two ideas are critical. You can disagree with Trump in the sense that you wish things were going differently, but you can never attribute any fault to Trump, and you can never, ever criticize his actions.
In other words, it's a cult and whatever Trump does is fine and must be worshipped and the idea of mounting a campaign to explicitly pressure him on the issue is unthinkable.
Rather different from the progressive groups when Biden was in office.
To the contrary. Republicans have a rock hard, immutable position on all the issues: it's whatever Trump says it is. Today. And tomorrow, it's whatever he says it is then.
That’s true to an extent. But Trump has rock hard positions on few issues and frequently changes his mind, or just doesn’t care about many issues. I gave the example of abortion. Even though the pro lifers don’t like it, Trump’s position is “let the states decide” and he doesn’t much care which way states go much less individuals. He’s supposedly the pro-life President yet RFK Jr - who supports abortion rights - runs all the agencies related to abortion. Abortion is not any like of litmus test. He is not out there purging heretics on abortion. With Trump, issues are far less important than loyalty and feeding his ego, on which there is no compromise.
Yes, this is true. The Republican coalition is purely a cult. Thus the pro-life groups, whose entire raison d'etre for half a century, has been outlawing *all* abortions, simply salute and say "yessir." They believe in nothing, except that worshipping Trump is the Ultimate Good.
It seems to me like we’re talking about different levels of politics. Leftists are doing this on a voter level; Republicans, so far as I recall, do this more on a politician level, and more often in the heat of a race. They’re not so much policing who gets to be in the party generally as who gets the nomination—which I think is a very important difference.
Edit: the more I think about it, I do see the far right fringe arguing about who gets to be an *American*, along heritage and racial lines, and that’s more analogous I think.
I just hope they purge and alienate large portions of their voting base. I hope the “we are going to terrorize Hispanics based purely on racial profiling” undercuts Republican gains with that group.
Yeah, MY's analysis of the Tumblr left here was fine, but was underbaked of how vicious the RINO/anti-MAGA accusations have been on the Right. At the elected official level, pretty much every anti-MAGA Republican has been driven from office. Dick Luger lost a primary for being too close to Obama.
Yup, I grew up in the Protestant denomination that disassociated itself from French a year or two ago, and the way he's been vilified by people who are in 90% agreement with him has been astonishing to witness.
It slackened over the past eight years, now that we have MAGA Maoism and increasingly pearl clutching conservatives who are hyper sensitive to criticism or deviation from ideological adherence to erratic incompetence we will see more alienation against them.
I wrote a separate post about this, but I think Matt is really not reckoning with the fact that if he's seeing a lack of right-wing infighting and super right wingers attacking moderate right wingers as being secret Communists, it's actually downstream from a very bad dynamic going on. Super Lefties attacking moderate lefties as secretly Fascist is almost certainly unhelpful to be polite about it. Hashing out disagreements on the best path forward either on policy or politics is actually a healthy thing. The lack of infighting on the right is actually a sign of either a) absolute cowardice at defying orange man leader or b) people being in actual cult.
The lack of infighting on the right is a big part of you get an actual insane person risking the lives of thousands if not millions of Americans based on absolutely quack theories regarding vaccines and health generally. As long as Trump doesn't say anything publicly or behind the scenes saying RFK is going too far, there's no push back. I mean Bill Cassidy at least (Finally) seems like he's woken up to the fact that he helped lunatic become HHS secretary. But I've seen this movie before the past 10 years. Likely scenario is behind the scenes Trump reams him out or he puts out a deranged 3AM Truth Social post and Cassidy within a week is either silent or talking up how great it is RFK is rooting out "lefty elitists" from the CDC.
Bill Cassidy fucking voted to confirm RFK knowing exactly who he was! He's a US Senator, if he has a problem with how the government is being run he could do something. At this point I almost despise these people who pretend to care about things more than the ones who openly say they don't care.
Cassidy could have single handedly prevented RFK Jr from getting confirmed but at least we can be eternally grateful that he's voicing strong opposition to Kennedy's policies. Thank you for your infinite courage, Bill; a nation turns its grateful eyes to you, Hero of the People.
Yes, Marc, but, by nobly voting for RFK Jr, Cassidy avoided a Trump-endorsed primary challenger and you can't put a price in mere human lives on something as precious as that!
Cassidy voted to convict Trump in 2021. The idea that voting for RFK Jr will save him in the primary says so much about his intelligence that it's a good thing he doesn't practice medicine anymore and can't affect patients' health.
I shall celebrate when he goes down in the primary.
Re: "I mean Bill Cassidy at least (Finally) seems like he's woken up to the fact that he helped lunatic become HHS secretary."
The amazing thing is that it's basically only Bill Cassidy. There are a lot of (what I used to think of as) normal, sane, conservative-business-type Republicans in the Senate... how are they not all lining up with Cassidy on this? But there's no way only one senator can stick his neck out at a time and survive (just ask Jeff Flake or Bob Corker), and no courage from any of Cassidy's colleagues to join him on something that is not "their issue" (just ask Joni Ernst when her colleagues--including good ol' Bill Cassidy--all started supporting Hegseth).
Their intra coalition dialogue on X these days often seems to take the form of for example weird alt right people attacking Ramaswamy because of his race. I'm not sure what to make of this but it's hard to imagine it coming anywhere near the Republican mainstream.
What you don't see is people attacking RFK or Gabbard or Rogan for being RINOs, even though they are super unorthodox in their views on issues.
One reason the MAGA right doesn't attack people for issue/policy/ideological divergence is that they're too stupid to understand issues/policies/ideologies. It's all race, wacko culture memes, cult worship and random victim oppression. They're just not into that policy thing and so as long as Trump isn't bleating about some position, it's just not something that triggers their attention.
This is true, but the number of my friends who posted in 2020 on Facebook that "police don't reduce crime but actually increase it, and if we simply abolish all police forces, there wouldn't be any crime" and similar things really educated me on how people can be brilliant in some ways while seemingly lack even the most basic of thinking skills in others. I still like to hope that everyone just went insane in 2020 and mostly recovered.
Well, if you step out of line with the current manifestation of the Republican party, they only send the FBI to raid your home whereas on our side you get people saying mean things about you on social media.
Quite a lot of the "RINO" accusations were justified in hindsight. Many ended up supporting Biden and Harris and not just as the lesser of two evils, but actively defending affirmative action and calling for police reform.
But the victim of the ad Tom Campbell, has only voted Republican once since 2010 and is now a ranked choice voting campaigner. The RINO accusation seems to be fair.
I think racial multiculturalism is in theory objectively superior to anti-racism or racism but the 90s wasn’t some golden age of racial multiculturalism yet. Things were headed in that direction but most white adults didn’t approve of interracial marriage in the early 90s and this only increased to about 60% in the later 90s: https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx. Most nonwhite people did not see the 90s as a golden age of racial multiculturalism—today is objectively more multicultural, you can get a lot more types of ethnic food, there are more non-white people portrayed in media in positive ways, there is more interracial marriage, etc.
The good thing about 90s was that politics were less racist. Ideally we would have the culture of today with the politics of the 90s or even 80s that framed America in explicitly multicultural and “nation of immigrants” terms.
And when Thrift Shop came out you had tumbler SJW types decrying him and Lorde as racist for being white people who wrote hit songs "judging" the conspicuous consumption of African American/Hip Hop "culture". The worm was clearly turning by 2012.
I never heard that argument even though I was at a very liberal university at the time and in any event it didn’t stop him from being the biggest hit at the time.
No one said they were banned? And that comparison is a bit disingenuous- Eminem at his early 2000’s height was FAR bigger than Macklemore, even in Thrift Shop’s immediate aftermath
It is wild to revisit media from the 90s and early 2000s and realize how racist, sexist, and homophobic a lot of it was. Asian people didn't even start to get love from mainstream culture until about 10 years ago.
This transition from racial multiculturalism to anti-racism encapsulates how the Democratic Party went off the rails so well. We were growing and evolving, then our worldview became unhealthy; now we are living through the correction, which sucks, and is absolutely not guaranteed to put things back on a healthy path either.
I’m not sure the shot at Walz at the end was justified. He’s a successful midwestern governor. I don’t think his VP nomination was as mistaken as Harris’s was.
If memory serves he was having some success ad-libbing and then the campaign wanted him to stick to the script. There's also thr question of whether they expected him to appeal to moderates just by dint of being a middle aged white football coach from Minnesota.
A) Was it a good idea to have a Veep pick whose main job was to seem moderate and normal to Midwestern swing voters?
Probably not, Veep choices aren't very important and should be geared to picking a future president. Swing voters don't care that much that he was White or had been a teacher, that has basically no Salience.
B) Was Walz good at the role Harris wanted him to play?
No. He was incompetent, badly prepared and slightly too leftwing. He was expected to do his job more effectively than he did.
"Needed to make a big play in a game we were losing" is strong hindsight bias. I think it would be intellectually self-aggrandizing to have treated the race as anything but a toss-up from the moment Harris locked up the nomination.
Not exactly 50.0/50.0, but the difference between 55/45 and 45/55 is detectable only with a large sample and only in retrospect.
I don't think so. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but IIRC Biden was losing to Trump in the polls all through 2024. I distinctly remember Matt reiterating down the stretch here that this was an election the Democrats were currently losing. Nate Silver was pretty similarly saying the whole way through that on balance odds were against the Democrats winning.
Now things did tighten up a bit down the stretch but that's where I think it's most important to be wary of the copium. It's a polarized country and to some degree all presidential elections will appear close of you squint your eyes. However that's exactly the kind of thinking that I think Ds in particular need to get away from, having being bitten by it twice now and this second time with really disastrous results.
It was reasonable and expected by Silver, at a minimum, that Harris would end up the underdog as soon as the excitement of the convention wained. I think people had reasons to talk themselves out of agreeing with this, but those reasons all revolved around “this time is different,” which is the kind of thought process that people should probably challenge themselves on more often.
Anyway, to my eye, since Silver's model launch, the two traded places for who was more likely to win and split that time almost exactly 50/50. After Walz-Vance, it [edit: "it" = win percentage] was never larger than 55/45 in either direction.
If you go back and read what Silver was saying, not just the model's point predictions, he was consistently concerned that Harris was going to lose, and critical of the campaign's "let's play it safe, since we're ahead" strategy.
Nah, I was saying it at the time... Starmer could do the "Ming vase" thing 'cuz he was 20 points ahead... Harris was maybe a point ahead occasionally so she needed to be splashy.
Yea, I think MY underrates what could broadly be called retail politics and calculated risk taking. A different VP probably doesn't in itself save Harris but the entire thing was illustrative of a 'play it safe' ethos that's wrong for the current environment, and may not work no matter how many 'moderate' noises someone makes or record they establish.
We might be watching the first signs of that now in the VA governor's race with Spanberger, who is kind of the platonic ideal of an SB candidate, getting stuck unable to respond to another school incident around everyone's (least) favorite topic, and giving life to a GOP campaign that for a bunch of reasons should have no business even being in the race this cycle.
Look I agree with you that in all probability that should be what happens. This time around the GOP is in the White House and Trump has very directly messed with the federal civil service in a way that has gored a lot of oxes in the region. Sears, while not totally MAGA also isn't the kind of Republican Younkin is, that not so long ago used to be competitive enough in NoVa, back before everything went crazy.
But here is where I have to ask- in light of what has happened over the last 10 years why on God's green Earth would you ever be complacent about anything? Democrats need to get into the mind set of trying to mop the floor in races that they should win. Conversely, if play not to lose when things tighten up, or the unexpected arises, well, weird things happen.
The problem with this line of thinking is that while VP choices probably don’t matter to winning elections, being the VP is historically the single biggest predictor of becoming your party’s presidential nominee in 4 to 12 years. And so VP candidates should be chosen by the presidential nominee with that in mind.
I think Walz presented better than he performed and the difference between Walz and Shapiro seemed smaller up front. I wonder if Matt would agree and say that the choice mattered more than he expected, given this overrating of Walz. Of course, it’s also possible Shapiro would have underperformed!
Shapiro's electoral record thus far was not that impressive. He barely beat a nobody for AG and defeated an absolute whack job for governor. Walz at least had substantial electoral experience and success.
Shapiro would have been (deservedly) mocked for having transformed his voice and cadence into an exact copy of Obama. It’s weird for a white guy to sound like that.
Running up the middle is the most honorable way to lose. Growing up in Chicago, there was an attitude in sports where supporting the losingest team made you the truest fan. I stopped being a cubs fan after they broke the curse because the entire meaning structure of my fandom was gone.
To the extent that politics is the new sports, I hope no one gets sucked into the cult of righteous loserdom. It wasn't very fun.
Look I grew up and remain a fan of the Washington Redskins/now 'Manders and the Baltimore Orioles. These teams went through historical terrible stretches. While there was and remains a certain pride I take in being a fan through all of it let me tell you nothing nothing nothing feels better than winning.
'Manders is an abbreviation I hadn't heard until now. I'll sometimes lovingly call them the Commies, to break any antiquated connection to communism still out there, and it's funny how their colors are burgundy and gold.
And strong agree with you. Fuck the 1996 Jaguars for all eternity for the worst sports feeling ever, and all hail 1997 and 1998 for putting that dark moment in the past.
Walz played well on the left because he'd signed a bunch of left-wing bills, but as Slow Boring readers we know that was because of the makeup of the state legislature rather than any particular brilliance on his part.
VP picks rarely add much other than some minor home state effects. I think Josh Shapiro for instance probably helps pull Casey across the finish line (which is not nothing), but not much else is different ultimately.
Only in hindsight and perhaps not even then. I think it was reasonable to assume he could attract some white moderates that Harris couldn’t but then they tied his hands so hard he could barely move.
Yeah, I've seen a mini-consensus forming on the great centrist substacks (here, Nate Silver, Josh Barro) that he lost badly to Vance in the debate and was discredited. But opinion polling after the debate showed it was dead even and both candidates' favorability ratings rose (Vance was starting lower, so I guess from that perspective he did better).
Personally, I recall Vance having the advantage, albeit not decisively, until the end of the debate when they had to talk about the 2020 election and he had to pretend the Hunter Biden laptop story and FB's "get out the vote" campaign were equivalent to January 6.
1. He called Trump weird and Dems liked that and thought it would play well with swing voters, but really didn't (Only weirdos vote Trump. Not as bad as deplorables, but still in that vein).
2. He was a Pro-Union Left of Dems governor. Popular for Democrats and in line with Biden politics, but that just made it seem like he was more continuation of Biden policy.
I hadn't heard of Walz before he was chosen and honestly found everything about him either unappealing or underwhelming. Maybe I am being unfair; Pence was of similar stock, but carried himself with much greater professionalism in my opinion.
I think the real issue was that Harris was utterly inept as a candidate, so her camp both pushed Walz out of his comfort zone by asking him to stick exactly to the script AND leaned on him to be a major part of the campaign. There were also lots of weird things like their insistence on trying paint Walz as some blue collar dirt under the fingernails guy who loved fixing cars all day and having him play Madden with AOC and posting about how AOC could "run a mean pick six" which obviously makes absolutely zero sense to anyone with even a basic knowledge of football. Walz is the equivalent of a mid-round draft pick with promise who is unfortunately drafted onto a terribly run team so whatever skills he has are never developed.
Harris was never my choice, but she rather impressed me as a candidate! She made a few mistakes, most glaringly having no answer to, "What would you have done differently from Biden." But for the most part she established herself as fun and likable, and she absolutely annihilated Trump in that debate. Only a generational political talent, like Obama or Clinton, could have overcome the headwinds Democrats faced in the summer and fall of 2024, and even they probably would have struggled. There wasn't enough time to pull together a competent and effective political operation.
I honestly don't understand how Harris could have impressed anyone who wasn't already pretty committed to her. Her interviews were all terrible--just word salad that didn't mean anything and it was extremely odd how she often just refused to give a position on certain issues (ie fracking in Pennsylvania). She was not a good candidate.
