Reading Bouie's piece, I was just transplanted to my confusion, late-90s, about the Democratic Party being beholden to special interests. My god, but it never clicked back then that "special interests" was a euphemism for black people. I assumed it meant a collection of small industries or communities, too numerous to articulate, but we can broadly gesture to them.
Is the OMFG supposed to be a working link?
"If you like your genitals, you can keep them. "
I forget how health care reform went back then.
Oh hey, I wanted to listen to people talking about this. It drives me nuts, because it's so dependent on the actual empirical facts, and I don't know who to trust. That is, if you could, for example, get politicians that will enact policies that advance social justice and racial equality elected by deemphasizing those issues in their campaign rhetoric, I think anyone would take that deal, but how do you know if it's likely to work?
I thought it went "Hilary is a witch who wants your genitals" but maybe I misunderstood.
More thoughts when I have time, but I thought this response from Ian Haney Lopez was a good addition: https://medium.com/@halo.politics/shor-is-mainly-wrong-about-racism-which-is-to-say-about-electoral-politics-77692910255c
Also, the Klein piece is worth reading whether or not you agree with Shor. It does a good job of presenting the strengths and weaknesses of his arguments.
8: Isn't that a tiny difference from Shor's position?
From NickS's link, this is smart:
The conflicted voters in the middle who toggle between the two parties -- and thus the voters who determine elections -- are not "moderate." They are low-information voters who are not paying attention (something Shor sometimes concedes). More than that, they often quickly bounce between progressive and reactionary views of the world (but certainly do NOT hold nuanced, considered, centrist views). They are "conflicted," in the sense that they can be pulled in very different and possibly extreme directions. It makes no sense to advise Democrats to adopt ideologically moderate policies to appeal to people who are not, in fact, ideologically moderate.
Fixed.
And actually it was just that I'd done it from my phone. Just reloading the comment on the back end fixed it.
10: Yes, that's why I called it an addition. Both Shor and Lopez think that Democrats need to have a better feel for how their arguments come across to politically disengaged audiences. But, within that, they would offer different areas of emphasis.
Is David Shor the last person still doing the triple-parentheses thing?
Bouie is correct that Shor needs to be straightforward and specific about what his politics would entail. (I hadn't known he was essentially a climate denier.)
Douthat, however, has the goods.
For instance, popularist Democrats would not merely avoid a term like "Latinx," which is ubiquitous in official progressive discourse and alien to most U.S. Hispanics; they would need to attack and even mock its use.
Likewise, a popularist candidate -- ideally a female candidate -- on the stump in a swing state might say something like: I want this to be a party for normal people, and normal people say mother, not "birthing person."
Instead of reducing the salience of progressive jargon, the goal would be to raise its salience in order to be seen to reject it -- much as Donald Trump in 2016 brazenly rejected unpopular G.O.P. positions on entitlements that other Republican rivals were trying to merely soft-pedal.
11: I think that's a good point, and it's something I saw Klein address somewhere -- maybe in the OP or maybe on Twitter or something. To put it another way, there's a constellation of positions that gets called 'moderate' -- 90s Third Way austerity and means testing and so on -- but that's not particularly appealing to actual swing voters, who are whimsical on plenty of issues but generally fond of government spending.
16: Douthat is very much not anyone whose take on an intra-Democratic Party controversy I would take as anything but an attempt to sow dissension.
18: Douthat strikes me as having an accurate answer to Bouie's question. If I'm getting Shor right, he thinks Democrats can just finesse the whole race thing (and the climate thing, etc.), but that's not what Bill Clinton did.
And the idea that Hillary or Biden -- or any significant number of the federal Democrats -- are out there saying "defund the police" just isn't accurate. What the Democrats have failed to do, as a party, is engage in the level of mockery required to execute Shor's game plan. Douthat gets it (as does Bouie).
Yeah, I mean the whole point of the Shor approach is that one should completely ignore Douthat's opinion on everything. He has no idea what actual republican voters think for all the same reasons that the Democratic activist class are very out-of-touch with the typical Democratic voter.
I would do anything for Dems but I won't Douthat.
Can't we just execute someone who is mentally retarded, criticize a rapper, and move on?
