I link to Matt Yglesias a lot here, because his whole schtick is to pen hot takes that really aren't hot takes, so much as repudiation of assaults on conventional wisdom. However, I'm going to link to his recent piece for a different reason. Yglesias is part of a cadre of commentators who have taken issue with the New New Left's take on politics. In large part, I agree with him, Jon Chait and others who find a lot of the New New Left to be pursuing politically toxic policies and messaging because they have their heads firmly up each other's asses. Years ago, epistemological closure warped the Republican party into what it is today: a fever swamp of conspiracy theories and counterfactuals. The New New Left would create a similar condition of epistemological closure among Democrats, and that would be bad.
In response to this, Yglesias suggests creating a new "Center Party." The idea is in response to a truism about American politics: it is currently broken. The reason it's broken is that excessive partisanship - mostly fomented by Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell - has made it impossible for Congress to pass legislation through regular order. The anti-democratic - and therefore anti-Democratic - nature of the Senate makes this especially pronounced. Yglesias proposes that a Center Party made up of Joe Manchin, Susan Collins, Jon Tester and Lisa Murkowski could somehow break this logjam.
What he doesn't address is the filibuster. Even if Collins, Murkowski, Portman and Toomey signed on to the Center Party nothing would change. Even a modest voting rights bill would not get enough votes. Maybe...MAYBE you get some sort of "Protect Democracy" Act that prevents another 1/6 from happening, but I doubt that.
The problem with Yglesias' argument is that it badly mistakes cause and effect. He presumes that Murkowski and Manchin - who have been at odds with the general bent of their national parties - would somehow want to separate from those parties. But it is precisely the rigid partisanship that creates the loyalty to parties. Break with the GOP and who is really going to support you? As we have seen, especially on the Right, loyalty to party is usually very, very important. In fact, being a Republican is today about 90% being loyal to the person of Donald Trump.
There are likely quite a few Republicans who would love to break with Trump, but his cultists are their primary voters. They know they can't get elected without them. In a few states, you could see an argument for Collins being an independent. Angus King, the other Senator from Maine, is an "independent" but he's a Democrat in name only. (This doesn't even get into committee assignments. The whole of Congress is structured around parties.)
The other part of Yglesias' argument I find bothersome is the idea that the Democratic Party is basically just "the party for people who live in big cities and care a lot about intersectionality." This is the sort of bullshit analysis one gets if one spends a lot of time on Twitter arguing with 20-something Leftists who think Joe Biden wants to lower taxes on billionaires when literally the opposite is true.
I agree that fear-mongering about Democrats being Socialists and wanting to abolish the police helped keep the 2020 election close. But the Democrats ARE a big tent party in ways the Republicans really aren't anymore. It was culturally conservative African American voters who rescued Joe Biden in South Carolina and helped win the election. Relying on young voters or new voters almost always fails; you need to convince the people who vote to vote for you. Yglesias made this very point yesterday. Trump managed to mobilize a certain group of voters who had not voted before, but it is very far from clear if those voters will vote without him on the ballot.
(I could see Terry McAuliffe in Virginia losing narrowly, winning narrowly or blowing Glenn Youngkin out of the water. Pollsters are always trying to make up for their mistakes and having undersampled Trump voters in 2020, they could oversample them in 2021. The California recall was a nail biter until they actually started counting votes.)
In a perfect world, it would be nice to have a three party system, where the center had the ability to mold legislation to appeal to the broadest possible constituency. However, Murkowski and Collins voted for Trump's tax cuts. Manchin votes with Democrats most of the time, and he will vote for the BBB when they are done negotiating it. In fact, the current standing of Manchinema is precisely the centrist structure Yglesias claims to want. It's unclear what the advantage would be for Susan Collins or Jon Tester to drop their party identifier.
Yglesias says that Duverger's Law isn't really applicable here, because Canada and Great Britain (and Mexico) have the same sort of electoral systems, but more than two parties. The problem is that our two parties are so deeply institutionalized that even when they change their positions completely, they still exist. The parties don't exist because of ideological commitments, but because we have a presidential system and you really only have a binary choice.
I have been hoping for years that the GOP splinters into a Chamber of Commerce/Libertarian party and a Trumpist/Revanchist/White Supremacist party. The outcome will be large majorities for Democrats in the Congress, as the minority Rightists in this country split their votes. Yglesias' idea isn't that hopeful. All he wants to do is take the existing system and rearrange the letters on the name plates of Senator's doors.
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