I thought the common wisdom on Slow Boring was that it's a good idea to refuse to give a position on issues where you think it's just going to lose votes no matter what answer you give.
I liked Walz but thought Shapiro was clearly a better choice. And then Vance buried Walz in the debate. Walz's sputtering deer in the headlights performance was brutal compared to JD's smug lying confidence, but over all it didn't seem as bad because Biden had the most dreadful debate performance in the TV era.
It seems to obviously have been a lackluster pick from the perspective of “you must assume this person will be the standard bearer and nominee you’re stuck with in the future.” The arguments in his favor are pretty weak-Minnesota is politically about as midwestern as Illinois.
Given Walz's age, my strong suspicion is that Harris (don't know about Walz himself) presumed he would never actually run for president after serving as VP. (He'd have been 73 after two terms for Harris, IIRC.)
I just don’t think that’s something they should or could assume. He wouldn’t want the nomination if he didn’t aspire to be president. Governor is a better job than VP in every way except for the path to the presidency.
I think that was part of the strategy. Shapiro, Whitmer, et al, were too risk-averse to challenge Harris, but that calculus may have changed if they thought there was a high enough likelihood of 8 years of Harris followed by 4-8 years of her VP. I think Walz put that worry to bed.
Agree 100%. I think Walz would have won if he was on top of the ticket and could campaign unshackled. He is plain spoken, moderate (at least he used to be) and seems normal unlike most Dems.
People concerned that Harris wouldn't win (eg, Matt, Nate Silver, ..., me) wanted Shapiro. Progressives wanted Walz. For whatever reason, the Harris campaign did what the progressives wanted, as the Biden administration had consistently done, rather than what would maximize her chances of winning. I don't think it was a shot at Walz, it was a shot at the Harris campaign's decision making.
That's a fair point. I suppose that didn't resonate with me because I certainly found Walz unimpressive. But that's a shot. Nonetheless, I think it was _mostly_ a shot at the Harris campaign's decision making.
Matt just tweeted an important point: "very few topics actually have the specific structure of the civil rights movement battling Jim Crow." That movement benefitted from a perfect storm of circumstances--the Nazis giving racism a bad name, the Cold War need to look good to the nonwhite world, a Supreme Court liberal enough to issue Brown, a new communications medium that allowed/forced people to literally see segregationist brutality, a leader as charismatic as King--happening in such rapid succession. The way that it accomplished so much so fast fooled a lot of people into thinking that politics can be like that all the time, and that only a coward/sellout/traitor would think that there are times when progress requires a slow boring of hard boards.
Well it was a one-time event and then gay marriage came along.
One could forgive someone for thinking, hey, if we could do it for civil rights *and* for gay marriage, then why can't we achieve [X]? And then they go way overboard.
Also the misunderstanding was that Gay Marriage didn't actually require a bunch of changes in society.
It didn't produce video of women getting their heads bashed in by biological men volleyball players, or stories of biological men raping women in women's only prisons or other spaces.
Or less culture war, it didn't require people to give up gas cars or stoves.
This is not how opponents of it saw gay marriage. They saw it as the destruction of marriage in our society. They were dead serious. It was much more a threat to their conception of society than the, what, ten transwomen athletes the NCAA supposedly has in it.
Most Americans don't experience much in the way of these culture wars. A tiny percentage of Americans have any contact with transwomen athletes. (Vastly more know gay people, including married couples, but that didn't stop them from opposing gay marriage before the nation flipped.) The areas in the country most opposed to immigrants have the fewest immigrants.
People are not forming their attitudes based on personal experience but on their view of trends in the country at large and what they envision the good society looking like.
Matt writes: "So you’ll say, 'I think it’s good to have a well-funded police department that arrests criminals' and the retort will be 'You’re racist'....These styles of argument work because most people have a stronger commitment to second-order progressive values — racism is bad, we should be inclusive of L.G.B.T. people — than they do to specific policy ideas."
I would say these styles of argument worked prior to 2023 or so. But they don't work nearly as effectively today.
“This YA novel is racist because it has a racist character”-style left-wing or “we must smash capitalism”-style left-wing (not that the two are totally mutually exclusive)?
I am a librarian. Your first comment about the YA novel is more common than I would like - not from the kids, but from adults, especially adults who read YA novels. It's like the Moms for Liberty of the left, but more benign because at least they don't call librarians the left equivalent of pedophiles and groomers (racists & transphobes?) for having the books in the library. Instead, they contribute to book sales falling for decent and somewhat complex books. Despite all the articles about people not reading, public libraries still have high circulation of books (print, ebook, and audio) and bookstores are doing well. But I sometimes wonder how many people are reading the whole books and understand context.
I’m getting most of this from Blocked and Reported, but apparently in the heady days of 2018-2019, maybe more recently, it was common to accuse a book that had *any* expression of racism in any context, including racism directed at non-existent fantasy races and / or racist attitudes that are meant to mark a character as unsympathetic, as “racist.”
These accusations would come from people whose job it is to read - editors, publishers, other YA authors - and demonstrated a complete lack of reading comprehension. As BARPod put it: “any 5 year old understands that the presence of a wolf in Little Red Riding Hood does not make the story pro-wolf.” And yet this was the logic here.
Also, remember when “think of the children” used to be something we made fun of (e.g. the whole character of Helen Lovejoy), not something that people took seriously?
Leftwing people who remained on Twitter, by-and-large, have less depression and other mental health problems than those that absconded to Bluesky. Bluesky is like mid-teens Tumblr.
Do people spend a lot of time reading comments from low follower count/ordinary schmoes on Bluesky (or Twitter for that matter)? If so, why? How is that a good use of one's time?
If not, how do people know what these folks on Bluesky are like?
I mean, it's one thing to mix it up with the fine people here on SB but why would you ever waste time doing the same with the pile of crap that comments are on most social media sites?
I can say that I go on Bluesky for the same reason I go on Twitter: To read Matt's posts and insane replies. Based on that experience, I can confirm what Sean O. says about Bluesky.
Same, I mostly saw moderate left-wing people like Will Stancil go over to BlueSky, most further-left people like Jason Hickel seem to have mostly kept posting mostly or all on Twitter. BlueSky feels much more like boring normie lib posting, you have to be on Twitter to see spicy left wing or right wing takes, though right wing is much more common there.
I feel like the more conflict-avoidant people went to BlueSky and the more aggressive leftists stayed on Twitter where they get some masochistic enjoyment out of fighting with far-right people. BlueSky just feels too nice and boring.
I commented on this elsewhere, but one of the biggest Bluesky scolds I know was complaining the other day about...Bluesky scolds. I think it might be collapsing in on itself at this point.
People put up with the lying and abuse of those trying to “shift the Overton window” because we were being extorted with the threat of Trump returning.
Then when it became clear that those in charge of the Democratic Party weren’t taking Trumpism seriously, and were engaging is self indulgent behavior people stopped tolerating this nonsense.
I have heard people I know in real life make arguments about pretending extreme positions as normal is an “effective” way to push political discourse to the left.
Lying about mundane and normal statements and presenting them as being out of line with normal or acceptable discourse is an extension of this mindset.
Obviously, public opinion changes over time, but folk theories of “mainstreaming” or “normalizing” or whatever else need to be discredited…possibly by “mainstreaming” or “normalizing” the notion that “mainstreaming” or “normalizing” is bunk.
In a perfect world, yes a Shapiro or Whitmer choice would've had a better chance of winning. But your answer elides the two biggest reasons Harris was put forward: (1) as part of the Biden ticket, she had access to all his fundraising money, which was not an insignificant consideration, and (2) there wasn't an obvious mechanism to choose someone else, particularly at the late stage of the game Biden withdrew (the Mark Carney example is illustrative; we don't have a parliamentary system!). If, for example, a group of delegates publicly had said, "We think Whitmer is the best choice and we're throwing our support to her," before any other pronouncements, you'd probably get a lot of other campaigns trying to pick off other delegates, and then you'd have real questions about undoing the will of the primary voters (Trump did try this line of attack but it didn't go far).
None of what actually happened is optimal, of course, but even at the time there was a lot of wishful thinking into getting a non-Harris candidate.
Right. The real optimal scenario was Biden announcing after the surprisingly ok 2022 midterms that "hey America, I beat Trump, delivered a solid record of legislation, and I'm ready to hand off to the next generation, won't be running in 2024, Biden out".
Perhaps so, but the election was actually quite close! Harris might have pulled it off had she been able to adapt and grow as a candidate over the course of a primary campaign and general election.
I think that's overstated. If Biden announced end of 2022 he would not be running in 2024 there would certainly have been a primary with Harris probably running. While she would have been a favorite, i don't see any chance her odds would be 100% from the jump. Even 70% seems high. Maybe in the mid-60% probability range.
Except that, as the Democratic party existed at that point, Biden would have been compelled to endorse Harris and campaign on her behalf. Is there any US VP who has lost their party's presidential nomination when endorsed by the sitting President?
The discourse seems to lean a lot into "Democratic Elites should have..." (or "Republican elites should have... in 2016"), and these elites are rarely identified in any kind of numbers. I think this is because they mostly do not exist in any kind of singular power-holding statuses.
That would have led to an incredibly divisive primary, with the left pushing all the candidates in their direction just like they did in 2020 (when, remember, Trump was actually President) and then after Oct. 7 it would have been a catastrophic bloody civil war within the party.
It's hard to believe the result would have been a centrist nominee with a united party behind him or her.
The optimal scenario is the Charlie Baker - Lt Gov Karyn Polito scenario: "Hey America, we beat Trump, we delivered a solid record of legislation, we're ready to hand off to the next generation and so *we* won't be running in 2024".
I sometimes read a political blog called "Balloon Juice" -- fairly lefty, ex-hippie, photos from their meet-ups show a group of dinosaurs, almost as old as I am.
That group contained a lot of Biden dead-enders, who were outraged that Biden was forced out of the race. Many of them thought this was gross ageism. Many of them had a hard time reconciling to the switch to Harris. One of the few arguments that seemed to mollify the Biden dead-enders was that Harris at least could claim to have been elected to the ticket by the Democratic electorate, when she was added to Biden's ticket as VP. No other candidate would have had even that much legitimacy -- they would have seen Whitmer or Shapiro or X as an illegitimate candidate installed by party insiders against the will of the Dem rank and file.
How representative is Balloon Juice? I couldn't say. But I do think that moving to the VP after the President resigns is the only move that has obvious institutional legibility.
That's not to take a stance on Harris' electability. And of course it would have been far better for Biden to back out earlier and allow a real primary. But given how things stood after the disastrous debate, Harris was the obvious coordination point.
DKos is where I first started reading Nate Silver's #content! I don't remember under what name he was blogging/commenting at the time, but I know I first saw it there.
Atrios, CalPundit, and Daily Kos were probably my top spots. It's not clear to me which of us changed the most: Atrios or me. Or maybe we're just no longer united by the salient issues of the time: Iraq, Social Security, and marriage equality.
Crooked Timber is still active, and still hopelessly lost somewhere out in academic leftism where the Trotskyites are battling the Gramsci-ites, or something.
I miss "The Poor Man" blog, written by The Editors. There was some funny stuff on that blog way back when. Also, Fafblog, which was extremely funny until Obama's election made them get deeply resentful and weird.
The humor some of these had is underrated-I miss (the blogger) Jon Swift! He even would take on liberal pieties, eg on the New Yorker’s “terrorist fist bump” cover that made people so mad.
Your description of Balloon Juice also describes the situation at the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog, where a substantial part of the commenters went into frothing, near psychotic fits over replacing Biden.
"coordination problem" was exactly the issue, yes. It's strange how Matt writes about the inside baseball stuff of parties, and then ignores this, because it doesn't support his "Moderation is the only answer."
July 2024 was agony for most Democrats. Biden flamed out in the most spectacular manner possible. Democrats wanted out of this dynamic. Harris was the easiest way to do that, and she, "Brought back the joy," very quickly and successfully. However, she barely had time to really build a platform or set up an infrastructure separate from Bidenworld. The stink of Biden's flameout also hurt Harris. What did she know and why didn't she say anything? I think even if Harris had won an actual primary, this would've helped her.
I will take what appears to be the unpopular opinion and say it was only wishcasting because of a tragic poverty of imagination on the part of the Democratic elite. If a group of prominent figures in left-of-center politics—including Joe Biden—had come together and said, "We believe the fate of the republic is on the line and that the vice president is a mediocre politician with ties to an unpopular administration. Let's go instead with the popular governor of the likely tipping point state", I think they could have brought their voters along with them!
Your comment exemplifies why it's wishcasting! Yes, if the relevant set of party elites (a broad and heterogenous set) had coordinated around a candidate, the convention delegates would have followed. (The voters were irrelevant by July.) But the whole problem is that they would not have coordinated around a candidate. They had different preferences, and once the field was open this would have gotten worse because other ambitious Dems would have gotten in the running. And the only way to resolve the differences would have been a contested convention, which would be a disaster with no legitimacy--the delegates were picked to coronate Biden, not to wield actual power.
A hypothetical that could be clarifying is: Had Joe Biden gone to Warren, Sanders, AOC, and said "I'm stepping down and endorsing [NOT HARRIS]. We can fight this out, or we can cohere around my choice". I personally don't think they would have contested his choice, but I suspect that you think they would have. For me, Biden and the establishment's unwillingness to risk a revolt on their left by elbowing Harris out was a strategic catastrophe.
I don't think Biden could have gotten away with bypassing his own VP to unilaterally select a governor. I don't think it would have stopped other Democratic politicians from seeking the nomination and it may not even have stopped Harris from arguing that she was the more appropriate choice. Biden's standing at this point was terrible anyway. The problem was not any particular political faction, it's just built into the structure of collective decisionmaking in the absence of a decision procedure or clear leadership.
I don't think they would have cheered the selection of Whitmer. Why would they have? It's not like they were so paralyzed by the fear of Trump in 2020 (when he was President!) that they didn't do everything they could to prevent the nomination of a centrist candidate.
I.e., Gretchen Whitmer. That was the only realistic alternative. And Whitmer might have turned out to be great! Or with the bright spotlight on her she herself might have flamed out as badly as she did in the Oval Office and in her other encounters with Trump.
There was no super obvious alternative to Harris who had a substantially higher probability of doing better than she did.
>I think they could have brought their voters along with them
Not African American voters, who Dems absolutely need to turn out if they are going to win swing states like PA, GA and MI. Bypassing an African American VP would have been very, very risky, and for what? Gretchen Whitmer?
It was by far the most likely solution, but Obama, Pelosi, Schumer and Jefferies could have done a press conference announcing Whitmer as the candidate and it would work.
I think Matt is correct that it fundamentally wasn't a process issue. The issue was precisely the same left factional polarization dynamic that hobbles opposition to MAGA. The perceived "justice" concerns that put Harris there in the first place simply scared away any viable challenge.
Now, I happen to think there's an argument about how much of that is lack of courage/leadership and how much the coalition genuinely would tear itself to shreds over replacing a black woman on the ticket, but the core issue is that rightly or not the key actors were too afraid to try. If they had wanted to they could have done it.
I have no idea whether or not it would have happened but if they had tried to nominate some white governor instead of Harris—which could not have been the result of a normal primary process, at that point—there was a *genuine risk* of a complete collapse of Democratic unity, (more) protests at the convention, write-in campaigns, etc., etc. I don’t think it’s crazy to try and avoid that risk!
The mistake actually was not prepping Harris for the job at all. Everyone knew Biden was old, and there was a non-trivial chance that Harris would have to take take over at some point. Yet zero effort, it seems, was made to raise her profile, and prepare her for the job. She was given portfolios that were doomed to fail. She had no track record of success, especially compared to a popular governor, and still had the baggage of her extreme left-wing views
from her previous failed primary. She basically had no opportunity to change that profile as VP thanks in large part to the Biden admin sidelining her, and what opportunities she did have, she performed poorly.
You’d think that old Presidents with a non-trivial chance of dying or becoming infirm - and their staffs - would know better, but I guess that’s too much to expect.