The Bouie piece is great. That said, I think it's using examples from too far in the past, the country has moved dramatically leftward on racial issues since 1992. In 1992 only 48% of Americans approved of interracial marriage, now that number is 94%. You don't need someone campaigning in a way that would appeal to 1992 swing voters on race, you just need to appeal to 2022 swing voters on race, which is much easier. I do think Bouie is right that you should make more concrete what that means, because I do think it involves doing things that are still somewhat racist. Basically these swing voters disapprove roughly equally of Obama "taking sides" in favor of Skip Gates or Trayvon Martin as they did of Trump saying that some Nazis are good people, with the centrist view being halfway between these. The "centrist" viewpoint in this sense on George Floyd is 1) This was murder and this was a bad cop, 2) Looting is very bad and needs to stop, 3) "All lives matter," and bad violent cops make things dangerous for everyone. Or imagine a purple state Democratic governor banning affirmative action in college admissions in favor of using top 5% of graduating class.
Bouie is right that you should make more concrete what that means
Ian Haney Lopez has ideas (this is from last year). I like this framing, I'm uncertain that it's as easy as he says (I suspect if this sort of messaging became standard that Republicans would figure out ways to counter it -- no plan survives contact with the enemy): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote-strategy.html
We began by asking eligible voters how convincing they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned "illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs" and called for "fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws."
Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.
These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it.
...
The key is to link racism and class conflict. The pivot we recommend was also the most convincing message we tested among whites and African-Americans.
Democrats should call for Americans to unite against the strategic racism of powerful elites who stoke division and then run the country for their own benefit. This is not to deny the reality of pervasive societal racism. But it does direct attention away from whites in general and toward the powerful elites who benefit from divide-and-conquer politics.
...
Here's what this looks like:
We had come so far, but now Covid-19 threatens our families -- for instance with health risks, record unemployment and losing the businesses we worked hard to build. To overcome these challenges, we need to pull together no matter our race or ethnicity. But instead of uniting us, certain politicians make divisions worse, insulting and blaming different groups. When they divide us, they can more easily rig our government and the economy for their wealthy campaign donors. When we come together by rejecting racism against anyone, we can elect new leaders who support proven solutions that help all working families.This message was more convincing than the dog-whistle message among Hispanics no matter how they saw the group's racial identity. It also beat the dog-whistle message among African-Americans and whites.
What you need to in order to execute Shor's game plan is the same thing you needed to create Bill Clinton: A minority and liberal population that is sufficiently cowed and abused to offer enthusiastic support to someone who is lukewarm to their concerns.
Biden's nomination and election reflected the view of Democrats that a certain amount -- this amount -- of compromise was necessary. But the Democrats are far from being ready for a "very fine people on both sides" kind of candidate.
When we get there -- and I think Shor is right that we will get there -- Shor will be hailed as a prophet. But Shor's problem in 2021 is that he's teaching a lesson that the politicians have already taken to heart. What Shor wants to change is the constituents, not the politicians, and he's not prepared to admit that.
It would do absolutely no good for Biden to stop advocating to defund the police, because Biden doesn't do that in the first place. What Shor needs to see is the Democratic rank-and-file falling in line. And for that to happen, some evil shit has to go down. Shor just needs to be patient.
But Shor's problem in 2021 is that he's teaching a lesson that the politicians have already taken to heart. What Shor wants to change is the constituents, not the politicians, and he's not prepared to admit that.
Yglesias's contention is that he's trying to reach activists and donors.
Right. The thing about finessing is that it takes finesse. Douthat is saying that you can't appeal to swing voters on race and gender without being brutally hostile to blacks and trans people, and that seems wrong to me.
I mean, getting off race specifically for a minute, stuff like dumbass flagwaving. As the kind of person we mostly all are, I listen to cheap America-Fuck-Yeah patriotism and hear it as a signal that the person talking is not my kind and I probably have a lot of severe disagreements with them. On the other hand, listening to that kind of stuff does me no harm, and if it gets someone elected who is likely to enact policies I agree with it doesn't seem like much of a price to pay.
I mean, nothing's going to change along the lines of 25.4, ideas that are unpopular with the median voter are often very popular with under 45s. No one is going to change their personal viewpoints or behavior when those viewpoints and behavior are popular with every person they'll interact with in real life (other than their parents). This is why entertainment and business is so far to the left of politics, because the viewpoints of old people overcount in politics and undercount elsewhere.
