Limits Of The DSA

 A lot has been written about the collapse in support for Tiffany Hong in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. As per usual, a lot of it looks wrong and serves to justify people's priors.

First of all, looking at a Marquette poll from late July, Hong was getting 38% support. On election night, she got...38% of the vote. She had clearly maxed out her ceiling and anyone who hadn't made up their mind seems to have shifted to Crowley.

There was also some sense that the more scrutiny Hong was placed under as the election got closer, the worse she looked. She did not exactly enthuse the usual rainmakers like Bernie or AOC either. 

It seems like Hong captured some imagination among younger voters and the "Fight!" crowd because she was a bit edgy, but some of those edges were natural attack avenues for Republicans. Abolish Thanksgiving? Abolish the police?

As Josh Marshal reminds us - not that we needed reminding - Zohran Mamdani is a very talented politician. He has expertly navigated between the somewhat utopian nature of DSA campaigns and the nuts and bolts nature of being a mayor. He is not "angry" and scary, and a lot of what he proposes are just solid, "improve people's lives" measures. 

There are two hobby horses that DSA flog nearly to death: Medicare for All and Israel. The distance between the DSA and the median Democratic representative in DC on Medicare for All is likely too small to measured with the naked eye. The median Democratic Rep just understands how the Congress works and how math works. On Israel, there is likely much more daylight, but the calculus of support for Israel - at least militarily - is also collapsing. The difference between the DSA candidates and normie Dems is mostly about rhetoric. 

For instance, I don't believe Israel's actions rise to the level of genocide - a word that is being diluted by throwing it around so much. I DO believe that we should cut off military aid and abandon our practice of protecting Israel with a UN veto. Does that make me "anti-Zionist"? No, I think Israel has a right to exist, but I think they have forfeited the right to count on unconditional support from the US. In policy terms, my difference from the DSA is pretty small. 

Where the DSA has been most successful is in overwhelmingly Blue districts where you have the "Fight" dynamic and often a rival who is too old. Not surprisingly, DSA candidates have done best with bougie, urban, college educated white liberals. They are not creating a "class consciousness" among non-college people - precisely the demographic that socialism is supposed to mobilize. A large part of that is because the DSA isn't so much about expanding social programs as bullshit, boutique radicalism like "Defund the Police" or "Open borders" that just repels a lot of people. 

It is absolutely healthy to have a left wing in the Democratic Party pushing for health care expansion as a first priority. But caterwauling about AIPAC or the systemic racism of Thanksgiving isn't helping anyone.

Class In America

Yglesias, the other day, raised the issue of how hard it is to define "class" in America. This is not a new challenge and it remains in many ways the single greatest obstacle that those self-styled socialists have in trying to win friends and influence people.

When Marx wrote back in the middle of the 19th century, he predicted that his communist revolution would most likely happen in America - a country he never set foot in. His reasoning was that the revolution had to occur in a place that had a highly developed industrial economy that relied on wage labor - the proletariat - coming to the realization that they were being exploited by capital - the bourgeoisie. Once they realized that, they would rise up in their numbers and overthrow the existing system of exploitation and replace it with a utopia where the fruits on industrial production would be shared equally.

So that never happened.

Where "communist" revolutions happened were in fact economically backwards societies like Russia, China and Cuba where you had the old feudal-style relationship between land owner and peasant. This was not at all what Marx predicted and predictably, those countries struggled to distribute the fruits of industrial production because they lacked industrial production. C'est la guerre.

This did lead to a bunch of feverish arguments all the way into the 20th century of why class-based politics never took hold in the US. Britain and other countries had Labour parties and Socialist Parties that routinely won elections. The Socialist Party in the US maxxed out with a 4th place finish in 1912. Despite real anger among many working class people, there simply never developed a fully "class conscious" proletariat in the United States.

Fast forward to the post-industrial US of today, the elements of class based politics is even tougher to create. Yglesias' jumping off point is the Graham Platner debacle in Maine, because Platner's definition of "working class" is so expansive, it's meaningless. Platner himself "qualifies" because he doesn't have a Bachelor's Degree, because he dropped out of college. He also went to Hotchkiss, which is not exactly working class. His attraction was that he seemed working class at first blush. He had a bushy beard; he was a veteran; he was an "oyster farmer." 

For that group of political consultants that elevated him to relevance, this was an antidote to "HR liberalism" that policed your pronouns and did land acknowledgements. (It was very much a gendered critique of current Democratic politics.) Platner looked credibly working class, so he must BE working class, and this will return working class voters to the Democratic Party.

Except wherever you look, including the current face off between the DSA Left and the Standard Liberal in the Michigan Senate primary, you see candidates like Platner or Abdul El-Sayed running much stronger amongst college educated voters than the "working class" voters that they purport to advocate for. In the NY House primaries, the DSA candidate defeated the head of the Hispanic Caucus by relying on voters in the Columbia University part of the district, not the Hispanic working class part of the district.

In other words, the biggest supporters of class-based leftwing politics are college educated voters who are not usually lumped into the "working class" basket. THOSE voters are not interested in "defund the police" or "Free Palestine". What's more, they typically don't really think government is going to work for them anyway, so what's the point in voting for someone who promises them "Medicare for All" when you don't expect Medicare to be there when you retire anyway?

Rather than grapple with this dynamic, WAAAAAY too many on that Left of Left of Center space are simply throwing out vibes candidates like Platner - who turned out to be a train wreck. You have a similar situation in Ohio's 7th CD, with a Republican who is credibly accused of violence against women facing another "working class" non-college graduate with some history of troublemaking in his past, too.

There is ONE version of class-based politics that I think does land, but I'm not sure who coined it: The Epstein Class. If you want to take down Trump and the GOP, that's a brilliant rhetorical flourish, because it links Trump's heavily implied crimes with Epstein's documented crimes with the heavily implied crimes of a bunch of rich creeps who hung out a private island and may or may not have raped a bunch of children. And except for Epstein, none of these super rich perverts has faced a whiff of legal consequences in this country. 