I think this argument typifies the sort of risk-averse "habits of mind" that drove decision makers in the Democratic elite to support Harris, but it's precisely these dynamics that Matt is urging those decision makers to interrogate.
In my view, neither of these points were insurmountable. If the Harris campaign had dumped the entirety of the war chest they inherited from Biden into Pennsylvania, would it have closed the gap between the popularity of their candidate and Shapiro in what was widely presumed to be the tipping point state? I'm skeptical.
The mechanism for choosing someone else was to act like a political party and unify your most prominent actors around the candidate who maximized the party's odds of winning the election, then send them out to make the pitch to the parts of the coalition with which they have sway. The _lack_ of a primary should have afforded them the maneuverability to pull that off, but the decision makers didn't have the political imagination for it!
I am not unsympathetic to the dilemma that Biden put the party in, but the result of the party elite's choices was that their candidate's association with the unpopular incumbent administration left the campaign operating from what proved to be an insuperable strategic deficit.
If we're talking about Democratic elites being afflicted by hidebound risk aversion, I mean sure, but then this whole thing probably wouldn't have happened anyway. Harris was the obvious schelling point. She had access to the infrastructure. She was even livelier on the campaign trail than her boss or Trump. Ex ante, I don't see someone who would've had a better shot of quickly uniting the party and taking things to attack Donald Trump at the time.
The more I see of her, the less I'm impressed with Whitmer. And Shapiro was such a newbie and so untested, that making him the nominee would be like taking some awesome college pitcher with a 100 mph fastball and instantly putting him forth to pitch the seventh game of the World Series. It might work but yeesh.
What was left unstated in the post was what the Left would have done during a primary. Most of the left discourse in the 2020 primary was a waste of everyone's time.
Was looking at the list of heads of government of OECD countries, and Carney in such a short time already looks like the best. Just a first rate public servant.
Imagine that Biden drops out, Harris doesn't run, and there's an open mini primary. If I'm Whitmer, et al, I still wouldn't run. Winning is very unlikely and could end my political career. Better to wait for 2028.
Look at the presidential fields in 1984, 1996, 2004, and 2012. When the incumbent is strong or the macro environment is unfavorable, the strongest candidates tend to sit and wait.
I have to say, I’m not looking forward to several more years of tedious Buttigieg vs. Black voters discourse that treats Black voters’ skepticism/indifference to him as the anomaly that needs explaining, as if white voters’ attitude are per se normal. The guy had a not-particularly-impressive tenure as mayor of a small city, followed by a not-particularly-impressive tenure as a second tier Cabinet secretary. The real question is what do white voters see in him? If Anthony Foxx had run for president and done well with black voters but flatlined with white voters, no one would be casting about for explanations for this phenomenon; everyone would understand that voters value representation and gravitate towards candidates who feel like “one of them”. But when educated, upper middle class white liberals gravitate towards the candidate who exemplifies the values of educated, upper middle class white liberals, all of sudden it becomes a huge mystery when no one else follows suit.
The reason Black voters don’t like Pete has very little to do with his tenure as mayor/transportation secretary and a quite lot to do with the fact that he’s gay. As to what white Democrats see in him, it’s pretty obvious: he’s a great public speaker with a genuinely impressive CV.
Really? I think Rhodes Scholar who did a stint at McKinsey before becoming a war veteran Naval Intelligence officer, then mayor, who got a cabinet post and became one of the more successful communicators and media surrogates for the administration is pretty impressive, personally.
These are all genuinely impressive things that he deserves plaudits for. I would be very proud of him if I were his mom or his husband! But, he has never won a close election or been chief executive of a state and many of the presidential competitors have.
I'm impressed by his CV. I am impressed by what he says and how he says it. But so far he hasn't been able to win an office that's commensurate with that, which is a bit of an issue.
How does it suit him to the presidency? LBJ graduated from Southwest Texas State Teachers College; are we poorer for having lost the talents of the Harvard man he replaced? That seems like a dubious proposition.
You appear to be demonstrating my point that his supporters are attracted to him out of cultural affinity.
Not in the context of a discussion of why people do or do not support him for president, although your apparent concession that his CV is relevant to a discussion of his appeal to voters even though it may not demonstrate his qualifications for office is further support in favor of my hypothesis.
This is my concern as well - we might still need a straight white male to win 2028, especially since theoretically we'd be bringing in ex-MAGA folks who finally got fed up with the OBBBA but who are still back in the 19th c regarding LGB etc.
What is impressive about his CV? In particular what was impressive about his CV in 2020? IMO his tenure as Transportation Secretary moved him from “has no business even running for president” to “minimally qualified candidate for president”. Nothing about his record suggests he’d be the best candidate at engaging in international diplomacy, negotiating complex legislation with Congress, or managing the federal bureaucracy.
I’ll concede that he’s good at the parts of the job that involve going on TV, but we’re not casting the lead character in the popular, long-running TV show “The News”. That’s a foolish way to pick a president.
No. It’s hard to ask people “would you not vote for someone because they are gay” and get a straight answer. But look at the GSS question for “are homosexual relations morally acceptable” by race. And then look at the fact that ~85% of Black voters are Democrats. It’s not rocket science.
If memory serves, Buttigieg recruited a UCC minister to be his faith-outreach person in 2019. That's like asking Tim Gunn to do your outreach to men. It's not that there's anything wrong with Tim Gunn; it's just that the kinds of voters he reaches are already with you.
I take Milan's point that Buttigieg's being gay is probably a real electoral issue in ways we shouldn't underestimate. But it's also true that talking like a college professor's kid and getting mainline progressive Protestants to help with faith issues on your campaign does nothing for you with the majority of black voters.
My position is that well-educated, upper middle class white liberals have a cultural affinity with Pete Buttigieg that voters outside that demographic don’t share, but WEUMCWL’s cultural hegemony in the media and among Democrats fools them into thinking their beliefs are the norm and deviation from them is what must be explained.
Acceptance of homosexuality is part of that cultural hegemony, so it’s difficult to disentangle its effects independently. Still, I suspect that Buttigieg would be doing only slightly better with black voters if everything about him were the same except he was straight, and that would be offset by the fact that a non-trivial amount of support is because he’s gay.
White educated Democrats like Pete because he sounds like we'd like to think we sound. Heck, I like how he sounds. Why that would make him a strong candidate for President is beyond me, however.
"But when educated, upper middle class white liberals gravitate towards the candidate who exemplifies the values of educated, upper middle class white liberals, all of sudden it becomes a huge mystery when no one else follows suit."
I feel like this is kind of backwards.
The lack of Black support for Pete is framed as a knock on Pete not a question of Black voters. There is a type of double counting of Black votes as well as the idea of some innate wisdom.
Pete (and Whitmer) did well in the post Biden polls. Whatever his coalition was it seems to have been completive but the lack of support from Black voters is treated as an extra weakness that is added on top of the overall polling results.
I don’t think black voters have some innate wisdom; I do however think that there’s a substantial overlap between the views on non-racial issues of black voters and non-black voters who are otherwise demographically similar. That is to say, black voters are the segment of the primary electorate who are most similar to swing voters, and so a candidate who wins the primary without their support is less likely to win the general than a candidate who won with a coalition of the same size that included black voters.
Yes and that’s foolish. His lack of black support is hardly inexplicable: he’s an objectively unimpressive candidate for president. If elected, he would be the second least experienced president ever, and the precedent set by the least experienced suggests that it would be unwise to ignore this glaring deficit of his.
Don’t get me wrong, delivering the party’s message effectively in unscripted media opportunities is among the top twenty most important skills for a president to have, and it’s a skill at which he’s well above average. But it is curious that so many white voters don’t mind that he hasn’t demonstrated even average skills at many of the other nineteen, let alone above average. Thats the phenomenon that calls out for an explanation.
Pete has a short resume for a presidential candidate because he is relatively young but he has a resume of education, military and public service.
The issues with Trump's presidency rarely seem to stem from a lack of experience. In many ways he is quite experienced, he was president for 4 years prior to this term and it hasn't seemed to make him better at the job.
Being a good communicator of ideas is the skill voters are in the best position to access from a candidate.
The idea that Black voters are doing some sort of objective resume analysis while White voters are charmed by Pete's media skills seems like part of this "Magical Negro Voter" idea.
I am not claiming Black voters are not particularly wise relative to white voters; they are probably just as likely as white voters to support a candidate on the basis of cultural affinity. The hypothesis is that cultural affinity with well-educated upper middle class white liberals is all Pete really has going for him, so he is not particularly appealing to voters outside of that tribe. Nonetheless, his tribe’s cultural hegemony in the media makes it appear as if their attitudes are normal, and deviations from them are what requires explanation, even though based on all prior nomination contests one would expect a candidate like him to get no traction at all. In other words, black voters are behaving towards Pete Buttigieg how Democratic voters in general have treated similarly undistinguished candidates in the past. The anomaly that requires explanation is why white voters treat him differently.
"Activists successfully pressured Democrats to abandon the successful 'all of the above' energy message of Obama’s two campaigns. But they did not successfully persuade the voters in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Alaska that this was a good idea."
You could go hoarse counting the ways that the 2012 results convinced Democrats that there was no electoral downside to moving left. Chuck Schumer gets endless heat his "for every voter we lose in central Pennsylvania, we gain two in the Philadelphia suburbs" remark. But the same thinking informed the leftward march on climate, LGBTQ issues, gun rights, etc and etc.
On energy, a lot of column space was spent on how Obama's "war on coal" was going to cost him Pennsylvania and Ohio. Then the votes came in. Obama did much worse than any other modern Democrat in "coal country," which included a 35% meltdown in West Virginia. He did do worse in communities that depended or used to depend on the industry. But he won Pennsylvania and Ohio. On LGBTQ, you had Bill Galston arguing that Obama's gay marriage endorsement was ceding Ohio to win Colorado. But he won both states, and on election night, for the first time, gay marriage bans fail everywhere.
It's easy to draw a line from the post-election confidence Democrats felt then to activists convincing the 2nd Obama administration to cancel Keystone, expand protections for gender identity, etc. And can Republicans capitalize on the backlash if, instead of Trump, they run some 2016 Republican who says he'll tackle Medicare to cut the deficit? Probably not. But they ran Trump.
As with all of these discussions about Obama and 2012, it seems like the answer comes down to “Obama is an exceptional politician and counting on someone else to replicate his success won’t work.”
And those leftists were still riding high in 2024 and would have been the dominant force in a wide open primary beginning with Biden withdrawing after the 2022 midterms.
I can actually see it both ways and also a lot depends on what Trump does if he loses a primary.
Path 1 - Trump doesn't run, Rubio or Jeb wins - I can easily see them winning somewhat easily (Obama '12 or Biden '20, not Bush '88) or losing because the same problems they had in a GOP primary happen in a national election.
Path 3 - Trump runs, loses the primary by hook or crook, continues to bash the GOP - Hillary wins and the GOP is in trouble
Path 4 - Trump runs, loses the primary and is paid off to go away - depends on the candidate.
I don't think there's a world where the Rubio/[GOP Governor] ticket wins 330 EV's or anything. Maybe a Jeb/[Governor] ticket that actually openly moderates but even then, while Hillary was unpopular, the economy was fine and it's not like any of the non-Trump candidates were great candidates considering...they lose to Trump in a primary.
I think Hillary's negatives were excaberated by Trump's strengths in a way that running against a 'normal' Republican wouldn't be. Now, does Hillary then lose in 2020 after a Republican Congress basically stops all COVID relief and we're in a giant recession? Probably. And then Bernie runs and wins in 2024 after we have all the inflation as we've gone through and none of the relative positive economic growth post-COVID.
In regards to the bit about moderate Democrats being castigated as crypto-MAGA's for hetreodox views:
OMG this!
I can't tell you how many times I've been called a terrible person, a bigot, a racist, etc. (online and in person) because I had a slightly dissenting view. My two favorite anecdotes are:
(1) The time a woman online called me some of the most horrible names I have ever been called (it really hit some nerves, she was good at insults) because I said that some homeless people are mentally ill. She legit believed that all homeless people are homeless because of lack of affordable housing*. No other answer was allowed. That man I see babbling to himself on the street corner is not mentally ill, he is just unhoused. That is his problem. I was literally talking in a very left-coded way about how our country does a shit job taking care of the mentally ill - and that was what set her off. The babbling mentally ill man on the street, that is just my racist eyes lying to me!
(2) The time a college professor friend of mine told me that he considers me a right-wing Jordan Peterson-type because I once read & liked Better Angels of our Nature by Stephen Pinker. I was like "I'm a Democrat. I voted for Clinton and Biden. I donated to their campaigns. I don't like Jordan Peterson at all." And he was like "I'm sorry but your reading choices are right wing and problematic..." But to his credit he didn't cut me off friendship-wise, he was just "letting me know."
*Note: I am very pro-abundance agenda and in no way oppose affordable housing.
The book thing is pretty disturbing coming from a college professor. I often read books by people whose philosophies I disagree with, or at least think I do. Isn't that what people on college campuses are supposed to do? I also gravitate towards authors/content creators who are accused of being both too liberal and too conservative because I figure they must have something interesting to say if lots of people think they are shills for the other side. Although I do admit that sometimes I am reluctant to have the covers of those books visible when I am reading in certain public spaces.
In his defense, this was during the pandemic at the time of peak wokeness and culture war nonsense, and I think he was influenced as an academic by this environment. I recall him later being very nervous about his DEI statement that he provided - probably the closest I've ever seen him come to criticizing wokeness, etc. He is young and not tenured.
I should also note that I said that I liked the book and more or less agreed with it. Not just that I read it.
I'm similarly disturbed by this episode, but I shared a somewhat similar 2020 anecdote and I hope that this was at least partially a summer of 2020 temporary madness.
We are in a (the?!) bad place. I was literally just walking to a cafe to work while listening to the latest Freakonomics podcast, featuring Patrick Deneen. It's a really interesting conversation, and I thought about sending it to a few friends, but I'm not sure that anyone I know wouldn't be horrified at the thought of taking his arugments seriously.
He sounds gross to me. I always find that for a lot of these supposedly "reasonable" and "intellectual" sounding conservatives of late, when you start to scratch the surface of their beliefs, their core rationales seem to be:
1. Black people are less intelligent than White people.
2. Women should be subservient to men.
3. "Freedom" means following my religion.
4. Rich people earned every penny and poor people are living the just life of suffering ordained by God.
Just because I'm occasionally hetrodox on some liberal points does not make me a conservative by any stretch, which is why I'm so incensed at being called one.
I think the important thing is to simultaneously recognize that these views aren’t ideal, but also that nonetheless people still have them, and furthermore that telling them “they’re bad people” for having such views is not going to change their mind, not to mention vote for a Democrat.
Totally agree! I am embarrassed to say that some of these views were MY views once upon a time because of the culture I was raised in, and I don't think that I'm a bad person or even was a bad person at the time. Just ignorant and indoctrinated.
Even relatively progressive heroes of the past; Lincoln, Hamilton, Washington, etc. probably had views we would consider not only retrograde and backward, but downright bigoted and maybe even sort of evil.
We're probably no different as 500 years from now people might consider our generation evil genocidal maniacs because we eat meat and accept the existence of a military force.
OK, maybe I'm overgeneralizing. But I've been disappointed so many times by alleged conservative "intellectuals" that I've developed a gag reflex.
I think my fundamental problem with even the most highbrow ideas of "new conservatism" is that they always seem to be tied to the ideas of (1) more religion in government (which history has shown is neither good for religion nor government) and (2) further empowering wealthy elites.
And it is not an exaggeration to say that the current manifestation of conservative rule (Trump/MAGA) is looking more like a Franco-style dictatorship each day.
I do find Deneen kind of horrifying ideologically, but i just take solace in that he's way too much of an academic to really get much traction anywhere. He really does think the early modern era of absolute social control through community was really the best era.
This is what I always find funny about these "highbrow" conservatives, that they divine this sort of idea that they are going to influence conservative culture and bring about a sort of religious-conservative revolution or reformation, but what actually ends up happening is a race to the gutter, with everyday conservatives acting out the worst impulses our culture has to offer, and essentially appropriating whatever liberal culture was fashionable 10 years ago.
