The myth of all powerful corrupting corporate money in politics has lead to a ‘stab in the back’ narrative on the left where the reason great left wing ideas don’t pass under ‘unified democratic governance’ is that dem pols secretly don’t believe anything they say and are taking bribes from big bad business. So candidates must be made to walk costly planks to demonstrate that they are true believers who can be trusted with nominations.
This is a huge part of it. Also when you go into political discussion online, so much of it emphasizes how useless persuasion is. Indeed, when's the last time you got someone to admit that they were wrong about a political opinion online? While swing voters are less common than in the past, they're not gone, and they're not debating the capital gains tax on reddit. However, to the overly online types, the only way forward is to force elites to signal their purity to you. If they have to send a costly signal, so much the better.
I think the stab in the back narrative is definitely a huge part of this. The poison-pill nature of the demands is very much the point. The activist groups do NOT want candidates to win through a swing-voter persuasion strategy. In their view, they have done all the work but have reaped none of the reward as politicians simply pivot to the center at will.
When candidates are forced to adopt poison pill positions, it reduces their freedom of political movement and binds them more tightly to the activist groups and the votes they can (in theory) deliver through mobilization.
The issue of course is that the activist groups are nowhere near as effective as they think they are. In their minds, they are the protagonists of politics who make everything happen. But the reality is, activist groups in the 21st century mostly lack the capability to deliver votes. The most successful politicians treat activists as a constituent group to be managed, not as key allies. But activists continue to overestimate their own capabilities and blame any problems on being stabbed in the back rather than on their own inability to actually deliver votes.
Well, they are right some of the time on this. Wasn’t there a provision in the BBB negotiations about giving Medicare the ability to negotiate with Pharma (which is amazingly popular across the board) that several Democratic congress folks killed? But yeah, there are many other cases where activists just don’t want to accept that their goal currently isn’t as popular as they think it is.
Genuine question (because I've looked and can't easily find the answer): Who besides Sinema on the D side was against it? And were they of as much consequence as her?
Sinema is also interesting from this perspective because she seems to take a funhouse-mirror view of the bad position "the groups" took in 2020--by taking unpopular positions on high-salience subjects in the *conservative* direction, she is trying to sell herself as a "maverick" in the vein of John McCain. What she seems to neglect is that whenever McCain broke with conservative orthodoxy, it was to take *popular liberal-coded* positions, not unpopular ones. (Outside foreign policy, where he was always just a hawk whether that was popular at the moment or not.)
I thought there was at least one congressperson (not senator) from the San Diego area who announced their public opposition to it but I could be mistaken.
That's fair, but was there a bloc in the House big enough to keep it off the table there as well? (Genuinely don't know).
Also, to be frank, if Sinema *had* been OK with the prescription-drug thing, I wonder if the NJ guys (especially Menendez) wouldn't find some way to tank it in a back room. (NJ because pharma is NJ's home-state industry, Menendez because Booker still has some national ambitions.)
I’m not being clear, but yes- that’s what I’m saying. There was a bloc in the House big enough to keep it off the table. And you’re probably right about Menendez. The larger point being that this given the popularity of this issue, this really does seem to be an example of “stabbed in the back” corrupt perfidy - but I have a hard time coming up with others.
Hey hey hey, Sinema may say dumb shit, but she can't possibly compete with the savant of baffling cringe shitposting that is Tulsi Gabbard. It's like comparing Karl Malone to MJ. Salieri will always be inadequate next to the virtuoso Mozart
One of the challenges of popularism is that which is popular is often not what is on the table. In this case, prescription drug pricing might be popular, but the bill in question was a really weird (and IMO bad) way to do prescription pricing.
I think the emotional logic makes perfect sense and you do see examples like this. It’s just that when you get into the pesky details it turns out that some congresspeople killed this or that responding to their particular district and circumstances and the presidential primary candidates or random unrelated senate candidates stated campaign positions are just not relevant. But if you’re a voter or front line activist without much trust in the system it’s easy to look at that and say it’s all a shell game and the corrupt Dems just shift the blame around and pick in secret meetings who will kill this or that. So you end up obsessed with purity across the board since you no longer trust strategy.
Democrats have been mired in single-issue organizing so long (since '70s) that most of it's activists don't even think about strategy, 'obsessed with purity'. Mobilizing the base is mechanics. Being able to build on the common elements that appeal to diverse strata of the electorate is strategy. The Obama Administration almost lost the ACA because they played up universal health coverage (one goal) and not how millions of people who already had insurance would benefit from reforms on pre-existing disease, wellness care, coverage caps and exclusions and other nuts-and-bolts insurance reforms.
One thing you haven't touched on is that Sunrise and others have learned all the wrong lessons from right-wing advocacy groups like Club for Growth and the Right to Life campaign. Those groups have enforced strict messaging and will only endorse Republicans that support their full platform.
So why shouldn't left-wing groups do likewise? Because like it or not, the median vote in the Senate is coming from an R+3 state. Democrats have to play by different rules. It ain't fair, but that's the constitution we have.
"... learned all the wrong lessons from right-wing advocacy groups like Club for Growth and the Right to Life campaign."
Was going to say this. Left-wing frustration with message discipline, as counterproductive as it is, stems from a sense that the right wing never pays a price for its advocacy of unpopular views. And that Democrats always pay a maximal price for the unpopular views of even their most crazy, unrepresentative splinter-groups.
And that's not due to the Constitution, but to the fact that the media environment is (in Josh Marshall's phrase) wired for Republicans.
It drives me crazy that some left wing advocates continue to insist that there's no price paid by Republicans for unpopular views and totally miss how the GOP gave up winnable Senate seats in 2010 and 2012 for this very reason.
Because to many even normie left-wing friends I have (and I say this as a left-wing social democrat), the GOP should basically be unelectable, as opposed to losing a couple of Senate seats. Thus, they see the GOP do things they think are beyond the pale, and still come close to winning, and get upset they have to vote for Joe Biden.
I think it's pretty clear the Republicans (despite getting a Senate majority) also won fewer Senate seats in 2014 than they might otherwise have gotten with a more sane roster of candidates.
"Left-wing frustration with message discipline, as counterproductive as it is, stems from a sense that the right wing never pays a price for its advocacy of unpopular views."
I think this stems from a dynamic where the most attention is paid to social issues, where the right-wing position might be unpopular, but not especially so. If the GOP ran on a platform of bringing back school prayer, it wouldn't poll well, and lefties would pounce on it, but I don't think it'd actually lose them that many votes. At the same time, the solid-left position on these issues also tends to be less popular than we care to admit.
When the unpopular views in question are about economic issues, they're much more likely to become political liabilities for Republicans. Remember Paul Ryan's brilliant plan to take money from Meals on Wheels?
I think it is due to the constitution. Let's say Jay Rosen optimal media, or pick whatever platonic ideal you want, but kept senate apportionment, the EC, and single-member FPTP districts drawn by state legislatures. I think republicans would act mostly the same because whatever advantage the media environment gives them I believe it to be less than the partisan lean of senate apportionment and gerrymandered legislative districts.
Now imagine the reverse, we keep our media environment but go to a unicameral legislature with multi-member districts with proportional representation. I think then you see a much more disciplined republican party. I just can't imagine the effect size of Republican Wired media is on the scale of Wyoming having two senators or the Wisconsin gerrymander. Not to say media doesn't matter, but the disparity you identified in how much of a price each national party pays for the fringe beliefs of associated groups I think is itself a byproduct of these structural tilts. Republicans can afford to spend down some of their vote cushion on ideological extremity because the tipping point voter is to the right of the median voter.
well I don't think robust parties are a priori bad, but the architects of our system did and thought they would avoid them. Then you end up where the rules as designed require more consensus than is feasible with ideologically sorted national political parties.
On the contrary: Many of the founders wrote often about the dangers of faction. They expected it. But the worst of their fears has not come to pass in two and a half centuries.
There were a number of sane, experienced, and mainstream presidential candidates in the Democratic primaries that would have had a good chance of earning the nomination in the old system of smoke-filled rooms of party éminences grises. But the primary system gave us the choice of several left-wing nut jobs and Joe friggin’ Biden.
"It is an almost childishly silly thing to argue about."
The elevation of young adults - VERY young adults - into positions of influence is, IMO, a real problem for the Progressive wing. I made the mistake this morning of following a couple of Matt's links to the Sunrise movement. The reported founders -- Sara Blazevic and Varshini Prakash -- were in their early 20s when Sunrise began its rise in the Democratic Party in 2016-2018. The organization is filled with college students, professional college students and young people filled with idealistic and simplistic notions about how the world should work. There is a place for this enthusiasm. But that place isn't in leadership positions.
The media - also filled with young and idealistic people - fawn over and provide favorable coverage of these groups. As one example, Ezra Klein interviewed Prakash in 2019 (she was 26!) and the transcript is full of support and encouragement, with no difficult questioning. Add to this the 'coverage' in the NYTimes, WaPo, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Time, etc., and you see how these movements become convinced of both their righteousness and the perfidy of anyone who disagrees.
I don't know how this is solved -- it seems to be hard-wired into the DNA of Progressives to believe Young People™ have some special insight and wisdom to which we should defer (Greta Thunburg comes to mind) -- but at some point, adults need to be in charge.
wtf is this ageism. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google were founded by people in their 20s. The US government is led by people in their 70s. Do I need to ask which has been better led?