However, when you think about the "Epstein Class" you aren't differentiating between wage labor and salaried employees or between people who hold college degrees and those who don't. You're talking about a corrupt system whereby the very rich escape the consequences of their lawlessness. But if you simply attack the whole system as being corrupted beyond redemption, does that include the system that underwrites your mortgage? That raises taxes to educate your child? We are seeing the effects of dismantling the regulatory state in the explosive diarrhea moment. Isn't THAT system worth preserving?

If you're a DSA-type, you have to see the whole system as corrupt and needing to be replaced by a vanguard of non-politicians who arise from a working class that you likely never really were part of and who have no real credible plan to achieve their change via policy. Focusing instead on the specific corruption of Trumpism is less satisfying (especially because for many in the DSA, the real enemy isn't Trump but "establishment Dems").

Americans have never really seen themselves as part of a distinct class. Even in the Gilded Age and the New Gilded Age, when socio-economic mobility is deeply constrained, Americans have typically not seen themselves as "working class" and that term is now even more meaningless. As a teacher, am I working class? I have a graduate degree and a salary, so probably not. But you aren't going to create a mass class politics excluding people like me. In fact "people like me" are your most likely to embrace the DSA critique of America. 

I'll conclude by noting the most successful DSA politician in the country, Mamdani, has succeeded by being really good at providing public services and for embracing the joy of community. He's a really, really good administrator and a really, really good communicator. His popularity is not based on seizing the means of production, and where his earlier professions of DSA sort of politics like Defund the Police have caused him problems, he has simply jettisoned them. AOC also has a similar pragmatism to her politics. 

What we are seeing is that a pragmatic left is capable of real success, but waiting for Marx's moment of class consciousness is a non-starter.

Tell Us, Tillis

 Republican Senator Thom Tillis's speech in which he announced his intention not to run again in the face of a primary challenge by a True Trumpist will be a fascinating document for future historians. A current historian, Heather Cox Richardson, excerpts from it:

In a statement, Tillis said: “In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.” He wrote: “I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit and representing the great people of North Carolina to the best of my ability.”

Tonight, Tillis told the Senate: “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys?... [T]he effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

What Tillis, in effect, admits to is that he has NOT represented "the great people of North Carolina to the best of (his) abilities." He has warped his principles in service of the malignant Baal encamped in the White House. 

You hear this from Democratic Members of both the House and Senate. There are Republicans who are also somewhat aghast at what Trump says and does, and they admit is much when the mics are off. Yet, time and time again, they shut up and toe the line, afraid of Trump using his social media bullying to level a primary challenge against them. Yes, sure, there are feral weirdos like Markwayne Mullin or Marjorie Traitor Greene. There are moronic bigots like Tommy Tuberville and Lauren Boebert.

Right now, the fate of millions of Americans hinges on Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Tillis and Rand Paul - of all people - have signaled that they will not vote for this OBBB. Meanwhile, Rick Scott, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and Cynthia Lummis are wavering because it's not cruel enough.

Almost exactly 8 years ago, Collins and Murkowski saved the Affordable Care Act - with a dramatic late assist from John McCain. They have been subsequently re-elected, so that vote absolutely did not hurt them. Still, Trump's improbable win last November has imbued him with some sort of magic that has so many Republicans fearful of saying anything that might cross him.

I remain hopeful that one day a hamburdlar will do its patriotic duty and rid us of this evil man. When that happens, what becomes of the Republican Party? What becomes of a Lindsay Graham, who has contorted himself into something hateful and stupid to appease Baal? There is no way that JD Vance can inspire the same fear that Trump does. Vance is evil in his own way, but it's as much his lack of true principles as opposed to Trump's bedrock character that makes Vance evil. Trump is evil like Sauron; Vance is evil like Grima Wormtongue.

Thom Tillis is simply the latest Republican to be defeated by Trump's malevolence. He joins Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, Kevin McCarthy and more than I can relate here. Men and women of different ideological positions, all of whom were destroyed by Trump. HR McMaster, John Kelly and Rex Tillerson are gone, replaced by evil, mendacious creatures. 

I dunno, maybe we shouldn't have let the absolute worst people in this country run the Executive Branch, especially since the other two branches are run by the craven, the cowardly and the sycophantic.

The Budget

 One of the things that seemed apparent was that DOGE was doing the ugly work of killing popular programs because Congress doesn't have the nerve for it. Let Musk be the Sin Eater who kills the NIH. 

The problem is that eventually the GOP has to pass a budget. Josh Marshall seems to think that they are engineering a crisis whereby the accumulated pile of money that was not spent (because Musk gutted the federal government like a junkie stealing copper piping) gets validated by Congress. Basically, you have to agree to this or you have to agree to this. Honestly, I think that's the logic behind forcing what's called a rescission bill to validate the idea of impoundment. "We didn't want to violate the Constitution, but you made us."

It seems all very stupid and ill-conceived to me.

Paul Krugman looks at the actual budget they are trying to shove down the throats of the Lapdog Caucus. Basically, Trump wants to make his tax cuts "permanent" but he needs spending cuts - massive ones - to offset that lost revenue. He will not touch Social Security and Medicare; he wants to increase Defense spending. There are a few other areas that he wants to keep or expand upon. The FAA is apparently one. 

The problem is that all the money is in Defense and the broad umbrella of health care. If Medicare is off the table (and there is an actual waste issue with Medicare payments under Medicare Advantage), then you are basically left with gutting Medicaid. Poor people, amirite?

The problem is that 78,000,000 Americans are on the combined programs of Medicaid and CHIP. What's more, a lot of those people are Trump voters.

This is the inherent coalitional problem that Trump's coalition faces. They have brought a ton of low information, low propensity voters into the Republican Party. The central dynamic has its own meme: The Leopards Eating Faces Party. Still, while hard core cultists will gratefully embrace losing their health insurance, I think that many actually won't. I may be naïve, I admit it. 

The reason Trump took over the GOP is that he was able to bring in voters who were fired up for "The only war is the culture war" and who hated the Paul Ryan-led wing of the GOP. Trump promised to preserve THEIR government benefits while cutting THOSE PEOPLE'S benefits. 

Yeah, it doesn't really work that way. 