I disagree with much of what he says, especially his prescriptions as opposed to his descriptions of social problems, but IMO it's worth at least thinking about.
Yeah, to set a very low bar i found him to be more interesting to listen to than the usual conservative commentator, mostly because he's actually explicit about his beliefs, sometimes. It's more than i can say about the usual conservative who either plays extremely coy or mostly focuses on bad insult comedy through the pretense of political discussion.
Yeah. I was raised Catholic and, while lapsed, a lot of his foundational thinking is familiar to me. But I don't think any the nuns I know/am related to would be open to listening.
Actually he's a really great guy and I like him a lot. That is why the criticism stung so much.
A lot of people have said that Better Angels has not aged well, but I would counter that cultural backsliding is actually quite common in history and is touched on in the book, if I recall correctly.
Why is "Better Angels" right-wing? I haven't read it, but I just read the Wikipaedia page and the criticisms seem to be confusions about statistics and that it's irreligious.
I don't think it is right wing at all, which is why I found the criticism so perplexing.
But I suppose from an ultra-woke 2020 perspective, BA could be considered right wing because it does not center race activism as the end all be all of politics?
I have only been to a Waffle House once, but your comment made me laugh. The next time I visit my brother in Baton Rouge, I am determined to go to Waffle House again just so I can comment knowledgeably on this issue.
There was never going to be a world where Biden stepped down where it wasn’t Harris replacing him. Otherwise what’s even the point of having a VP? It’s a fantasy to think this could have played out otherwise. So I really don’t see the point in “more scrutiny of what habits of mind inside Democratic Party elites led them to nominate a Harris-Walz ticket.”
The bigger problem is that Biden never seemed to think about the implication his VP choice would become the party’s nominee at some future point — even though history would show that it was a highly likely outcome! He chose someone to help him win in 2020. And to be fair, maybe it worked because he did win in 2020! But it does feel like at some level parties should make it so the VP pick isn’t at the sole discretion of the nominee.
Harris as VP was totally a sop to the Dem base and didn't help Biden win at all in 2020, if anything she was probably a drag on the campaign. She's a horrible politician to normie voters.
“I think you have to look at the dominant discursive strategy that’s used in these left-wing spaces, which is to essentially punish people for heterodoxy by greatly exaggerating the extent of disagreement.”
This is something I loathe about people online. They literally lie about what was said. It’s like they a functionally illiterate and just guess at the meaning of words.
I mean, sort of. There is a whole idea of 'unpacking things' which is about finding the secret sexist, or racist, or ableist, or whatever of things. Like literally anything.
Its kind of an academically accepted conspiracy theory about the secret moral taintedness of everything.
Which is just to say: I don't think they invented this behavior out of thin air.
Circa 2012, Ann Romney began a speech with some boilerplate along the lines of "It's a privilege to speak to you today." The academics in my social-media feed melted down, posting long riffs on Ann Romney's "privilege" and lack of awareness thereof.
I couldn't believe that no one could say that this was obviously a meaningless filler phrase put into the speech by a so-so speechwriter, but to say that would have been to confess oneself both right-wing and incapable of appreciating the finer nuances of academic reading, so everyone else kept rhapsodizing, and I kept my cowardly mouth shut.
I think there's just so much tacky, trolly, bad-faith arguing on the internet that a lot of folks just assume anyone who disagrees - even if initially reasonably - is ultimately a troll and reacts as such.
It feels like a tragedy of the commons sort of thing. Only takes a few bad-faith actors to flood the zone of online discussion and make everyone cynical and detached.
“But it is still true that the dominant rhetorical strategy of the left is to tell anyone who is somewhat less left-wing that they should go become Republicans.”
Bringing back "it's a free country" is excellent praxis. I've been on that train for a while now and I have been surprised how effective it can be at getting people to slow down a bit when our backyard fire policy arguments start getting a bit proscriptive.
(wow, Substack is letting me comment on SB again, will ceases never miracle?)
I find it harder and harder to reuse that childhood idiom with a straight and non-defensive face. It does reflect a sincere belief - classic "children of immigrants from repressive country raised more patriotic than natives" thing - but I keep expecting pushback, like being interpreted sarcastically. Imagine using the same voice as James Inhofe holding a snowball on the floor of Congressional hell, "so much for global warming!", plus a conspiratorial wink to make sure the audience knows you're In The Know. That is, muh freedumbs with an eyeroll, something something stage IV capitalism, long live the revolution, worst time ever to be alive. And it's awkward to backtrack from that? To like...no...I mean it seriously, it's (still) a free country, Shining City On A Hill for so many, let's all be more chill and cherish the ability to let a thousand flowers Bloomberg. But of course, actually living the creed means smiling and nodding anyway. Even if I privately think it's rather unhealthy that many people seemingly feel the need to preface optimism with self-flagellation and garment-rending these days. One must imagine Sisyphus satisfied, and all that.
I agree with this but think Matt’s heroin example is actually a bad one. If it’s a free country, and I’m not harming anyone else, why can’t I buy/use heroin? The fact that it saves lives doesn’t really seem like a justification.
It does hurt other people: your family, the workplace that misses your productivity, the people that have to see you nodding off on a park bench. It’s a disorder machine and we don’t want those running.
“Saves lives” and “Harms your family/employer” both feel like arguments that prove too much, you could justify a lot of really totalitarian regulation of people’s personal lives on those grounds.
Disorder machine seems more defensible, very few people have the ability to maintain an active heroin habit without turning into street junkies, and street junkies commit a lot of random assaults and property damage.
I think nearly all policy questions are a matter of degree. Heroin more reliably destroys lives and families than most other bad habits, just like (and for the same reasons that) it more reliably makes people disorderly.
Maybe slightly, but it's clear that they really accelerated with the crackdown.
Switching from medical grade drugs where you know what you are getting to black market drugs where you don't greatly increases the potential for a fatal OD, especially when Fentanyl enters the picture.
There's a real post hoc/propter hoc problem here, because the main thing that started the crackdown on opioids was their role in contributing to heroin use! So I would want to see an in-depth analysis before concluding that the crackdown caused the heroin overdoses to increase.
But also, haven't we changed topics from where we started? The original question wasn't "why should the government make it harder to get prescription opioids?", it was, "why shouldn't I be able to buy and use heroin if I want?" Granting that heroin and fentanyl are more dangerous than prescription drugs, it's not clear that making them legal would alleviate that danger; it might even exacerbate it.
I don't think legal heroin would necessarily be more dangerous than prescription drugs.
Though Fentanyl probably is given just how potent it is and easy to OD.
Either way, I still think adults should largely be free to put what they want into their own bodies. Even if it's bad for them. The exception would be antibiotics because of the problems of antibiotic resistance.
Note I consider this to be separate from the question of public disorder.
I think it's very reasonable to declare to public intoxication or use of drugs, and to keep public areas clear of disorder.
"Right-wing social media is often extreme, bigoted, or otherwise gross. But it very rarely consists of telling Trump voters who agree with Republicans about 70 percent of issues and who are to the left of Democrats on 100 percent of issues that they are actually secret leftists who love Chuck Schumer."
It wasn't that long ago that the pejorative "RINO" or "cuckservative" was commonly used against someone right of center who wasn't sufficiently right wing. I'm sorry but the very particular dynamic you're describing really just downstream from "orange man bad". The reason you likely don't see this is Trump since 2015 has gone after anyone who disagrees with him (including people right of center) in the grossest terms and result is that now basically people who still want to associate themselves with GOP are basically scared to death to cross him.
Also, the other thing that's going on is that Trump wildly changes his mind on topics all the time. Go look at polling at Russia/Ukraine. It gyrates wildly because Trump wildly gyrates from being a Putin suck up, to angry diatribes, to Putin suck up (we're back at Putin suck up stage right now). And yet as long as you continue to go with "Trump is most awesomest person in the history of aweesome", no one will come after you. Do you really think this is a healthy dynamic?
Lastly, how likely is it this dynamic on the right holds if JD Vance is the GOP nominee in 2028?
I may be overthinking and this doesn't apply to RINO, so much, but cuck...isn't the implication 'stop being a cuck and join us, the real men?' Not, as with racist/sexist/TERF 'you are irrevocably tainted, fuck you?'
Now, it's not clear the loony tunes can actually make you irrevocably tainted unless you let them...but that's easy to say...
I think you're right but Matt is also right--the Republican Party becoming much more personalist (which is bad!) has also made it more ideologically flexible on non-Trump-adjacent things (which is an electoral asset, at least sometimes).
This is right to me. Almost any other president who would flip flop like this almost day to day would be pilloried. I think justifiably; like seriously how do you even know if you're a GOP politician or Trump loving pundit what the right message is supposed to be on Ukraine.
I think it goes hand and hand with the bizarre dynamic that Trump being so rambling and incoherent actually helps his "moderate" image. So many people just ignore or don't believe the crazy stuff he says because too many people think it's just "Trump being Trump" instead of some sort of actual policy position. Like there's no way to explain the market continuing to go up in the face of actual policy being pursued (including threatening the Fed independence) without there being a whole lot of people out there who think "eh he really doesn't mean it".
"...Right-wing social media ... very rarely consists of telling Trump voters who agree with Republicans about 70 percent of issues... that they are actually secret leftists who love Chuck Schumer...."
Maybe? I seem to recall a lot of Republican intra-party discourse over the decades consisting in calling each other "RINOs" when they were not on board with the most extreme agenda, i.e. if you do not agree about Topic T then you are not a Republican. Has the "RINO" line been retired? When?
Beat me to what was going to be another top level comment by me. I certainly haven't ventured upon places like Truth Social, but it's absolutely true that extreme Republicans have long had a habit of trying to push people out of their tent, to the point that people like Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney are no longer within it!
I think the difference is the cult of personality. If you accept Trump as a great President, probably the greatest ever, then you have a lot of room to disagree on some specific policies without being excommunicated. Especially if they are policies that Trump doesn’t care much about. For example, abortion - there’s lots of room in the GoP currently for hard line pro-lifers and more moderate views.
Trump also reverses course frequently in ways that would never be tolerated from a normal politician, so if Trump changes to your position, all is good.
" If you accept Trump as a great President... then you have a lot of room to disagree on some specific policies...."
That analysis gives him a role that is weirdly like the role of a ceremonial head of state in e.g. the UK-style constitutional monarchy. You swear loyalty to the king or queen, but you don't have to agree with them on policy.
The similarities may be worth thinking about....
I think that’s the political benefit of having Trump as the undisputed leader of the party. Trump can allow a lot of viewpoints until he decides an issue, then everyone is expected to get onboard. Democrats, by contrast, have no way to decide anything decisively, no leadership figure that speaks for the whole party, so it ends up being unending infighting.
It kinda seems like a lot of the GOP base just doesn't have deeply held views about most issues so this dynamic works. It only goes so far though. Trump tried to declare warp speed a success but the base shouted him down because they genuinely hold anti vax views.
Good counter-example!
"...he decides an issue, then everyone is expected to get onboard...."
That's a slightly different dynamic from what you described up above: "you have a lot of room to disagree" is not the same as "everyone is expected to get on board."
Maybe you mean by "get on board" merely that you are still required to support Trump, even if you continue to disagree with him. But the two analyses still differ.
This is my theory: Trump isn’t particularly ideological, and he’s unprincipled. Take Ukraine. Lots of people in the GoP support Ukraine and others don’t and each group tries to convince Trump who doesn’t seem to care about Ukraine except for his personal goal of getting a Nobel Prize. No one is being ostracized from the GoP or from Trump’s circle to having a strong opinion on supporting Ukraine or dumping Ukraine. The main thing Trump wants is unconditional support in the moment he when he does something, which he might and often does reverse or roll back. Trump’s superpower is his shamelessness at not ever having to held to any standard or policy and prioritizing optics over substance.
Do the pro-life folks disagree with Trump on abortion policy? They've been awfully quiet for folks who've spent decades trying to outlaw all abortion, only to silently become complacent when Trump (and the Republican Congress!) gives them the back of the hand.
Are they really happy that abortions are totally available in blue states, that pharmaceutical abortions are still easily available? I thought these guys were serious. Surely, winning the abortion fight just in the red states wasn't their ultimate goal. But I hear barely a peep from them.
They are still feverishly working on their issue. Do they disagree with Trump on abortion? Well, first they, and Trump, would have to definitively say what Trump's position is. Trump is always a little slippery about where he actually stands, and they point to Dobbs and other actions and say clearly he's with us. Then they hand wave away anything that seems to contradict that.
Do they in their hearts know he doesn't care about abortion the way they do? Probably, but if by they you mean activists who are trying to effect change, they are strategic thinkers. They figure, probably correctly, that so long as Trump and the Republicans are in power they'll keep chalking up the wins, even if not completely or quickly. They also know that calling Trump out for his inconsistencies or lack of urgency wouldn't help, because he could get mad and their base won't stick with them. So they utter not a word against him, in fact if asked they'll sing his praises highly, and if really pushed they will attribute any deficiency in the pace of change to people other than Trump who are clearly thwarting his efforts.
The latter two ideas are critical. You can disagree with Trump in the sense that you wish things were going differently, but you can never attribute any fault to Trump, and you can never, ever criticize his actions.
In other words, it's a cult and whatever Trump does is fine and must be worshipped and the idea of mounting a campaign to explicitly pressure him on the issue is unthinkable.
Rather different from the progressive groups when Biden was in office.
To the contrary. Republicans have a rock hard, immutable position on all the issues: it's whatever Trump says it is. Today. And tomorrow, it's whatever he says it is then.
That’s true to an extent. But Trump has rock hard positions on few issues and frequently changes his mind, or just doesn’t care about many issues. I gave the example of abortion. Even though the pro lifers don’t like it, Trump’s position is “let the states decide” and he doesn’t much care which way states go much less individuals. He’s supposedly the pro-life President yet RFK Jr - who supports abortion rights - runs all the agencies related to abortion. Abortion is not any like of litmus test. He is not out there purging heretics on abortion. With Trump, issues are far less important than loyalty and feeding his ego, on which there is no compromise.
Yes, this is true. The Republican coalition is purely a cult. Thus the pro-life groups, whose entire raison d'etre for half a century, has been outlawing *all* abortions, simply salute and say "yessir." They believe in nothing, except that worshipping Trump is the Ultimate Good.
"...was going to be another top level comment by me...."
To me, CoT, all of your comments are top level.
It seems to me like we’re talking about different levels of politics. Leftists are doing this on a voter level; Republicans, so far as I recall, do this more on a politician level, and more often in the heat of a race. They’re not so much policing who gets to be in the party generally as who gets the nomination—which I think is a very important difference.
Edit: the more I think about it, I do see the far right fringe arguing about who gets to be an *American*, along heritage and racial lines, and that’s more analogous I think.
I just hope they purge and alienate large portions of their voting base. I hope the “we are going to terrorize Hispanics based purely on racial profiling” undercuts Republican gains with that group.
Yeah, MY's analysis of the Tumblr left here was fine, but was underbaked of how vicious the RINO/anti-MAGA accusations have been on the Right. At the elected official level, pretty much every anti-MAGA Republican has been driven from office. Dick Luger lost a primary for being too close to Obama.
When you read David French, it's a little hard to buy the argument that people on the left are more exclusionary than people on the right.
French is one of the few elite media figures who actually does directly interact with the Republican base on a regular basis.
Those that will speak to him.
Yup, I grew up in the Protestant denomination that disassociated itself from French a year or two ago, and the way he's been vilified by people who are in 90% agreement with him has been astonishing to witness.
Lugar was also 80 and didn't live in Indiana anymore, it wasn't just about Obama
It slackened over the past eight years, now that we have MAGA Maoism and increasingly pearl clutching conservatives who are hyper sensitive to criticism or deviation from ideological adherence to erratic incompetence we will see more alienation against them.