What you want is just for Biden to pivot to the center after winning the nomination, people who disagree with that can then get angry and protest it, and that'll only make Biden more popular because he's standing up to the far left.
25: Just to be clear, you're arguing that Shor is advocating for a set of policy positions well to the right of the Democratic party is now, and is trying to move Democratic voters there? Because that's kind of the reverse of what he's saying. There are certainly people in politics being dishonest; I'm just trying to clarify that you think he's one of them.
NickS's linked piece from medium starts out really strong with the weaknesses in Shor's arguments but at the end for me it fizzled because the positive recommendation was "The best evidence calls for a new approach that reframes racism as a tool of division that threatens all racial groups." What? You're trying to reach disengaged flipflopping voters who cannot be bothered to figure out which party is for the rich but you're going to change their whole conception of racism through several levels of abstraction and jargon? Maybe you could get the message through "Democrats are the party that thinks racism is bad" but from recent elections its not clear that's a winner.
Right, the 27.last viewpoint that I think is low hanging fruit here is saying we should all be proud of the normal American flag and fly that. None of these black-and-white American flags, none of these rainbow American flags, we're one America and should be fly the actual red-white-and blue flag.
30: I think that's referencing what I've seen called the "Race Class Narrative" -- roughly, a populist-style argument that the 1% is deliberately ginning up racial conflict to distract us all from the fact that they have their foot on our necks and are robbing us blind. I think this is the sort of thing that has some potential for being directly appealing to low-information voters, and has the benefit of being as true as anything that oversimplified can be.
30: More details in the link in 24 (but, again, I don't think it's a perfect solution).
I'm a middle-class homeowner with a professional job and a bald spot. Back when I was a kid, everybody in politics was trying to be nice to people like that. But once I get there, it's all about the geriatric set and the worst assholes of the blue collar set. I blame Trump.
But mostly it's probably because of the size of the generations older and younger than me.
29: No. Shor is making a set of political messaging recommendations that sound better if he's not explicit about exactly who needs to carry them out and what those recommendations would entail. 27.last (and therefore 31) strike me as being indistinguishable from what Democratic politicians actually do.
The view of Yglesias, as Nick describes it in 26, seems right to me. Shor is talking to activists -- the folks who, in Upetgi's formulation, are flying rainbow flags -- and they're simply not going to hear him yet. They have gotten a taste of respect, and they aren't going to surrender it easily.
30 before reading 24 but even with the extra detail there I am skeptical. And if Haney's is published I'm not going to track that down.
Or like "We're the party that flies American Flags made in America, they're the party that flies Trump flags made in China."
Sorry that was me. But to 38, I don't think you're going to get under 45s to stop having rainbow stuff everywhere, but you could say ban all flags that aren't American flags from the convention and that would make a point. You'd end up having to eject some activists, but that'd just give you more press. It's cynical and amoral, but doesn't require grassroots change.
33/38: More here: https://raceclassnarrativeaction.com/resources/
Skimming it I think . . . it's a good effort.
For example, does this manage to thread the needle? I'm not sure, but I think it's a useful attempt.
JUSTICE FOR LGBT PEOPLE
...
No matter who you are, what you look like, or who you love, deep down we all know it's wrong for a boss, a landlord, or any politician to tell someone 'you don't belong' just because of who you are. That's why we have laws and Constitutional protections against discrimination.
Yet too often certain politicians refuse to enforce these laws, stoking fear against transgender people to divide and distract us from their failures to ensure all of us have what we need to get and stay well. They spout slurs as Black trans women are murdered, they lock up Black and brown trans migrants who move here for a better life, and they instruct emergency shelters to turn away transgender people needing a roof overhead.
We make the future, and by joining together across race, gender, and sexuality, we can ensure this is a place where liberty and justice is for all -- no exceptions.
Here is Shor, from the Klein article:
"In the summer, following the emergence of 'defund the police' as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined," Shor said in a March interview with New York magazine. "So I think you can tell this microstory: We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who'd been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites."
"We raised the salience ..." Shor says. Who is "we"? Who is Shor talking to? Per Klein, Shor is talking to "liberal Democrats" and the politicians who cower before them. Here's Klein:
It's a striking argument, and it fits Shor's broader theory of the case: Liberal Democrats were either backing or cowering before a politically toxic slogan that had taken over Twitter but was alienating them from their working-class supporters. And even though Biden publicly and repeatedly repudiated the idea, it hurt him anyway, because voters don't distinguish between different Democrats anymore.