This year's budget will be a true acid test for those GOP members who are in anything worse than a GOP+10 district or state. It looks brutal, but can they defy Trump? I didn't think they would pass an earlier CR, but they did. Barely, but they did. 

How much pain are they willing to inflict? And what happens when the US economy enters the recession that sure seems imminent. What happens when you cut spending for the poor while actively making more poor people?

I'd like to believe that it would result in a 1932 style rejection of the GOP, but I simply do not trust the American electorate anymore.

Does Protest Work?

 David Wallace-Wells takes a run at the last decade of social and political protest to try and determine if protest actually achieves anything.

My own take is that "protest" rarely does work. Those idiots who glued their hands to the Macy's Parade route are not changing minds. Too many of the radical protests are not at all intended to change minds but signal righteousness. On the other hand, the fact that the protests exist often signifies that the issue is important. Wallace-Wells mentions that climate protests have led to significant legislation surrounding climate. 

Broad concerns about climate are not, however, limited to the protestors. I have not and likely will never go to a climate protest, yet I think it's currently the second most important issue facing the US (after Trumpism). The climate measures that Biden has embraced have won my loyalty, even if I think those idiots throwing soup on Van Gogh are, indeed, idiots.

There's also the Code Pink protests. Do we really think that people turned against Iraq because of Code Pink had some protests? The most persuasive case might be that Occupy did reorient people towards caring about wealth inequality, yet I bet there are a non-negligible number of Trump voters who care about wealth inequality, because that's their lived experience. 

Too often, I think protests are roosters taking credit for the dawn.

What's more, the reality of massive backlash absolutely exists. I remain convinced that the Defund the Police nonsense cost Biden support among enough middle class Black and Latine voters to prevent him winning North Carolina and Texas. The chaos unleashed by anarchists is often the best friend rightists have. 

Wallace-Wells and others would do well to revisit Crane Brinton's old work about "Thermidor" or how revolutions inevitably slip back into the forms that existed before. True change, enduring change comes in steps. It's frustrating and slow, but it's also why liberal democracy - for all its myriad faults - remains the best form of government. 

I Guess I'm A Grumpy Old Man

 Kids these days...

Yglesias takes a look at the illiberalism of today's youth. I think I mentioned having a conversation with my son about Hamas that was truly disturbing. Josh Marshall noted that a lot of kids get their "news" from Tik Tok and that could explain some of the stark opinions the under 40 crowd have about this conflict.

However, there's some fertile ground there, with Ruy Teixeira takes on how "identity politics" has led to some poisonous ideas: 

Over the last number of years, huge swathes of the American left have become infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those involved in said actions or arguments. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s effective or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved in the action or argument are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized bucket or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

I've certainly seen some of this on my end of academia. I think there's some important truths in intersectionality, in terms of being empathetic to other people's perspectives borne of lived experience. Teixeira went on to attack Ibram Kendi's anti-racist work. I greatly enjoyed Stamped from the Beginning, but his subsequent work on ideas for policy have been...impractical and I think counterproductive. He goes on to attack the idea of equity, which is that we need equal outcomes as opposed to equal opportunity. 

I do think that equal opportunity is both preferred, but hard to achieve. How can we determine how structures are thwarting our idea of equality? It's tough, and I think elements of CRT and Kendi's work are helpful. What they are not is absolute truth. What's more, I don't agree with equity (equality of outcomes) as a principle. Few Americans do, I would wager. Equity has been tried and...it's track record is not great.

Yglesias does push back on the particularly vitriolic Teixeira piece. He returns, of course, to his NIMBY hobby horse, but as a way of illustrating how "equity" is usually just bullshit, too. He notes that, for instance, closed schools hurt poorer (and therefore minority) communities, but leftists tended not to care. In part that was to support teachers, which I think Yglesias totally ignores, but it was also a reaction to Trump not taking Covid seriously. 

A better example is how the Climate Left continual fucks up actual ways to improve the climate situation, most notably by shuttering nuclear power plants. Efforts that the Climate Left would want to put in place to combat putting carbon in the atmosphere would disproportionally effect poorer communities, which skew towards people of color. Hell, the very reason Biden isn't leading in the polls is because people wish things cost as much as they did four years ago. Never mind that people are earning more and buying more and consumer confidence is high, they don't like that things cost more, and now the Climate Left wants to jack up the price of energy? Where's the equity there?

The problem with much of this Leftist identity politics is that you start to see obvious conflicts between agendas. Inter-factional warfare is and always has been the standard of behavior amongst the Left in any polity, but now that they have a bit more power than they typically have, we are seeing how dysfunctional it can be to make policy decisions based on academic ideas like equity. Whose equity? When?

Back to Hamas, the idea that October 7th was "justified" because Jews are, what, White is historically bonkers. Every country is born in blood. Israel is no exception, but it is a recognized state and an actual democracy with civil rights and liberties. Hamas is a terrorist organization linked to Iran and Russia. How in the hell can anyone who has a "Hate has no home here" sign in their yard support Hamas? Because they have decided that Israel are "oppressors" and Hamas is therefore justified in committing atrocities based on that "fact."

The reality of Israel's occupation is way more complicated than that. The occupation is wrong and should end, but that should not lead to Hamas running Gaza. We saw what ISIS did when they took over places, and Hamas would be pretty similar. To pretzel oneself into supporting Hamas because Israel is wealthier and more powerful than Palestinian communities is to reach for the single assumption that the occupation is the entire and sole reason Palestinians are poor. Hamas and even the Palestinian Authority are not good at governing. And Israel is also wealthier and powerful than Jordan, Lebanon, Syria...you name it. Why? Because goddamnit, liberal democracy works.

Some of this is cyclical. However, the stakes going into the 2024 election are so catastrophically high that we have narcissistic ideologues like Cornell West running spoiler campaigns and grifts off the outrage of young people who have been trained to expect equity rather than equality from a world that it never, ever going to accommodate them.

I'm reminded, in the end, of the excesses of Campus Leftism in the 1960s that helped spawn a backlash that led to Nixon and Reagan. While both of those men were horrible presidents, their threat to American Democracy was slight. Trump's threat is real and imminent.

