Reminds me of one of Dubyas best jokes: "This is an impressive crowd. The haves and the have mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base".
This is well on pace to be one of the most upvoted comments in Slow Boring history, and it makes sense given who the upvoters are and how they've been described.
Looking forward to his own planet in heaven more every day, I think.
He refused to endorse Kamala, gambling on having some role in the post-Trump party, only for Trump to win and guarantee there won't be a post-Trump party within Romney's lifetime.
It'll be interesting to see if conditions make it so Democrats can pitch themselves as the party of fiscal frugality and Republicans as profligate spenders, when the perceptions have been the opposite for a long time.
I think they won’t even get a CR out on party lines, much less an extension of the TCJA. This is especially true if the GOP can’t replace their House seats.
That's just a way of trolling "femininsts." Republicans are not really "for" anything except power to enact upward income transfers. Everything else is tactical.
I would describe them as wanting to stop income transfers because they don't want downward income transfers. What upward income transfers do they support?
If it weren't refundable, then it would not be a downward transfer. But the fact that it is refundable (I.e, it is money paid beyond what taxes are due) does make it a downward transfer.
I support the EITC, by the way. But the rationale mathew uses isn't wrong.
Let's go back to 2017. A bill passed that reduced corporate tax rates (hooray!) but instead of making up the lost revenue also cut rates in a way that most of the reduction was reduction in revenues from high income people and the result was an in crease in borrowing. _I_ call that an upward transfer of income. You don't have to call it that, but I continue to refer to that bill as the "Tac Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Acto of 2017."
Bad fiscal policy is how I would describe it. But I still don't see how that's an upward transfer. Most of that borrowed money goes to downward spending not upward spending.
I guess everything depends on framing. I'm judging against a tax reform that reduces taxes on corporations but raises individual taxes enough to make deficits equal to public investment.
But 2017 was an upward transfer just looking at whose incomes increased, "passing through" the corporate reduction to shareholders.
And in the long run don't low income people benefit more from growth than the better off? So the negative growth effects of the deficit falls more heavily on the those with higher marginal utilities of consumption.
The first thing that comes to my mind is in the workplace. If the government loosens labor laws and weakens unions, employers can pay their workers less and give more money to shareholders and executives. You can call this an upward income transfer, because the recipients are richer than rank-and-file workers, while the income production requires the workers' labor.
Those are certainly regressive relative to not existing, but they mostly let you keep more of your money without paying tax, that's not really an income transfer.
I dunno. My understanding is that tax breaks are spending. Mortgage holders, like me, are wealthier on average. If a guy who rents sees money go from his paycheck to fund my mortgage interest tax deduction, is that not income distribution? Just because I don’t get a check (well, until I file my taxes)?
How is the money going from his paycheck to do that?
1) The upper income people most benefiting from the mortgage interest deduction are probably contributing more to the federal government than they receive in benefits (if we didn't have a deficit, then there must be _some_ people who are sending more to the government than they are getting in return, and I assume that's true even with our deficit).
2) As long as I'm contributing more than I'm receiving, a reduction in what I receive is not coming out of his paycheck (I guess unless he works for the federal government directly and we're cutting funding)
401k, 529, mortgage interest deduction are all things that definitely benefit higher income earners (not least because of higher marginal tax rates) more than lower income earners, but framing them to individuals as "taking it out of someone else's paycheck" doesn't seem like a winning phrasing.
From a federal government balancing budget standpoint, thinking of tax breaks as 'spending' can be relevant, since it's returning money to a subgroup of people, but I don't think it's a good argument to sell individual voters on it.
Is that something that large numbers of conservatives value? Like obviously there are loud people on twitter about that, but it's not clear to me that a large part of the conservative coalition is dedicated to recreating the stay at home mom paradigm.
Conservatives seem more aligned with viewing a married couple as a single unit. So, if one member of the couple is working, then the work requirement is satisfied.
This is a really clever way to make the argument, @KateLE. I wonder if anyone tried this type of proposal to Manchin to satisfy his work requirement concern?
I feel like this is a really stretched way to define perverse incentive. Bad marriages certainly exist on a continuum where they overlap with good marriages and mixed / medium marriages.
There are going to be millions of marriages that are in danger of ending but "shouldn't" and millions that "should" end but won't.
I apologize that I'm probably not expressing the idea well, but something strikes me as very off when it comes to primarily being concerned with encouraging bad marriages to stay together. Policies that operate over marriages operate over all marriages, there's no way around it.
Because it does not address the actual issue progressives care about --reducing child poverty -- which is far more prevalent (400%-500%) among single-mother households than among two-parent households. When you argue that we need to do some kind of trick to get conservatives "on board" you are simply acknowledging that conservatives don't actually care about reducing child poverty, so they need to be bribed with public funds into raising themselves up to the lowest possible bar of human moral sensibility: protecting impoverished toddlers. But there are lots of ways to bribe these morally defective conservatives into taking actions that will result in better outcomes. We don't need to add expensive caveats to already expensive programs.
I think the idea being that if there's a work requirement, but it's imposed on couples as a single unit, then so long as one parent is working the other doesn't need to, period, not just in the first 2-3 years. Whereas with a single parent the exemption ends and the stay at home possibility ends.
It’s something that a lot of conservative *women*, and just women in general, value.
Most women, except the most educated who are in “fulfilling” careers, want to cut back on work to be with their children. And even a lot of professional class women, in my experience, feel the same way once they actually have children, even though it is stigmatized among well educated women to say so too loud.
I know many working class women who love staying home with their kids because it offers them a lot more creativity and autonomy than their jobs so. It is more of a profession. They usually aren't home long - only when they can't dons jobs that will cover the cost of working - because they need the money. But a lot of educated people think paid work is more fulfilling than staying at home when it often isnt
Matt has observed plenty of times in the past that those that make the argument of paid work being fulfilling overwhelmingly come from the few people that genuinely love all aspects of their jobs. But for most it strikes me that ¿por qué no los dos? dominates, as you say.
I think there's a vast swathe of small c conservative people who very definitely believe that at a deep level and are somewhat low key disgruntled that modern capitalism doesn't allow traditional 1950s gender roles. But it tends to come out in pretty subtle ways most of the time. But just to go any "stay at home dad" discussion on social media and see just how many men AND women think there is something slightly unnatural about a man doing that instead of a woman.
I have no objection to saying that, on the whole, more women want to stay home and take care of children than men do. That's a quantifiable reality that can't be denied.
But we should absolute push back against the idea of parents being in non-traditional gender as somehow "unnatural." My husband takes care of our kids while I work, and we have absolutely come to this arrangement because it's what's "natural" to both of us as individuals. He likes baking, playing with toys, and just basically being like a Big Kid hanging out with Little Kids. Conversely, he couldn't abide my job...the paperwork, the dealing with idiots, the office attire, etc. And I hate staying home with the kids. I don't WANT to play with them. Something I routinely say to them is, "Kids, you have to play for yourself. I can't do it for you."
At home, we do slip into slightly more traditional gender roles. I still do much of the home decorating and make him kill the spiders and mow the lawn.
But work nowadays -- at least white collar professional work -- is not gendered the way the trades are. There's nothing weird about a mom being a doctor while a dad stays at home and does house projects -- in fact, this arrangement can easily exist while both parents still very much fit into "mom" and "dad" roles.
TL/DR: Just because sometimes unusual does mean it's unnatural.
"There's nothing weird about a mom being a doctor while a dad stays at home and does house projects -- in fact, this arrangement can easily exist while both parents still very much fit into "mom" and "dad" roles."
I agree that this arrangement can easily exist. But its certainly still "weird" as in it's not very common.
Note I say this as someone who's wife does all the construction and fixes the cars. Again, it obviously does happen, but it's certainly not normal. And I very much doubt it ever will be.
Also if you just look what conservative women DO, most of them work.
A lot of liberals like to lie to themselves about this and pretend conservatives are basically all like the Duggars and want to restore 1950's gender roles, but that's just an affect of the larger phenomenon that partisans always lie about their political adversaries and nutpick the most extreme members of the opposing coalition as supposedly being what "they" believe.
Agreed, but we have to be careful to distinguish between what people *do* from what they *would prefer to do.* (A statement that obviously can be taken to extremes.)
It would also drive a wedge in the Republican Party between those who would support it on these grounds, and those who are really revved up about demanding work requirements.
I was trying to figure out if conservatives preferred limiting the benefits to working families, or if they preferred limiting it to families with stay-at-home parents. Then I realized that they would ideally prefer to limit it to families with one working parent and one stay-at-home parent.
I don't think so, because they would get mad when they learn it doesn't just go to stay at home moms who "deserve" it.
Hence calls for Hungary style tax policy where married stay at home mom's with 4 kids get a tax cut, it's a tiny slice of the population but they are largely conservative Christian types so the idea becomes popular.
DISAGREE. This was precisely the old recipe that used to work, and Matt has written about it before. A program would primarily serve white people, but disproportionately help Black people, and that would thread the needle to satisfy both groups.
On a proportional basis the stay-at-home moms would White, Asian and immigrants of whatever census category, because these are the groups that tend to get and remain married the most.
Isn't the problem with The Squad that normies see them and mistake their views for the party views? Especially when they are getting such social media traction from the tiny noisy far left?
Similar problem with MTG and some others on the right, to be fair.
It’s that and it’s their supporters not getting the rest of the country is not like them. Having a bunch of progressive activists chase people down in bathrooms and parking garages because someone is not far enough to the left for them is not productive. It’s the same people who were constantly saying that we needed to find a more progressive Democrat in West Virginia to replace Joe Manchin. Sorry that candidate does not exist in West Virginia.
I think fighting with Joe Manchin was probably a good thing, it let him show he was different from other democrats. I don't think the Swearingin campaigns really did him in or threatened him int he slightest. But he was never going to win a senate election in 2024 as polarization increased due to factors outside his control. He squeaked by in 2018.
Swearengin is such an excellent case example. Just an absolute indictment of the idea that left wing economic populism wins you a senate seat in a red state.
If he’d looked at 2018 and gone independent, then spent the next six years caucusing with Democrats but loudly bitching about everything they said and did, then he might have been able to squeak ‘24. But to do so late in the game wouldn’t have worked and he frankly didn’t want the job anymore.
This is something I thought may have been missing from Matt's take: does the gerontocratic nature of Congress arguably empower (perhaps of necessity) interest group agita because you can't trust that Congress will meaningfully reflect the concerns of your generation based solely on the age of its membership creating a default set of shared vibes and experience?
They get social media traction from the right, too. It's not simply a mistake the normies are making, but a mistake they are being deliberately set up for by various actors -- foreign and domestic -- who are motivated to portray the Democratic party as extreme.
I'm not even sure at this point what the Democrats can do about it. MAGA will believe pretty much anything (see Pizzagate) regardless of what the Squad does or how regular Democrats campaign. For me, this is the HUGE problem in Matt's article -- even if Democrats do what he suggests, it may not be enough to counter the flood of misinformation.
MAGA doesn't actually matter! Every single time lefties bring up that nothing they can say or do will influence the nutjobs, it's sheer sophistry, a distraction from the fact that everything they say and do influences the mushy middle normies.