I wrote a separate post about this, but I think Matt is really not reckoning with the fact that if he's seeing a lack of right-wing infighting and super right wingers attacking moderate right wingers as being secret Communists, it's actually downstream from a very bad dynamic going on. Super Lefties attacking moderate lefties as secretly Fascist is almost certainly unhelpful to be polite about it. Hashing out disagreements on the best path forward either on policy or politics is actually a healthy thing. The lack of infighting on the right is actually a sign of either a) absolute cowardice at defying orange man leader or b) people being in actual cult.
The lack of infighting on the right is a big part of you get an actual insane person risking the lives of thousands if not millions of Americans based on absolutely quack theories regarding vaccines and health generally. As long as Trump doesn't say anything publicly or behind the scenes saying RFK is going too far, there's no push back. I mean Bill Cassidy at least (Finally) seems like he's woken up to the fact that he helped lunatic become HHS secretary. But I've seen this movie before the past 10 years. Likely scenario is behind the scenes Trump reams him out or he puts out a deranged 3AM Truth Social post and Cassidy within a week is either silent or talking up how great it is RFK is rooting out "lefty elitists" from the CDC.
Bill Cassidy fucking voted to confirm RFK knowing exactly who he was! He's a US Senator, if he has a problem with how the government is being run he could do something. At this point I almost despise these people who pretend to care about things more than the ones who openly say they don't care.
Cassidy could have single handedly prevented RFK Jr from getting confirmed but at least we can be eternally grateful that he's voicing strong opposition to Kennedy's policies. Thank you for your infinite courage, Bill; a nation turns its grateful eyes to you, Hero of the People.
Yes, Marc, but, by nobly voting for RFK Jr, Cassidy avoided a Trump-endorsed primary challenger and you can't put a price in mere human lives on something as precious as that!
Cassidy voted to convict Trump in 2021. The idea that voting for RFK Jr will save him in the primary says so much about his intelligence that it's a good thing he doesn't practice medicine anymore and can't affect patients' health.
I shall celebrate when he goes down in the primary.
Re: "I mean Bill Cassidy at least (Finally) seems like he's woken up to the fact that he helped lunatic become HHS secretary."
The amazing thing is that it's basically only Bill Cassidy. There are a lot of (what I used to think of as) normal, sane, conservative-business-type Republicans in the Senate... how are they not all lining up with Cassidy on this? But there's no way only one senator can stick his neck out at a time and survive (just ask Jeff Flake or Bob Corker), and no courage from any of Cassidy's colleagues to join him on something that is not "their issue" (just ask Joni Ernst when her colleagues--including good ol' Bill Cassidy--all started supporting Hegseth).
Their intra coalition dialogue on X these days often seems to take the form of for example weird alt right people attacking Ramaswamy because of his race. I'm not sure what to make of this but it's hard to imagine it coming anywhere near the Republican mainstream.
What you don't see is people attacking RFK or Gabbard or Rogan for being RINOs, even though they are super unorthodox in their views on issues.
One reason the MAGA right doesn't attack people for issue/policy/ideological divergence is that they're too stupid to understand issues/policies/ideologies. It's all race, wacko culture memes, cult worship and random victim oppression. They're just not into that policy thing and so as long as Trump isn't bleating about some position, it's just not something that triggers their attention.
This is true, but the number of my friends who posted in 2020 on Facebook that "police don't reduce crime but actually increase it, and if we simply abolish all police forces, there wouldn't be any crime" and similar things really educated me on how people can be brilliant in some ways while seemingly lack even the most basic of thinking skills in others. I still like to hope that everyone just went insane in 2020 and mostly recovered.
Right, the whole "Republicans watch TV" point is relevant here.
Well, if you step out of line with the current manifestation of the Republican party, they only send the FBI to raid your home whereas on our side you get people saying mean things about you on social media.
Quite a lot of the "RINO" accusations were justified in hindsight. Many ended up supporting Biden and Harris and not just as the lesser of two evils, but actively defending affirmative action and calling for police reform.
A lot of it was also nuts. The Demon Sheep ad from the 2010 California gubernatorial primary comes to mind.
But the victim of the ad Tom Campbell, has only voted Republican once since 2010 and is now a ranked choice voting campaigner. The RINO accusation seems to be fair.
As far as 90s nostalgia goes, the "Peak Eminem" era of racial multiculturalism was objectively superior to the anti-racism era.
There was a time when our most famous rapper was white and our most famous golfer was Black - And it was glorious!
I think racial multiculturalism is in theory objectively superior to anti-racism or racism but the 90s wasn’t some golden age of racial multiculturalism yet. Things were headed in that direction but most white adults didn’t approve of interracial marriage in the early 90s and this only increased to about 60% in the later 90s: https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx. Most nonwhite people did not see the 90s as a golden age of racial multiculturalism—today is objectively more multicultural, you can get a lot more types of ethnic food, there are more non-white people portrayed in media in positive ways, there is more interracial marriage, etc.
The good thing about 90s was that politics were less racist. Ideally we would have the culture of today with the politics of the 90s or even 80s that framed America in explicitly multicultural and “nation of immigrants” terms.
Right, actual "peak Eminem" was 1999-2002.
And Macklemore was in the 2010s? White people weren’t banned from rapping after Eminem.
And when Thrift Shop came out you had tumbler SJW types decrying him and Lorde as racist for being white people who wrote hit songs "judging" the conspicuous consumption of African American/Hip Hop "culture". The worm was clearly turning by 2012.
I first listened to Lorde while sitting above the bluffs of Santa Monica and your comment is making me want to throw myself off of them.
I never heard that argument even though I was at a very liberal university at the time and in any event it didn’t stop him from being the biggest hit at the time.
No one said they were banned? And that comparison is a bit disingenuous- Eminem at his early 2000’s height was FAR bigger than Macklemore, even in Thrift Shop’s immediate aftermath
Have there been any big musicians lately except like Taylor Swift? The Internet just fractured the culture.
It is wild to revisit media from the 90s and early 2000s and realize how racist, sexist, and homophobic a lot of it was. Asian people didn't even start to get love from mainstream culture until about 10 years ago.
This transition from racial multiculturalism to anti-racism encapsulates how the Democratic Party went off the rails so well. We were growing and evolving, then our worldview became unhealthy; now we are living through the correction, which sucks, and is absolutely not guaranteed to put things back on a healthy path either.
French thought destroyed the left, just as in the 60s.
Should have added this to my top level comment as well.
I’m not sure the shot at Walz at the end was justified. He’s a successful midwestern governor. I don’t think his VP nomination was as mistaken as Harris’s was.
I think he was much worse on the campaign trail than the Harris team expected.
If memory serves he was having some success ad-libbing and then the campaign wanted him to stick to the script. There's also thr question of whether they expected him to appeal to moderates just by dint of being a middle aged white football coach from Minnesota.
I think there are two separate parts to that.
A) Was it a good idea to have a Veep pick whose main job was to seem moderate and normal to Midwestern swing voters?
Probably not, Veep choices aren't very important and should be geared to picking a future president. Swing voters don't care that much that he was White or had been a teacher, that has basically no Salience.
B) Was Walz good at the role Harris wanted him to play?
No. He was incompetent, badly prepared and slightly too leftwing. He was expected to do his job more effectively than he did.
"He was incompetent, badly prepared and slightly too leftwing." --Possibly because the Harris campaign was all three of these things, too.
Walz was fine, but they milked his identity too much. Should have just let him be himself
It was a decision to run it up the middle when we needed a big play in a game we were losing.
"Needed to make a big play in a game we were losing" is strong hindsight bias. I think it would be intellectually self-aggrandizing to have treated the race as anything but a toss-up from the moment Harris locked up the nomination.
Not exactly 50.0/50.0, but the difference between 55/45 and 45/55 is detectable only with a large sample and only in retrospect.
I don't think so. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but IIRC Biden was losing to Trump in the polls all through 2024. I distinctly remember Matt reiterating down the stretch here that this was an election the Democrats were currently losing. Nate Silver was pretty similarly saying the whole way through that on balance odds were against the Democrats winning.
Now things did tighten up a bit down the stretch but that's where I think it's most important to be wary of the copium. It's a polarized country and to some degree all presidential elections will appear close of you squint your eyes. However that's exactly the kind of thinking that I think Ds in particular need to get away from, having being bitten by it twice now and this second time with really disastrous results.
I mean, what did I literally write? "From the moment Harris locked up the nomination?"
Yes, Biden was going to lose.
It was reasonable and expected by Silver, at a minimum, that Harris would end up the underdog as soon as the excitement of the convention wained. I think people had reasons to talk themselves out of agreeing with this, but those reasons all revolved around “this time is different,” which is the kind of thought process that people should probably challenge themselves on more often.
I am disinclined to go back and dig into the details, but I believe his model at least attempts to account for convention bounces for both parties.
Anyway, to my eye, since Silver's model launch, the two traded places for who was more likely to win and split that time almost exactly 50/50. After Walz-Vance, it [edit: "it" = win percentage] was never larger than 55/45 in either direction.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model
If you go back and read what Silver was saying, not just the model's point predictions, he was consistently concerned that Harris was going to lose, and critical of the campaign's "let's play it safe, since we're ahead" strategy.
Yes, given the grievous consequences of Trump winning, how daring and out there should you be to run your race in a basically 50/50 electorate?
Nah, I was saying it at the time... Starmer could do the "Ming vase" thing 'cuz he was 20 points ahead... Harris was maybe a point ahead occasionally so she needed to be splashy.
It's the difference between running it on 4th and 4 and being aggressive by taking a shot to win.
Maybe. I actually recall Matt’s commentary at the time being “VP nominations don’t matter anyway, so choose whoever she’s comfortable with”.
Yea, I think MY underrates what could broadly be called retail politics and calculated risk taking. A different VP probably doesn't in itself save Harris but the entire thing was illustrative of a 'play it safe' ethos that's wrong for the current environment, and may not work no matter how many 'moderate' noises someone makes or record they establish.
We might be watching the first signs of that now in the VA governor's race with Spanberger, who is kind of the platonic ideal of an SB candidate, getting stuck unable to respond to another school incident around everyone's (least) favorite topic, and giving life to a GOP campaign that for a bunch of reasons should have no business even being in the race this cycle.
Let's circle back on this in November, but I suspect Spanberger will actually breeze to a 15 point victory and end up on everyone's VP shortlist.
Look I agree with you that in all probability that should be what happens. This time around the GOP is in the White House and Trump has very directly messed with the federal civil service in a way that has gored a lot of oxes in the region. Sears, while not totally MAGA also isn't the kind of Republican Younkin is, that not so long ago used to be competitive enough in NoVa, back before everything went crazy.
But here is where I have to ask- in light of what has happened over the last 10 years why on God's green Earth would you ever be complacent about anything? Democrats need to get into the mind set of trying to mop the floor in races that they should win. Conversely, if play not to lose when things tighten up, or the unexpected arises, well, weird things happen.
What specifically do you think Spanberger should be doing differently?
The problem with this line of thinking is that while VP choices probably don’t matter to winning elections, being the VP is historically the single biggest predictor of becoming your party’s presidential nominee in 4 to 12 years. And so VP candidates should be chosen by the presidential nominee with that in mind.
Rule 1 of VP selection: don't pick someone who would outshine you and lead people to ask, "why can't we flip the order of the ticket?"
Rule 2: don't pick Sarah Palin.
Yes, I agree with that. But that’s not the point I was responding to.
Right, I’m just pointing out that Matt is wrong to say that.
I think Walz presented better than he performed and the difference between Walz and Shapiro seemed smaller up front. I wonder if Matt would agree and say that the choice mattered more than he expected, given this overrating of Walz. Of course, it’s also possible Shapiro would have underperformed!
Shapiro's electoral record thus far was not that impressive. He barely beat a nobody for AG and defeated an absolute whack job for governor. Walz at least had substantial electoral experience and success.
Shapiro would have been (deservedly) mocked for having transformed his voice and cadence into an exact copy of Obama. It’s weird for a white guy to sound like that.
Running up the middle is the most honorable way to lose. Growing up in Chicago, there was an attitude in sports where supporting the losingest team made you the truest fan. I stopped being a cubs fan after they broke the curse because the entire meaning structure of my fandom was gone.
To the extent that politics is the new sports, I hope no one gets sucked into the cult of righteous loserdom. It wasn't very fun.
Look I grew up and remain a fan of the Washington Redskins/now 'Manders and the Baltimore Orioles. These teams went through historical terrible stretches. While there was and remains a certain pride I take in being a fan through all of it let me tell you nothing nothing nothing feels better than winning.
'Manders is an abbreviation I hadn't heard until now. I'll sometimes lovingly call them the Commies, to break any antiquated connection to communism still out there, and it's funny how their colors are burgundy and gold.
And strong agree with you. Fuck the 1996 Jaguars for all eternity for the worst sports feeling ever, and all hail 1997 and 1998 for putting that dark moment in the past.
Am not a sports fan but I was born in Detroit and love when the teams are playing well. Go Tigers and Lions!
When you win, you're a genius and all of your decisions were pure gold. When you lose, you're a chump.
Two percentage points more of the vote, and we'd be talking about what a fantastic ticket that was.
Walz is an ok governor. The conceit was thinking that picking an ok governor as vice president would fix Harris’s problems.
Walz played well on the left because he'd signed a bunch of left-wing bills, but as Slow Boring readers we know that was because of the makeup of the state legislature rather than any particular brilliance on his part.
Walz was a zero value add pick. They needed value.
VP picks rarely add much other than some minor home state effects. I think Josh Shapiro for instance probably helps pull Casey across the finish line (which is not nothing), but not much else is different ultimately.
Right, the Walz pick wasn't very important in terms of its impact on the race. It was important for what it said about the decision makers.
Only in hindsight and perhaps not even then. I think it was reasonable to assume he could attract some white moderates that Harris couldn’t but then they tied his hands so hard he could barely move.
Yeah, I've seen a mini-consensus forming on the great centrist substacks (here, Nate Silver, Josh Barro) that he lost badly to Vance in the debate and was discredited. But opinion polling after the debate showed it was dead even and both candidates' favorability ratings rose (Vance was starting lower, so I guess from that perspective he did better).
Personally, I recall Vance having the advantage, albeit not decisively, until the end of the debate when they had to talk about the 2020 election and he had to pretend the Hunter Biden laptop story and FB's "get out the vote" campaign were equivalent to January 6.
It appeared as though they picked him because:
1. He called Trump weird and Dems liked that and thought it would play well with swing voters, but really didn't (Only weirdos vote Trump. Not as bad as deplorables, but still in that vein).
2. He was a Pro-Union Left of Dems governor. Popular for Democrats and in line with Biden politics, but that just made it seem like he was more continuation of Biden policy.
I hadn't heard of Walz before he was chosen and honestly found everything about him either unappealing or underwhelming. Maybe I am being unfair; Pence was of similar stock, but carried himself with much greater professionalism in my opinion.
Did you listen to his interview with Ezra Klein? I have rarely heard a better Democratic politician speaking off the cuff.
I think the real issue was that Harris was utterly inept as a candidate, so her camp both pushed Walz out of his comfort zone by asking him to stick exactly to the script AND leaned on him to be a major part of the campaign. There were also lots of weird things like their insistence on trying paint Walz as some blue collar dirt under the fingernails guy who loved fixing cars all day and having him play Madden with AOC and posting about how AOC could "run a mean pick six" which obviously makes absolutely zero sense to anyone with even a basic knowledge of football. Walz is the equivalent of a mid-round draft pick with promise who is unfortunately drafted onto a terribly run team so whatever skills he has are never developed.
Harris was never my choice, but she rather impressed me as a candidate! She made a few mistakes, most glaringly having no answer to, "What would you have done differently from Biden." But for the most part she established herself as fun and likable, and she absolutely annihilated Trump in that debate. Only a generational political talent, like Obama or Clinton, could have overcome the headwinds Democrats faced in the summer and fall of 2024, and even they probably would have struggled. There wasn't enough time to pull together a competent and effective political operation.