Murc's Law

 Murc's Law states that Democrats - and Democrats alone - have control over political events in America. What this means is that every time something bad happens, it's inevitably Democrat's fault. The invasion of Iraq, somehow, becomes Democrats fault, because reasons.

Jon Chait points out a telling example from a leftist author, Samuel Moyn. Moyn basically blames Democrats for Donald Trump. There is the Leninist impulse of "heightening the contradictions" that suggests that things need to get worse in order to prompt the necessary Marxist revolution. In Moyn's telling (at least according to Chait, I'll be damned if I'm reading the book), "Cold War liberals" abandoned efforts to bring about a more egalitarian society because they irrationally feared communism.

First, it was not irrational to fear communism. The Soviet Union sucked. Hard. The waving away of Stalinist atrocities is either historically illiterate or blatantly dishonest. I actually knew a communist from that time period, and he would growl, "In the 1930s you were either a fascist trying to conquer the world or a communist trying to save it." What about Stalin, we asked. "That son of a bitch..." and he would trail off in anger. 

The fundamental problem with communism is that it requires a powerful, unchecked, coercive state to create equality. Equality is great! The measures taken to get there are almost always bad, including collectivized agriculture, which might be the worst idea in human history, with a body count that rivals the last century's wars. All of those problems are waved away by contemporary Marxists.

What Chait focuses on, is the application of Murc's Law. Moyn notes that there have been notable failures of liberalism since 1945. True! However, he fails to note that there is an entire political party that has the loyalty of at least 45% of the electorate that is dedicated to rolling back the tide of liberalism.

What's more, I think we can safely assume that Moyn does not care about the broad basket of concerns known as "social issues." If he did, I'm sure Moyn would point out that Dobbs was actually the Democrats' fault for "letting it happen" as if there were not a multi-decades project to overturn Roe. Additionally, the most prominent advancement in equality in American since 1945 was the civil rights revolution that not only freed Black from the worst abuses of Jim Crow, but led to Second Wave Feminism, the American Indian Movement and LGBTQ rights. This was actively pursued by Democrats. 

The counter-reaction to the Great Society is the basic story of American politics since 1965. From 1932-1968, liberalism was ascendant and dominated American politics. Even Eisenhower had elements of his presidency that could be construed as a continuation of New Deal policies. After the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the White South broke with the Democratic Party, as did many working class Whites in the North - Reagan Democrats. What followed was the Reagan Revolution that made America fundamentally less equal and concentrated wealth at the top. For Moyn, Reagan's actions are Democrat's fault.

As Matthew Yglesias noted yesterday, White Working Class resentment over the immigration issue isn't exactly about economics. Hispanic workers are not taking factory jobs, because there are no factory jobs to take. The "neoliberal" trade regime that prioritized share holder returns by outsourcing labor costs to places like Mexico and China was, indeed, promulgated by some Democrats like Bill Clinton. But it was driven by Republicans, and every effort by Democrats to claw back some of that industry is met with tooth and nail resistance from Republicans. 

No, the resentment over immigration, which was a large driver in Trump's victory, is mostly cultural. It's about the perception that the southern border is porous (which isn't exactly true, Republicans actually complain about how many people are caught at the border), and that America is losing its identity to a flood of foreigners. The fact that the jobs are already gone just makes it worse.

There have been two major policy achievements passed by Democrats this century: the Affordable Care Act and the economic and climate legislation passed by Biden. All of this has made America a little more equal, though there is still a mountain of work to be done. The fact that Republicans have spent every year since the ACA was passed trying to get rid of it, the fact that Republicans have erased a woman's autonomy over her own body, the fact that wealthy Republicans have signaled that they are OK with Trump's efforts to end American democracy, all of this is just Democrats' fault.

In the end, most leftist political messaging, policies and advice are unhelpful if not actively bad to win elections in America. Democrats have a potent potential message for 2024 surrounding a Republican party that is actively hostile to women and voting rights. In other words, Democrats can seize the mantle of being the party of freedom AND equality.

But if, by 2028, America is not a utopia, then that will be Democrats' fault, I guess.

Is This A Real Thing?

 I'm not implying it's not, but Yglesias and now Jon Chait are basically arguing that the activist base of the Democratic Party - which is largely composed of college educated Whites - is turning off its socially moderate wing that is unusually Black, Brown and Asian. It was Chait who noted the racial disparity.

Now, I certainly agree with the idea that many of the activists' strategies and messages are bad. I really think "Defund the Police" hurt Democrats with Hispanic voters, many of whom work in law enforcement. The fact that the Biden Administration has increased spending on the police is A) true B) not something they can flog publicly because that might upset some of the base. 

Affirmative Action is a really good example of a complicated issue that hurts Democrats with one constituency (Asians) and doesn't really yield a ton from others (African and Hispanic Americans). Obviously, a college educated Black person is going to feel more strongly about Affirmative Action than a non-college educated Black person, but largely those positions are locked in.

So, I think we can say that divisions exist between activists and even the populations they purport to represent. I remember DeRay McKesson noting that "Black lives matters" also means good policing that prevents Black lives from being lost to crime. That makes sense. If Black communities are suffering disproportionately from crime, then "Defund the Police" is problematic. 

However, the data point that this is costing Democrats votes is largely confined to 2020 and Hispanics. My thinking on this is that incumbency matters a lot to low information voters and working class folks of any ethnic background tend to be low information voters. I also think that Hispanic communities in Florida that are largely Cuban and Venezuelan are probably deeply anti-Democratic, because the GOP rhetoric about "socialism" actually works on them.

What then to do? I do think that Democrats need to find a way around the Affirmative Action trap. "Going to the mattresses" for a program that isn't really popular with ANYONE is a bad idea. Making college more open to low income families and first generation college students would seem to be a way to square this. There is a first generation Chinese student who could benefit as much as a first generation Black student. 

The other issue Chait points to is support for LGBTQ folks. Sorry, that would seem to be contrary to Democratic values. I don't think EVERY aspect of supporting LGBTQ rights is unquestionable. I think there are legitimate questions about trans athletes, I just don't think it's that big of a deal, as we are talking about cases in the dozens. I think it's probably good to wait to provide irreversible aspects of gender affirming care. But you don't get to tear down Pride flags or endorse book banning. 