Federal elections are won or lost in the minds of sub-to-exurban swing voters who don't care to pay a ton of attention and vote based on vibes, some of which are based on their personal circumstances, some on the national environment.
A lot of the national environment, for a long time now, consists of utterly stupid or insane crap coming from left-of-center organizations, celebrities, or protestors. This is the downside of the center-left dominating the cultural heights; it's very easy to end up with a spotlight on left-wing batshittery, and it matters.
Of course MAGA matters. When Hegseth was up for confirmation and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) opposed him, it was a targeted MAGA media blitz that almost immediately flipped her vote in a matter of days. Unlike "crap coming from left-of-center", MAGA pressure involves unconcealed threats of political violence, made credible by the Jan 6th pardons conducted by the MAGA man himself. Every Republican who voted to confirm RFK Jr is scared of Trump's MAGA base. When Trump and Elon Musk violate the constitution as we speak, the Republican-majority Congress refuses to act because of their MAGA base.
Federal elections cover the executive branch once every four years, which is a third of the government intentionally designed to be limited. It's Congress that has the authority to pass durable and lasting legislation.
I am also talking about winning elections. MAGA is a huge voting bloc, so for example when Joni Ernst decided to back down, the obvious factor was that if she disobeyed she would never win an election again, she would be replaced by a more compliant candidate that will win the MAGA majority in her electorate. No one is talking about challenging her from the mushy middle to exploit this MAGA capitulation because the mushy middle isn't large enough there to make it competitive. This is why some are nervous about midterms for the Senate in particular, there is a "math problem" for Democrats because there is higher polarization and fewer competitive seats.
This continues to make no sense. Not least because you're conflating the concept of a MAGA majority in Iowa's general electorate, which does not exist, with one in Ernst's primary electorate, which might possibly exist.
If you want to pretend that what the left loudly does and says and the degree to which Democrats can or want to generate space between themselves and the left doesn't matter, fine. I'm not going to do that.
Seems like it would be really easy to punch left at e.g. the batshit extremists who are sharing Luigi memes on reddit.
Wouldn't that be a breath of fresh air? Amid all the partisan schreeching & whataboutism, to hear prominent Dem politicians take a principled stand against openly advocating for political violence? Why won't they do it?
But to Blary's point, neither punched left. They could have called Luigi a terrorist (he is). They didn't. Instead, they used the killing to bring attention back their preferred health care policy.
"People who kill others over policy disputes are no better than the terrorists who invaded the Capitol on January 6th and deserve to be tried and imprisoned for their crimes."
Then, on a completely separate day in a completely separate venue, you can pivot back to "private medical insurance bad."
I'm pretty sure they did exactly that? It just didn't get pushed out by the social media algorithms and bots. And if it doesn't get pushed out on social media, it basically doesn't exist in the mind of the average voter.
Ding ding ding. Plus there’s a perception (true or not) that unless there was some public break, the Squad would have a hotline to the Democratic White House. That’s VERY unappealing to people who disapprove (to put it mildly) of The Squad.
Exactly. I don't see how you can say it's bad for Dick Durbin to take unpopular positions but it's fine for AOC. She's way more famous than Dick Durbin ever was.
This is why I'd like to see AOC run for the 2028 nomination. She's becoming a savvy, pragmatic politician and it wouldn't surprise me at all to see her do some really significant moderating of her positions. That, more than anything else, would help take some of the steam out of the out of touch progressive cause.
Maybe a little like John Fetterman? But, voting for Pam Bondi . . . I dunno, man. Being an iconoclast is one thing; being a dumb one, well, no.
So give the man room to playact at being Manchin and hold a purple-state Senate seat.
His favorables are up like 20 points since he started performatively pissing the progressives off and we need to find equivalents in other states, enough to change the character of the party preferably.
Yeah, I feel like in a lot of ways the media, left-wing more than right wing, is more responsible for making swing voters think the Squad represents the views of the entire Democratic party. As Matt points out, safe-seat blue dems pushing for crazy policy ideas is a component of the party ecosystem. The problem is the breathless wall-to-wall coverage every time AOC passes gas. I eventually got in the habit of downvoting any article on reddit that from the title could be summarized as "AOC said something," because that is not inherently newsworthy.
Glad Matt wrote this piece. I've long been frustrated with progressive activists who failed to understand the importance of grass roots organizing and long-term persuasion. Conservatives are very, very good at this and progressives are very much not.
Think about the timeline for gay marriage -- the first gay marriage court case was in Minnesota in the early 1970s (lost, of course). Then you had people like Andrew Sullivan making the case for gay marriage in the late 80s after the AIDS epidemic ravaged the community. Hawaii gave approval in the 90s, only for DOMA to pass along with a whole lot of state gay marriage bans, supported strongly by the GOP while Dems went for the compromise civil unions. Then you had states slowly come around in the mid-2000s, while even people like Obama came out publicly for civil unions (and most activists let him slide, because they "knew" he really supported gay marriage but couldn't take the politically difficult stance). It was only when Biden blurted out that Obama was for it -- before the 2012 elections! -- that he had his famous conversation with Robin Roberts in support. And all Dems fell in line behind him. Depending upon where you start counting, that's at least 40 years of a radical idea to go from ridiculous to intriguing to mainstream to accepted. And TBH, I think a lot of mainstream Dem voters (like me) were initially wary of gay marriage and took years of convincing by gay activists ("we want the same as what you have, and by the way we can't get legal spousal benefits") that turned the tide.
Now, think about how trans activists pursued their cause in the 2010s -- pretty much how Matt describes in the piece. I'm supposed to be a good leftist ally so I need to publicly wear a lanyard and include my pronouns on my email signature? Well, okay... but what about the people who find that uncomfortable and need more time being convinced? How are you going to convince them? What about the very real concern that their 12 year old children who are going through a confusing and difficult time might want puberty blockers because they think they might be trans, even though they've never shown that inclination before (note: I say this statement knowing full well that there very much ARE trans kids who are candidates for hormone therapy)? This is a very different paradigm than "we want the same as what you have." So how do you convince people that this is the right course of action?
Is it that conservatives are better at grass roots campaigns, or is it that enough conservatives retained the ability to consider whether their policy preferences had downsides that needed to be acknowledged and addressed rather than shouted down? Progressives are such a mirror image of the 70s/80s religious right in their lack of ability and/or willingness to wonder if they might be wrong about anything.
Rick Perlstein has researched this extensively. Conservative donors (dating back at least to the Mellons in the 1920s) have built and supported a propaganda network to advance their agenda. The whole conservative ecosystem (Evangelical churches, the NRA, Fox News, the Federalist Society, Amway -- see the Atlantic this month for a piece on them) is interconnected. They don't take their losses and move on; they keep funding the infrastructure to combat it. Progressives need to realize this and understand that the issues they care about need *constant* support in the face of an extremely well funded opposition.
Progressives' most damaging weaknesses, IMO, are the inability to: (1) consider whether they are wrong, and (2) evaluate the results of their policy preferences and decide that they were wrong if they did not see improvements in outcomes. No amount of blind allegiance fixes that. Neither of those two things have anything to do with taking their losses and moving on.
Someone recently noted that the MAGA people love RFK Jr and Tulsi despite their prior "liberal" positions or rather because of those positions. They love converts! Winning over dumb hicks is fine as far as it goes, but having the scales fall from the eyes of liberal elites is pure joy.
The progressive movement doesn't have any equivalent to this.
Good counter-example: The "Rich men north of Richmond" guy was supposed to be the progressive equivalent of this for about 2 seconds, then I think he got forgotten about when the progressives promoting him found out he held some non-progressive opinions.
Republicans also now disapprove of everyone behind the Iraq war and domestic spying (which is why those folks switched from Fox appearances to MSNBC appearances). It often takes people a while to realize they’ve been had, but they get there eventually.
At a deep level, conservatism is just better suited to this kind of thing since hierarchy and "following the leader" are intrinsic to their worldview, whereas the progressives tend to think everyone should have their own voice.
Not saying there are no populist revolts on the right, of course, as that obviously happens all the time. But even within the context of a populist revolt, there's more of a willingness among right-wingers to consciously subordinate themselves to a movement or a leader, even if it's just a factional leader.
I don't thing that is really true. Both have hierarchies IMO, it's just that we don't notice them on our own team, or we think that they are natural. Each side disagrees on who should be on the neck end or the foot end of the boot. Neither side objects to (or even acknowledges) the existence of the boot, provided their in-groups and out-groups are accorded their 'deserved' place. Interestingly, both sides are absolutely convinced that their sole aim is actually to help the poor, misguided, inferior souls in the out-group.
Wholeheartedly disagree with this. It is true that both sides have hierarchies, because that's part of human nature, but the scale is so different as to barely be comparable. Hierarchy is a stated value with conservatives, whereas with progressives it is a hypocrisy.
Republicans know that their cut taxes and ban abortion policies are not super popular, and so they message strategically and trust their politicians to enact the plan without publicly explicitly promising to do so.
Democrats, or at least the more progressive ones, think that their preferred policies (green new deal, trans rights) are widely popular and so thing forcing D politicians to promise to do these things will help them win. Some lefties also don’t trust D politicians to actually enact progressive legislation when given the chance, so they try to tie down (easily broken) promises
TL:DR Nothing anyone wants to do it popular, voters hate change. Republicans: know they’re unpopular, don’t promise anything, win, do things.
Democrats: don’t know they’re unpopular, promise everything, lose, do nothing.
We talked about Obergefell last night in l*w school, and I nervously raised my hand to say that a lot of the points from the dissent seemed pretty compelling--there was a very healthy and productive conversation about the topic ten to twenty years ago that seemed to be working the way it was supposed to. And the turn of the century shift in the tactics to intentionally emphasize the conservative aspect of the argument the way Sullivan was pushing for does seem to have worked better than what we were doing for the first 30 years. In retrospect, maybe it is unfortunate that the court made the decision for everyone else, particularly in light of how social movements have been operating over the past decade. Lots of appeals to authority, very few attempts to find common ground.
Good point. I feel similarly about the Supreme Court's presidential immunity decision. Their timing was atrocious (they should have taken the case in January) but the outcome was very defensible. Leave Trump out of it: I want the President to be shielded in his/her official actions and not let any podunk DA be able to prosecute the President as part of an ideological agenda. Oh, and given Jack Smith's revised indictment, it seemed to him and his team that the Court's decision didn't prevent them from prosecuting Trump. They just ran out of time.
If the President's actions are heinous enough, there's still impeachment, battered and weakened as that is.
And the Court left itself plenty of wiggle room to decide on the facts of any individual case that at least part of the president’s conduct wasn’t “official” and therefore not immune; it’s not anything close to the blank check some people have made it out to be, particularly given that it only protects the president personally, not accomplices or co-conspirators.
Unchecked pardon power that amounts to a license to break the law, now that’s a different matter….
Another fascinating thing about that time is that almost all of the circuit courts were reading the recent caselaw and saw where this was going. There could have been a chance that this never would have gotten to SCOTUS at all, but the Sixth Circuit done fucked up with Obergefell v. Hodges and created the circuit split to get cert granted.
yes it seems quite clear that Obergefell or not, gay marriage would have won through the democratic process eventually. It definitely would have taken longer though.