If journalists are treating young leaders differently because of their age, that's bad. If you take the responsibility, you need to be able to withstand the scrutiny.
However, those companies were (and are) subject to the disciplines of the marketplace, which doesn't care about the age of the founder but only whether the product/service is valuable. I see no similar mechanism for the activists I mentioned.
If anything the problem is the opposite: market discipline in donation-funded activism filters in favor of nutjobs who speak eloquently and really strongly believe what they’re selling.
As opposed to those who say things like “we’re going to make compromises, get dirty, and achieve teeny-weeny-but-measurably-positive results.”
All of those companies had a mix of ages that doesn't exist in those activist groups. Lots of companies with young founders will go out and hire older people for various C-level jobs to balance out the founder (often at the demand of investors). There's no comparable "let's be sensible" thrust with activist groups.
Your position here is that we should be completely agnostic on age and its impact on maturity, wisdom, strategic approach, etc.? Because we can point to a few specific examples of old, immature people acting like inexperienced fools and of some young people who are wise beyond their years?
If I understand it correctly I on't agree with that logic. Even going to your corporoate examples, yes those companies were founded by people in their 20s. But they were "led" in the more mature phases of their business by much older, non-founder CEO's and senior leadership. Apple doesn't replace their CEO every five years with a new 26 year old, and I feel safe predicting that none of those companies will have a 20-something CEO ever again.
You've been a subscriber and commenter long enough to have read _many_ stories about young, inexperienced, and most often _loud_ people grabbing the reins from the older folks who had been in charge and running progressive companies and organizations off of bridges. It's not ageism, it's a literal description of what is happening. Why it's happening is a very interesting question, but it seems to be, basically, fear of bad media coverage, for the reasons John mentioned.
From this side of the Atlantic, Dem leadership seems consistently poor across all age groups.
The most positive institutional change within the Democratic Party I can think of in recent years is Crooked Media, which is slightly closing Republicans' messaging advantages. That was started by a bunch of guys in their mid-30s. Positively babies by the standards of the Democratic congressional leadership.
I'm not saying young progressive leaders are faultless but the problem seems to go way beyond them
Yes and then Google's board brought in a seasoned executive in 2001 to be CEO and put the founders under "adult supervision." Apple had done the same thing in 1983. Venture capital investors and board members provided adult supervision at all of those companies in their early years.
All of those companies are very smart and the smartest people on the planet are probably in their 20s (think great mathematicians). Wisdom tends to come with age. Is Facebook wise? Google has been around for what, 20 years? The Us Government has been around for 235 years or so. We should revisit this when Google has matured to 100 years old?
Friend, I don't know how old you are, but I know someone once made the same complaint about your generation, and then their generation before, and so on all the way back to the first apes to walk upright. Old bloods' disgust for young whippersnappers is a central feature of human society.
The prevalence of people in their teens and early 20's leading influential organizations seems to be a more recent phenomenon, as is the increase in those over 75 (Biden, Pelosi, McConnell, et al.). Neither are positive developments, in my view.
There is a good reason why "prime working age" is defined as 25-54. For leadership, I think the best years are from 35-64, though: old enough to have garnered some experiential learning, young enough to have the energy to accomplish something.
'A more recent phenomenon...' William Pitt, the Younger, became Prime Minister of Britain at age 24; Napoleon, First Consul of France at age 30. On the elder side, we have the example not just of Biden, but Queen Victoria and the current Queen. Not sure this adds up to anything, except you can cherry pick examples from history to make any point. I agree though 35-64 seems the sweet spot for combining vigor and experience.
To be fair, the gerontocratic nature of U.S. governance is both an acute problem and seemingly a scourge particular to more recent years -- consider that we have had five presidents since 1992, and three of them over the span of *thirty years* were born in 1946, with Biden even older (1942) and McConnell born in the same year as Biden.
I think the point about the young being the ones to live in the future, conversely, is both self-evidently true and its importance particularly acute with respect to the failures of government on climate change (in the case of Republican administrations, deliberate failures. The Frank Luntz memo to the GWB administration is really something as far as naked bad faith and cynicism goes). The point of disagreement I have with your Hegelian characterization is that it's very much *not the case* that the future will be better. In several material respects it will be --and, in fact, already is--worse, and the people behind the wheel whom one might suppose to act in the interest of their own descendants if not of their political constituents instead seem to content to bank on dying and making it someone else's problem.
It's simply a fact that things I took for granted as a kid in New England like playing in the snow or skating on a frozen lake are not as available to today's kids (citations available on request. This is also apparently affecting the capacity of Canadian kids to practice hockey, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/climate/canada-outdoor-rinks.html). And this of course isn't even getting into plastic pollution or wildlife extinctions which are a whole 'nother kettle of fish. At least in America, the future (and the present) is in many respects much worse than, say, the 1990s.
This is, likewise, a source of frustration with advice to cater to popularism although I don't have any formal (or informal) affiliation with the activist groups in question. California droughts and wildfires really don't give a fig about the political palatability of carbon taxation. As between physics and the "art of the possible," the latter is going to be the one to give. Accordingly, it invites contempt as a normative matter when we treat public opinion as immutable (or even relevant) versus physical reality.[1]
The 1940s generation has been doing its best to fiddle while Rome -- and, in more recent years, California--burns for the better part of thirty years. I'm pretty sure that not just the young but everyone from Generation X on Up has pretty good reason to be pissed off with them at this point.
[1](One could also make a more general argument against Matt's more descriptivist / instrumentalist argument for popularism in the sense that adopting only agendas that command majoritarian support basically precludes the capacity of law to surpass the instincts of the electorate. Free speech is often unpopular, it's also clearly better than the alternatives).
>"I didn't imply this, and was actually criticizing such a Whig history notion."
I'm aware that you were criticizing this, my point was that inasmuch as I could offer an apologia for the anti-popularist view (and as I understand the predominant frustrations of the anti-popularist segment of Sunrise et al.) they very much agree with the premise that the young are the ones who have to live in the future but would express the diametric opposite of a belief that the future will be better--indeed, their complaint is precisely the opposite. Thus, I think one of the two premises posited as a position against which you argue is incorrectly stated. Indeed, if the future were presumptively better sans struggle, whence the agita of the young?
(Side note: I'm interpreting your use of "Hegelian" as broadly parallel to "Manichean" here, but Im not actually particularly familiar with Hegel, so if I have erred on that basis I apologize).
A lot of this is likely just life expectancy, and the population pyramid, right? In the 90's life expectancy was about 5 years shorter. And the cohort of people born in the 1950s (so now entering their early 70s) is much much bigger than the cohort of people born in the 1920's.
Which unfortunately implies that this will stay a problem for a long time, as the % of old people in the population continues to increase.
"Again, I concede that this is a really stupid argument and certainly uninteresting on an academic level."
People overrate the importance of saying smart things. Sometimes, saying the stupid thing is much more clarifying. I started winning more cases when I started to explain to my witnesses that I was deliberately asking stupid questions and expected stupid answers. The witnesses stopped trying to be clever and just gave dumb answers when I needed them. The judges/administrative boards understood what my case was so much better after that.
Agreed. I should emphasize, though, that I only got results when I started specifically saying (in witness preparation sessions) "I am deliberately asking stupid questions and expect stupid answers." Framing it as "stupid" rather than "simple" or "basic" got the message across better.
I once spoke to an old attorney who had argued in front of Judge Learned Hand and told me that Learned Hand told him "explain it to me in language I can understand, give it to me in baby talk."
I recall my English teacher having to tell everyone before we did an exam that if the question seemed stupidly easy, it actually was stupidly easy and not secretly asking for a complicated answer.
A lot of good lawyering sounds silly. Another bit of good practice I've picked up is "When unsure which word to write, choose the one with an Old (or at least Middle) English root." (It's much punchier than "When in doubt about synonyms, use the term with the Germanic etymon.")
Brief-writing, especially when other lawyers where you practice overuse the Law Latin and Law French. (Like Pennsylvania.) It makes your writing stand out as more straightforward (and easy to read) when your briefs say things like "Here, Nelson misunderstands the law" rather than "Defendant's argument is based on a misapprehension of the statute."
That sort of clarity is sadly rare in legal writing (and, in fact, most writing generally - most planners refuse to say "close to" when they could say "in close proximity to")...I hope lots of practicing attorneys (and planners, and others) are reading your comment and taking it to heart!
I'm skeptical. Brian Garner has been yelling this at the profession for like 30 years, and Ross Guberman for at least 10. Those of us who try to follow their techniques (and I'll admit I'm not perfect about it!) still find ourselves seen as members of a weird cult. Even when we get results.
This problem is going to get worse, not better, now that Democrats have counter-gerrymandered the hell out of quite a few places themselves.
Everywhere the real election is a primary, the activists are further incentivized to go hog-wild, which will reflect badly on the national stage and atrophy the muscles needed to win competitive elections.
My point wasn’t “they can’t win elections”; given the nature of the American electorate and its geographic distribution this is much less of a problem when you’re too far right than when you’re too far left.
My point was “whole party is now run by nutjobs in ultra-safe seats who primaried ‘RINOs’ in those seats after the old less safe ones were gerrymandered to hell for 2012.”
Then we have things like this, which just convince me we’re going to descend so far into navel-gazing that no normal person can even understand the Wokespeak we replaced English with:
I suspect the answer is and always will be “zero”. At least some of the folks quoted know that damned well and are just throwing a bitch-fit because they’ve been made to feel like they *should* by the zeitgeist.