The question therefore seems to be not whether there are certain things advocates demand that are politically counterproductive. Of course that happens. The question is just how big a deal it is when the other party is talking about bombing refugee ships, overthrowing elections and dehumanizing gay people entirely.

Activists who succeed couch their agenda in the language of universal rights, not special pleadings. The problem with Affirmative Action is that it came off as a special pleading. It's unclear where the lines are surrounding this when it comes to LGBTQ issues and Chait doesn't really identify a third issue.

So, yeah, build bridges, but know where you're going and why.

Fantasy Land

 Jon Chait advances a somewhat different take on the GOP Civil War unfolding in the House. His argument is that, perversely, the House GOP seems to think it has MORE power during divided government than when it has full control. During Democratic administrations, the House GOP routinely tries to force crises, government shutdowns and even debt defaults to try and force Democratic presidents to do exactly the opposite of what they want.

I hadn't really thought of it in those terms, but he's right. Jon Jordan and Matt Gaetz weren't asking for Trump to do anything radically crazy, aside from repealing the Affordable Care Act. When it failed in the Senate, the Freedom Caucus just shut up and did nothing. We did not see the sort of manic nonsense that we are seeing from the 20 opponents to McCarthy's speakership.

McCarthy might still become Speaker, but if he does, the Chaos Caucus is going to force him to shutdown the government and default on our sovereign debt to repeal...I dunno, Critical Race Theory in kindergartens or some crazy shit. They would never do this to a Republican president.

Reagan's so-called 11th Commandment was "Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Another Republican." The "Conservative" movement has been largely hierarchical and obedient to its leadership. What's happening now is a direct violation of a basic tenet of the post 1976 Republican Party, but their goals are in keeping with the post 1994 GOP. 

Brain Worms

 It is not a secret that the Right in this country has embarked upon a quest to elevate ignorance and bigotry as a form of political purity. Trumpism is a lot of things, but it's mostly about mean spirited stupidity.

Not to engage in whataboutism, but there is a similar problem on the Left. Jon Chait has been cataloguing the problem of leftist intolerance and quasi-authoritarianism and he demonstrates the negative impact of this when it comes to climate policy. Reading what the Climate-Justice movement wants to do about climate is just mind-numbingly stupid. 

As Chait notes, they start from a legitimate position: negative environmental impacts have the greatest effect on poorer communities, which are usually minority communities. The natural solution is to direct resources to those communities and make sure that the typically powerless communities have a say...but not a veto. NIMBYism is not a strictly middle class phenomenon. 

Instead, we get a movement whose ultimate goal is the overthrow of neoliberal capitalism, and they then squeeze other ideas through a climate lens. The most aggravating aspect of the "climate emergency" is how half-assed the purported climate groups are in looking for solutions. If you want to be absolutely certain that we address the presence of carbon in the atmosphere, then you HAVE to look at nuclear and direct air carbon capture. You HAVE to look at geothermal, as well as solar and wind. Instead, climate-justice groups oppose these because a large corporation would be necessary to build nuclear and geothermal plants and if direct air capture ever became feasible, it would lessen the need to destroy capitalism.

More fundamentally, there is a brain worm in certain left wing circles that symbolism - whether language or action - is more important than institutions. Glibly, this is what happens when you let English majors address social concerns. You get a ten page position paper on the oppression of pronouns but you don't set up an office in the Department of Health and Human Services to guide and counsel transgender people. If someone wants to be called "they" I do my best to accommodate them, because I don't want to be an asshole, but that doesn't do shit to change how Trans people are treated. In fact, if anything, it focuses the outrage of the Right.

During the Civil Rights Movement, there was a lot of agita over whether to use the word "Negro," "Black," "Afro-American," or "African-American." But ultimately, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were more important in elevating the status of Blacks in the South and across the country and current efforts to erase those laws are more important than whether one says "black," "Black" or "Person of Color." Still, there seems to be a weird fascination that changing language will change institutions. I haven't seen the evidence from history to suggest that's true.

The only example I can see is that calling yourself a climate-justice group means that you actually ignore climate.

Promises To The People

 Yglesias has been hammering his "popularist" idea and he found an example of an Australian party running on a narrowly tailored list that allowed them to avoid the pitfalls of unpopular far left culture war positions. In his piece, he notes that Perry Bacon has come up with a similar idea for Democrats for the midterms. It's a ten point plan called Promises to the People. Here are the ten planks.

1. Eliminate the filibuster.

2. A national law guaranteeing a right to an abortion in the first trimester and in all cases of rape and incest.

3. A democracy reform law mandating independent commissions to draw state and congressional districts lines free of gerrymandering; vote-by-mail and two weeks of early voting; proportional representation through multi-member congressional districts; and measures to prevent election subversion.

4. A ban on the sale of military-style weapons such as AR-15 rifles and high-capacity magazines, along with universal background checks for gun sales.

5. A minimum income tax of at least 20 percent on billionaires.

6. A ban on members of Congress buying individual stocks.

7. National marijuana legalization.

8. A climate change plan that puts the United States on a path to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

9. A required civics and life-skills course for high school seniors, with the same curriculum throughout the country.

10. Voluntary term limits of 12 years in Congress for all Democrats (six terms in the House, two in the Senate).

It's not a bad list. Off the bat, I'm OK with numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8. They are focused and popular. Number 2, especially, turns down some of the heat from justifiably angry women who want to use outrage to create a more sweeping right to an abortion. While their anger is understandable, expanding abortion rights beyond Roe/Casey is a bad idea because the GOP has given you a wedge issue with the Dobbs ruling and you should leverage that to protect actual abortions. Same with 4, as that's roughly the position that holds large majority support.

The ones I have quibbles with are the following.

The first half of 3 is great. But going to proportional representation would likely require a constitutional amendment. Drop that and that's a good plank,

Number 7 is potentially tricky, and Biden has largely avoided this issue, wisely, I think. If the Federal marijuana law were simply to throw the issue to the states, and remove all criminal penalties for anything except international trafficking...OK. That's a good bill. 