But all those LGBT groups now had nothing to do and thought Trans would move as quickly as gay marriage would.
Trans activism has proceeded primarily through grassroots - your average msnbc watcher supports trans kids. But there has been a short circuit in the last bit, trying to jump to control from 30-40% support, rather than waiting for 60% support.
What if I care about equal rights, healthcare, childhood education, social security, medicare - but I don't really if ICE is enforcing immigration law. Do I still get to be a Democrat?
A once played pickleball against a young woman who advertised her (purported) virginity on her t-shirt. A slow boring quarter zip tastefully imprinted with “relative elite” would be almost as hysterical.
I want to go up to the guys with those t-shirts and say. "I respect your honesty, but it's considered polite and the right thing to do to delete all those photos of your ex from your phone, instead of what you're doing."
I'd love to see Matt at some point give a perspective of how lobbying works. When is it effective, what are its limits, to what extent does a "group" that focuses on lobbying have a legitimate role, etc.
Feels like that's a bit of a missing piece in the ecosystem he describes here.
Land acknowledgements are the perfect manifestation of what was wrong with 2015-24 politics. Useless, performative, divisive, and totally fucking pointless. If you are on the right, you should feel great every time someone does one, because doing so is like watching someone publicly admit they are dumber than a box of rocks politically (and probably otherwise)
Land acknowledgments are one of those things that got a lot of play on twitter but I never once saw in real life living in two different hyper blue cities during that period
They had a land acknowledgement with some guy struggling to read it in a Native American language at the DNC chair elections last Saturday. The "this never happens in real life" bit is patently false. If we don't want normies associating democratic politicians with this kind of thing then we need to not have the party apparatus do it on national television.
Yes, but also from 2000-2013, progressives were right about four big things: Iraq, Gay Marriage, financial deregulation, and the Obama stimulus package being too small. An entire generation came into political maturity watching Democrats show caution on these issues and looking like cowards when the progressive activists were vindicated. It’s colored how an entire generation of Democrats think.
Sorry driving was not an appropriate word here- my apologies.
That said, the point I get to is there’s a lot of catastrophization and borderline persecutory delusion takes on Twitter etc (mostly by academia and NGO types)
Don’t apologize - those individuals are not only completely mentally unbalance but also create a lot of mental stress in both their constituencies (particularly students) and those who they attack as racist , homophobic , etc. There views and actions are insane- not in the technical psychological definition but in the sense that they are totally divorced from the mainstream conception of reality.
I think that the story of the 2010s is that increasingly polarized political spaces increased the efficacy of hectoring/bullying tactics from the wings of the political sides aimed at the moderates, and the wings realizing this and using these tactics to pull politicians and opinion makers away from the center.
It's basically like the primary dynamic, but everywhere. It doesn't matter if you have a winning message for the general if you can't get past the primary, so you sometimes have to adopt a less popular message just to be in the race at all.
Similarly, if more extreme people are gatekeepers to your basic ability to be a credible politician, you have to appease them even if it hurts your performance to the general audience.
I think that's part of it. I also think the 'demographics is destiny' argument on the left created a combination of complacency and loss of perspective. The activist base is operating from a belief of already having the numbers, it's just a matter of getting them to show up. A natural result of that faulty premise is losing touch with what actually is and isn't popular. It isn't clear to me that the most radical voices that have dominated really understand how different their priorities are, and if on top of all of that you live on Twitter and work in an NGO or some other place totally ensconsed in the most progressive of progressive values you might never find out.
And also drove the Republicans insane in important ways, starting from the post-2010 gerrymandering going balls-to-the-wall in many states that traditionally were not bad on the issue.
Yea I mean the biggest irony is that we might be getting to a point where turnout could be a boon for Republicans in some places and save them in areas where 10 years ago they appeared to be threatened. It just involves accepting that a lot of the people they didn't think could be Republicans (for uh... reasons) actually might be. Talk about minds being blown.
The nature of political parties means that once racial depolarization proceeds far enough, many of the Republicans' new non-white voters will have elected officials with a voice. What does everyone expect, that the rural GOP politicians are actually hardcore racists who will shun their new (Latin, Asian, occasionally Black) urban counterparts when they show up in Congress?
ROFL no. Not gonna happen.
Way more likely that the urban left keeps its head in the sand about all of this and keeps calling said (Latin, Asian, occasionally Black) politicians racists for a decade plus, because they clearly haven't gotten the message thus far and tried to woo those voters back.
We see this so much with Sandersistas. They keep asserting they represent a majority opinion as their candidates and faction’s electoral success consistently diminishes.
Not just political spaces. Because of things like geographical sorting, educational attainment polarization, and everyone becoming so online, it's now much more common for (for example) progressives to rarely encounter conservatives in their everyday lives. That can really distort your judgment as to what the costs of those tactics are.
I think social media played a role in shaping engagement from media in that more extreme wings bludgeoning moderates sold well but also was more fun for those same people to do. Like it is much more satisfying to be on the offensive than to have unpopular core beliefs and to have to do triangulation over decades for progress to occur. I guess an advantage in engagement from conflict led to more effective elite bullying but outrunning mass opinion on cultural values (mass persuasion takes longer!). This led to a more hollow electoral situation where the party brand doesn't hold up in conservative states and well structurally you do need to win in conservative states to exercise power. As to why you can't just paper over the cultural values, I'd assume conservative messages are more effective bc they're simple and rely on quick intuition and well enough people aren't progressive or leftists.
The children (new, young staffers) learned they could bully their way into silencing the logical adult voices in the room because of the one (only) way in which they are superior: knowledge of how to use social media. It happened at the universities at the same time. Combine that with them being the first generation to be told from birth that their voices matter (instead of "you have no idea what you are talking about, now go away until you are able to produce a coherent and reasoned argument to support your position"), and you have a Twilight Zone episode: the belief in one's own rightness and righteousness, the power to implement it, and the ability to insulate oneself Gatsby-style from the easily predicted bad results (bonus, you get to ignore reality and blame those results on Those People just not getting with the program).
I think a lot of Gen X and Boomer adults, especially in professional spaces, have been so conditioned to think of themselves as one of the “cool, hip with it kids” that they have a really hard time being grown ups and telling the children “no” - especially when the children frame things as matters of “kindness” and “justice.”
Also the feminization of the professional class has made it more vulnerable to social contagion and manipulative Girl Bully tactics, especially those that utilize pseudo-kindness to get their own way.
Activists exploited the hell out of these weaknesses and insecurities among the gatekeepers.
This is related to a separate rant I have about how public schooling in Canada has become. Because it’s always easier to enact a “kind” policy to solve a problem (e.g., one-off forgiveness on tardiness because failing a class has negative long term effects on the student etc etc etc) the incentives are always for public services to try and reach for these “kind” solutions. Coupled with the “hip” needs of boomers and Xers, our public institutions have literally no ability to play the bad cop anymore and - with each cohort of kids learning they can get away with successively more - public schools are becoming basically lawless. And of course, the kids with affluent and involved parents make it out ok but the kids who would actually benefit from a more structured and disciplined educational experience are instead taught that it’s ok to call their teacher a c*** to her face and pass courses while submitting 0 work.
I’m not some hard-ass old crank here, but it’s truly deplorable, the state we’re reaching.
It used to be “if I let this young person get away with this, it’ll set them on the wrong path” witch has turned into “if I reprimand this young person, it will send them down the wrong path”
Our answer (wife and me) as people who worked in the helping profession (police, counselor, psychologist): People these days use those "out there" ideas to give themselves a sense of identity. Doing this makes someone a "somebody."
Look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Basic needs are being met. But peoples' self-esteem and self-actualizing needs aren't.....so, on both sides they adopt strong ideas to do this for themselves.
Our society used to give people a sense of identity in other ways that were not as destructive to society.
Agree. We can postulate some others. One might have been neighborhood schools. All parents were invested in them, running for PTA, organizing fairs, etc.
One of my powerful senses of identity: I can remember 40-45 years ago laying in bed at night thinking of the children asleep in their rooms, not knowing that those rooms were provided by the work their parents did. THAT was a sense of identity that I carry with me more than my actual work gave me (which was powerful in and of itself).
Appreciate anyone who puts relevant topics in the concept of Maslow’s hierarchy. I learned it in psych class in college in ancient times (1960) and still find it very useful today. An even more usual concept from those classes was cognitive dissonance, and also the idea that individuals could be grouped by whether they were driven by a need for power, affiliation or achievement. All obviously simplifications rather than nuanced diagnoses of various situations, but nevertheless all incredibly insightful and helpful over 6 decades later.
I taught psychology for 30 years. I hope many of my students learned what you learned and can see those ideas in their current lives. It's very rewarding to read this. Thanks.
Some people touched on this a bit, but too many centrist/center-left members and staffers weren't willing to spend social and political capital on telling the weirdest parts of the very online left to stop bothering them. It's easier in certain spaces to start saying "Latinx" in 2017 when activists online bother you and then drop it by 2019. I think we also underestimate how the fact that Congressional staff are paid a lot less than a lot of other policy professionals from the same educational backgrounds, which leads to weird selection effects.
1– Online fundraising platforms make it possible for a wider variety of candidate types to compete in and win primaries, and incentivizes campaigns that cater to the people who are most willing to donate. “Cares a lot about politics” and “moderate” is a very small slice of the Venn diagram, and even elite centrists are pretty un-representative of persuadable voters in general.
2– Social media broke down longstanding barriers between private and public self-presentation. This makes the sort of preference falsification that say, Obama engaged in in 2008 a lot more difficult, because it’s much easier for the general public to get a sense for what a typical academic/community organizer actually thinks, and because it’s much harder to maintain message discipline when your communication with your friends and colleagues overlaps with your communication with the general public. Some candidates still manage to do it (I think that MGP is one), but it requires some unusual habits and psychological discipline. I think that we’ll eventually evolve new norms to deal with this, but we’re not there yet.
Social media is a big part of it, but another significant factor is that after 2010 and especially 2014, it became much harder to imagine that progress was going to happen via the mechanisms Matt describes. And so lots of people started looking for other strategies. One was that if everyone publicly espoused their most left wing actual views, then more stuff would actually pass. This was true but I think had bad consequences downstream (that's basically Matt's theory of the Biden administration). The other is giving up on broader politics and just focusing on making your own institution, which is composed almost all of liberals anyway, adopt the policies you want directly. Again this worked but the consequences for politics outside those institutions and for the way those institutions function caused serious problems.
It actually worked, though. If you have a narrow majority then having a disciplined party enables you to pass significant legislation. The Biden administration passed a lot of legislation that could not have gotten through with those small majorities and the Obama-era party.
It works in terms of getting some of the passed, but make sure those things are worth potentially losing the next election over. Some of them are! The ACA, for instance (it was a loser before it became well enough established to be a winner)
If they're just going to be overturned or sabotage a bunch of other more important priorities then it's a very pyrrhic victory.