Whereas the amateur nerds and teenagers who dream of doing this work would sit somewhere around here:
“He ran down pregnant women and ate their fetuses after work? Are you sure?
Meh, he still got us to the moon, can’t win ‘em all.”
I blame social media and activist engagement with it for the phenomenon. I can't be the only person with a Facebook feed that periodically features someone going on an aggressively, woker-than-thou screed. It then gets 15 or 20 likes and a handful of enthusiastically supportive comments. From that person's perspective what they are saying probably feels both subversive and popular. So the best thing ever.
I am not in remotely activist circles but I can imagine if I was it would be even more extreme. My take is that even where people intellectually understand that certain ideas don't have broad-based support, if they are Extremely Online, as I imagine most left-wing activists to be, they don't at a gut level understand how unpopular these things can be. It isn't so much popularism vs. whatever the opposite is, it's failure to accept that they are actually not popular.
This is so true. You could knock on 50 doors and have polite conversations explaining why you vote Democrat and why you hope they will too and you might actually change a vote or two or boost turnout. That’s actually valuable, but because you won’t know for sure, you won’t get the immediate dopamine rush of the 20 likes from your Facebook post that isn’t moving the political needle at all.
No one is forcing CEOs at cable companies and media conglomerates to make coverage decisions disproportionately based off of what is trending on a website that a tiny unrepresentative sample of the population is signed up for, let alone actively uses. At the end of the day, if Social Media didn't exist (and it didn't in the late 90s when a lot of these coverage decisions materialized), they would still find some way to cater to their bread and butter demographic (16 - 40 year old, middle to upper middle class, political hobbyist) and cater to the stories and trends those folks can't help but interact with. Just look at all the harmful media news cycles we had towards the end of the Clinton era / start of the Bush era before Facebook or Twitter even got here...all the pieces were in place, these companies just found efficiencies in how to determine those trends thanks to social media.
That is completely insane and also very sad. If you can't appreciate anything about America and all you can focus on is racism, you're really pretty lost. People of all creeds and colours from all over the world go to incredible lengths to give their families a chance of living there.
I think there's a big difference between having an appreciation of racism (or any other issue) in your own life and telling other people on Facebook that you understand their life better than they do, especially if you do so in a critical way.
I agree with FrigidWind that large companies are better at mitigating discrimination and bias. At least this is true in tech. These DEI departments might be good for something, but there are many other reasons: formal perf evaluation and promotion processes, 360 feedback, better interviewing practices (well, sometimes). And what is definitely unique to large companies is that you can look at the stats like who is getting promoted, women vs men, white vs asian etc. on a huge sample.
Do you find all races equally attractive? Like, don't answer me, but answer to yourself and think about the question for a minute- visualize all of the various human subgroups. You find them all equally attractive with zero differences- really? I don't believe that, sorry man.
Step 2- once you acknowledge that you do find some subgroups less attractive- is that because you're racist?
Applying the concepts of prejudice and discrimination to the world of romance and dating seems like fraught territory to me, because romantic/physical attraction is just so personal and subjective. If romantic courtship was a necessary component of climbing the social ladder like it was in the olden days, then I could see where discrimination could be an issue, but thankfully we've mostly moved past that as a society. I think it simply important not to base your self-worth on who happens to find you attractive.
I think any analysis of the counterproductive actions of activists needs to take into account their incentives. Activist groups are not necessarily primarily incentivized to work towards likely progress on their stated aims. Instead, their chief interest is fundraising. Those two aims can align at times—particularly when donors prioritize outcomes—but they don’t have to. At times donors themselves may care more about supporting ideological purist movements that reinforce the donor’s personal identity than a boring pragmatic cause.
Hence, activists can be incentivized to create the most compelling ideological product to sell to donors. Further, they need to differentiate themselves from competing activism products by developing a unique brand. And of course they want to maximize their courting of free media coverage, including distribution on social media. That can incentivize taking extreme and outrageous positions that are more likely to garner engagement.
One needn’t even assume activist leadership is deliberately scheming to craft optimal ideological products for sale to donors. Market forces alone could ensure that more compelling and engaging movements outcompete lesser ones and thereby garner more funds for continuation and expansion. Through this Darwinian evolution we’d be left with ideological products optimized for donor consumption.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. I’d also add that getting candidates to adopt their extreme positions is a demonstration of power. It helps with fundraising and gets the organizations placed in the center of the media narrative. For frustrated activists and partisans, at least they did something. The stuff I saw on Rachel Maddow is reflected somewhere. The republicans did something similar with Club for Growth and others. You could say that Trump is the outgrowth of these groups forcing candidates to take positions out of line with the mainstream of the party. It took a transgressive narcissist to overcome the phalanx of right wing groups and he really didn’t once he was in power.
Hard agree, and this dynamic is really hurting Dems vis-a-vis the center, a problem that is salient to me. What is an engaged but deeply frustrated citizen with moderate views to do when these incentives push NGOs and candidates waaaay to the left?
Maybe popularism isn't interesting to Matt, but having watched, over the course of my voting life, the transition from the DLC to....what we have now has left me bewildered as well as politically homeless. The vagaries and policy and governance have always fascinated me, though I don't enjoy the sports-fan aspect of politics per se, and they seem to have become completely decoupled. Trying to understand exactly what is happening here is, to me, very interesting (even though it's pretty depressing).
I also think that as long as trump is the republican nominee, we’re all trapped. Most of us won’t vote for him and an independent challenger would seem like an automatic vote for trump. Once he’s gone, an independent candidate could split the democratic base and force the party to get real.
More and more I think this is the Pauline Kael situation for Democratic staff and activists. They are in such a bubble away from the vast majority of voters they don't recognize the unpopularity of their positions. I've been following the unionization efforts of Democratic congressional staff and some of the statements clearly indicate a divide from "average" Americans. Last week the House voted on a pretty robust marijuana legalization bill, but it was being faulted for not going far enough--despite going so far it's largely lost any bipartisan appeal--by Democratic staff who insisted that the vast majority of Americans are regularly using marijuana. It's totally missing the public polling on some of these issues and making the class of fellow activists in DC the focus group.
I've noticed that on non-top level comments, the front end animation for the like action doesn't always execute. However, I got an email saying you upvoted my comment, so it looks like it's at least registering in the back end.
Pauline Kael was a New York Times film critic and is often credited with saying in connection with the 1972 election some version of, "How did Nixon win? Nobody I know voted for him!" (That's not actually what she said, but it's generally what people mean when making a Pauline Kael reference.)
EDIT: Or you could just read the link City of Trees posted while I was typing this.....
Pauline Kael was a New Yorker critic, a very slight difference, just to correct the record. The NY Times and New Yorker of 1972 weren't quite the clones of each other they are today. Renata Adler was the NY Times film critic at the time and did a famous hatchet job on Kael in the New York Review of Books.
Isn’t the steel man argument just that the activists believe these issues are morally righteous and that when the public is exposed to them outside the ‘right wing/corporate media’ filter they will be convinced of this?
Then they run push polls that show that people can support something like their idea when not presented with any criticism, which ‘proves’ the point.
You are right on about “defund” though - that is just pure cope.
Matt is obviously right, which begs the question: why doesn't the Dem establishment stand up to these extremists more?
With Republicans, the answer is supposedly obvious. Republican have to deliver red meat to their base so they can pass their unpopular tax cuts.
I suspect Dems are not so different. Dems share plenty of culpability for the orgy of rent seeking that is the American economy, and these symbolic gestures are penance for or distractions from their inaction on that front.
The Obama administration actually raised taxes and passed regulations that, for good or for ill, Wall Street hated. I can't recall equivalents under Biden. He's mostly sprayed a load of cash around
Since the financial crisis "spray cash everywhere" wasn't a bad strategy, politically (at least in non-Tea Party circles) or substantively since demand was low. At the very least, it papers over the cracks in the Democratic coalition. Now that inflation is here, you gotta choose wisely, and while I think stuff like cutting child poverty and fighting climate change are wise investments, you have to prioritize. Democrats' coalitional politics, along with their slim margins, make that difficult.
1. There are a fair number of people that argue that politicians taking a position will change the public's viewpoint in a positive direction. Thus, a candidate that jettisons "safe, legal, and rare" will help destigmatize abortion and push the public to become more pro-choice.
2. I think an awful lot of this was just about trying to clear the field for Bernie. You didn't see many people talking about how "Medicare for All" is a neoliberal sellout policy, since it leaves a role for privately run hospitals.
3. Being a YIMBY teaches you a lot about political pragmatism. It's hard to argue that voters will support your anti-free parking agenda if only you spend more time explaining it to them.
> There are a fair number of people that argue that politicians taking a position will change the public's viewpoint in a positive direction
I cannot imagine that a single one of those people has ever tried to run for office or even work for a winning campaign. Nothing disabuses you of the notion that a "politician taking a position" does _anything_ positive faster than trying to do so as a politician. There's a reason politicians are stereotyped as spineless -- it works!