Number 9 is a nasty can of worms, and I don't think it would be good politics. First, Fox and the GOP would immediately decry the nationalization of civics education. They would claim that AOC is going to indoctrinate your kids with socialmalism. The fact that it's a lie is irrelevant to the current political climate, those attacks will land. I understand the impulse to create a standard civics curriculum- American civic education is clearly poor - but I don't think this is a "popular" position.

Number 10 is just a bad idea. Term limits have been proven time and again to empower the shadow state of lobbyists and think tanks. If, instead, there were an effort to create a mandatory retirement age for Senate and Congressional leadership...that might work. The fall into gerontocracy is a real burden for effective legislative action. Pat Leahy and Dianne Feinstein should not be in the Senate anymore. Nancy Pelosi should be actively preparing for her successor.

There's also the fact that 8 items are better than 10, if you're trying to narrow the agenda. I suppose you could put some anodyne language in a plank about making sure that the civil rights of all Americans are respected could be good. You're not taking a stance on LGBTQ or religious freedom overtly, but it's implied in language that won't offend anyone.

The idea of creating a national agenda that is narrowly tailored to avoid pitfalls is a good one. Yglesias is right that there were elements of the 2020 primary that were nutty, especially open borders. 

The GOP has lurched far, far to the right. There is an opening here, but there are, indeed elements of the Left wing of the Democratic Party to try and force their party even further left. I don't really understand the thinking behind that.

Campaign from the center and govern from the center-left is a really good strategy.

The Theocratic Right Gets Their Day

 Jon Chait does a good job laying out the broad history of the last 30-40 years when it came to the Reagan Coalition. For the most part, the neoconservative foreign policy hawks and the libertarian anti-statists have had the wheel and - while their agenda has largely been a disaster - they haven't been TOO far out of line with public opinion. That could be toxic, because - as he puts it:

Republicans will try to confine their ambitions to poll-tested measures like a 15-week abortion ban. But it is far from certain they will restrain a base that has the taste of victory. One prologue is Florida, where social conservatives led the party into a nationalized fight over a bill restricting schools from any mention of homosexuality. The pressure to demonstrate ideological commitment will push officials farther and farther rightward.

Meanwhile, the GOP operatives interviewed by Ben Jacobs feel that the Democrats will screw this up, because the Democrats always screw up. This elides the fact that more people vote for Democrats in every national election, but the GOP has leveraged the anti-democratic structures of the American form of government to avoid democratic accountability. It was interesting reading the GOP operatives saying things like this:

A senior Capitol Hill staffer made a similar point: “The left has lost the plot so much, it will neutralize what will be a vote-moving issue. The traditional left argument is about protecting women, but now they can’t even say what a woman is.” As the red-state operative wondered, the question is also whether abortion becomes a separate issue from the current cultural wars or if it just becomes “part and parcel with drag-queen story time and teaching kids hypersexual content in schools” and the other social issues currently animating the right.

This is kind of nuts. This is pure Fox News bullshit. It echoes this line from Chait's piece:

The conservative movement traditionally consisted of three main wings: foreign-policy hawks, anti-statist libertarians, and social conservatives. All three wings have developed radical ideas in the ideologically purified sanctity of their think tanks and media organs. 

The idea of epistemological closure has fascinated me for awhile. Chait and other have waged a lonely battle to try and avoid this on the Left, but certainly the Very Online Twitter Left that thinks Bernie was more popular than Hillary has fallen into this very trap. What's striking is that the entire GOP establishment has fallen into believing the Fox News bullshit. 

I've written before that everyone seems to think that the GOP are full of political masterminds, when really they have terrible structural advantages that allow them to pursue shitty policy without suffering the electoral consequences of it.

It could very well be the case that inflation destroys the ability of the Democrats to retain control of the Senate (and therefore the judicial nominations needed to counteract this theocratic lunacy). Inflation is a real problem. However, by November, it might be so baked into the cake that the death of a young woman in Texas from a self-induced abortion this fall could be a rallying cry for a surprisingly diverse counterwave.

The GOP operatives do have a point, when they say that Democrats shouldn't be going to far. "Safe, legal and rare" remains the best expression of the popular position on abortion. Women's autonomy works well, too. You just know that some nitwit will say that women should have abortion on demand through the third trimester, and that will become the "Democrat position" on Fox and OANN. 

Yglesias can be tiresome on this issue, but Democrats really should try some message discipline on popular positions, seize the middle ground and then be able to actually govern.

The future of democracy might depend on it.

Sausage Making, Sausage Eating

 It looks like we are getting closer to having an actual BBB plan. It will be - in the manner of all major legislation - a bundle of compromises. Today, ACA is considered a policy triumph, an effort to provide health insurance to millions of Americans. In 2010, it was considered a failure by progressive advocates who want a single payer system. Since 2010, ACA has been protected, expanded and improved upon.

A similar dynamic is at play here. BBB will be a major accomplishment, but the idea and plan for BBB was so expansive that any bill that survives Manchinema will seem like a letdown. 

It will not be.

The question is: How can Democrats - in an age of Internet Hot Takes and Purity Politics - sell a truly impressive expansion of benefits to a skeptical public?

Dave Chappelle

 There is apparently a heap of controversy over Dave Chappelle's latest stand-up special on Netflix. I've never seen anything but a few clips of Chappelle's work over the years, but I at least know that he specializes in taking his comedy right up to the edge. Much of his targeting is towards White people, but in this special he targets Trans people.

There are two different takes on this. 

The first is that Chappelle represents a broader problem at Netflix, where they produce so much content that some of it is especially hurtful. The article at the link runs through some of it. However, it's difficult to conclude that Netflix itself is discriminatory towards Trans people, since so many Trans people who work for them are upset.

The second is roughly that Chappelle specialize in controversial and largely juvenile takes on gender and sexuality issues, and if you don't want to watch it than you shouldn't. One argument that Yglesias has been making for months now is that activists - especially culturally left activists - have a tin ear for what is actually popular.

I suppose there is a third take - that Chappelle is right - but that's not worth engaging in. He's not.

This is one of those messy issues where basically a lot of people are right. Chappelle targeting Trans people is more or less punching down. Comedians who punch down are verbal bullies. Chappelle seems to get that when he concludes by saying he doesn't have a problem with Trans people, he has a problem with White people.