I honestly don't understand how Harris could have impressed anyone who wasn't already pretty committed to her. Her interviews were all terrible--just word salad that didn't mean anything and it was extremely odd how she often just refused to give a position on certain issues (ie fracking in Pennsylvania). She was not a good candidate.
I thought the common wisdom on Slow Boring was that it's a good idea to refuse to give a position on issues where you think it's just going to lose votes no matter what answer you give.
I liked Walz but thought Shapiro was clearly a better choice. And then Vance buried Walz in the debate. Walz's sputtering deer in the headlights performance was brutal compared to JD's smug lying confidence, but over all it didn't seem as bad because Biden had the most dreadful debate performance in the TV era.
It seems to obviously have been a lackluster pick from the perspective of “you must assume this person will be the standard bearer and nominee you’re stuck with in the future.” The arguments in his favor are pretty weak-Minnesota is politically about as midwestern as Illinois.
Given Walz's age, my strong suspicion is that Harris (don't know about Walz himself) presumed he would never actually run for president after serving as VP. (He'd have been 73 after two terms for Harris, IIRC.)
68. Walz is the same age as Harris.
Yikes, sorry! For some reason I was thinking Walz was 65 at the time of the 2024 election.
I just don’t think that’s something they should or could assume. He wouldn’t want the nomination if he didn’t aspire to be president. Governor is a better job than VP in every way except for the path to the presidency.
I think that was part of the strategy. Shapiro, Whitmer, et al, were too risk-averse to challenge Harris, but that calculus may have changed if they thought there was a high enough likelihood of 8 years of Harris followed by 4-8 years of her VP. I think Walz put that worry to bed.
Agree 100%. I think Walz would have won if he was on top of the ticket and could campaign unshackled. He is plain spoken, moderate (at least he used to be) and seems normal unlike most Dems.
People concerned that Harris wouldn't win (eg, Matt, Nate Silver, ..., me) wanted Shapiro. Progressives wanted Walz. For whatever reason, the Harris campaign did what the progressives wanted, as the Biden administration had consistently done, rather than what would maximize her chances of winning. I don't think it was a shot at Walz, it was a shot at the Harris campaign's decision making.
I mean “equally unimpressive” is definitely a shot.
That's a fair point. I suppose that didn't resonate with me because I certainly found Walz unimpressive. But that's a shot. Nonetheless, I think it was _mostly_ a shot at the Harris campaign's decision making.
The motivation behind his selection was to make Harris look better in comparison and I think they achieved that.
Matt just tweeted an important point: "very few topics actually have the specific structure of the civil rights movement battling Jim Crow." That movement benefitted from a perfect storm of circumstances--the Nazis giving racism a bad name, the Cold War need to look good to the nonwhite world, a Supreme Court liberal enough to issue Brown, a new communications medium that allowed/forced people to literally see segregationist brutality, a leader as charismatic as King--happening in such rapid succession. The way that it accomplished so much so fast fooled a lot of people into thinking that politics can be like that all the time, and that only a coward/sellout/traitor would think that there are times when progress requires a slow boring of hard boards.
Even then that progress was built on literal decades of hard work and compromises.
Well it was a one-time event and then gay marriage came along.
One could forgive someone for thinking, hey, if we could do it for civil rights *and* for gay marriage, then why can't we achieve [X]? And then they go way overboard.
Also the misunderstanding was that Gay Marriage didn't actually require a bunch of changes in society.
It didn't produce video of women getting their heads bashed in by biological men volleyball players, or stories of biological men raping women in women's only prisons or other spaces.
Or less culture war, it didn't require people to give up gas cars or stoves.
This is not how opponents of it saw gay marriage. They saw it as the destruction of marriage in our society. They were dead serious. It was much more a threat to their conception of society than the, what, ten transwomen athletes the NCAA supposedly has in it.
I agree that's how opponents saw gay marriage, but that's not what the everyday experience of most American was, which is surely the key distinction?
Most Americans don't experience much in the way of these culture wars. A tiny percentage of Americans have any contact with transwomen athletes. (Vastly more know gay people, including married couples, but that didn't stop them from opposing gay marriage before the nation flipped.) The areas in the country most opposed to immigrants have the fewest immigrants.
People are not forming their attitudes based on personal experience but on their view of trends in the country at large and what they envision the good society looking like.
Yes, but polling on trans issues have actually gone the opposite way less supporting, as the issues became clear
The reverse of the acceptance of gay marriage
Definitely parallels.
Matt writes: "So you’ll say, 'I think it’s good to have a well-funded police department that arrests criminals' and the retort will be 'You’re racist'....These styles of argument work because most people have a stronger commitment to second-order progressive values — racism is bad, we should be inclusive of L.G.B.T. people — than they do to specific policy ideas."
I would say these styles of argument worked prior to 2023 or so. But they don't work nearly as effectively today.
Yeah - this is hard to empirically measure, but it seems like that kind of argument is declining and retreating to specific communities.
Kind of reminds me of Josh Barro calling Bluesky a “containment dome.” It’s a padded room for the worst, most extreme progressives!
It is interesting that people say this since the most-left people I follow are still on Twitter.
“This YA novel is racist because it has a racist character”-style left-wing or “we must smash capitalism”-style left-wing (not that the two are totally mutually exclusive)?
I am a librarian. Your first comment about the YA novel is more common than I would like - not from the kids, but from adults, especially adults who read YA novels. It's like the Moms for Liberty of the left, but more benign because at least they don't call librarians the left equivalent of pedophiles and groomers (racists & transphobes?) for having the books in the library. Instead, they contribute to book sales falling for decent and somewhat complex books. Despite all the articles about people not reading, public libraries still have high circulation of books (print, ebook, and audio) and bookstores are doing well. But I sometimes wonder how many people are reading the whole books and understand context.
I’m getting most of this from Blocked and Reported, but apparently in the heady days of 2018-2019, maybe more recently, it was common to accuse a book that had *any* expression of racism in any context, including racism directed at non-existent fantasy races and / or racist attitudes that are meant to mark a character as unsympathetic, as “racist.”
These accusations would come from people whose job it is to read - editors, publishers, other YA authors - and demonstrated a complete lack of reading comprehension. As BARPod put it: “any 5 year old understands that the presence of a wolf in Little Red Riding Hood does not make the story pro-wolf.” And yet this was the logic here.
> especially adults who read YA novels
sigh.
> I sometimes wonder how many people are reading the whole books and understand context.
:(
Also, remember when “think of the children” used to be something we made fun of (e.g. the whole character of Helen Lovejoy), not something that people took seriously?
Both of those are still decently represented on Twitter; Bluesky is much more "we need a new Sherman's March and we're finishing the job this time".
Leftwing people who remained on Twitter, by-and-large, have less depression and other mental health problems than those that absconded to Bluesky. Bluesky is like mid-teens Tumblr.
Do people spend a lot of time reading comments from low follower count/ordinary schmoes on Bluesky (or Twitter for that matter)? If so, why? How is that a good use of one's time?
If not, how do people know what these folks on Bluesky are like?
I mean, it's one thing to mix it up with the fine people here on SB but why would you ever waste time doing the same with the pile of crap that comments are on most social media sites?
I can say that I go on Bluesky for the same reason I go on Twitter: To read Matt's posts and insane replies. Based on that experience, I can confirm what Sean O. says about Bluesky.
Same, I mostly saw moderate left-wing people like Will Stancil go over to BlueSky, most further-left people like Jason Hickel seem to have mostly kept posting mostly or all on Twitter. BlueSky feels much more like boring normie lib posting, you have to be on Twitter to see spicy left wing or right wing takes, though right wing is much more common there.
The biggest demographic to move to Bluesky was academics, who have a variety of kinds of politics.
I feel like the more conflict-avoidant people went to BlueSky and the more aggressive leftists stayed on Twitter where they get some masochistic enjoyment out of fighting with far-right people. BlueSky just feels too nice and boring.
I like Bluesky but I don't recognize this characterization. ;)
Because Putin isn’t on Bluesky…
I commented on this elsewhere, but one of the biggest Bluesky scolds I know was complaining the other day about...Bluesky scolds. I think it might be collapsing in on itself at this point.
People put up with the lying and abuse of those trying to “shift the Overton window” because we were being extorted with the threat of Trump returning.
Then when it became clear that those in charge of the Democratic Party weren’t taking Trumpism seriously, and were engaging is self indulgent behavior people stopped tolerating this nonsense.
Was that ever a given justification? I can believe that it was, just not one I recall hearing much.
I have heard people I know in real life make arguments about pretending extreme positions as normal is an “effective” way to push political discourse to the left.
Lying about mundane and normal statements and presenting them as being out of line with normal or acceptable discourse is an extension of this mindset.
Oof. That’s really something.
Obviously, public opinion changes over time, but folk theories of “mainstreaming” or “normalizing” or whatever else need to be discredited…possibly by “mainstreaming” or “normalizing” the notion that “mainstreaming” or “normalizing” is bunk.
Uh oh.
It still works amazing well considering how bad an argument it is.
"I would say these styles of argument worked prior to 2023 or so. But they don't work nearly as effectively today."
I think that really depends on where you are making the argument. For regular people yes. On Blue Sky, NO
In a perfect world, yes a Shapiro or Whitmer choice would've had a better chance of winning. But your answer elides the two biggest reasons Harris was put forward: (1) as part of the Biden ticket, she had access to all his fundraising money, which was not an insignificant consideration, and (2) there wasn't an obvious mechanism to choose someone else, particularly at the late stage of the game Biden withdrew (the Mark Carney example is illustrative; we don't have a parliamentary system!). If, for example, a group of delegates publicly had said, "We think Whitmer is the best choice and we're throwing our support to her," before any other pronouncements, you'd probably get a lot of other campaigns trying to pick off other delegates, and then you'd have real questions about undoing the will of the primary voters (Trump did try this line of attack but it didn't go far).
None of what actually happened is optimal, of course, but even at the time there was a lot of wishful thinking into getting a non-Harris candidate.
Right. The real optimal scenario was Biden announcing after the surprisingly ok 2022 midterms that "hey America, I beat Trump, delivered a solid record of legislation, and I'm ready to hand off to the next generation, won't be running in 2024, Biden out".
I feel 100% certain this still would have resulted in Harris as the candidate.
Perhaps so, but the election was actually quite close! Harris might have pulled it off had she been able to adapt and grow as a candidate over the course of a primary campaign and general election.
100%? No, but I'll go in on 90%.
I think that's overstated. If Biden announced end of 2022 he would not be running in 2024 there would certainly have been a primary with Harris probably running. While she would have been a favorite, i don't see any chance her odds would be 100% from the jump. Even 70% seems high. Maybe in the mid-60% probability range.
Except that, as the Democratic party existed at that point, Biden would have been compelled to endorse Harris and campaign on her behalf. Is there any US VP who has lost their party's presidential nomination when endorsed by the sitting President?
The discourse seems to lean a lot into "Democratic Elites should have..." (or "Republican elites should have... in 2016"), and these elites are rarely identified in any kind of numbers. I think this is because they mostly do not exist in any kind of singular power-holding statuses.
That would have led to an incredibly divisive primary, with the left pushing all the candidates in their direction just like they did in 2020 (when, remember, Trump was actually President) and then after Oct. 7 it would have been a catastrophic bloody civil war within the party.
It's hard to believe the result would have been a centrist nominee with a united party behind him or her.
Maybe?
Everything about the Democratic party between 2016 and 2024 screams at me "No!"
The optimal scenario is the Charlie Baker - Lt Gov Karyn Polito scenario: "Hey America, we beat Trump, we delivered a solid record of legislation, we're ready to hand off to the next generation and so *we* won't be running in 2024".
I sometimes read a political blog called "Balloon Juice" -- fairly lefty, ex-hippie, photos from their meet-ups show a group of dinosaurs, almost as old as I am.
That group contained a lot of Biden dead-enders, who were outraged that Biden was forced out of the race. Many of them thought this was gross ageism. Many of them had a hard time reconciling to the switch to Harris. One of the few arguments that seemed to mollify the Biden dead-enders was that Harris at least could claim to have been elected to the ticket by the Democratic electorate, when she was added to Biden's ticket as VP. No other candidate would have had even that much legitimacy -- they would have seen Whitmer or Shapiro or X as an illegitimate candidate installed by party insiders against the will of the Dem rank and file.
How representative is Balloon Juice? I couldn't say. But I do think that moving to the VP after the President resigns is the only move that has obvious institutional legibility.
That's not to take a stance on Harris' electability. And of course it would have been far better for Biden to back out earlier and allow a real primary. But given how things stood after the disastrous debate, Harris was the obvious coordination point.
Obi-wan voice: "I haven't heard that name in a long time."
Time for the oldheads to start naming discontinued blogs from 2005 as if they were retired baseball players.
Is Daily Kos still active? Run by that powerbroker of the Democratic Party, Markos Moulitsas?
That's the era when Balloon Juice got started.
DKos is where I first started reading Nate Silver's #content! I don't remember under what name he was blogging/commenting at the time, but I know I first saw it there.
CHILDREN, GET OFF MY LAWN
Poblano!
Majithise
Pandagon
Making Light
MattY, when he had "the worst comment section on the internet"
You mean in 2025?
Hey wait a minute.
One discord I'm in has a thread where we just name guys.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned old-school Andrew Sullivan
Sadly, No!
Crooked Timber
Eschaton
Atrios, CalPundit, and Daily Kos were probably my top spots. It's not clear to me which of us changed the most: Atrios or me. Or maybe we're just no longer united by the salient issues of the time: Iraq, Social Security, and marriage equality.
Crooked Timber is still active, and still hopelessly lost somewhere out in academic leftism where the Trotskyites are battling the Gramsci-ites, or something.
I miss "The Poor Man" blog, written by The Editors. There was some funny stuff on that blog way back when. Also, Fafblog, which was extremely funny until Obama's election made them get deeply resentful and weird.
The humor some of these had is underrated-I miss (the blogger) Jon Swift! He even would take on liberal pieties, eg on the New Yorker’s “terrorist fist bump” cover that made people so mad.
Personally the blog I miss most of all is The Head Heeb, which lasted only from 2002-2007, but still has not been replaced for understanding the things only he blogged about: https://web.archive.org/web/20080217061822/http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/2007/08/
The BJ blog is older than some SB employees.
Yeah, this was on my blog roll at some point, a thousand years ago.
That used to be a daily read for me. I only recently donated my old Tunch shirt.
Your description of Balloon Juice also describes the situation at the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog, where a substantial part of the commenters went into frothing, near psychotic fits over replacing Biden.
"of course it would have been far better for Biden to back out earlier and allow a real primary"
It's actually not "of course" at all. A long, open primary would have been horrific for the Democrats.
100%. Talking about a non-Harris.candidate was wishcasting. In the absence of a primary, Harris was the only solution to the coordination problem.
"coordination problem" was exactly the issue, yes. It's strange how Matt writes about the inside baseball stuff of parties, and then ignores this, because it doesn't support his "Moderation is the only answer."
July 2024 was agony for most Democrats. Biden flamed out in the most spectacular manner possible. Democrats wanted out of this dynamic. Harris was the easiest way to do that, and she, "Brought back the joy," very quickly and successfully. However, she barely had time to really build a platform or set up an infrastructure separate from Bidenworld. The stink of Biden's flameout also hurt Harris. What did she know and why didn't she say anything? I think even if Harris had won an actual primary, this would've helped her.
I will take what appears to be the unpopular opinion and say it was only wishcasting because of a tragic poverty of imagination on the part of the Democratic elite. If a group of prominent figures in left-of-center politics—including Joe Biden—had come together and said, "We believe the fate of the republic is on the line and that the vice president is a mediocre politician with ties to an unpopular administration. Let's go instead with the popular governor of the likely tipping point state", I think they could have brought their voters along with them!
Your comment exemplifies why it's wishcasting! Yes, if the relevant set of party elites (a broad and heterogenous set) had coordinated around a candidate, the convention delegates would have followed. (The voters were irrelevant by July.) But the whole problem is that they would not have coordinated around a candidate. They had different preferences, and once the field was open this would have gotten worse because other ambitious Dems would have gotten in the running. And the only way to resolve the differences would have been a contested convention, which would be a disaster with no legitimacy--the delegates were picked to coronate Biden, not to wield actual power.