I’m fearful that a lot of progressives greatly misread the damage that over-zealous pandemic policies did for us, especially among working class voters. I think that early in the pandemic, as a direct result of Trump and other Republicans’ insanely irresponsible view to ignore the pandemic, many progressives changed how they viewed NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions - masking, distancing, shutting down indoor dining- everything except vaxing) from “important tools to help deal with this pandemic” to “a public talisman that I take this emergency seriously, unlike the horrible Republicans I already hated”. I don’t think they ever understood the perspective that much of the country was unhappy with continued insistence of NPIs even after vaccine availability as well as a failure of leaders to provide clear and transparent metrics as to when these interventions would be made optional. Yet because so many progressives are viewing these things as talismans they have a big blind spot on this: “why are you demanding clear metrics? Masks aren’t that big a deal- they show you care, DON”T YOU CARE?” Left out of that is the fact that occasionally being asked to wear a mask to enter a grocery store is very different from being asked to wear one all day if you work there.
My view is that we should assume NPIs will be unpopular and we should limit their usage and rapidly update our guidance as we learn more about effectiveness. If we find out that cloth masks are almost worthless (which we have), then we should either update our mask mandates to require better masks or kill the mandate entirely. We should develop clear and transparent rules and make a commitment to the community that our NPIs go up based on X metric and as soon as it comes down we pull them down. In short we should be doing everything we can to communicate to as broad a public as possible that we recognize the burdens that we are asking people to take and as a result we are doing everything we can to minimize them. And our failure to do that is costing us with many otherwise winnable voters.
I was actually told by someone who is very left-leaning that even if mask mandates aren’t doing much to stop the spread of the virus, they’re still a good thing because the Trump voters hate them. This is not a healthy way to evaluate restrictions that supposedly have a public health purpose.
We have the data right now. Hong Kong has excellent mask compliance and they are literally being killed by COVID right now because a lot of their elderly didn’t get vaccinated.
Here is my attempt at a steelman version of antipopularism:
1. Nothing really matters. The effect of adopting popular positions, as opposed to antipopular positions, is so small as to be insignificant. Elections are decided almost exclusively by trends in the economy, thermostatic public opinion, and other larger trends.
2. Therefore the way to achieve social change is not by maximizing your likelihood of winning elections, but rather to maximize the likelihood that your program will be implemented when your side wins the elections it was always going to win anyway. So we should focus all our energies on ensuring that the right people are in place, ready for that moment: people who are committed to using their power as sweepingly (and perhaps as ruthlessly) as possible once they have the opportunity.
Popularists tend to focus on the fact that defunding the police etc. are extremely unpopular. The problem is that you're speaking to an audience made up of cynics who believe that "the system is broken" and popularity is irrelevant to political success. So I think popularists could persuade more of the people they're trying to persuade by focusing less on the fact of unpopularity, and more on proving that popularity *matters*. And I would suggest doing so in positive terms, e.g. "if we adopt more popular positions on issues ABC, we can achieve greater electoral success in races XYZ and here's why."
I think the nature of this cynicism - the desperation people go through before arriving at a "burn it all down" attitude - is underappreciated and misunderstood as glibness by the popularist crowd.
I don't hate this argument- actually, I think 1 is extremely correct- but I still think it's plausible that popularism gets you say 1-3% more votes, and all of the presidential swing states are typically decided by that much. Insert Robert De Niro quote about 'it's a game of inches' from that weird late 90s Oliver Stone football movie.
I also find popularism more convincing for what you campaign on, versus how you govern. Again I find your point number one very, very plausible, so I think either party should just pass whatever laws they think are right when they're in power- I doubt it affects election outcomes that much. You are basically guaranteed to lose the midterms after winning the Presidency, for instance.
Actually I suspect that having midterms makes American politics more extremist, not less- why bother tacking to the center? You're basically guaranteed to lose if you just won and vice versa. Like, when Democrats won a trifecta and 60 Senate seats in 2008, would anyone say that Republicans were chastened, and so moderated & tacked to the center to win again? I mean, obviously not
I'm in the odd position of being a pro-Bernie guy who agrees with the popularists because:
-I genuinely don't much care for the sort of people who run the Democratic party, I think that i) they confuse "I-went-to-college" snobbery with enlightenment and virtue; ii) they are wrong about a lot of things that Sanders is correct about, in particular about foreign policy.
-I dislike them so much that although I always vote blue, I think that they are sometimes overwrought about the danger posed by Republicans or the specific evils of Donald Trump. I'd take a chance on a less-obviously-electable Democrat I agreed with.
-Sort of a corollary: I'm completely immune to this anti-Joe-Manchin BS. There are lots of centrists in the party (I'm still pissed off about Biden and Schumer voting for the Iraq War). Part of being in the center of the party involves endorsing an interlocking set of commitments that seem to me misguided & to be about solidarity within the blob that is the Democratic establishment.
-I really think a Sanders-style campaign would win more votes from working people (I don't think the contemporary far-left has absorbed his wisdom). It is weird and unpleasant for the supposedly left-wing party not to get the votes of the poorer and less educated. You can blame FOX News or any number of things, but if you promise and deliver clear material benefits to this demographic it will vote for you and if you don't why should it?
-I have basically culturally liberal positions (& am a middle-aged gay man, I'm aware how much this stuff can matter) but would dial them all many ticks back to focus on "economic culture war." The only exception is climate change, which I guess is a kind of cultural issue.
What does a Sanders-style campaign mean? Does it include identifying as a socialist? Is Medicare for all a non-negotiable (as opposed to affordable insurance for all)? Does it center on calling for a "political revolution"? I am not persuaded that such an approach can win in the Electoral College until more people who remember the Cold War have shuffled off this mortal coil.
Maybe not, although he still might have won in 2016: the key is focusing like a laser on economics to the point where you genuinely alienate college graduates. At any rate that's what I as a politics fan would like, for various reasons it won't happen, particularly while Trump is around and the GOP economic agenda remains an amorphous blob. You don't really see that kind of left-wing politics anywhere outside of Latin America nowadays.
So I will grit my teeth and vote for Democrats, while disliking the people who run, work for & fund the party & not hating the people who vote for Republicans. I just feel I'm a bit more lucid about what role my feelings play in my political preferences than a lot of influential Democrats are.
I try not to hate anyone, but Trump really pushes my buttons with his low character. I think that most people are doing the best that they can under the circumstances, but he's just a really selfish person who seems to relish cruelty in a way that no one I have known irl does. Yes, there are people who have caused more harm, but it's still pretty shocking to me that people so wish to own the libs or the elites or whatever that they would vote for a person with seemingly no redeeming qualities. I really disliked the Clintons because I was appalled that Bill Clinton was willing to destroy the reputation of a pretty innocent person barely older than his own daughter rather than tell the truth and be embarrassed and Hillary went right along with the play. But she was at least well prepared to lead the country and I do think that if she had been elected, fewer Americans would have died of COVID. But who can know. I am all for much more redistribution of wealth, but that does not seem to be popular with much of the working class...
I voted for her, through gritted teeth. And I get the anti-Trump thing.
The most irritating thing about Trump is that he's tremendously embarrassing, the fact that he's a big deal in our politics makes the whole country & whatever we like or try to stand for seem smaller and cheaper.
A true far-left perspective would be that Trump has just revealed the essential tackiness of American politics. I can't quite manage that, I love America enough that I'm still embarrassed by the mere fact we are talking about Trump.
I completely agree and I truly think that the left needs to run on a message of loving America as a way to counteract the fear based stuff that Trump is doing which is why I am a sucker for Cory Booker.
It's easy to see Matt's point when I think the popularist position is correct on the merits, like with police funding. But on issues where I think an unpopular position is correct, the point gets a lot harder to swallow.
Like if I imagine a candidate strongly supporting rolling back protectionist measures or increasing legal immigration, I can't help imagining that people would be convinced and public opinion would shift. Because they *should* be convinced, those positions are correct!
And I notice Matt pushes candidates hard on housing issues even though NIMBY positions are still popular...
My understanding of popularism is that candidates should avoid getting drawn into debates of the latter kind while campaigning. The way to address such issues is through compromise and incremental progress, perhaps under the auspices of Secret Congress.
The myth of all powerful corrupting corporate money in politics has lead to a ‘stab in the back’ narrative on the left where the reason great left wing ideas don’t pass under ‘unified democratic governance’ is that dem pols secretly don’t believe anything they say and are taking bribes from big bad business. So candidates must be made to walk costly planks to demonstrate that they are true believers who can be trusted with nominations.
This is a huge part of it. Also when you go into political discussion online, so much of it emphasizes how useless persuasion is. Indeed, when's the last time you got someone to admit that they were wrong about a political opinion online? While swing voters are less common than in the past, they're not gone, and they're not debating the capital gains tax on reddit. However, to the overly online types, the only way forward is to force elites to signal their purity to you. If they have to send a costly signal, so much the better.
I think the stab in the back narrative is definitely a huge part of this. The poison-pill nature of the demands is very much the point. The activist groups do NOT want candidates to win through a swing-voter persuasion strategy. In their view, they have done all the work but have reaped none of the reward as politicians simply pivot to the center at will.
When candidates are forced to adopt poison pill positions, it reduces their freedom of political movement and binds them more tightly to the activist groups and the votes they can (in theory) deliver through mobilization.
The issue of course is that the activist groups are nowhere near as effective as they think they are. In their minds, they are the protagonists of politics who make everything happen. But the reality is, activist groups in the 21st century mostly lack the capability to deliver votes. The most successful politicians treat activists as a constituent group to be managed, not as key allies. But activists continue to overestimate their own capabilities and blame any problems on being stabbed in the back rather than on their own inability to actually deliver votes.