The problem was that a lot of the legislation was destructive for the party’s continuation in power because it was often not popular outside the party elites who existed in their own bubble. In addition, a lot of it turned out to be unworkable in the real world because it was so ideological. Their “party discipline” based on the belief that their leaders were omniscient and therefore must be obeyed in lockstep in order to maintain their power at all costs turned out to be a completely false premise. The should have paid more attention to the critical voices in their own party. Oh No, listen to Manchin and Sinema - horror of horrors! As you can probably guess - I believe that Chuckie and Nancy and their actions and words are two of the main reasons that the party that viewed itself as having manifest destiny on its side might be in the wilderness for awhile. And since I am a centrist libertarian ( (definitely small l } I am very glad that the country has escaped that path to destruction .
Really? It seems like aside from a bunch of stimulus that shouldn't have been passed and caused a lot of inflation, most of what Biden did get through was bipartisan legislation that required compromise with Republicans
The IRA was a pretty significant piece of legislation. Plus a lot of stuff was done administratively through a similar process (persuading the agency heads rather than senators).
The IRA handed out a lot of money true. But the unspent parts will not likely be clawed back because it was passed through reconciliation and not regular order.
I think a big apart of it is both Obama’s victory as a black man, the shape shift in public opinion on gay rights, and then Trump’s victory as a crazy person who broke lots of taboos made a lot of people feel like anything was possible. That the Overton Window as far wider than we had thought, and that we could push for all our ideals without suffering politically. Fairly or not these events caused a whole generation of political conventional wisdom to be called into question.
And it turns out that just because some of that political conventional wisdom was wrong doesn’t mean it all was.
I feel like this has got to be tied to Twitter and instead of communicating through press release people needed a direct personal relationship with small donors and local people who are interested in politics.
People thinking that twitter is real life? Instead of understanding that Twitter mobs have less people than a High school football game on a Friday night in Texas. And should be given about the same deference.
Kelly Ayotte was elected Governor of NH in part by running against Massachusetts. The Mayor of Boston is being called before Congress to get embarrassed on immigration issues. Electeds in non-competititve deep blue voting districts do have a negative impact beyond their district.
I agree in principle, but I'm not sure I trust Democratic party primary voters (very much including myself) to reliably judge which candidates seem normal
I don't know if people should try to pick the most "normal" candidate per se, because what does that even mean. But what you can look for is *crossover appeal* which is the key in any popularity contest, whether you're a politician, athlete, or other celebrity.
"What I think is not valid, though, is staffers for Squad members publicly opining that Democrats would do better nationally if they all acted like AOC."
I hope that all staffers, not just Squad ones, are reading this article.
I think, if people in the party knew that a little bit of sparring was reasonable, but we're not going to tank anybody's run over it, it'd be a lot easier to differentiate one another, unfortunately, we kinda just let inter-party fights go way too far.
I don't think we have a really good way to signal to each other that this isn't really a material fight though.
I agree with the broader thesis (change minds before you run on issues, rather than the reverse), but I didn't find Matt's answer to the question posed by the title satisfying. What do you do if you're an activist with sincere but unpopular beliefs? Ok, a select few can become influential opinion journalists, and another select few can become successful "apolitical" artists and then smuggle their political ideas into their work. But those are not attainable for most. What if you're just an ordinary activist?
I think this is why so much activism turns into pressuring politicians. If you're a small local organization on issue X, you can probably get a meeting with your Representative. But you almost certainly don't have the power to influence technocratic elites or mass public opinion. So if you're not supposed to pressure politicians, what are you to do?
“ I don’t totally understand how it is that decidedly conservative people who routinely vote for Republican Party candidates and complain about government spending have reconciled themselves to the apparent contradiction, but they clearly have.” Hahaha, you just explained how in the first half of this substack. How did Obama reconcile himself to being against gay marriage? Pragmatism. If you think a super-popular program should be eliminated (or more likely, modified) you quietly move on.
I think social security should be modified to be personally managed accounts, but I don’t want my Republican candidates to touch that.
Isn't one honest answer that a lot of people become conservatives not because of across the board libertarianism but because they fear change? So if a program is already here and works well enough, that doesn't scare them like a new program would?
Of course. There are a lot of people with motivations ranging from atavism to pragmatism and idealism. A lot of people are progressive because they like free stuff, but if a thoughtful conservative wants to engage progressives those aren’t the ones to seek.
Notice that he didn’t say this about the candidates, which is what you’re talking about - he said this about the voters, who don’t have a pragmatic reason.
Disagree. In fact in my post (I'm a voter not a candidate) I wrote, "I think social security should be modified to be personally managed accounts, but I don’t want my Republican candidates to touch that."
I'm a voter who is pragmatic. I'm pragmatically voting for candidates who pragmatically choose not to do what I wish could be done.
Now, if you mean, how voters think rather than how they vote, I'd suggest that none of us really know that. Some are pragmatic like me, and some are probably low information voters cheering for their team.
Another thing to do with sincere but unpopular beliefs is to try to persuade people that they are actually good, to make them popular. Same-sex marriage folks did that.
"My view of what I do in life is “persuasive writing aimed at relatively elite audiences.” "
Elite audiences like...moi? What a flatterer -- I bet you say that to all the subscribers.
Reminds me of one of Dubyas best jokes: "This is an impressive crowd. The haves and the have mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base".
Different times!
It's funny to think of the way the stereotype of the "typical Republican" has shifted over time.
1980-2000: Heartless Wall Street Shark
2000-2008: Fundamentalist Christian Warhawk
2009-2016: Paranoid Gun Guy
2016-????: Internet Troll who Needs a Girlfriend
Trump’s version: ”I love uneducated people”.
He is one
😂😂😂🤣😆😂😅🤣😺🤑😛😃😄🤩😆😀😸🤪😜😁😝😆😛😅🤪😀😜😃😄😝🤩😺🤑😂🤠🤣😁😸😀😛😝🤑😆😜😄😅🤣😁🤪😂🤩😺😃😆😺😸🤩🤪🤑😂😃😀😜😅😁😛🤣😄😝😛🤩🤪🤑😆🤣😁😃😂😅😺😝🤠😜😄😀😝😛😃😸😀🤑😜😁😂🤠😅😄🤣😺😆🤪🤩😁🤑😄😺😀🤣😆😅😜😝😛😸🤩🤪😃😂😆😺🤪🤩😛😝😜😁🤣😸😃😅🤑😀😄😂😆😂😛😃😜🤩😀🤪😸🤑😁😺😅🤣😝😀😸😂🤣😅😃😺😆😛😜🤩😄😝🤠😁🤑🤪😝😄🤪😃😆😜😂🤣🤑😀😛😺😅🤩😁😸😁😆😺😂😜😄🤑🤣😛😝😅🤩😀😃😀😝🤩😆😄😂😸🤑😛🤠😃🤣🤪😅😜😁😁😺🤩😝😂🤪🤣🤠😛😜😄😅😃😆😸😀🤑😅😄🤠🤩😃🤣😀😁🤑😸😂😛😝😜😺😆🤪😛😜😺😅😂🤩😆🤣😃😝😁🤑😀😸😄🤪😛😅🤣😁😃🤩😂😝🤪🤑😆😀😸😄😂😂😂🤣😆😂😂😂🤣😆😂😂😂🤣😆
This is well on pace to be one of the most upvoted comments in Slow Boring history, and it makes sense given who the upvoters are and how they've been described.
“… given who the upvoters are….”
They’re “liking” it ironically, in order to signal that they see through the flattery.
But the thing about competent flattery is that even people who think they see through it are still affected by it.
“And that, Emil, is what I do all day.” https://youtu.be/A1OdrAUthbg?si=0fvv7KYJ9V59GuGF
"Like," is nice. Now, please subscribe. :)
No, you're just the humble patron who funds the endeavor, not the audience.
"...you're just the humble patron..."
You misspelled "peon".
Nah, the peons are the ones who have to actually do work for the master take-smith. So Ben, in other words.
I think the spelling you're looking for is "rube."
"Elite" means the kind of person JD Vance has decided to hate.
""Elite" means the kind of person JD Vance has decided to hate."
Hey, we both hate the faculty of the Yale Law School, so we have that in common.
Except, he had to go to school there to wise up, and I'm a quicker learner.
Yes, he became as the English would say, "A smartarse".
Not you, me means people like Lisa C and me.
The winning message to conservatives regarding the Child Tax Credit would be that it allows more women to be stay-at-home Moms.
GOP would have to choose between expanded ctc and trump tax cuts. Or risk absolutely exploding the deficit. I think we know which one they prefer…
Or adopt the Romney plan from 6 years ago which neithet raised taxes nor increased the deficit.
Where's Mitt Romney again?
Looking forward to his own planet in heaven more every day, I think.
He refused to endorse Kamala, gambling on having some role in the post-Trump party, only for Trump to win and guarantee there won't be a post-Trump party within Romney's lifetime.
It'll be interesting to see if conditions make it so Democrats can pitch themselves as the party of fiscal frugality and Republicans as profligate spenders, when the perceptions have been the opposite for a long time.
Voters love nothing more than fiscal frugality. Especially when you provide all the lovely details of what that means.
At the very least we should have been doing that since the infamous Bush tax cuts and even more the 2017 Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act.
I think they won’t even get a CR out on party lines, much less an extension of the TCJA. This is especially true if the GOP can’t replace their House seats.
That's just a way of trolling "femininsts." Republicans are not really "for" anything except power to enact upward income transfers. Everything else is tactical.
I would describe them as wanting to stop income transfers because they don't want downward income transfers. What upward income transfers do they support?
How else could you describe cutting personal income tax rates and corporate tax rates and borrowing the money to pay for it?
That maybe bad fiscal policy. But letting people keep more of their own money isn't an upward transfer.
So I guess the expanded EITC isn't a downward transfer, either?
If it weren't refundable, then it would not be a downward transfer. But the fact that it is refundable (I.e, it is money paid beyond what taxes are due) does make it a downward transfer.
I support the EITC, by the way. But the rationale mathew uses isn't wrong.
compared to not cutting rates it is.
Let's go back to 2017. A bill passed that reduced corporate tax rates (hooray!) but instead of making up the lost revenue also cut rates in a way that most of the reduction was reduction in revenues from high income people and the result was an in crease in borrowing. _I_ call that an upward transfer of income. You don't have to call it that, but I continue to refer to that bill as the "Tac Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Acto of 2017."
It is if you have to borrow money to pay for it.
the money that is bein borrowed is paying for federal expenditures.
not taxing people isn't the same thing as giving them money
Bad fiscal policy is how I would describe it. But I still don't see how that's an upward transfer. Most of that borrowed money goes to downward spending not upward spending.
Thanks for the challenge!!!
I guess everything depends on framing. I'm judging against a tax reform that reduces taxes on corporations but raises individual taxes enough to make deficits equal to public investment.
But 2017 was an upward transfer just looking at whose incomes increased, "passing through" the corporate reduction to shareholders.
And in the long run don't low income people benefit more from growth than the better off? So the negative growth effects of the deficit falls more heavily on the those with higher marginal utilities of consumption.
The first thing that comes to my mind is in the workplace. If the government loosens labor laws and weakens unions, employers can pay their workers less and give more money to shareholders and executives. You can call this an upward income transfer, because the recipients are richer than rank-and-file workers, while the income production requires the workers' labor.
I doubt unions and labor laws in the aggregate and in the long run shift income downward, at least not very much.
Mortgage tax breaks, I think? 529 plans?