A hypothetical that could be clarifying is: Had Joe Biden gone to Warren, Sanders, AOC, and said "I'm stepping down and endorsing [NOT HARRIS]. We can fight this out, or we can cohere around my choice". I personally don't think they would have contested his choice, but I suspect that you think they would have. For me, Biden and the establishment's unwillingness to risk a revolt on their left by elbowing Harris out was a strategic catastrophe.
I don't think Biden could have gotten away with bypassing his own VP to unilaterally select a governor. I don't think it would have stopped other Democratic politicians from seeking the nomination and it may not even have stopped Harris from arguing that she was the more appropriate choice. Biden's standing at this point was terrible anyway. The problem was not any particular political faction, it's just built into the structure of collective decisionmaking in the absence of a decision procedure or clear leadership.
I like these comments and agree that the leadership is hidebound. But hypothetical Biden is much more functional than real-life Biden is/was.
I don't think they would have cheered the selection of Whitmer. Why would they have? It's not like they were so paralyzed by the fear of Trump in 2020 (when he was President!) that they didn't do everything they could to prevent the nomination of a centrist candidate.
I.e., Gretchen Whitmer. That was the only realistic alternative. And Whitmer might have turned out to be great! Or with the bright spotlight on her she herself might have flamed out as badly as she did in the Oval Office and in her other encounters with Trump.
There was no super obvious alternative to Harris who had a substantially higher probability of doing better than she did.
>I think they could have brought their voters along with them
Not African American voters, who Dems absolutely need to turn out if they are going to win swing states like PA, GA and MI. Bypassing an African American VP would have been very, very risky, and for what? Gretchen Whitmer?
It was by far the most likely solution, but Obama, Pelosi, Schumer and Jefferies could have done a press conference announcing Whitmer as the candidate and it would work.
I think Matt is correct that it fundamentally wasn't a process issue. The issue was precisely the same left factional polarization dynamic that hobbles opposition to MAGA. The perceived "justice" concerns that put Harris there in the first place simply scared away any viable challenge.
Now, I happen to think there's an argument about how much of that is lack of courage/leadership and how much the coalition genuinely would tear itself to shreds over replacing a black woman on the ticket, but the core issue is that rightly or not the key actors were too afraid to try. If they had wanted to they could have done it.
I have no idea whether or not it would have happened but if they had tried to nominate some white governor instead of Harris—which could not have been the result of a normal primary process, at that point—there was a *genuine risk* of a complete collapse of Democratic unity, (more) protests at the convention, write-in campaigns, etc., etc. I don’t think it’s crazy to try and avoid that risk!
The mistake actually was not prepping Harris for the job at all. Everyone knew Biden was old, and there was a non-trivial chance that Harris would have to take take over at some point. Yet zero effort, it seems, was made to raise her profile, and prepare her for the job. She was given portfolios that were doomed to fail. She had no track record of success, especially compared to a popular governor, and still had the baggage of her extreme left-wing views
from her previous failed primary. She basically had no opportunity to change that profile as VP thanks in large part to the Biden admin sidelining her, and what opportunities she did have, she performed poorly.
Biden treated her very badly, just like every other President has treated his VP.
It might have been nice had a dying FDR pulled Truman aside and said, "We have this thing called the atom bomb that maybe you should know about."
You’d think that old Presidents with a non-trivial chance of dying or becoming infirm - and their staffs - would know better, but I guess that’s too much to expect.
I think this argument typifies the sort of risk-averse "habits of mind" that drove decision makers in the Democratic elite to support Harris, but it's precisely these dynamics that Matt is urging those decision makers to interrogate.
In my view, neither of these points were insurmountable. If the Harris campaign had dumped the entirety of the war chest they inherited from Biden into Pennsylvania, would it have closed the gap between the popularity of their candidate and Shapiro in what was widely presumed to be the tipping point state? I'm skeptical.
The mechanism for choosing someone else was to act like a political party and unify your most prominent actors around the candidate who maximized the party's odds of winning the election, then send them out to make the pitch to the parts of the coalition with which they have sway. The _lack_ of a primary should have afforded them the maneuverability to pull that off, but the decision makers didn't have the political imagination for it!
I am not unsympathetic to the dilemma that Biden put the party in, but the result of the party elite's choices was that their candidate's association with the unpopular incumbent administration left the campaign operating from what proved to be an insuperable strategic deficit.
If we're talking about Democratic elites being afflicted by hidebound risk aversion, I mean sure, but then this whole thing probably wouldn't have happened anyway. Harris was the obvious schelling point. She had access to the infrastructure. She was even livelier on the campaign trail than her boss or Trump. Ex ante, I don't see someone who would've had a better shot of quickly uniting the party and taking things to attack Donald Trump at the time.
The more I see of her, the less I'm impressed with Whitmer. And Shapiro was such a newbie and so untested, that making him the nominee would be like taking some awesome college pitcher with a 100 mph fastball and instantly putting him forth to pitch the seventh game of the World Series. It might work but yeesh.
strong Jacob Miesorowski (sp) in the All Star Game vibes
I could see starting Paul Skenes in the seventh game but the dude is a unicorn.
As a middle schooler, he could probably have a 3.50 ERA in the majors.
What was left unstated in the post was what the Left would have done during a primary. Most of the left discourse in the 2020 primary was a waste of everyone's time.
What do you think the Left would have done and with what impact?
Was looking at the list of heads of government of OECD countries, and Carney in such a short time already looks like the best. Just a first rate public servant.
Imagine that Biden drops out, Harris doesn't run, and there's an open mini primary. If I'm Whitmer, et al, I still wouldn't run. Winning is very unlikely and could end my political career. Better to wait for 2028.
Look at the presidential fields in 1984, 1996, 2004, and 2012. When the incumbent is strong or the macro environment is unfavorable, the strongest candidates tend to sit and wait.
Their is another mechanism get a bunch of people together in a smoke filled room (the smoke is mandatory)
And they all agree "let's do what's best for the country".
Ideally this group would include Harris, Biden, Schumer along with Shapiro Whitmer etc
And Harris would put country over self interest and back a winner. She and the entire Democrat elites failed miserably at this basic task
I have to say, I’m not looking forward to several more years of tedious Buttigieg vs. Black voters discourse that treats Black voters’ skepticism/indifference to him as the anomaly that needs explaining, as if white voters’ attitude are per se normal. The guy had a not-particularly-impressive tenure as mayor of a small city, followed by a not-particularly-impressive tenure as a second tier Cabinet secretary. The real question is what do white voters see in him? If Anthony Foxx had run for president and done well with black voters but flatlined with white voters, no one would be casting about for explanations for this phenomenon; everyone would understand that voters value representation and gravitate towards candidates who feel like “one of them”. But when educated, upper middle class white liberals gravitate towards the candidate who exemplifies the values of educated, upper middle class white liberals, all of sudden it becomes a huge mystery when no one else follows suit.
The reason Black voters don’t like Pete has very little to do with his tenure as mayor/transportation secretary and a quite lot to do with the fact that he’s gay. As to what white Democrats see in him, it’s pretty obvious: he’s a great public speaker with a genuinely impressive CV.
I like Pete, but what's impressive about his CV? I think almost every other 2028 contender has a better one.
Really? I think Rhodes Scholar who did a stint at McKinsey before becoming a war veteran Naval Intelligence officer, then mayor, who got a cabinet post and became one of the more successful communicators and media surrogates for the administration is pretty impressive, personally.
Glad you are not my mom; goodness!
These are all genuinely impressive things that he deserves plaudits for. I would be very proud of him if I were his mom or his husband! But, he has never won a close election or been chief executive of a state and many of the presidential competitors have.
I'm impressed by his CV. I am impressed by what he says and how he says it. But so far he hasn't been able to win an office that's commensurate with that, which is a bit of an issue.
Being a Rhodes scholar is very impressive!
How does it suit him to the presidency? LBJ graduated from Southwest Texas State Teachers College; are we poorer for having lost the talents of the Harvard man he replaced? That seems like a dubious proposition.
You appear to be demonstrating my point that his supporters are attracted to him out of cultural affinity.
Whether his CV suits him for the presidency is a different question from whether is CV is impressive.
Not in the context of a discussion of why people do or do not support him for president, although your apparent concession that his CV is relevant to a discussion of his appeal to voters even though it may not demonstrate his qualifications for office is further support in favor of my hypothesis.
This is my concern as well - we might still need a straight white male to win 2028, especially since theoretically we'd be bringing in ex-MAGA folks who finally got fed up with the OBBBA but who are still back in the 19th c regarding LGB etc.
What is impressive about his CV? In particular what was impressive about his CV in 2020? IMO his tenure as Transportation Secretary moved him from “has no business even running for president” to “minimally qualified candidate for president”. Nothing about his record suggests he’d be the best candidate at engaging in international diplomacy, negotiating complex legislation with Congress, or managing the federal bureaucracy.
I’ll concede that he’s good at the parts of the job that involve going on TV, but we’re not casting the lead character in the popular, long-running TV show “The News”. That’s a foolish way to pick a president.
Have you done polling on this specifically? I've seen this floated quite a bit.
No. It’s hard to ask people “would you not vote for someone because they are gay” and get a straight answer. But look at the GSS question for “are homosexual relations morally acceptable” by race. And then look at the fact that ~85% of Black voters are Democrats. It’s not rocket science.
It does not follow from this observation that his being gay is a but-for cause of his lack of support among black voters.
If memory serves, Buttigieg recruited a UCC minister to be his faith-outreach person in 2019. That's like asking Tim Gunn to do your outreach to men. It's not that there's anything wrong with Tim Gunn; it's just that the kinds of voters he reaches are already with you.
I take Milan's point that Buttigieg's being gay is probably a real electoral issue in ways we shouldn't underestimate. But it's also true that talking like a college professor's kid and getting mainline progressive Protestants to help with faith issues on your campaign does nothing for you with the majority of black voters.
So your position is that his lack of support among black voters is not explained by him being gay? I think it is.
My position is that well-educated, upper middle class white liberals have a cultural affinity with Pete Buttigieg that voters outside that demographic don’t share, but WEUMCWL’s cultural hegemony in the media and among Democrats fools them into thinking their beliefs are the norm and deviation from them is what must be explained.
Acceptance of homosexuality is part of that cultural hegemony, so it’s difficult to disentangle its effects independently. Still, I suspect that Buttigieg would be doing only slightly better with black voters if everything about him were the same except he was straight, and that would be offset by the fact that a non-trivial amount of support is because he’s gay.
White educated Democrats like Pete because he sounds like we'd like to think we sound. Heck, I like how he sounds. Why that would make him a strong candidate for President is beyond me, however.
Upper middle class white liberals are very prominent in legacy media
"But when educated, upper middle class white liberals gravitate towards the candidate who exemplifies the values of educated, upper middle class white liberals, all of sudden it becomes a huge mystery when no one else follows suit."
I feel like this is kind of backwards.
The lack of Black support for Pete is framed as a knock on Pete not a question of Black voters. There is a type of double counting of Black votes as well as the idea of some innate wisdom.
Pete (and Whitmer) did well in the post Biden polls. Whatever his coalition was it seems to have been completive but the lack of support from Black voters is treated as an extra weakness that is added on top of the overall polling results.
I don’t think black voters have some innate wisdom; I do however think that there’s a substantial overlap between the views on non-racial issues of black voters and non-black voters who are otherwise demographically similar. That is to say, black voters are the segment of the primary electorate who are most similar to swing voters, and so a candidate who wins the primary without their support is less likely to win the general than a candidate who won with a coalition of the same size that included black voters.
Race is a pretty potent political identity to ignore when calling people demographically similar.
Again Pete and Whitmer did well in the polling before Biden dropped out. Those polls include swing voters.
People are asking Pete to explain his lack of Black support not the other way around.
Yes and that’s foolish. His lack of black support is hardly inexplicable: he’s an objectively unimpressive candidate for president. If elected, he would be the second least experienced president ever, and the precedent set by the least experienced suggests that it would be unwise to ignore this glaring deficit of his.
Don’t get me wrong, delivering the party’s message effectively in unscripted media opportunities is among the top twenty most important skills for a president to have, and it’s a skill at which he’s well above average. But it is curious that so many white voters don’t mind that he hasn’t demonstrated even average skills at many of the other nineteen, let alone above average. Thats the phenomenon that calls out for an explanation.
Pete has a short resume for a presidential candidate because he is relatively young but he has a resume of education, military and public service.
The issues with Trump's presidency rarely seem to stem from a lack of experience. In many ways he is quite experienced, he was president for 4 years prior to this term and it hasn't seemed to make him better at the job.
Being a good communicator of ideas is the skill voters are in the best position to access from a candidate.
The idea that Black voters are doing some sort of objective resume analysis while White voters are charmed by Pete's media skills seems like part of this "Magical Negro Voter" idea.
I am not claiming Black voters are not particularly wise relative to white voters; they are probably just as likely as white voters to support a candidate on the basis of cultural affinity. The hypothesis is that cultural affinity with well-educated upper middle class white liberals is all Pete really has going for him, so he is not particularly appealing to voters outside of that tribe. Nonetheless, his tribe’s cultural hegemony in the media makes it appear as if their attitudes are normal, and deviations from them are what requires explanation, even though based on all prior nomination contests one would expect a candidate like him to get no traction at all. In other words, black voters are behaving towards Pete Buttigieg how Democratic voters in general have treated similarly undistinguished candidates in the past. The anomaly that requires explanation is why white voters treat him differently.
"Activists successfully pressured Democrats to abandon the successful 'all of the above' energy message of Obama’s two campaigns. But they did not successfully persuade the voters in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Alaska that this was a good idea."
You could go hoarse counting the ways that the 2012 results convinced Democrats that there was no electoral downside to moving left. Chuck Schumer gets endless heat his "for every voter we lose in central Pennsylvania, we gain two in the Philadelphia suburbs" remark. But the same thinking informed the leftward march on climate, LGBTQ issues, gun rights, etc and etc.
On energy, a lot of column space was spent on how Obama's "war on coal" was going to cost him Pennsylvania and Ohio. Then the votes came in. Obama did much worse than any other modern Democrat in "coal country," which included a 35% meltdown in West Virginia. He did do worse in communities that depended or used to depend on the industry. But he won Pennsylvania and Ohio. On LGBTQ, you had Bill Galston arguing that Obama's gay marriage endorsement was ceding Ohio to win Colorado. But he won both states, and on election night, for the first time, gay marriage bans fail everywhere.
It's easy to draw a line from the post-election confidence Democrats felt then to activists convincing the 2nd Obama administration to cancel Keystone, expand protections for gender identity, etc. And can Republicans capitalize on the backlash if, instead of Trump, they run some 2016 Republican who says he'll tackle Medicare to cut the deficit? Probably not. But they ran Trump.
As with all of these discussions about Obama and 2012, it seems like the answer comes down to “Obama is an exceptional politician and counting on someone else to replicate his success won’t work.”
And those leftists were still riding high in 2024 and would have been the dominant force in a wide open primary beginning with Biden withdrawing after the 2022 midterms.
I think any normie Republican would have crushed Hillary in 2016, and that Trump was by far the weakest general election candidate.
I can actually see it both ways and also a lot depends on what Trump does if he loses a primary.
Path 1 - Trump doesn't run, Rubio or Jeb wins - I can easily see them winning somewhat easily (Obama '12 or Biden '20, not Bush '88) or losing because the same problems they had in a GOP primary happen in a national election.
Path 2 - Trump doesn't run, Cruz wins - I think Hillary wins here.
Path 3 - Trump runs, loses the primary by hook or crook, continues to bash the GOP - Hillary wins and the GOP is in trouble
Path 4 - Trump runs, loses the primary and is paid off to go away - depends on the candidate.