Well, they are right some of the time on this. Wasn’t there a provision in the BBB negotiations about giving Medicare the ability to negotiate with Pharma (which is amazingly popular across the board) that several Democratic congress folks killed? But yeah, there are many other cases where activists just don’t want to accept that their goal currently isn’t as popular as they think it is.
Genuine question (because I've looked and can't easily find the answer): Who besides Sinema on the D side was against it? And were they of as much consequence as her?
Sinema is also interesting from this perspective because she seems to take a funhouse-mirror view of the bad position "the groups" took in 2020--by taking unpopular positions on high-salience subjects in the *conservative* direction, she is trying to sell herself as a "maverick" in the vein of John McCain. What she seems to neglect is that whenever McCain broke with conservative orthodoxy, it was to take *popular liberal-coded* positions, not unpopular ones. (Outside foreign policy, where he was always just a hawk whether that was popular at the moment or not.)
I thought there was at least one congressperson (not senator) from the San Diego area who announced their public opposition to it but I could be mistaken.
That's fair, but was there a bloc in the House big enough to keep it off the table there as well? (Genuinely don't know).
Also, to be frank, if Sinema *had* been OK with the prescription-drug thing, I wonder if the NJ guys (especially Menendez) wouldn't find some way to tank it in a back room. (NJ because pharma is NJ's home-state industry, Menendez because Booker still has some national ambitions.)
I’m not being clear, but yes- that’s what I’m saying. There was a bloc in the House big enough to keep it off the table. And you’re probably right about Menendez. The larger point being that this given the popularity of this issue, this really does seem to be an example of “stabbed in the back” corrupt perfidy - but I have a hard time coming up with others.
Hey hey hey, Sinema may say dumb shit, but she can't possibly compete with the savant of baffling cringe shitposting that is Tulsi Gabbard. It's like comparing Karl Malone to MJ. Salieri will always be inadequate next to the virtuoso Mozart
I mean, her position on prescription drug pricing (what triggered me to think of this) is definitely unpopular. But point taken.
One of the challenges of popularism is that which is popular is often not what is on the table. In this case, prescription drug pricing might be popular, but the bill in question was a really weird (and IMO bad) way to do prescription pricing.
Sinema just likes rubbing it in the noses of the people who charged in on her in the bathroom (which is understandable)
I think the emotional logic makes perfect sense and you do see examples like this. It’s just that when you get into the pesky details it turns out that some congresspeople killed this or that responding to their particular district and circumstances and the presidential primary candidates or random unrelated senate candidates stated campaign positions are just not relevant. But if you’re a voter or front line activist without much trust in the system it’s easy to look at that and say it’s all a shell game and the corrupt Dems just shift the blame around and pick in secret meetings who will kill this or that. So you end up obsessed with purity across the board since you no longer trust strategy.
Democrats have been mired in single-issue organizing so long (since '70s) that most of it's activists don't even think about strategy, 'obsessed with purity'. Mobilizing the base is mechanics. Being able to build on the common elements that appeal to diverse strata of the electorate is strategy. The Obama Administration almost lost the ACA because they played up universal health coverage (one goal) and not how millions of people who already had insurance would benefit from reforms on pre-existing disease, wellness care, coverage caps and exclusions and other nuts-and-bolts insurance reforms.
They also dress like slobs. The people marching with MLK would never do that.
Hey, I am *proud* of the way utter slovenliness has become acceptable since 1960!
[SITS IN OFFICE IN T-SHIRT]
You wearing your baseball cap backwards, too?
Nah. Gotta flash that hair while I still have some of it.
Sounds like a mirror image of the MAGA people believing RINOs dominate their party in Congress, starting with McConnell.
Isn't it obvious that, if you know the absolute right answer to a political question, that anyone opposing it must be corrupt?
One thing you haven't touched on is that Sunrise and others have learned all the wrong lessons from right-wing advocacy groups like Club for Growth and the Right to Life campaign. Those groups have enforced strict messaging and will only endorse Republicans that support their full platform.
So why shouldn't left-wing groups do likewise? Because like it or not, the median vote in the Senate is coming from an R+3 state. Democrats have to play by different rules. It ain't fair, but that's the constitution we have.
"... learned all the wrong lessons from right-wing advocacy groups like Club for Growth and the Right to Life campaign."
Was going to say this. Left-wing frustration with message discipline, as counterproductive as it is, stems from a sense that the right wing never pays a price for its advocacy of unpopular views. And that Democrats always pay a maximal price for the unpopular views of even their most crazy, unrepresentative splinter-groups.
And that's not due to the Constitution, but to the fact that the media environment is (in Josh Marshall's phrase) wired for Republicans.
It drives me crazy that some left wing advocates continue to insist that there's no price paid by Republicans for unpopular views and totally miss how the GOP gave up winnable Senate seats in 2010 and 2012 for this very reason.
Because to many even normie left-wing friends I have (and I say this as a left-wing social democrat), the GOP should basically be unelectable, as opposed to losing a couple of Senate seats. Thus, they see the GOP do things they think are beyond the pale, and still come close to winning, and get upset they have to vote for Joe Biden.
I think it's pretty clear the Republicans (despite getting a Senate majority) also won fewer Senate seats in 2014 than they might otherwise have gotten with a more sane roster of candidates.
[deleted. no sick burns intended.]
"Left-wing frustration with message discipline, as counterproductive as it is, stems from a sense that the right wing never pays a price for its advocacy of unpopular views."
I think this stems from a dynamic where the most attention is paid to social issues, where the right-wing position might be unpopular, but not especially so. If the GOP ran on a platform of bringing back school prayer, it wouldn't poll well, and lefties would pounce on it, but I don't think it'd actually lose them that many votes. At the same time, the solid-left position on these issues also tends to be less popular than we care to admit.
When the unpopular views in question are about economic issues, they're much more likely to become political liabilities for Republicans. Remember Paul Ryan's brilliant plan to take money from Meals on Wheels?
DEIA training lands with me as a form of “school prayer”.
I think it is due to the constitution. Let's say Jay Rosen optimal media, or pick whatever platonic ideal you want, but kept senate apportionment, the EC, and single-member FPTP districts drawn by state legislatures. I think republicans would act mostly the same because whatever advantage the media environment gives them I believe it to be less than the partisan lean of senate apportionment and gerrymandered legislative districts.
Now imagine the reverse, we keep our media environment but go to a unicameral legislature with multi-member districts with proportional representation. I think then you see a much more disciplined republican party. I just can't imagine the effect size of Republican Wired media is on the scale of Wyoming having two senators or the Wisconsin gerrymander. Not to say media doesn't matter, but the disparity you identified in how much of a price each national party pays for the fringe beliefs of associated groups I think is itself a byproduct of these structural tilts. Republicans can afford to spend down some of their vote cushion on ideological extremity because the tipping point voter is to the right of the median voter.
I agree with your first point, but I think media consumption during the Trump years belies your last point.
“Democrats have to play by different rules”
Nope: Same rules. There is nothing preventing the Democratic Party from removing the unpopular parts of their platform.
The problem with our democracy is too much democracy.
well I don't think robust parties are a priori bad, but the architects of our system did and thought they would avoid them. Then you end up where the rules as designed require more consensus than is feasible with ideologically sorted national political parties.
On the contrary: Many of the founders wrote often about the dangers of faction. They expected it. But the worst of their fears has not come to pass in two and a half centuries.
There were a number of sane, experienced, and mainstream presidential candidates in the Democratic primaries that would have had a good chance of earning the nomination in the old system of smoke-filled rooms of party éminences grises. But the primary system gave us the choice of several left-wing nut jobs and Joe friggin’ Biden.
I think this is also a good and rarely stated point. The fight is not symmetrical.
"It is an almost childishly silly thing to argue about."
The elevation of young adults - VERY young adults - into positions of influence is, IMO, a real problem for the Progressive wing. I made the mistake this morning of following a couple of Matt's links to the Sunrise movement. The reported founders -- Sara Blazevic and Varshini Prakash -- were in their early 20s when Sunrise began its rise in the Democratic Party in 2016-2018. The organization is filled with college students, professional college students and young people filled with idealistic and simplistic notions about how the world should work. There is a place for this enthusiasm. But that place isn't in leadership positions.
The media - also filled with young and idealistic people - fawn over and provide favorable coverage of these groups. As one example, Ezra Klein interviewed Prakash in 2019 (she was 26!) and the transcript is full of support and encouragement, with no difficult questioning. Add to this the 'coverage' in the NYTimes, WaPo, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Time, etc., and you see how these movements become convinced of both their righteousness and the perfidy of anyone who disagrees.
I don't know how this is solved -- it seems to be hard-wired into the DNA of Progressives to believe Young People™ have some special insight and wisdom to which we should defer (Greta Thunburg comes to mind) -- but at some point, adults need to be in charge.
wtf is this ageism. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google were founded by people in their 20s. The US government is led by people in their 70s. Do I need to ask which has been better led?
If journalists are treating young leaders differently because of their age, that's bad. If you take the responsibility, you need to be able to withstand the scrutiny.
But if you're good enough, you're old enough.
In theory, I agree.
However, those companies were (and are) subject to the disciplines of the marketplace, which doesn't care about the age of the founder but only whether the product/service is valuable. I see no similar mechanism for the activists I mentioned.