Those are certainly regressive relative to not existing, but they mostly let you keep more of your money without paying tax, that's not really an income transfer.
I dunno. My understanding is that tax breaks are spending. Mortgage holders, like me, are wealthier on average. If a guy who rents sees money go from his paycheck to fund my mortgage interest tax deduction, is that not income distribution? Just because I don’t get a check (well, until I file my taxes)?
How is the money going from his paycheck to do that?
1) The upper income people most benefiting from the mortgage interest deduction are probably contributing more to the federal government than they receive in benefits (if we didn't have a deficit, then there must be _some_ people who are sending more to the government than they are getting in return, and I assume that's true even with our deficit).
2) As long as I'm contributing more than I'm receiving, a reduction in what I receive is not coming out of his paycheck (I guess unless he works for the federal government directly and we're cutting funding)
401k, 529, mortgage interest deduction are all things that definitely benefit higher income earners (not least because of higher marginal tax rates) more than lower income earners, but framing them to individuals as "taking it out of someone else's paycheck" doesn't seem like a winning phrasing.
From a federal government balancing budget standpoint, thinking of tax breaks as 'spending' can be relevant, since it's returning money to a subgroup of people, but I don't think it's a good argument to sell individual voters on it.
Tax breaks are not spending! They are things we are not taxing. We don't tax X, does that mean the government is subsidizing X? - No!
E.g. We don't tax laughter, does that mean the government is spending on laughter? No!
Deductions instead of partial tax credits for stuff.
Is that something that large numbers of conservatives value? Like obviously there are loud people on twitter about that, but it's not clear to me that a large part of the conservative coalition is dedicated to recreating the stay at home mom paradigm.
Conservatives seem more aligned with viewing a married couple as a single unit. So, if one member of the couple is working, then the work requirement is satisfied.
This is a really clever way to make the argument, @KateLE. I wonder if anyone tried this type of proposal to Manchin to satisfy his work requirement concern?
I can't see Progressives going for it because single mothers would not qualify.
Right, and it could result in perverse financial incentives to stay in a bad marriage.
Yes, as opposed to perverse financial incentives to become/remain single mothers. Every policy has positive and negative outcomes.
I feel like this is a really stretched way to define perverse incentive. Bad marriages certainly exist on a continuum where they overlap with good marriages and mixed / medium marriages.
There are going to be millions of marriages that are in danger of ending but "shouldn't" and millions that "should" end but won't.
I apologize that I'm probably not expressing the idea well, but something strikes me as very off when it comes to primarily being concerned with encouraging bad marriages to stay together. Policies that operate over marriages operate over all marriages, there's no way around it.
I think we all need someone whispering in our ear at all times: "The status quo is not without perverse incentives. Are these better or worse ones?"
How many single mothers, realistically, are not working? This would still help them
Because it does not address the actual issue progressives care about --reducing child poverty -- which is far more prevalent (400%-500%) among single-mother households than among two-parent households. When you argue that we need to do some kind of trick to get conservatives "on board" you are simply acknowledging that conservatives don't actually care about reducing child poverty, so they need to be bribed with public funds into raising themselves up to the lowest possible bar of human moral sensibility: protecting impoverished toddlers. But there are lots of ways to bribe these morally defective conservatives into taking actions that will result in better outcomes. We don't need to add expensive caveats to already expensive programs.
You are welcome to provide your own proposal!
??? Why would single mothers not qualify They woud get the same 2-3 year exemption.
I think the idea being that if there's a work requirement, but it's imposed on couples as a single unit, then so long as one parent is working the other doesn't need to, period, not just in the first 2-3 years. Whereas with a single parent the exemption ends and the stay at home possibility ends.
That would certainly be my knock against that formulation.
And it has other positive qualities besides that one!
As a conservative I approve this message.
It’s something that a lot of conservative *women*, and just women in general, value.
Most women, except the most educated who are in “fulfilling” careers, want to cut back on work to be with their children. And even a lot of professional class women, in my experience, feel the same way once they actually have children, even though it is stigmatized among well educated women to say so too loud.
It's always fascinating to read the arguments in this regard that say that this is a bad thing for women, even when so many women genuinely want it.
I look forward to the day when a lot of dads genuinely want to do it too.
I do too, and I really think a lot of dads should be encouraged to do so if they want to without shame.
yes the data is pretty clear. Women are MUCH less willing to date and marry someone who is below their station.
A male doctor or lawyer totally ok with marrying the cute waitress. The female doctor or lawyer would never consider the marrying the cute bussboy.
I know many working class women who love staying home with their kids because it offers them a lot more creativity and autonomy than their jobs so. It is more of a profession. They usually aren't home long - only when they can't dons jobs that will cover the cost of working - because they need the money. But a lot of educated people think paid work is more fulfilling than staying at home when it often isnt
Matt has observed plenty of times in the past that those that make the argument of paid work being fulfilling overwhelmingly come from the few people that genuinely love all aspects of their jobs. But for most it strikes me that ¿por qué no los dos? dominates, as you say.
And also. Trying to type on a phone while on a city bus leads to more nonsensical typos than usual. But I think you get my drift
My equivalent of this is typing on a tablet just after I've awoken.
A lot of educated people think that, and apparently a lot of working class men too.
agreed especially in the younger years.
Not to mention it's just REALLY nice to come home and not have to spend the whole evening doing chores.
I think there's a vast swathe of small c conservative people who very definitely believe that at a deep level and are somewhat low key disgruntled that modern capitalism doesn't allow traditional 1950s gender roles. But it tends to come out in pretty subtle ways most of the time. But just to go any "stay at home dad" discussion on social media and see just how many men AND women think there is something slightly unnatural about a man doing that instead of a woman.
"...slightly unnatural..."
I have no objection to saying that, on the whole, more women want to stay home and take care of children than men do. That's a quantifiable reality that can't be denied.
But we should absolute push back against the idea of parents being in non-traditional gender as somehow "unnatural." My husband takes care of our kids while I work, and we have absolutely come to this arrangement because it's what's "natural" to both of us as individuals. He likes baking, playing with toys, and just basically being like a Big Kid hanging out with Little Kids. Conversely, he couldn't abide my job...the paperwork, the dealing with idiots, the office attire, etc. And I hate staying home with the kids. I don't WANT to play with them. Something I routinely say to them is, "Kids, you have to play for yourself. I can't do it for you."
At home, we do slip into slightly more traditional gender roles. I still do much of the home decorating and make him kill the spiders and mow the lawn.
But work nowadays -- at least white collar professional work -- is not gendered the way the trades are. There's nothing weird about a mom being a doctor while a dad stays at home and does house projects -- in fact, this arrangement can easily exist while both parents still very much fit into "mom" and "dad" roles.
TL/DR: Just because sometimes unusual does mean it's unnatural.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
"Kids, you have to play for yourself. I can't do it for you." amazing! lol
Excellent comment.
As long as you don’t say, "Kids, you have to play WITH yourself. I can't do it for you.” That could lead to problems in interpretation.
There's a very funny scene in Hunt for the Wilderpeople premised on this misinterpretation!
"There's nothing weird about a mom being a doctor while a dad stays at home and does house projects -- in fact, this arrangement can easily exist while both parents still very much fit into "mom" and "dad" roles."
I agree that this arrangement can easily exist. But its certainly still "weird" as in it's not very common.
Note I say this as someone who's wife does all the construction and fixes the cars. Again, it obviously does happen, but it's certainly not normal. And I very much doubt it ever will be.
Also if you just look what conservative women DO, most of them work.
A lot of liberals like to lie to themselves about this and pretend conservatives are basically all like the Duggars and want to restore 1950's gender roles, but that's just an affect of the larger phenomenon that partisans always lie about their political adversaries and nutpick the most extreme members of the opposing coalition as supposedly being what "they" believe.
Agreed, but we have to be careful to distinguish between what people *do* from what they *would prefer to do.* (A statement that obviously can be taken to extremes.)
It would appeal to the JD Vance wing of the party, which appears to be in ascendency.
These past few weeks it seems like JD's priorities have been sidelined.
"Donald Trump does not care about your pet issues" has a batting average of 1.000.
If you could restrict it to white people they’d be all for it. Black stay at home moms would be considered welfare queens!
Do conservatives want minority women to be stay at home moms or is that only for the herrenvolk?
Republicans are fine with it as long as the married dad is working.
only if he makes enough to pay for the party.
GOP won handily with lower-income and lower-education voters.
I don't know how it's possible to not have seen them doing exactly that without deliberately avoiding seeing it.
It would also drive a wedge in the Republican Party between those who would support it on these grounds, and those who are really revved up about demanding work requirements.
I was trying to figure out if conservatives preferred limiting the benefits to working families, or if they preferred limiting it to families with stay-at-home parents. Then I realized that they would ideally prefer to limit it to families with one working parent and one stay-at-home parent.
they’ll tolerate a couple working moms married to house husbands just to look “neutral”
Which is something progressives find offensive, because apparently individuals shouldn't have agency over their pursuits.
I don't think so, because they would get mad when they learn it doesn't just go to stay at home moms who "deserve" it.
Hence calls for Hungary style tax policy where married stay at home mom's with 4 kids get a tax cut, it's a tiny slice of the population but they are largely conservative Christian types so the idea becomes popular.
"Government should encourage the formation of healthy families and we don't want government dictating what that looks like."
Not as long as the money goes to non-white families also
DISAGREE. This was precisely the old recipe that used to work, and Matt has written about it before. A program would primarily serve white people, but disproportionately help Black people, and that would thread the needle to satisfy both groups.
On a proportional basis the stay-at-home moms would White, Asian and immigrants of whatever census category, because these are the groups that tend to get and remain married the most.
Unconstitutional. 14th amendment.
Romney pitched it by having it replace other welfare programs like TANF and CDCTC, which I think is very reasonable.
EDIT: not sure why you deleted that, Ben, I thought you made a good point.
Like all 5 people on TANF these days
Isn't the problem with The Squad that normies see them and mistake their views for the party views? Especially when they are getting such social media traction from the tiny noisy far left?
Similar problem with MTG and some others on the right, to be fair.
It’s that and it’s their supporters not getting the rest of the country is not like them. Having a bunch of progressive activists chase people down in bathrooms and parking garages because someone is not far enough to the left for them is not productive. It’s the same people who were constantly saying that we needed to find a more progressive Democrat in West Virginia to replace Joe Manchin. Sorry that candidate does not exist in West Virginia.
I think fighting with Joe Manchin was probably a good thing, it let him show he was different from other democrats. I don't think the Swearingin campaigns really did him in or threatened him int he slightest. But he was never going to win a senate election in 2024 as polarization increased due to factors outside his control. He squeaked by in 2018.
Swearengin is such an excellent case example. Just an absolute indictment of the idea that left wing economic populism wins you a senate seat in a red state.
If he’d looked at 2018 and gone independent, then spent the next six years caucusing with Democrats but loudly bitching about everything they said and did, then he might have been able to squeak ‘24. But to do so late in the game wouldn’t have worked and he frankly didn’t want the job anymore.
He was also 77.
And apparently the only near-octogenarian or octogenarian in Congress who wants to go the fuck home to go boating and play with their grandchildren.
I don't understand what the hell is wrong with all the other old folks in Congress...