Yglesias teases this out in a way that's interesting. Basically, Black elites are like White elites in that they largely support LGBTQ issues, but the general support for these issues among Black voters is much, much weaker, BUT it's not non-existent. As Yglesias puts it, Black voters may not actively support LGBTQ issues, but they vote for people who do. Chappelle's quip about White people feels like a targeted barb at the sort of White people who put a "Hate has no home here" sign in their front yard, but vote against building affordable housing that might bring poor or minority groups into their school district.

Polling on Trans rights in particular is all over the place. Generally speaking, progress like this is largely supported, but often if it's done without drawing attention to it. Yglesias shows the polls that show an astonishing 66% of Americans agreeing that Trans people should be allowed to serve in the military, but a similar number 62% believing that Trans people - mostly women - should be required to play on teams with their sex at birth. At the same time, 54% say that gender is determined by birth sex and also 63%  saying that Trans rights are either about right or could be improved.

It's just a mess, and so picking battles over what is exactly important and what isn't is largely impossible. However, coalitional politics suggest that doing work quietly on controversial issues is better than picking loud public battles that alienate median voters.

People like to point to Republicans nakedly brutal power politics, but the reality is that Republicans campaign on roughly popular messaging before pivoting to plutocratic service. They don't tout their unpopular positions, so much as place themselves in opposition to less than popular Democratic positions. No one wins an election on cutting Jeff Bezos' taxes.

Democrats should campaign on popular things but do righteous things.

All Legislating In America Is Transactional

 I was reading A Different Democracy (OK, I'm still reading it; it's a slog), and the authors made the point that legislating in a presidential system is, by definition, transactional. Here's what that means.

In most parliamentary systems, the prime minister has his or her job, because they control a majority of the votes in parliament. If they didn't, they wouldn't be prime minister. Even if it requires a coalition, they can command a majority, otherwise they aren't prime minister. If the PM brings a major piece of legislation to the floor of the parliament and it fails, there will be snap elections, which could damage the party or parties in a coalition.

In other words, the PM can command her party members in the parliament via the threat of having elections that could cost people their seats. What's more, the party usually determines who gets to run for seats. If you're Krysten Sinema in a parliamentary system, you are bounced from the ballot by the party leadership, and your seat will be contested by someone less intractable.

In a presidential system, Congress is elected independently (if occasionally concurrently) of the president. This is why Joe Biden can win less than 30% of the vote in West Virginia, but Joe Manchin can win a Senate seat there. 

Every bill a president wants passed into law must be negotiated with everyone who holds a veto point in the process: committee chairs, majority leaders, and now Manchinema. Republicans don't have to worry about this because they have no ideas or plans about how to run the country beyond cut taxes and roll back regulations.

So, when Democrats want to pass a major bill like BBB or ACA, they have negotiate their way through those veto points. Those are transactional. In 2009, people pitched a fit about the "Cornhusker Kickback" for Nebraska negotiated by Ben Nelson, an actual Democrat from Nebraska. In return for voting for ACA, he got some special carve outs for his home state and people freaked out.

Why? 

Congress has broken down precisely because it is no longer nakedly transactional. Ideally, Joe Manchin would demand a huge jobs program to rehabilitate old coal mines to be carbon sequestration vaults. Since we can't sequester carbon in large quantities yet, this would be an obvious boondoggle.  

Who cares?

(I have no idea what Sinema would want.) 

Everyone seems to think that some bizarre fealty to an abstract standard is more important to getting things done. Giving West Virginia or Arizona some special perks should absolutely be part of Manchinema's strategy.

As it is, they have no strategy. That's just dumb.

Reclaiming Patriotism

 The sickening imagery of 1/6 has led many people from the center left to become deeply uncomfortable with patriotic symbols and expressions of patriotism in general. Sickening images like Hair Furor literally humping the flag have soiled the garment in many people's eyes.

Matt Yglesias has been trying to resurrect left of center patriotism, especially as the Far Right has moved to embrace fascist movements abroad like Viktor Orban's Hungary. As American culture moves continually leftward, the Right seems willing to abandon American values like democracy. They simultaneously wrap themselves in the flag and shit all over the founding documents and ideals of the country.

The Rightist attacks on what they have vaguely labelled "Critical Race Theory" (really anything that accurately describes the racist past of this country) are part of this last gasp attempt to preserve the White Ethnonationalist state that prevailed largely until the 1960s. It began with the 1619 Project, which accurately placed both African Americans and White Supremacy in their proper historical context. If you grew up with shitty, inaccurate, white washed history, it was a shock (and likely an unwelcome one) to read that essay.

Except you probably DIDN'T read that essay. You read someone criticizing it. There was one sentence that I thought was bad about the Revolution, but what was striking about the essay was how the author's father remained intensely patriotic, even in the face of Jim Crow. If there is a fascinating truth to the American story, it has been the steadfast patriotism of many groups that have traditionally been excluded at times from American power. Immigrants have been targeted well before Trump came along, and yet they continue to come here and become our most devoted citizens. Black Americans are certainly familiar with America's history of racism, yet they (mostly) refuse to give up on America.

My worry is that the one group that has never really bought into the promise of America are Leftists, and their ideas are increasingly gaining traction beyond their usual grip on Academia. (This is not something I worry about from Joe Biden.)

If the Right wants to embrace anti-American regimes like Orban's, Bolsonaro's and Erdogan's, then they are ceding the field to the Center Left.

What I find weird is that "Doomers" who see 1930s Germany around every corner in America are so blind to our own country's history. I'm reading Fawn Brodie's biography of Thaddeus Stevens and the politics of the 1840s-1870s were more fraught, violent and repressive than anything the GQP dreams of today. 

If you're worried about attacks on democracy in America, there are other examples than freaking Hitler. America's commitment to its ideal has always been a conflict, an argument, not a settled case.

The proper attitude for the center left should be to reclaim American patriotism along the lines that Obama did: focusing on "in order to build a more perfect union." It is the fight to make America what it claims to be that is the truest expression of patriotism. Not coddling Viktor Orban or claiming against all available evidence that America is the only or even most racist country in the world.