I don't think there's a world where the Rubio/[GOP Governor] ticket wins 330 EV's or anything. Maybe a Jeb/[Governor] ticket that actually openly moderates but even then, while Hillary was unpopular, the economy was fine and it's not like any of the non-Trump candidates were great candidates considering...they lose to Trump in a primary.
I think Hillary's negatives were excaberated by Trump's strengths in a way that running against a 'normal' Republican wouldn't be. Now, does Hillary then lose in 2020 after a Republican Congress basically stops all COVID relief and we're in a giant recession? Probably. And then Bernie runs and wins in 2024 after we have all the inflation as we've gone through and none of the relative positive economic growth post-COVID.
In regards to the bit about moderate Democrats being castigated as crypto-MAGA's for hetreodox views:
OMG this!
I can't tell you how many times I've been called a terrible person, a bigot, a racist, etc. (online and in person) because I had a slightly dissenting view. My two favorite anecdotes are:
(1) The time a woman online called me some of the most horrible names I have ever been called (it really hit some nerves, she was good at insults) because I said that some homeless people are mentally ill. She legit believed that all homeless people are homeless because of lack of affordable housing*. No other answer was allowed. That man I see babbling to himself on the street corner is not mentally ill, he is just unhoused. That is his problem. I was literally talking in a very left-coded way about how our country does a shit job taking care of the mentally ill - and that was what set her off. The babbling mentally ill man on the street, that is just my racist eyes lying to me!
(2) The time a college professor friend of mine told me that he considers me a right-wing Jordan Peterson-type because I once read & liked Better Angels of our Nature by Stephen Pinker. I was like "I'm a Democrat. I voted for Clinton and Biden. I donated to their campaigns. I don't like Jordan Peterson at all." And he was like "I'm sorry but your reading choices are right wing and problematic..." But to his credit he didn't cut me off friendship-wise, he was just "letting me know."
*Note: I am very pro-abundance agenda and in no way oppose affordable housing.
The book thing is pretty disturbing coming from a college professor. I often read books by people whose philosophies I disagree with, or at least think I do. Isn't that what people on college campuses are supposed to do? I also gravitate towards authors/content creators who are accused of being both too liberal and too conservative because I figure they must have something interesting to say if lots of people think they are shills for the other side. Although I do admit that sometimes I am reluctant to have the covers of those books visible when I am reading in certain public spaces.
In his defense, this was during the pandemic at the time of peak wokeness and culture war nonsense, and I think he was influenced as an academic by this environment. I recall him later being very nervous about his DEI statement that he provided - probably the closest I've ever seen him come to criticizing wokeness, etc. He is young and not tenured.
I should also note that I said that I liked the book and more or less agreed with it. Not just that I read it.
I'm similarly disturbed by this episode, but I shared a somewhat similar 2020 anecdote and I hope that this was at least partially a summer of 2020 temporary madness.
We are in a (the?!) bad place. I was literally just walking to a cafe to work while listening to the latest Freakonomics podcast, featuring Patrick Deneen. It's a really interesting conversation, and I thought about sending it to a few friends, but I'm not sure that anyone I know wouldn't be horrified at the thought of taking his arugments seriously.
He sounds gross to me. I always find that for a lot of these supposedly "reasonable" and "intellectual" sounding conservatives of late, when you start to scratch the surface of their beliefs, their core rationales seem to be:
1. Black people are less intelligent than White people.
2. Women should be subservient to men.
3. "Freedom" means following my religion.
4. Rich people earned every penny and poor people are living the just life of suffering ordained by God.
Just because I'm occasionally hetrodox on some liberal points does not make me a conservative by any stretch, which is why I'm so incensed at being called one.
I think the important thing is to simultaneously recognize that these views aren’t ideal, but also that nonetheless people still have them, and furthermore that telling them “they’re bad people” for having such views is not going to change their mind, not to mention vote for a Democrat.
Totally agree! I am embarrassed to say that some of these views were MY views once upon a time because of the culture I was raised in, and I don't think that I'm a bad person or even was a bad person at the time. Just ignorant and indoctrinated.
Even relatively progressive heroes of the past; Lincoln, Hamilton, Washington, etc. probably had views we would consider not only retrograde and backward, but downright bigoted and maybe even sort of evil.
We're probably no different as 500 years from now people might consider our generation evil genocidal maniacs because we eat meat and accept the existence of a military force.
Yeah I mean I'd be happy if people 200 years from now called me horrible because it'd mean we've come a long way.
Right, I hope things go so well that I'm considering an old fuddy duddy that's out of touch by progress by time I'm 90.
I haven't read much of his work, but the conversation I listened to was interesting and his contribution in no way resembled this list.
OK, maybe I'm overgeneralizing. But I've been disappointed so many times by alleged conservative "intellectuals" that I've developed a gag reflex.
I think my fundamental problem with even the most highbrow ideas of "new conservatism" is that they always seem to be tied to the ideas of (1) more religion in government (which history has shown is neither good for religion nor government) and (2) further empowering wealthy elites.
And it is not an exaggeration to say that the current manifestation of conservative rule (Trump/MAGA) is looking more like a Franco-style dictatorship each day.
Yeah, Patrick Deneen is bad, but then I'm a proud defender of liberalism.
I do find Deneen kind of horrifying ideologically, but i just take solace in that he's way too much of an academic to really get much traction anywhere. He really does think the early modern era of absolute social control through community was really the best era.
This is what I always find funny about these "highbrow" conservatives, that they divine this sort of idea that they are going to influence conservative culture and bring about a sort of religious-conservative revolution or reformation, but what actually ends up happening is a race to the gutter, with everyday conservatives acting out the worst impulses our culture has to offer, and essentially appropriating whatever liberal culture was fashionable 10 years ago.
I disagree with much of what he says, especially his prescriptions as opposed to his descriptions of social problems, but IMO it's worth at least thinking about.
Yeah, to set a very low bar i found him to be more interesting to listen to than the usual conservative commentator, mostly because he's actually explicit about his beliefs, sometimes. It's more than i can say about the usual conservative who either plays extremely coy or mostly focuses on bad insult comedy through the pretense of political discussion.
Yeah. I was raised Catholic and, while lapsed, a lot of his foundational thinking is familiar to me. But I don't think any the nuns I know/am related to would be open to listening.
Luckily, SB has created a safe place for people like us who think "The Better Angels of Our Nature" is absolutely fantastic.
That guy is an idiot.
Actually he's a really great guy and I like him a lot. That is why the criticism stung so much.
A lot of people have said that Better Angels has not aged well, but I would counter that cultural backsliding is actually quite common in history and is touched on in the book, if I recall correctly.
Why is "Better Angels" right-wing? I haven't read it, but I just read the Wikipaedia page and the criticisms seem to be confusions about statistics and that it's irreligious.
I don't think it is right wing at all, which is why I found the criticism so perplexing.
But I suppose from an ultra-woke 2020 perspective, BA could be considered right wing because it does not center race activism as the end all be all of politics?
This kind of Waffle House slander will make me go MAGA
OK Waffle House, you heard the user, don't fuck up and do something like changing your logo or you will feel all kinds of wrath rain down upon you!
I don’t know that the waffle house is the kind of company that thinks about itself as having a logo…
That unselfconsciousness is part of what makes it great.
Nothing can compare to the brilliance of Waffle House's Scrabblesque wordmark.
I have only been to a Waffle House once, but your comment made me laugh. The next time I visit my brother in Baton Rouge, I am determined to go to Waffle House again just so I can comment knowledgeably on this issue.
The rankings depend on what you're eating and what time of day it is.
Cracker Barrel, though, gets points deducted for being but a poor knockoff of Lambert's Cafe in Sikestown, MO, home of the throwed roll.
I've never been to Lambert's Cafe, or even Sikestown, MO. Can you buy a rocking chair there? If not...
There was never going to be a world where Biden stepped down where it wasn’t Harris replacing him. Otherwise what’s even the point of having a VP? It’s a fantasy to think this could have played out otherwise. So I really don’t see the point in “more scrutiny of what habits of mind inside Democratic Party elites led them to nominate a Harris-Walz ticket.”
The bigger problem is that Biden never seemed to think about the implication his VP choice would become the party’s nominee at some future point — even though history would show that it was a highly likely outcome! He chose someone to help him win in 2020. And to be fair, maybe it worked because he did win in 2020! But it does feel like at some level parties should make it so the VP pick isn’t at the sole discretion of the nominee.
Harris as VP was totally a sop to the Dem base and didn't help Biden win at all in 2020, if anything she was probably a drag on the campaign. She's a horrible politician to normie voters.
“I think you have to look at the dominant discursive strategy that’s used in these left-wing spaces, which is to essentially punish people for heterodoxy by greatly exaggerating the extent of disagreement.”
This is something I loathe about people online. They literally lie about what was said. It’s like they a functionally illiterate and just guess at the meaning of words.
I mean, sort of. There is a whole idea of 'unpacking things' which is about finding the secret sexist, or racist, or ableist, or whatever of things. Like literally anything.
Its kind of an academically accepted conspiracy theory about the secret moral taintedness of everything.
Which is just to say: I don't think they invented this behavior out of thin air.
Circa 2012, Ann Romney began a speech with some boilerplate along the lines of "It's a privilege to speak to you today." The academics in my social-media feed melted down, posting long riffs on Ann Romney's "privilege" and lack of awareness thereof.
I couldn't believe that no one could say that this was obviously a meaningless filler phrase put into the speech by a so-so speechwriter, but to say that would have been to confess oneself both right-wing and incapable of appreciating the finer nuances of academic reading, so everyone else kept rhapsodizing, and I kept my cowardly mouth shut.
I couldn't agree more. What kind of loser reads political takes online? And the people who comment on the posts are literally the scum of the Earth.
I think there's just so much tacky, trolly, bad-faith arguing on the internet that a lot of folks just assume anyone who disagrees - even if initially reasonably - is ultimately a troll and reacts as such.
It feels like a tragedy of the commons sort of thing. Only takes a few bad-faith actors to flood the zone of online discussion and make everyone cynical and detached.
“But it is still true that the dominant rhetorical strategy of the left is to tell anyone who is somewhat less left-wing that they should go become Republicans.”
Freddie’s ears must be burning.
Surprised we haven’t seen him in the comments yet
“ We’re becoming a society in which people struggle to remain adequately indifferent
I am about to use the hated R-word.
We should all be more… resilient.
It's a good word!
Bringing back "it's a free country" is excellent praxis. I've been on that train for a while now and I have been surprised how effective it can be at getting people to slow down a bit when our backyard fire policy arguments start getting a bit proscriptive.
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(wow, Substack is letting me comment on SB again, will ceases never miracle?)
I find it harder and harder to reuse that childhood idiom with a straight and non-defensive face. It does reflect a sincere belief - classic "children of immigrants from repressive country raised more patriotic than natives" thing - but I keep expecting pushback, like being interpreted sarcastically. Imagine using the same voice as James Inhofe holding a snowball on the floor of Congressional hell, "so much for global warming!", plus a conspiratorial wink to make sure the audience knows you're In The Know. That is, muh freedumbs with an eyeroll, something something stage IV capitalism, long live the revolution, worst time ever to be alive. And it's awkward to backtrack from that? To like...no...I mean it seriously, it's (still) a free country, Shining City On A Hill for so many, let's all be more chill and cherish the ability to let a thousand flowers Bloomberg. But of course, actually living the creed means smiling and nodding anyway. Even if I privately think it's rather unhealthy that many people seemingly feel the need to preface optimism with self-flagellation and garment-rending these days. One must imagine Sisyphus satisfied, and all that.
I agree with this but think Matt’s heroin example is actually a bad one. If it’s a free country, and I’m not harming anyone else, why can’t I buy/use heroin? The fact that it saves lives doesn’t really seem like a justification.
It does hurt other people: your family, the workplace that misses your productivity, the people that have to see you nodding off on a park bench. It’s a disorder machine and we don’t want those running.
“Saves lives” and “Harms your family/employer” both feel like arguments that prove too much, you could justify a lot of really totalitarian regulation of people’s personal lives on those grounds.
Disorder machine seems more defensible, very few people have the ability to maintain an active heroin habit without turning into street junkies, and street junkies commit a lot of random assaults and property damage.
I think nearly all policy questions are a matter of degree. Heroin more reliably destroys lives and families than most other bad habits, just like (and for the same reasons that) it more reliably makes people disorderly.
It doesn't even save lives.
Opioid deaths sky rocked after the crackdown
People turned from doctors to drug dealers and thousands upon thousands died
Are you sure about the timeline there? I had thought opioid deaths and heroin use were already rising when the crackdown began.
Maybe slightly, but it's clear that they really accelerated with the crackdown.
Switching from medical grade drugs where you know what you are getting to black market drugs where you don't greatly increases the potential for a fatal OD, especially when Fentanyl enters the picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_drug_overdose_death_rates_and_totals_over_time
There's a real post hoc/propter hoc problem here, because the main thing that started the crackdown on opioids was their role in contributing to heroin use! So I would want to see an in-depth analysis before concluding that the crackdown caused the heroin overdoses to increase.
But also, haven't we changed topics from where we started? The original question wasn't "why should the government make it harder to get prescription opioids?", it was, "why shouldn't I be able to buy and use heroin if I want?" Granting that heroin and fentanyl are more dangerous than prescription drugs, it's not clear that making them legal would alleviate that danger; it might even exacerbate it.
I don't think legal heroin would necessarily be more dangerous than prescription drugs.
Though Fentanyl probably is given just how potent it is and easy to OD.
Either way, I still think adults should largely be free to put what they want into their own bodies. Even if it's bad for them. The exception would be antibiotics because of the problems of antibiotic resistance.
Note I consider this to be separate from the question of public disorder.
I think it's very reasonable to declare to public intoxication or use of drugs, and to keep public areas clear of disorder.
"Right-wing social media is often extreme, bigoted, or otherwise gross. But it very rarely consists of telling Trump voters who agree with Republicans about 70 percent of issues and who are to the left of Democrats on 100 percent of issues that they are actually secret leftists who love Chuck Schumer."
It wasn't that long ago that the pejorative "RINO" or "cuckservative" was commonly used against someone right of center who wasn't sufficiently right wing. I'm sorry but the very particular dynamic you're describing really just downstream from "orange man bad". The reason you likely don't see this is Trump since 2015 has gone after anyone who disagrees with him (including people right of center) in the grossest terms and result is that now basically people who still want to associate themselves with GOP are basically scared to death to cross him.
Also, the other thing that's going on is that Trump wildly changes his mind on topics all the time. Go look at polling at Russia/Ukraine. It gyrates wildly because Trump wildly gyrates from being a Putin suck up, to angry diatribes, to Putin suck up (we're back at Putin suck up stage right now). And yet as long as you continue to go with "Trump is most awesomest person in the history of aweesome", no one will come after you. Do you really think this is a healthy dynamic?
Lastly, how likely is it this dynamic on the right holds if JD Vance is the GOP nominee in 2028?
I may be overthinking and this doesn't apply to RINO, so much, but cuck...isn't the implication 'stop being a cuck and join us, the real men?' Not, as with racist/sexist/TERF 'you are irrevocably tainted, fuck you?'
Now, it's not clear the loony tunes can actually make you irrevocably tainted unless you let them...but that's easy to say...
I think you're right but Matt is also right--the Republican Party becoming much more personalist (which is bad!) has also made it more ideologically flexible on non-Trump-adjacent things (which is an electoral asset, at least sometimes).
This is right to me. Almost any other president who would flip flop like this almost day to day would be pilloried. I think justifiably; like seriously how do you even know if you're a GOP politician or Trump loving pundit what the right message is supposed to be on Ukraine.
I think it goes hand and hand with the bizarre dynamic that Trump being so rambling and incoherent actually helps his "moderate" image. So many people just ignore or don't believe the crazy stuff he says because too many people think it's just "Trump being Trump" instead of some sort of actual policy position. Like there's no way to explain the market continuing to go up in the face of actual policy being pursued (including threatening the Fed independence) without there being a whole lot of people out there who think "eh he really doesn't mean it".