This is something I thought may have been missing from Matt's take: does the gerontocratic nature of Congress arguably empower (perhaps of necessity) interest group agita because you can't trust that Congress will meaningfully reflect the concerns of your generation based solely on the age of its membership creating a default set of shared vibes and experience?
They get social media traction from the right, too. It's not simply a mistake the normies are making, but a mistake they are being deliberately set up for by various actors -- foreign and domestic -- who are motivated to portray the Democratic party as extreme.
I'm not even sure at this point what the Democrats can do about it. MAGA will believe pretty much anything (see Pizzagate) regardless of what the Squad does or how regular Democrats campaign. For me, this is the HUGE problem in Matt's article -- even if Democrats do what he suggests, it may not be enough to counter the flood of misinformation.
MAGA doesn't actually matter! Every single time lefties bring up that nothing they can say or do will influence the nutjobs, it's sheer sophistry, a distraction from the fact that everything they say and do influences the mushy middle normies.
Federal elections are won or lost in the minds of sub-to-exurban swing voters who don't care to pay a ton of attention and vote based on vibes, some of which are based on their personal circumstances, some on the national environment.
A lot of the national environment, for a long time now, consists of utterly stupid or insane crap coming from left-of-center organizations, celebrities, or protestors. This is the downside of the center-left dominating the cultural heights; it's very easy to end up with a spotlight on left-wing batshittery, and it matters.
Of course MAGA matters. When Hegseth was up for confirmation and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) opposed him, it was a targeted MAGA media blitz that almost immediately flipped her vote in a matter of days. Unlike "crap coming from left-of-center", MAGA pressure involves unconcealed threats of political violence, made credible by the Jan 6th pardons conducted by the MAGA man himself. Every Republican who voted to confirm RFK Jr is scared of Trump's MAGA base. When Trump and Elon Musk violate the constitution as we speak, the Republican-majority Congress refuses to act because of their MAGA base.
Federal elections cover the executive branch once every four years, which is a third of the government intentionally designed to be limited. It's Congress that has the authority to pass durable and lasting legislation.
From the perspective of Democratic strategies to win elections, MAGA doesn’t matter and is not an excuse in the manner it is frequently used.
Context clearly indicated this meaning in my original comment.
I am also talking about winning elections. MAGA is a huge voting bloc, so for example when Joni Ernst decided to back down, the obvious factor was that if she disobeyed she would never win an election again, she would be replaced by a more compliant candidate that will win the MAGA majority in her electorate. No one is talking about challenging her from the mushy middle to exploit this MAGA capitulation because the mushy middle isn't large enough there to make it competitive. This is why some are nervous about midterms for the Senate in particular, there is a "math problem" for Democrats because there is higher polarization and fewer competitive seats.
This continues to make no sense. Not least because you're conflating the concept of a MAGA majority in Iowa's general electorate, which does not exist, with one in Ernst's primary electorate, which might possibly exist.
If you want to pretend that what the left loudly does and says and the degree to which Democrats can or want to generate space between themselves and the left doesn't matter, fine. I'm not going to do that.
"MAGA is a huge voting bloc"
sure in Republican primary elections, NOT in general elections.
Seems like it would be really easy to punch left at e.g. the batshit extremists who are sharing Luigi memes on reddit.
Wouldn't that be a breath of fresh air? Amid all the partisan schreeching & whataboutism, to hear prominent Dem politicians take a principled stand against openly advocating for political violence? Why won't they do it?
"While we have deep reservations about how insurance companies treat the American people, we stand strongly against the use of vio--"
There you go being subtle, and there the audience goes, looking for something more interesting and easier to digest.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5042199-sanders-defends-warren-united-healthcare-ceo-shooting/
Yeah, that's basically exactly what Sanders and Warren said per the link, right? It's just that no one paid attention.
But to Blary's point, neither punched left. They could have called Luigi a terrorist (he is). They didn't. Instead, they used the killing to bring attention back their preferred health care policy.
"People who kill others over policy disputes are no better than the terrorists who invaded the Capitol on January 6th and deserve to be tried and imprisoned for their crimes."
Then, on a completely separate day in a completely separate venue, you can pivot back to "private medical insurance bad."
I'm pretty sure they did exactly that? It just didn't get pushed out by the social media algorithms and bots. And if it doesn't get pushed out on social media, it basically doesn't exist in the mind of the average voter.
Amusing to see the sheep join together in praising Trump's Gaza proposal to the skies. Whatever comes out of the Orange God's mouth.
"Four legs good, two legs *better*!"
Ding ding ding. Plus there’s a perception (true or not) that unless there was some public break, the Squad would have a hotline to the Democratic White House. That’s VERY unappealing to people who disapprove (to put it mildly) of The Squad.
Exactly. I don't see how you can say it's bad for Dick Durbin to take unpopular positions but it's fine for AOC. She's way more famous than Dick Durbin ever was.
This is why I'd like to see AOC run for the 2028 nomination. She's becoming a savvy, pragmatic politician and it wouldn't surprise me at all to see her do some really significant moderating of her positions. That, more than anything else, would help take some of the steam out of the out of touch progressive cause.
Maybe a little like John Fetterman? But, voting for Pam Bondi . . . I dunno, man. Being an iconoclast is one thing; being a dumb one, well, no.
Was he the swing vote? No.
So give the man room to playact at being Manchin and hold a purple-state Senate seat.
His favorables are up like 20 points since he started performatively pissing the progressives off and we need to find equivalents in other states, enough to change the character of the party preferably.
Didn’t Fetterman just come out in favor of Trump’s Gaza plan?
Oy gevalt.
Pretty much:
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5128425-john-fetterman-donald-trump-gaza-takeover-idea/
I think the point is if she is seen as fringe, it doesn’t matter what she says. Ron Paul was a nut but he never hurt the party because he was ignored
Not to mention fawning media that turned AOC and the squad to "stars" instead of the backbenchers they should be.
Yeah, I feel like in a lot of ways the media, left-wing more than right wing, is more responsible for making swing voters think the Squad represents the views of the entire Democratic party. As Matt points out, safe-seat blue dems pushing for crazy policy ideas is a component of the party ecosystem. The problem is the breathless wall-to-wall coverage every time AOC passes gas. I eventually got in the habit of downvoting any article on reddit that from the title could be summarized as "AOC said something," because that is not inherently newsworthy.
Glad Matt wrote this piece. I've long been frustrated with progressive activists who failed to understand the importance of grass roots organizing and long-term persuasion. Conservatives are very, very good at this and progressives are very much not.
Think about the timeline for gay marriage -- the first gay marriage court case was in Minnesota in the early 1970s (lost, of course). Then you had people like Andrew Sullivan making the case for gay marriage in the late 80s after the AIDS epidemic ravaged the community. Hawaii gave approval in the 90s, only for DOMA to pass along with a whole lot of state gay marriage bans, supported strongly by the GOP while Dems went for the compromise civil unions. Then you had states slowly come around in the mid-2000s, while even people like Obama came out publicly for civil unions (and most activists let him slide, because they "knew" he really supported gay marriage but couldn't take the politically difficult stance). It was only when Biden blurted out that Obama was for it -- before the 2012 elections! -- that he had his famous conversation with Robin Roberts in support. And all Dems fell in line behind him. Depending upon where you start counting, that's at least 40 years of a radical idea to go from ridiculous to intriguing to mainstream to accepted. And TBH, I think a lot of mainstream Dem voters (like me) were initially wary of gay marriage and took years of convincing by gay activists ("we want the same as what you have, and by the way we can't get legal spousal benefits") that turned the tide.
Now, think about how trans activists pursued their cause in the 2010s -- pretty much how Matt describes in the piece. I'm supposed to be a good leftist ally so I need to publicly wear a lanyard and include my pronouns on my email signature? Well, okay... but what about the people who find that uncomfortable and need more time being convinced? How are you going to convince them? What about the very real concern that their 12 year old children who are going through a confusing and difficult time might want puberty blockers because they think they might be trans, even though they've never shown that inclination before (note: I say this statement knowing full well that there very much ARE trans kids who are candidates for hormone therapy)? This is a very different paradigm than "we want the same as what you have." So how do you convince people that this is the right course of action?
Is it that conservatives are better at grass roots campaigns, or is it that enough conservatives retained the ability to consider whether their policy preferences had downsides that needed to be acknowledged and addressed rather than shouted down? Progressives are such a mirror image of the 70s/80s religious right in their lack of ability and/or willingness to wonder if they might be wrong about anything.
Rick Perlstein has researched this extensively. Conservative donors (dating back at least to the Mellons in the 1920s) have built and supported a propaganda network to advance their agenda. The whole conservative ecosystem (Evangelical churches, the NRA, Fox News, the Federalist Society, Amway -- see the Atlantic this month for a piece on them) is interconnected. They don't take their losses and move on; they keep funding the infrastructure to combat it. Progressives need to realize this and understand that the issues they care about need *constant* support in the face of an extremely well funded opposition.
Progressives' most damaging weaknesses, IMO, are the inability to: (1) consider whether they are wrong, and (2) evaluate the results of their policy preferences and decide that they were wrong if they did not see improvements in outcomes. No amount of blind allegiance fixes that. Neither of those two things have anything to do with taking their losses and moving on.
Someone recently noted that the MAGA people love RFK Jr and Tulsi despite their prior "liberal" positions or rather because of those positions. They love converts! Winning over dumb hicks is fine as far as it goes, but having the scales fall from the eyes of liberal elites is pure joy.
The progressive movement doesn't have any equivalent to this.
Good counter-example: The "Rich men north of Richmond" guy was supposed to be the progressive equivalent of this for about 2 seconds, then I think he got forgotten about when the progressives promoting him found out he held some non-progressive opinions.
Really? Majorities of Republicans now favor gay marriage.
Trump was able to distance himself from the pro-life side and still retain support.
For that matter Trump has said no cuts for SS or Medicare. And been saying that since the start.
Republicans also now disapprove of everyone behind the Iraq war and domestic spying (which is why those folks switched from Fox appearances to MSNBC appearances). It often takes people a while to realize they’ve been had, but they get there eventually.
At a deep level, conservatism is just better suited to this kind of thing since hierarchy and "following the leader" are intrinsic to their worldview, whereas the progressives tend to think everyone should have their own voice.
Not saying there are no populist revolts on the right, of course, as that obviously happens all the time. But even within the context of a populist revolt, there's more of a willingness among right-wingers to consciously subordinate themselves to a movement or a leader, even if it's just a factional leader.
I don't thing that is really true. Both have hierarchies IMO, it's just that we don't notice them on our own team, or we think that they are natural. Each side disagrees on who should be on the neck end or the foot end of the boot. Neither side objects to (or even acknowledges) the existence of the boot, provided their in-groups and out-groups are accorded their 'deserved' place. Interestingly, both sides are absolutely convinced that their sole aim is actually to help the poor, misguided, inferior souls in the out-group.
Wholeheartedly disagree with this. It is true that both sides have hierarchies, because that's part of human nature, but the scale is so different as to barely be comparable. Hierarchy is a stated value with conservatives, whereas with progressives it is a hypocrisy.
I always appreciate it when someone inadvertently provides a good example of my point.
