Church Of The Savvy

 During the Bush Years, someone coined the term "Church of the Savvy" to describe the political press. Basically, the DC press corpse understands things, don't your see. The simple rubes who populate the country aren't privy to this secret understanding. Two examples.

The first is Josh Marshall's takedown of Josh Kraushaar at Axios. There are a bunch of simplistic assumptions that Kraushaar embeds in his piece because that's what savvy people do. They know that Biden is too old to beat Trump, because they know that Biden is too old to beat Trump. The reality is that the DC press corpse is very bored with a Biden-Trump rematch, because no one really likes formulaic sequels.

Yglesias does something a bit different today. He takes all of his priors about how policy is how voters make up their minds to illustrate that...well, actually, it's a bit hard to figure our exactly what he's saying. Messaging matters, but only if it's linked to policy? This seems to be his thesis:

The point is, structural circumstances matter a lot.

But I think current conventional wisdom has come to be too dominated by a style of political science fatalism that overcorrects into a kind of LOL nothing matters view of the world.

He uses some historical examples, but largely strips them of those structural circumstances. He continues to flog the Big Lie that Trump was some moderate and then caved to the conservative wing of the party. Trump knew that cutting elderly entitlements was politically toxic, but he was still a conservative cipher for tax cuts and reactionary judges. He was a culture warrior through and through, because that's what filled his rallies and stroked his ego. He then manages to talk about 2016 without mentioning the persistent undercurrent of misogyny, the ridiculous email coverage or the fact that Clinton won by several million votes that were simply in the wrong states. 

He makes some vague noises about Biden moving to the left, but Biden's whole thing is moderation and closet bipartisanship - a feature that Yglesias writes a lot about. 

The title of the piece - Polarization is a Choice - suffers from fatal passive voice. Who's choosing that? If Biden passed some fairly leftwing legislation in 2021-2, he did so because he understands that most presidents get one bite of the apple...because of polarization. 

Biden's record is not perfect, but it's pretty damned impressive. He has not embraced open borders or defund the police. He has embraced some aspects of student debt relief, but that's just constituent service. Everything else has been exactly as left wing as Joe Manchin will allow it to be.

People vote their vibes. Not everyone. People like Yglesias (or me) who follow politics closely assume that people are making deep ideological choices. That's not exactly true.

People who do make ideological choices have already made their choice. That's baked in. The so-called undecided voters are largely disengaged (though they fancy themselves well-informed and free-thinking) who swing back and forth based on vibes. 

It is frustrating as hell that people are looking at the choice in 2024 - the outright authoritarian, under 91 indictments who has vowed publicly to end democracy in this country versus a grandpa who has seen a bit too much inflation caused by global events - and thinks that there are merits to both sides. If you are in that head space, you are not making a decision based on reasoned policy positions. 

That's a stupid argument, not a savvy one.