If anything the problem is the opposite: market discipline in donation-funded activism filters in favor of nutjobs who speak eloquently and really strongly believe what they’re selling.
As opposed to those who say things like “we’re going to make compromises, get dirty, and achieve teeny-weeny-but-measurably-positive results.”
Even more than them seeing this as their interest, it’s not their *product*.
Their product is allowing donors to feel they’re contributing to moral causes and thereby “work their neuroses out in the public square.”
All of those companies had a mix of ages that doesn't exist in those activist groups. Lots of companies with young founders will go out and hire older people for various C-level jobs to balance out the founder (often at the demand of investors). There's no comparable "let's be sensible" thrust with activist groups.
Your position here is that we should be completely agnostic on age and its impact on maturity, wisdom, strategic approach, etc.? Because we can point to a few specific examples of old, immature people acting like inexperienced fools and of some young people who are wise beyond their years?
If I understand it correctly I on't agree with that logic. Even going to your corporoate examples, yes those companies were founded by people in their 20s. But they were "led" in the more mature phases of their business by much older, non-founder CEO's and senior leadership. Apple doesn't replace their CEO every five years with a new 26 year old, and I feel safe predicting that none of those companies will have a 20-something CEO ever again.
You've been a subscriber and commenter long enough to have read _many_ stories about young, inexperienced, and most often _loud_ people grabbing the reins from the older folks who had been in charge and running progressive companies and organizations off of bridges. It's not ageism, it's a literal description of what is happening. Why it's happening is a very interesting question, but it seems to be, basically, fear of bad media coverage, for the reasons John mentioned.
From this side of the Atlantic, Dem leadership seems consistently poor across all age groups.
The most positive institutional change within the Democratic Party I can think of in recent years is Crooked Media, which is slightly closing Republicans' messaging advantages. That was started by a bunch of guys in their mid-30s. Positively babies by the standards of the Democratic congressional leadership.
I'm not saying young progressive leaders are faultless but the problem seems to go way beyond them
Yes and then Google's board brought in a seasoned executive in 2001 to be CEO and put the founders under "adult supervision." Apple had done the same thing in 1983. Venture capital investors and board members provided adult supervision at all of those companies in their early years.
All of those companies are very smart and the smartest people on the planet are probably in their 20s (think great mathematicians). Wisdom tends to come with age. Is Facebook wise? Google has been around for what, 20 years? The Us Government has been around for 235 years or so. We should revisit this when Google has matured to 100 years old?
Based Football Manager interview answer
The incentive structure is all forked up.
As one guy said once, "don't boo, vote!"
Friend, I don't know how old you are, but I know someone once made the same complaint about your generation, and then their generation before, and so on all the way back to the first apes to walk upright. Old bloods' disgust for young whippersnappers is a central feature of human society.
The prevalence of people in their teens and early 20's leading influential organizations seems to be a more recent phenomenon, as is the increase in those over 75 (Biden, Pelosi, McConnell, et al.). Neither are positive developments, in my view.
There is a good reason why "prime working age" is defined as 25-54. For leadership, I think the best years are from 35-64, though: old enough to have garnered some experiential learning, young enough to have the energy to accomplish something.
'A more recent phenomenon...' William Pitt, the Younger, became Prime Minister of Britain at age 24; Napoleon, First Consul of France at age 30. On the elder side, we have the example not just of Biden, but Queen Victoria and the current Queen. Not sure this adds up to anything, except you can cherry pick examples from history to make any point. I agree though 35-64 seems the sweet spot for combining vigor and experience.
Alas, young people do not know what they don't know. Which is nearly everything. They do however make absolutely pitiless child soldiers.
To be fair, the gerontocratic nature of U.S. governance is both an acute problem and seemingly a scourge particular to more recent years -- consider that we have had five presidents since 1992, and three of them over the span of *thirty years* were born in 1946, with Biden even older (1942) and McConnell born in the same year as Biden.
I think the point about the young being the ones to live in the future, conversely, is both self-evidently true and its importance particularly acute with respect to the failures of government on climate change (in the case of Republican administrations, deliberate failures. The Frank Luntz memo to the GWB administration is really something as far as naked bad faith and cynicism goes). The point of disagreement I have with your Hegelian characterization is that it's very much *not the case* that the future will be better. In several material respects it will be --and, in fact, already is--worse, and the people behind the wheel whom one might suppose to act in the interest of their own descendants if not of their political constituents instead seem to content to bank on dying and making it someone else's problem.
It's simply a fact that things I took for granted as a kid in New England like playing in the snow or skating on a frozen lake are not as available to today's kids (citations available on request. This is also apparently affecting the capacity of Canadian kids to practice hockey, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/climate/canada-outdoor-rinks.html). And this of course isn't even getting into plastic pollution or wildlife extinctions which are a whole 'nother kettle of fish. At least in America, the future (and the present) is in many respects much worse than, say, the 1990s.
This is, likewise, a source of frustration with advice to cater to popularism although I don't have any formal (or informal) affiliation with the activist groups in question. California droughts and wildfires really don't give a fig about the political palatability of carbon taxation. As between physics and the "art of the possible," the latter is going to be the one to give. Accordingly, it invites contempt as a normative matter when we treat public opinion as immutable (or even relevant) versus physical reality.[1]
The 1940s generation has been doing its best to fiddle while Rome -- and, in more recent years, California--burns for the better part of thirty years. I'm pretty sure that not just the young but everyone from Generation X on Up has pretty good reason to be pissed off with them at this point.
[1](One could also make a more general argument against Matt's more descriptivist / instrumentalist argument for popularism in the sense that adopting only agendas that command majoritarian support basically precludes the capacity of law to surpass the instincts of the electorate. Free speech is often unpopular, it's also clearly better than the alternatives).
"a scourge particular to more recent years"
Yes, and it follows a large decline in the average age in the 60s-70s.
There a many charts on this and they all show ~1980 as the beginning of the upward slope. Here's one that covers a long enough time put some perspective on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/lt92c3/average_age_of_congress/
>"I didn't imply this, and was actually criticizing such a Whig history notion."
I'm aware that you were criticizing this, my point was that inasmuch as I could offer an apologia for the anti-popularist view (and as I understand the predominant frustrations of the anti-popularist segment of Sunrise et al.) they very much agree with the premise that the young are the ones who have to live in the future but would express the diametric opposite of a belief that the future will be better--indeed, their complaint is precisely the opposite. Thus, I think one of the two premises posited as a position against which you argue is incorrectly stated. Indeed, if the future were presumptively better sans struggle, whence the agita of the young?
(Side note: I'm interpreting your use of "Hegelian" as broadly parallel to "Manichean" here, but Im not actually particularly familiar with Hegel, so if I have erred on that basis I apologize).
A lot of this is likely just life expectancy, and the population pyramid, right? In the 90's life expectancy was about 5 years shorter. And the cohort of people born in the 1950s (so now entering their early 70s) is much much bigger than the cohort of people born in the 1920's.
Which unfortunately implies that this will stay a problem for a long time, as the % of old people in the population continues to increase.
"Again, I concede that this is a really stupid argument and certainly uninteresting on an academic level."
People overrate the importance of saying smart things. Sometimes, saying the stupid thing is much more clarifying. I started winning more cases when I started to explain to my witnesses that I was deliberately asking stupid questions and expected stupid answers. The witnesses stopped trying to be clever and just gave dumb answers when I needed them. The judges/administrative boards understood what my case was so much better after that.
We need to be clearer in distinguishing between “stupid” as in “idiotic” and “stupid” as in “simple/basic”.
The latter is relative to your comfort and knowledge of a topic, and that’s what both you and Matt are talking about.
Agreed. I should emphasize, though, that I only got results when I started specifically saying (in witness preparation sessions) "I am deliberately asking stupid questions and expect stupid answers." Framing it as "stupid" rather than "simple" or "basic" got the message across better.
I once spoke to an old attorney who had argued in front of Judge Learned Hand and told me that Learned Hand told him "explain it to me in language I can understand, give it to me in baby talk."
Words to live by.
I recall my English teacher having to tell everyone before we did an exam that if the question seemed stupidly easy, it actually was stupidly easy and not secretly asking for a complicated answer.
A lot of good lawyering sounds silly. Another bit of good practice I've picked up is "When unsure which word to write, choose the one with an Old (or at least Middle) English root." (It's much punchier than "When in doubt about synonyms, use the term with the Germanic etymon.")
Can you give an example of when this would be helpful?
Brief-writing, especially when other lawyers where you practice overuse the Law Latin and Law French. (Like Pennsylvania.) It makes your writing stand out as more straightforward (and easy to read) when your briefs say things like "Here, Nelson misunderstands the law" rather than "Defendant's argument is based on a misapprehension of the statute."
That sort of clarity is sadly rare in legal writing (and, in fact, most writing generally - most planners refuse to say "close to" when they could say "in close proximity to")...I hope lots of practicing attorneys (and planners, and others) are reading your comment and taking it to heart!
I'm skeptical. Brian Garner has been yelling this at the profession for like 30 years, and Ross Guberman for at least 10. Those of us who try to follow their techniques (and I'll admit I'm not perfect about it!) still find ourselves seen as members of a weird cult. Even when we get results.
I should try that with my fiancée lol. (For anything not too sensitive and when she’s not overwhelmed by classes—life of an engineering student.)