Republicans know that their cut taxes and ban abortion policies are not super popular, and so they message strategically and trust their politicians to enact the plan without publicly explicitly promising to do so.
Democrats, or at least the more progressive ones, think that their preferred policies (green new deal, trans rights) are widely popular and so thing forcing D politicians to promise to do these things will help them win. Some lefties also don’t trust D politicians to actually enact progressive legislation when given the chance, so they try to tie down (easily broken) promises
TL:DR Nothing anyone wants to do it popular, voters hate change. Republicans: know they’re unpopular, don’t promise anything, win, do things.
Democrats: don’t know they’re unpopular, promise everything, lose, do nothing.
We talked about Obergefell last night in l*w school, and I nervously raised my hand to say that a lot of the points from the dissent seemed pretty compelling--there was a very healthy and productive conversation about the topic ten to twenty years ago that seemed to be working the way it was supposed to. And the turn of the century shift in the tactics to intentionally emphasize the conservative aspect of the argument the way Sullivan was pushing for does seem to have worked better than what we were doing for the first 30 years. In retrospect, maybe it is unfortunate that the court made the decision for everyone else, particularly in light of how social movements have been operating over the past decade. Lots of appeals to authority, very few attempts to find common ground.
Good point. I feel similarly about the Supreme Court's presidential immunity decision. Their timing was atrocious (they should have taken the case in January) but the outcome was very defensible. Leave Trump out of it: I want the President to be shielded in his/her official actions and not let any podunk DA be able to prosecute the President as part of an ideological agenda. Oh, and given Jack Smith's revised indictment, it seemed to him and his team that the Court's decision didn't prevent them from prosecuting Trump. They just ran out of time.
If the President's actions are heinous enough, there's still impeachment, battered and weakened as that is.
And the Court left itself plenty of wiggle room to decide on the facts of any individual case that at least part of the president’s conduct wasn’t “official” and therefore not immune; it’s not anything close to the blank check some people have made it out to be, particularly given that it only protects the president personally, not accomplices or co-conspirators.
Unchecked pardon power that amounts to a license to break the law, now that’s a different matter….
Another fascinating thing about that time is that almost all of the circuit courts were reading the recent caselaw and saw where this was going. There could have been a chance that this never would have gotten to SCOTUS at all, but the Sixth Circuit done fucked up with Obergefell v. Hodges and created the circuit split to get cert granted.
yes it seems quite clear that Obergefell or not, gay marriage would have won through the democratic process eventually. It definitely would have taken longer though.
But all those LGBT groups now had nothing to do and thought Trans would move as quickly as gay marriage would.
Trans activism has proceeded primarily through grassroots - your average msnbc watcher supports trans kids. But there has been a short circuit in the last bit, trying to jump to control from 30-40% support, rather than waiting for 60% support.
What if I care about equal rights, healthcare, childhood education, social security, medicare - but I don't really if ICE is enforcing immigration law. Do I still get to be a Democrat?
Don't confuse being a Democrat with being part of the progressive movement.
Of course you're a Democrat.
I wanted to try civil unions for a few decades and see if that eroded sexual morality.
Going to add "relatively elite" to my LinkedIn profile.
Is it too late to add some print to the quarter zips? 🤞
You can buy a quarter zip and embroider it yourself 😊
pfft what kind of relative elite self-embroiders?
You're being too literal. Clearly, an elite like drosophilist is referring to their servants performing the task, not literally themself.
ML gets it.
Did we get an answer on quarter zip sizing? The chart seemed weird.
Putting it in my Tinder bio
A once played pickleball against a young woman who advertised her (purported) virginity on her t-shirt. A slow boring quarter zip tastefully imprinted with “relative elite” would be almost as hysterical.
That kinda reminds me of these straight-edge christian shirts that said 'ex-masturbator'.
“once and future masturbator” would be funny
I want to go up to the guys with those t-shirts and say. "I respect your honesty, but it's considered polite and the right thing to do to delete all those photos of your ex from your phone, instead of what you're doing."
I would totally wear that shirt ironically
I'd love to see Matt at some point give a perspective of how lobbying works. When is it effective, what are its limits, to what extent does a "group" that focuses on lobbying have a legitimate role, etc.
Feels like that's a bit of a missing piece in the ecosystem he describes here.
He discusses it here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/change-not-activism
Land acknowledgements are the perfect manifestation of what was wrong with 2015-24 politics. Useless, performative, divisive, and totally fucking pointless. If you are on the right, you should feel great every time someone does one, because doing so is like watching someone publicly admit they are dumber than a box of rocks politically (and probably otherwise)
Land acknowledgments are one of those things that got a lot of play on twitter but I never once saw in real life living in two different hyper blue cities during that period
They had a land acknowledgement with some guy struggling to read it in a Native American language at the DNC chair elections last Saturday. The "this never happens in real life" bit is patently false. If we don't want normies associating democratic politicians with this kind of thing then we need to not have the party apparatus do it on national television.
Sounds bad! I have just never run into it irl is all
I feel like this is pretty much related to veal pen and the groups article but I also think three things that accelerated this trend are
- social media
- mental health driving left wing politics
- staffers and NGO come from young highly educated non STEM class
And those three are all intertwined.
And social media also helped define left wing movement by their fringes (guess same applies to right wing)
Idk what the solutions are (I wanna say social media restrictions but not quite sure if that’s feasible at this point…)
Yes, but also from 2000-2013, progressives were right about four big things: Iraq, Gay Marriage, financial deregulation, and the Obama stimulus package being too small. An entire generation came into political maturity watching Democrats show caution on these issues and looking like cowards when the progressive activists were vindicated. It’s colored how an entire generation of Democrats think.
Yeah I think that’s def true - I think that’s prob the fundamental reason boosted by the stuffs I mentioned above…?
I think I agree but would you expand on/give examples of “mental health driving left wing politics?” Just curious!
Sorry driving was not an appropriate word here- my apologies.
That said, the point I get to is there’s a lot of catastrophization and borderline persecutory delusion takes on Twitter etc (mostly by academia and NGO types)
Don’t apologize - those individuals are not only completely mentally unbalance but also create a lot of mental stress in both their constituencies (particularly students) and those who they attack as racist , homophobic , etc. There views and actions are insane- not in the technical psychological definition but in the sense that they are totally divorced from the mainstream conception of reality.
Oh I just thought the word “drive” was not the most descriptive of what I tried to say…
And yeah, I think this “activism as a therapy” has a lot of downsides…
Like I think the best course of action for a lot of people is to receive the actual therapy instead of getting into activism…
Why did the shift happen? Why would politicians systematically start to espouse more unpopular opinions en masse?
I think that the story of the 2010s is that increasingly polarized political spaces increased the efficacy of hectoring/bullying tactics from the wings of the political sides aimed at the moderates, and the wings realizing this and using these tactics to pull politicians and opinion makers away from the center.
It's basically like the primary dynamic, but everywhere. It doesn't matter if you have a winning message for the general if you can't get past the primary, so you sometimes have to adopt a less popular message just to be in the race at all.
Similarly, if more extreme people are gatekeepers to your basic ability to be a credible politician, you have to appease them even if it hurts your performance to the general audience.
I think that's part of it. I also think the 'demographics is destiny' argument on the left created a combination of complacency and loss of perspective. The activist base is operating from a belief of already having the numbers, it's just a matter of getting them to show up. A natural result of that faulty premise is losing touch with what actually is and isn't popular. It isn't clear to me that the most radical voices that have dominated really understand how different their priorities are, and if on top of all of that you live on Twitter and work in an NGO or some other place totally ensconsed in the most progressive of progressive values you might never find out.
And also drove the Republicans insane in important ways, starting from the post-2010 gerrymandering going balls-to-the-wall in many states that traditionally were not bad on the issue.
Yea I mean the biggest irony is that we might be getting to a point where turnout could be a boon for Republicans in some places and save them in areas where 10 years ago they appeared to be threatened. It just involves accepting that a lot of the people they didn't think could be Republicans (for uh... reasons) actually might be. Talk about minds being blown.
The nature of political parties means that once racial depolarization proceeds far enough, many of the Republicans' new non-white voters will have elected officials with a voice. What does everyone expect, that the rural GOP politicians are actually hardcore racists who will shun their new (Latin, Asian, occasionally Black) urban counterparts when they show up in Congress?
ROFL no. Not gonna happen.
Way more likely that the urban left keeps its head in the sand about all of this and keeps calling said (Latin, Asian, occasionally Black) politicians racists for a decade plus, because they clearly haven't gotten the message thus far and tried to woo those voters back.
We see this so much with Sandersistas. They keep asserting they represent a majority opinion as their candidates and faction’s electoral success consistently diminishes.
Not just political spaces. Because of things like geographical sorting, educational attainment polarization, and everyone becoming so online, it's now much more common for (for example) progressives to rarely encounter conservatives in their everyday lives. That can really distort your judgment as to what the costs of those tactics are.
Yeah i undoubtedly have a lot more contempt for conservatives now that I can see what they post.
You are taking the exact opposite lesson that you should be.
Yes there are always extremes on both sides. But the VAST majority of people on both sides are good people that want what's best for their country.
This means Republicans aren't all racist religious fanatics that want to "put you all back in chains"
And Democrats aren't all God/country hating hippies.
"It's basically like the primary dynamic, but everywhere. "
Well said.
Yep. You can see this on the Republican side when they nominate crazy right wing candidates in their Senate primaries and lose winnable elections.
Very bad for your process of choosing nominees to have the same basic winner-takes-all structure as, say, the NFL playoffs.
I think social media played a role in shaping engagement from media in that more extreme wings bludgeoning moderates sold well but also was more fun for those same people to do. Like it is much more satisfying to be on the offensive than to have unpopular core beliefs and to have to do triangulation over decades for progress to occur. I guess an advantage in engagement from conflict led to more effective elite bullying but outrunning mass opinion on cultural values (mass persuasion takes longer!). This led to a more hollow electoral situation where the party brand doesn't hold up in conservative states and well structurally you do need to win in conservative states to exercise power. As to why you can't just paper over the cultural values, I'd assume conservative messages are more effective bc they're simple and rely on quick intuition and well enough people aren't progressive or leftists.
The children (new, young staffers) learned they could bully their way into silencing the logical adult voices in the room because of the one (only) way in which they are superior: knowledge of how to use social media. It happened at the universities at the same time. Combine that with them being the first generation to be told from birth that their voices matter (instead of "you have no idea what you are talking about, now go away until you are able to produce a coherent and reasoned argument to support your position"), and you have a Twilight Zone episode: the belief in one's own rightness and righteousness, the power to implement it, and the ability to insulate oneself Gatsby-style from the easily predicted bad results (bonus, you get to ignore reality and blame those results on Those People just not getting with the program).
“ the first generation to be told from birth that their voices matter”
Is this the baby boomers or Gen x or millennials or zoomers?
I definitely don't think that's Boomers. Fair point about the others.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏Incredibly well stated summary of a major problem for all elements of society.
I was working for a university during the 2010s.
I think a lot of Gen X and Boomer adults, especially in professional spaces, have been so conditioned to think of themselves as one of the “cool, hip with it kids” that they have a really hard time being grown ups and telling the children “no” - especially when the children frame things as matters of “kindness” and “justice.”