Good News From Ohio

 Shontel Brown defeated Nina Turner in the primary for OH-11. Turner represents the "politics by division" wing of the Left. She throws more bombs at Democrats than Republicans. She was able to outraise Brown, because she could tap into a national network of Sanders' donors. Brown simply had Democrats on her side.

As we approach yet another critical midterm election, hanging on to every House seat is important. What's more, it's important that Democrats in Washington ultimately are all pulling in the same direction. I think that's something AOC ultimately gets, but I'm not sure Ilhan Omar does.

In an unlikely endorsement of David Brooks, Martin Longman points out that a certain cultural leftism has taken root. On the one hand, Turner seemed to represent the class and economic issues that would resonate with WWC voters. Where I differ with Longman is that I don't think a policy portfolio is going to shift the needle much. There's a pundit's fallacy that the arcane details of policy move voters. The sort of voters who get moved by that are already committed ideologically. Only a few voters are moved at the margins, and that is often for more generalized "feelings" about the state of the country or the candidate. 

Turner was a candidate for the Angry Left, petulantly relitigating the fact that Sanders lost. The reason Sanders and Turner lost is that they tended to attack other Democrats. For the Twitterati, Brown represents the dreaded "establishment Democrats." To the bulk of the party, she's just a team player. 

You need those.

The Sunrise Movement Of The People's Front of Judea's Popular Front

 Yglesias rightly points out the folly of so-called climate activists for attacking their allies in the climate fight. Biden's climate package is simultaneously the most aggressive attack on underlying climate issues that any president has attempted and insufficient to reach climate goals. There are many reasons why it's insufficient, but it can be reduced to "Republicans" when you get right down to it.

Rather than attack Republicans for obstructing more climate related reforms, the activists are naturally attacking Biden. If this has the effect of depressing turnout in 2022, then Republicans could win one or both houses of Congress, at which point there will be NO climate legislation passed.

This is just unbelievably stupid.

It reminds me a passage from a book I just read.

Burke believes that the attempt to apply what he calls metaphysical methods in politics confuses politicians and citizens about the purpose of politics - leading them to think that governing is about proving a point rather than advancing the interests and happiness of a nation.

I know I quoted this before, but it's just so spot-on. The problem with any extremist political stance or movement in a democracy is proved most dramatically by the Republican Party's descent into a form of maximalist culture war that has embraced authoritarianism as the culture leaves them behind. Because they see the "Democrat" Party as Satanic Communist Pedophiles, there's no reason to win elections by persuading voters, just prevent the "wrong" people from voting.

On the Left, we have factional purity politics that punishes allies for being insufficiently "right." We dissolve into intramural squabbles over how many letters come after LGBT or what is the proper way to refer to people from Latin America, while the Right pushes "conversion therapy" and family separation. Trump had the great ability to clarify the venal cruelty at the heart of the modern GOP. Now the "Resistance" is fracturing as it inevitably would.

Where Bernie Was Right

 Yglesias (I promise I read other people) makes the case against centering race and for centering class as a way to combat racial inequality.

There are two important points I want to highlight.

First, the idea that poorer Whites vote "against their interests" neglects that fact that white supremacy has real benefits for them. If they are poorer financially because they vote for Republicans, they are better off socially because of white supremacist politics. There are real social and psychological benefits for poorer Whites in voting for Donald Trump.

Second, Democrats have a natural constituency among poorer Whites, but they have failed to maximize it since Trump came on the scene. In terms of raw numbers, Biden got more votes from WWC (Whites Without College/White Working Class)  than he did from either Blacks or Hispanics. He barely beat Trump among Whites WITH College but then his winning margins came from people of color. 

It is tempting to write off WWC because some of them are so firmly ensconced in Cult 45. The problem with that is simply electoral math. It is very possible - even likely - that you can consistently win a majority of the popular vote with the existing Democratic coalition. However, we know how 2016 turned out and how close 2020 was in the Electoral College, and we know how disproportionately White the Senate is, in terms of who is represented.

Bernie Sanders ran an aggressively class-based campaign, and he lost support for it among Black voters. However, there are few voting blocs more tactical in their decision making than Black voters (especially in the South). In the primaries, they will vote for who they think enough White people will vote for. That's how Biden swept the South. 

What Sanders was right about, but struggled to express well, was that Democrats need to create a class-based policy agenda for public consumption, while also making sure that activists representing People of Color know that any class-based policy portfolio will have a proportionally higher impact on their constituencies. Sanders tended to get bogged down in his own Soft Socialist rhetoric and the need to both defend and live up to his label as a Socialist that his ability to craft a message that could appeal to everyone on the basis of class, while wink-wink-nudge-nudge play to the activist base.

If there's a great example of this dynamic, I would say it's the term "environmental racism." When you read the definition, it is undoubtedly true that Black and Brown people suffer from the degradations of environmental toxins at disproportionate effect. But, again, if you were to look at absolute numbers of people living in blighted communities, it wouldn't shock me to discover that the plurality of people living near environmental hotspots were White.

Selling environmental cleanup of places like Flint will have a huge impact on the health of all Americans, but disproportionately on Blacks. Selling it as race neutral on CNN, while selling it as racial justice in the community centers in Flint is the way to getting 60 votes in the Senate and a lock on the White House.

Public Safety First

 Josh Marshall points out that a rise in crime rates - whatever the reason - will lead to more people like Trump getting elected. It doesn't matter WHY crime rates are rising (in fact, given Fox News, it won't even matter IF crime rates are rising), if they are rising people will look to authoritarian style leaders.  Same goes for "open borders."

Any criminal justice reform has to be centered around public safety first.

UPDATE: A little off topic, but also not. Martin Longman looks at how the GOP has to seize on a sort of veiled/not veiled racism, because they have lost their other organizing ideas. They have to give a permission structure that allows "old school" Republicans to avert their eyes from the current white supremacist ideology of the GOP.

Crime will be a major way to accomplish. The rhetoric on crime from Republicans in 2022 will be apocalyptic and it will be bluntly racist - if ever so slightly hedged to allow a segment of their coalition to ignore the obvious.

UPDATE 2: Maybe the NYC Mayor's race captures this.