This problem is going to get worse, not better, now that Democrats have counter-gerrymandered the hell out of quite a few places themselves.
Everywhere the real election is a primary, the activists are further incentivized to go hog-wild, which will reflect badly on the national stage and atrophy the muscles needed to win competitive elections.
Just look at the GOP since 2012…
My point wasn’t “they can’t win elections”; given the nature of the American electorate and its geographic distribution this is much less of a problem when you’re too far right than when you’re too far left.
My point was “whole party is now run by nutjobs in ultra-safe seats who primaried ‘RINOs’ in those seats after the old less safe ones were gerrymandered to hell for 2012.”
With non-gerrymandered districts, to boot.
Thank god.
Then we have things like this, which just convince me we’re going to descend so far into navel-gazing that no normal person can even understand the Wokespeak we replaced English with:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-revelations-raise-pressure-on-nasa-to-rename-the-james-webb-space-telescope/
Maybe 40 years of electoral pain is just weakness leaving the body?
I suspect the answer is and always will be “zero”. At least some of the folks quoted know that damned well and are just throwing a bitch-fit because they’ve been made to feel like they *should* by the zeitgeist.
Whereas the amateur nerds and teenagers who dream of doing this work would sit somewhere around here:
“He ran down pregnant women and ate their fetuses after work? Are you sure?
Meh, he still got us to the moon, can’t win ‘em all.”
I blame social media and activist engagement with it for the phenomenon. I can't be the only person with a Facebook feed that periodically features someone going on an aggressively, woker-than-thou screed. It then gets 15 or 20 likes and a handful of enthusiastically supportive comments. From that person's perspective what they are saying probably feels both subversive and popular. So the best thing ever.
I am not in remotely activist circles but I can imagine if I was it would be even more extreme. My take is that even where people intellectually understand that certain ideas don't have broad-based support, if they are Extremely Online, as I imagine most left-wing activists to be, they don't at a gut level understand how unpopular these things can be. It isn't so much popularism vs. whatever the opposite is, it's failure to accept that they are actually not popular.
This is so true. You could knock on 50 doors and have polite conversations explaining why you vote Democrat and why you hope they will too and you might actually change a vote or two or boost turnout. That’s actually valuable, but because you won’t know for sure, you won’t get the immediate dopamine rush of the 20 likes from your Facebook post that isn’t moving the political needle at all.
No one is forcing CEOs at cable companies and media conglomerates to make coverage decisions disproportionately based off of what is trending on a website that a tiny unrepresentative sample of the population is signed up for, let alone actively uses. At the end of the day, if Social Media didn't exist (and it didn't in the late 90s when a lot of these coverage decisions materialized), they would still find some way to cater to their bread and butter demographic (16 - 40 year old, middle to upper middle class, political hobbyist) and cater to the stories and trends those folks can't help but interact with. Just look at all the harmful media news cycles we had towards the end of the Clinton era / start of the Bush era before Facebook or Twitter even got here...all the pieces were in place, these companies just found efficiencies in how to determine those trends thanks to social media.
That is completely insane and also very sad. If you can't appreciate anything about America and all you can focus on is racism, you're really pretty lost. People of all creeds and colours from all over the world go to incredible lengths to give their families a chance of living there.
I think there's a big difference between having an appreciation of racism (or any other issue) in your own life and telling other people on Facebook that you understand their life better than they do, especially if you do so in a critical way.
I agree with FrigidWind that large companies are better at mitigating discrimination and bias. At least this is true in tech. These DEI departments might be good for something, but there are many other reasons: formal perf evaluation and promotion processes, 360 feedback, better interviewing practices (well, sometimes). And what is definitely unique to large companies is that you can look at the stats like who is getting promoted, women vs men, white vs asian etc. on a huge sample.
Do you find all races equally attractive? Like, don't answer me, but answer to yourself and think about the question for a minute- visualize all of the various human subgroups. You find them all equally attractive with zero differences- really? I don't believe that, sorry man.
Step 2- once you acknowledge that you do find some subgroups less attractive- is that because you're racist?
Applying the concepts of prejudice and discrimination to the world of romance and dating seems like fraught territory to me, because romantic/physical attraction is just so personal and subjective. If romantic courtship was a necessary component of climbing the social ladder like it was in the olden days, then I could see where discrimination could be an issue, but thankfully we've mostly moved past that as a society. I think it simply important not to base your self-worth on who happens to find you attractive.
I think any analysis of the counterproductive actions of activists needs to take into account their incentives. Activist groups are not necessarily primarily incentivized to work towards likely progress on their stated aims. Instead, their chief interest is fundraising. Those two aims can align at times—particularly when donors prioritize outcomes—but they don’t have to. At times donors themselves may care more about supporting ideological purist movements that reinforce the donor’s personal identity than a boring pragmatic cause.
Hence, activists can be incentivized to create the most compelling ideological product to sell to donors. Further, they need to differentiate themselves from competing activism products by developing a unique brand. And of course they want to maximize their courting of free media coverage, including distribution on social media. That can incentivize taking extreme and outrageous positions that are more likely to garner engagement.
One needn’t even assume activist leadership is deliberately scheming to craft optimal ideological products for sale to donors. Market forces alone could ensure that more compelling and engaging movements outcompete lesser ones and thereby garner more funds for continuation and expansion. Through this Darwinian evolution we’d be left with ideological products optimized for donor consumption.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. I’d also add that getting candidates to adopt their extreme positions is a demonstration of power. It helps with fundraising and gets the organizations placed in the center of the media narrative. For frustrated activists and partisans, at least they did something. The stuff I saw on Rachel Maddow is reflected somewhere. The republicans did something similar with Club for Growth and others. You could say that Trump is the outgrowth of these groups forcing candidates to take positions out of line with the mainstream of the party. It took a transgressive narcissist to overcome the phalanx of right wing groups and he really didn’t once he was in power.
Hard agree, and this dynamic is really hurting Dems vis-a-vis the center, a problem that is salient to me. What is an engaged but deeply frustrated citizen with moderate views to do when these incentives push NGOs and candidates waaaay to the left?
Maybe popularism isn't interesting to Matt, but having watched, over the course of my voting life, the transition from the DLC to....what we have now has left me bewildered as well as politically homeless. The vagaries and policy and governance have always fascinated me, though I don't enjoy the sports-fan aspect of politics per se, and they seem to have become completely decoupled. Trying to understand exactly what is happening here is, to me, very interesting (even though it's pretty depressing).
I also think that as long as trump is the republican nominee, we’re all trapped. Most of us won’t vote for him and an independent challenger would seem like an automatic vote for trump. Once he’s gone, an independent candidate could split the democratic base and force the party to get real.
Unfortunately it seems like we are all in one giant political Hooverville: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville
More and more I think this is the Pauline Kael situation for Democratic staff and activists. They are in such a bubble away from the vast majority of voters they don't recognize the unpopularity of their positions. I've been following the unionization efforts of Democratic congressional staff and some of the statements clearly indicate a divide from "average" Americans. Last week the House voted on a pretty robust marijuana legalization bill, but it was being faulted for not going far enough--despite going so far it's largely lost any bipartisan appeal--by Democratic staff who insisted that the vast majority of Americans are regularly using marijuana. It's totally missing the public polling on some of these issues and making the class of fellow activists in DC the focus group.
You’ve got me at a disadvantage here. The “Pauline Kael situation?” What the heck is that? Inquiring minds want to know!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael#Nixon_quote
I tried to click the like heart on this and the previous post but for some reason it didn’t accept it. So here in written form is your dopamine rush!
I've noticed that on non-top level comments, the front end animation for the like action doesn't always execute. However, I got an email saying you upvoted my comment, so it looks like it's at least registering in the back end.
Pauline Kael was a New York Times film critic and is often credited with saying in connection with the 1972 election some version of, "How did Nixon win? Nobody I know voted for him!" (That's not actually what she said, but it's generally what people mean when making a Pauline Kael reference.)
EDIT: Or you could just read the link City of Trees posted while I was typing this.....
Pauline Kael was a New Yorker critic, a very slight difference, just to correct the record. The NY Times and New Yorker of 1972 weren't quite the clones of each other they are today. Renata Adler was the NY Times film critic at the time and did a famous hatchet job on Kael in the New York Review of Books.
Isn’t the steel man argument just that the activists believe these issues are morally righteous and that when the public is exposed to them outside the ‘right wing/corporate media’ filter they will be convinced of this?
Then they run push polls that show that people can support something like their idea when not presented with any criticism, which ‘proves’ the point.
You are right on about “defund” though - that is just pure cope.
Matt is obviously right, which begs the question: why doesn't the Dem establishment stand up to these extremists more?
With Republicans, the answer is supposedly obvious. Republican have to deliver red meat to their base so they can pass their unpopular tax cuts.
I suspect Dems are not so different. Dems share plenty of culpability for the orgy of rent seeking that is the American economy, and these symbolic gestures are penance for or distractions from their inaction on that front.
The Obama administration actually raised taxes and passed regulations that, for good or for ill, Wall Street hated. I can't recall equivalents under Biden. He's mostly sprayed a load of cash around
Since the financial crisis "spray cash everywhere" wasn't a bad strategy, politically (at least in non-Tea Party circles) or substantively since demand was low. At the very least, it papers over the cracks in the Democratic coalition. Now that inflation is here, you gotta choose wisely, and while I think stuff like cutting child poverty and fighting climate change are wise investments, you have to prioritize. Democrats' coalitional politics, along with their slim margins, make that difficult.