Also the feminization of the professional class has made it more vulnerable to social contagion and manipulative Girl Bully tactics, especially those that utilize pseudo-kindness to get their own way.
Activists exploited the hell out of these weaknesses and insecurities among the gatekeepers.
This is related to a separate rant I have about how public schooling in Canada has become. Because it’s always easier to enact a “kind” policy to solve a problem (e.g., one-off forgiveness on tardiness because failing a class has negative long term effects on the student etc etc etc) the incentives are always for public services to try and reach for these “kind” solutions. Coupled with the “hip” needs of boomers and Xers, our public institutions have literally no ability to play the bad cop anymore and - with each cohort of kids learning they can get away with successively more - public schools are becoming basically lawless. And of course, the kids with affluent and involved parents make it out ok but the kids who would actually benefit from a more structured and disciplined educational experience are instead taught that it’s ok to call their teacher a c*** to her face and pass courses while submitting 0 work.
I’m not some hard-ass old crank here, but it’s truly deplorable, the state we’re reaching.
It used to be “if I let this young person get away with this, it’ll set them on the wrong path” witch has turned into “if I reprimand this young person, it will send them down the wrong path”
Today’s Cartoons Hate Her post is relevant to this! https://open.substack.com/pub/cartoonshateher/p/confessions-of-a-permissive-parent?r=7ednr&utm_medium=ios
Our answer (wife and me) as people who worked in the helping profession (police, counselor, psychologist): People these days use those "out there" ideas to give themselves a sense of identity. Doing this makes someone a "somebody."
Look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Basic needs are being met. But peoples' self-esteem and self-actualizing needs aren't.....so, on both sides they adopt strong ideas to do this for themselves.
Our society used to give people a sense of identity in other ways that were not as destructive to society.
"Our society used to give people a sense of identity in other ways that were not as destructive to society."
yes a common patriotism and religion really did bind the vast majority of people together.
Agree. We can postulate some others. One might have been neighborhood schools. All parents were invested in them, running for PTA, organizing fairs, etc.
One of my powerful senses of identity: I can remember 40-45 years ago laying in bed at night thinking of the children asleep in their rooms, not knowing that those rooms were provided by the work their parents did. THAT was a sense of identity that I carry with me more than my actual work gave me (which was powerful in and of itself).
What others might there have been we wonder.
Appreciate anyone who puts relevant topics in the concept of Maslow’s hierarchy. I learned it in psych class in college in ancient times (1960) and still find it very useful today. An even more usual concept from those classes was cognitive dissonance, and also the idea that individuals could be grouped by whether they were driven by a need for power, affiliation or achievement. All obviously simplifications rather than nuanced diagnoses of various situations, but nevertheless all incredibly insightful and helpful over 6 decades later.
I taught psychology for 30 years. I hope many of my students learned what you learned and can see those ideas in their current lives. It's very rewarding to read this. Thanks.
Some people touched on this a bit, but too many centrist/center-left members and staffers weren't willing to spend social and political capital on telling the weirdest parts of the very online left to stop bothering them. It's easier in certain spaces to start saying "Latinx" in 2017 when activists online bother you and then drop it by 2019. I think we also underestimate how the fact that Congressional staff are paid a lot less than a lot of other policy professionals from the same educational backgrounds, which leads to weird selection effects.
1– Online fundraising platforms make it possible for a wider variety of candidate types to compete in and win primaries, and incentivizes campaigns that cater to the people who are most willing to donate. “Cares a lot about politics” and “moderate” is a very small slice of the Venn diagram, and even elite centrists are pretty un-representative of persuadable voters in general.
2– Social media broke down longstanding barriers between private and public self-presentation. This makes the sort of preference falsification that say, Obama engaged in in 2008 a lot more difficult, because it’s much easier for the general public to get a sense for what a typical academic/community organizer actually thinks, and because it’s much harder to maintain message discipline when your communication with your friends and colleagues overlaps with your communication with the general public. Some candidates still manage to do it (I think that MGP is one), but it requires some unusual habits and psychological discipline. I think that we’ll eventually evolve new norms to deal with this, but we’re not there yet.
Social media is a big part of it, but another significant factor is that after 2010 and especially 2014, it became much harder to imagine that progress was going to happen via the mechanisms Matt describes. And so lots of people started looking for other strategies. One was that if everyone publicly espoused their most left wing actual views, then more stuff would actually pass. This was true but I think had bad consequences downstream (that's basically Matt's theory of the Biden administration). The other is giving up on broader politics and just focusing on making your own institution, which is composed almost all of liberals anyway, adopt the policies you want directly. Again this worked but the consequences for politics outside those institutions and for the way those institutions function caused serious problems.
"One was that if everyone publicly espoused their most left wing actual views, then more stuff would actually pass."
"The Overton Window!," but in SpongeBob Chicken font.
It actually worked, though. If you have a narrow majority then having a disciplined party enables you to pass significant legislation. The Biden administration passed a lot of legislation that could not have gotten through with those small majorities and the Obama-era party.
It works in terms of getting some of the passed, but make sure those things are worth potentially losing the next election over. Some of them are! The ACA, for instance (it was a loser before it became well enough established to be a winner)
If they're just going to be overturned or sabotage a bunch of other more important priorities then it's a very pyrrhic victory.
Yes, that's what I meant by "bad consequences downstream".
The problem was that a lot of the legislation was destructive for the party’s continuation in power because it was often not popular outside the party elites who existed in their own bubble. In addition, a lot of it turned out to be unworkable in the real world because it was so ideological. Their “party discipline” based on the belief that their leaders were omniscient and therefore must be obeyed in lockstep in order to maintain their power at all costs turned out to be a completely false premise. The should have paid more attention to the critical voices in their own party. Oh No, listen to Manchin and Sinema - horror of horrors! As you can probably guess - I believe that Chuckie and Nancy and their actions and words are two of the main reasons that the party that viewed itself as having manifest destiny on its side might be in the wilderness for awhile. And since I am a centrist libertarian ( (definitely small l } I am very glad that the country has escaped that path to destruction .
Really? It seems like aside from a bunch of stimulus that shouldn't have been passed and caused a lot of inflation, most of what Biden did get through was bipartisan legislation that required compromise with Republicans
The IRA was a pretty significant piece of legislation. Plus a lot of stuff was done administratively through a similar process (persuading the agency heads rather than senators).
The IRA handed out a lot of money true. But the unspent parts will not likely be clawed back because it was passed through reconciliation and not regular order.
I think a big apart of it is both Obama’s victory as a black man, the shape shift in public opinion on gay rights, and then Trump’s victory as a crazy person who broke lots of taboos made a lot of people feel like anything was possible. That the Overton Window as far wider than we had thought, and that we could push for all our ideals without suffering politically. Fairly or not these events caused a whole generation of political conventional wisdom to be called into question.
And it turns out that just because some of that political conventional wisdom was wrong doesn’t mean it all was.
I feel like this has got to be tied to Twitter and instead of communicating through press release people needed a direct personal relationship with small donors and local people who are interested in politics.
Agreed plus the amplification/echo chamber effect of Twitter making it hard to keep things in perspective (ie Twitter is not real life)
People thinking that twitter is real life? Instead of understanding that Twitter mobs have less people than a High school football game on a Friday night in Texas. And should be given about the same deference.
Kelly Ayotte was elected Governor of NH in part by running against Massachusetts. The Mayor of Boston is being called before Congress to get embarrassed on immigration issues. Electeds in non-competititve deep blue voting districts do have a negative impact beyond their district.
Is this not just ... reinventing triangulation and message discipline?
Which is fine, these are important and effective political tools
Also nominate candidates who are ot at least seem normal, people that most other people want to have a beer with.
I agree in principle, but I'm not sure I trust Democratic party primary voters (very much including myself) to reliably judge which candidates seem normal
I don't know if people should try to pick the most "normal" candidate per se, because what does that even mean. But what you can look for is *crossover appeal* which is the key in any popularity contest, whether you're a politician, athlete, or other celebrity.
Normal's different things to different people.
I think that Matt has explicitly said that that’s the case in the past, yes.
Maybe there will be another chance to pull together a MAGA-beating coalition of the Biden voters, the Bernie voters, and the Haley voters.
But the party must absolutely bury the loony circa-2022 positions on race and trans topics.
The DNC election shows there are still corners of craziness that need to be excised.
Does Nancy Pelosi have another fight in her, or is she still recovering from dragging Joe out to the curb?
That and Dems should be supporting a REALLY strict border policy. They need to show voters they mean business on immigration.
"What I think is not valid, though, is staffers for Squad members publicly opining that Democrats would do better nationally if they all acted like AOC."
I hope that all staffers, not just Squad ones, are reading this article.
I think, if people in the party knew that a little bit of sparring was reasonable, but we're not going to tank anybody's run over it, it'd be a lot easier to differentiate one another, unfortunately, we kinda just let inter-party fights go way too far.
I don't think we have a really good way to signal to each other that this isn't really a material fight though.
I agree with the broader thesis (change minds before you run on issues, rather than the reverse), but I didn't find Matt's answer to the question posed by the title satisfying. What do you do if you're an activist with sincere but unpopular beliefs? Ok, a select few can become influential opinion journalists, and another select few can become successful "apolitical" artists and then smuggle their political ideas into their work. But those are not attainable for most. What if you're just an ordinary activist?
I think this is why so much activism turns into pressuring politicians. If you're a small local organization on issue X, you can probably get a meeting with your Representative. But you almost certainly don't have the power to influence technocratic elites or mass public opinion. So if you're not supposed to pressure politicians, what are you to do?
Figure out how to change grassroots minds locally, or else work in elite circles as a researcher or something rather than in politics directly.
Accept that nothing will happen till you change minds.
“ I don’t totally understand how it is that decidedly conservative people who routinely vote for Republican Party candidates and complain about government spending have reconciled themselves to the apparent contradiction, but they clearly have.” Hahaha, you just explained how in the first half of this substack. How did Obama reconcile himself to being against gay marriage? Pragmatism. If you think a super-popular program should be eliminated (or more likely, modified) you quietly move on.
I think social security should be modified to be personally managed accounts, but I don’t want my Republican candidates to touch that.
Isn't one honest answer that a lot of people become conservatives not because of across the board libertarianism but because they fear change? So if a program is already here and works well enough, that doesn't scare them like a new program would?
Of course. There are a lot of people with motivations ranging from atavism to pragmatism and idealism. A lot of people are progressive because they like free stuff, but if a thoughtful conservative wants to engage progressives those aren’t the ones to seek.
Notice that he didn’t say this about the candidates, which is what you’re talking about - he said this about the voters, who don’t have a pragmatic reason.
Disagree. In fact in my post (I'm a voter not a candidate) I wrote, "I think social security should be modified to be personally managed accounts, but I don’t want my Republican candidates to touch that."
I'm a voter who is pragmatic. I'm pragmatically voting for candidates who pragmatically choose not to do what I wish could be done.
Now, if you mean, how voters think rather than how they vote, I'd suggest that none of us really know that. Some are pragmatic like me, and some are probably low information voters cheering for their team.
Another thing to do with sincere but unpopular beliefs is to try to persuade people that they are actually good, to make them popular. Same-sex marriage folks did that.