They’re rapidly becoming a Latin American liberal party.
Yay.
1. There are a fair number of people that argue that politicians taking a position will change the public's viewpoint in a positive direction. Thus, a candidate that jettisons "safe, legal, and rare" will help destigmatize abortion and push the public to become more pro-choice.
2. I think an awful lot of this was just about trying to clear the field for Bernie. You didn't see many people talking about how "Medicare for All" is a neoliberal sellout policy, since it leaves a role for privately run hospitals.
3. Being a YIMBY teaches you a lot about political pragmatism. It's hard to argue that voters will support your anti-free parking agenda if only you spend more time explaining it to them.
> There are a fair number of people that argue that politicians taking a position will change the public's viewpoint in a positive direction
I cannot imagine that a single one of those people has ever tried to run for office or even work for a winning campaign. Nothing disabuses you of the notion that a "politician taking a position" does _anything_ positive faster than trying to do so as a politician. There's a reason politicians are stereotyped as spineless -- it works!
I’m fearful that a lot of progressives greatly misread the damage that over-zealous pandemic policies did for us, especially among working class voters. I think that early in the pandemic, as a direct result of Trump and other Republicans’ insanely irresponsible view to ignore the pandemic, many progressives changed how they viewed NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions - masking, distancing, shutting down indoor dining- everything except vaxing) from “important tools to help deal with this pandemic” to “a public talisman that I take this emergency seriously, unlike the horrible Republicans I already hated”. I don’t think they ever understood the perspective that much of the country was unhappy with continued insistence of NPIs even after vaccine availability as well as a failure of leaders to provide clear and transparent metrics as to when these interventions would be made optional. Yet because so many progressives are viewing these things as talismans they have a big blind spot on this: “why are you demanding clear metrics? Masks aren’t that big a deal- they show you care, DON”T YOU CARE?” Left out of that is the fact that occasionally being asked to wear a mask to enter a grocery store is very different from being asked to wear one all day if you work there.
My view is that we should assume NPIs will be unpopular and we should limit their usage and rapidly update our guidance as we learn more about effectiveness. If we find out that cloth masks are almost worthless (which we have), then we should either update our mask mandates to require better masks or kill the mandate entirely. We should develop clear and transparent rules and make a commitment to the community that our NPIs go up based on X metric and as soon as it comes down we pull them down. In short we should be doing everything we can to communicate to as broad a public as possible that we recognize the burdens that we are asking people to take and as a result we are doing everything we can to minimize them. And our failure to do that is costing us with many otherwise winnable voters.
I was actually told by someone who is very left-leaning that even if mask mandates aren’t doing much to stop the spread of the virus, they’re still a good thing because the Trump voters hate them. This is not a healthy way to evaluate restrictions that supposedly have a public health purpose.
We have the data right now. Hong Kong has excellent mask compliance and they are literally being killed by COVID right now because a lot of their elderly didn’t get vaccinated.
Here is my attempt at a steelman version of antipopularism:
1. Nothing really matters. The effect of adopting popular positions, as opposed to antipopular positions, is so small as to be insignificant. Elections are decided almost exclusively by trends in the economy, thermostatic public opinion, and other larger trends.
2. Therefore the way to achieve social change is not by maximizing your likelihood of winning elections, but rather to maximize the likelihood that your program will be implemented when your side wins the elections it was always going to win anyway. So we should focus all our energies on ensuring that the right people are in place, ready for that moment: people who are committed to using their power as sweepingly (and perhaps as ruthlessly) as possible once they have the opportunity.
Popularists tend to focus on the fact that defunding the police etc. are extremely unpopular. The problem is that you're speaking to an audience made up of cynics who believe that "the system is broken" and popularity is irrelevant to political success. So I think popularists could persuade more of the people they're trying to persuade by focusing less on the fact of unpopularity, and more on proving that popularity *matters*. And I would suggest doing so in positive terms, e.g. "if we adopt more popular positions on issues ABC, we can achieve greater electoral success in races XYZ and here's why."
I think the nature of this cynicism - the desperation people go through before arriving at a "burn it all down" attitude - is underappreciated and misunderstood as glibness by the popularist crowd.
I don't hate this argument- actually, I think 1 is extremely correct- but I still think it's plausible that popularism gets you say 1-3% more votes, and all of the presidential swing states are typically decided by that much. Insert Robert De Niro quote about 'it's a game of inches' from that weird late 90s Oliver Stone football movie.
I also find popularism more convincing for what you campaign on, versus how you govern. Again I find your point number one very, very plausible, so I think either party should just pass whatever laws they think are right when they're in power- I doubt it affects election outcomes that much. You are basically guaranteed to lose the midterms after winning the Presidency, for instance.
Actually I suspect that having midterms makes American politics more extremist, not less- why bother tacking to the center? You're basically guaranteed to lose if you just won and vice versa. Like, when Democrats won a trifecta and 60 Senate seats in 2008, would anyone say that Republicans were chastened, and so moderated & tacked to the center to win again? I mean, obviously not
The problem with popularists is that they assume the American public is more left-wing than in reality.
I'm in the odd position of being a pro-Bernie guy who agrees with the popularists because:
-I genuinely don't much care for the sort of people who run the Democratic party, I think that i) they confuse "I-went-to-college" snobbery with enlightenment and virtue; ii) they are wrong about a lot of things that Sanders is correct about, in particular about foreign policy.
-I dislike them so much that although I always vote blue, I think that they are sometimes overwrought about the danger posed by Republicans or the specific evils of Donald Trump. I'd take a chance on a less-obviously-electable Democrat I agreed with.
-Sort of a corollary: I'm completely immune to this anti-Joe-Manchin BS. There are lots of centrists in the party (I'm still pissed off about Biden and Schumer voting for the Iraq War). Part of being in the center of the party involves endorsing an interlocking set of commitments that seem to me misguided & to be about solidarity within the blob that is the Democratic establishment.
-I really think a Sanders-style campaign would win more votes from working people (I don't think the contemporary far-left has absorbed his wisdom). It is weird and unpleasant for the supposedly left-wing party not to get the votes of the poorer and less educated. You can blame FOX News or any number of things, but if you promise and deliver clear material benefits to this demographic it will vote for you and if you don't why should it?
-I have basically culturally liberal positions (& am a middle-aged gay man, I'm aware how much this stuff can matter) but would dial them all many ticks back to focus on "economic culture war." The only exception is climate change, which I guess is a kind of cultural issue.
What does a Sanders-style campaign mean? Does it include identifying as a socialist? Is Medicare for all a non-negotiable (as opposed to affordable insurance for all)? Does it center on calling for a "political revolution"? I am not persuaded that such an approach can win in the Electoral College until more people who remember the Cold War have shuffled off this mortal coil.
Maybe not, although he still might have won in 2016: the key is focusing like a laser on economics to the point where you genuinely alienate college graduates. At any rate that's what I as a politics fan would like, for various reasons it won't happen, particularly while Trump is around and the GOP economic agenda remains an amorphous blob. You don't really see that kind of left-wing politics anywhere outside of Latin America nowadays.
So I will grit my teeth and vote for Democrats, while disliking the people who run, work for & fund the party & not hating the people who vote for Republicans. I just feel I'm a bit more lucid about what role my feelings play in my political preferences than a lot of influential Democrats are.
I try not to hate anyone, but Trump really pushes my buttons with his low character. I think that most people are doing the best that they can under the circumstances, but he's just a really selfish person who seems to relish cruelty in a way that no one I have known irl does. Yes, there are people who have caused more harm, but it's still pretty shocking to me that people so wish to own the libs or the elites or whatever that they would vote for a person with seemingly no redeeming qualities. I really disliked the Clintons because I was appalled that Bill Clinton was willing to destroy the reputation of a pretty innocent person barely older than his own daughter rather than tell the truth and be embarrassed and Hillary went right along with the play. But she was at least well prepared to lead the country and I do think that if she had been elected, fewer Americans would have died of COVID. But who can know. I am all for much more redistribution of wealth, but that does not seem to be popular with much of the working class...
I voted for her, through gritted teeth. And I get the anti-Trump thing.
The most irritating thing about Trump is that he's tremendously embarrassing, the fact that he's a big deal in our politics makes the whole country & whatever we like or try to stand for seem smaller and cheaper.
A true far-left perspective would be that Trump has just revealed the essential tackiness of American politics. I can't quite manage that, I love America enough that I'm still embarrassed by the mere fact we are talking about Trump.
I completely agree and I truly think that the left needs to run on a message of loving America as a way to counteract the fear based stuff that Trump is doing which is why I am a sucker for Cory Booker.
It's easy to see Matt's point when I think the popularist position is correct on the merits, like with police funding. But on issues where I think an unpopular position is correct, the point gets a lot harder to swallow.
Like if I imagine a candidate strongly supporting rolling back protectionist measures or increasing legal immigration, I can't help imagining that people would be convinced and public opinion would shift. Because they *should* be convinced, those positions are correct!
And I notice Matt pushes candidates hard on housing issues even though NIMBY positions are still popular...
My understanding of popularism is that candidates should avoid getting drawn into debates of the latter kind while campaigning. The way to address such issues is through compromise and incremental progress, perhaps under the auspices of Secret Congress.