There's no recommendation here for Biden. Shor has left it up to Douthat to explain what politicians need to do. According to Shor, it's you liberals who need to get your shit together.
Everyone else is pure id, bouncing around the world and putting their bare, badly wiped ass on the white sofa.
||
Since Bad Art Friend is off the front page: Jay Gatsby disappointed in his treatment by Nick Carraway, by Alexandra Petri.
|>
37.last: So, my sense is that Shor and Yglesias think that activists are highly distinct from the "constituents" you're referencing in your 25.3 -- that's their whole point, that the party is run by, and largely appeals to, activists rather to even consistent Democratic voters, let alone possible swing voters. And that doesn't seem self evidently wrong to me.
It's a problem where the devil is in the details, of course -- if I understand you (and correct me if I'm wrong, of course), your position is that the Democratic party is already doing at least close to the absolute most that can be done to appeal to normie voters without going over the line into horrifying levels of active racism and so on. Which means that tactical changes along the Shor lines are inevitably going to be seriously evil. It's not clear to me that that's true, but I can see it as something to watch out for.
40: Right. That's the kind of thing that Shor won't talk about, and that Douthat spells out.
I am fascinated by the idea of "popularism" as a thing. If you're interested in gaining power in a democracy, yes, whether your ideas, people, and concerns are popular is going to be important! It reminds me of the concept of "meliorism", which in case you don't know, means thinking things could be better.
I haven't read the Klein and Bouie pieces yet, but in general the "popularism" discourse has always seemed to me to be a bit of inside-the-bubble echo-chamber stuff. There's a fair amount of truth to Shor's theories in general, but the people who actually run campaigns (not just candidates themselves but experienced staffers) absolutely know that stuff already and have been applying it for ages.
49 is right. I sometimes wonder if any of the people complaining about how the Democrats campaign have actually been on the receiving end of a campaign commercial spamming. It was just Trump talking about Biden being senile and Biden talking about how great us Americans are.
Like, with the exception of a very small number of places that are either extremely progressive or overwhelmingly nonwhite (no place is both), you absolutely cannot win an election in this country without getting the votes of a significant number of racists. That doesn't mean you have to appeal to them as racists; the traditional Democratic approach of downplaying social issues and playing up economic ones does work a lot of the time. But they really are racist, and if you focus your campaign on racial justice issues you are going to lose both their votes and the overall election. To the extent this is what Shor is saying, he's absolutely right.
But the people who are running the actual campaigns already know that and act on it. Sometimes they win and sometimes they lose, but the idea that the mainstream of the Democratic campaign world is going all in on wokeness without heeding the electoral consequences is totally wrong.
If Shor is right, then the way to do it is basically nutpicking. Take someone who's opinion is way outside the mainstream, and denounce them. If Clinton is the model, then Clinton '92 (rather than Clinton '96). I remember when Clinton had his "Sister Souljah moment" thinking "Who cares about this?" But if Shor is right, then a similarly meaningless target would be the way to go. Just pick some completely nutso statement and attack it. Maybe a good target would be the book "In Defense of Looting".
"Birthing person" is a weird one to me, because in a big picture sense it doesn't matter. If we had always said "birthing person", it's not like I would think we should switch. At the same time, it seems to me that it's a pure exercise of elite power, that there's a cultural elite that dictates what our language has to be, and can force a bizarre transformation in the language spoken by everyone. Also, every sentence containing "birthing person" contains an implied clause that begins "Well, actually..."
Of course, Shor could be wrong. It's tempting for me to think he was right, since I was against the whole "defund the police" slogan, but Klein assembles a pretty good counter-case.
In addition to the articles: if you can stand it, I recommend scrolling through, say, the top 10 or 15 "Reader Picks" among the more than 2000 comments on Klein's piece, as there seems to be a theme. I'll just selectively quote a few bits:
Some of the "wokism" of the Democratic party even turns me off, but I know for certain that it is a huge turn off to working class people of all stripes in rural KY. I think Bill Clinton already recognized this during 2016. And its not the content of the message, I am for ensuring equality, diversity and the protection of those who have traditionally been disadvantaged in this country. The problem is these ideas are often presented in divisive and condescending tones that convince no one.
I am so fed up with the Democratic party's trend toward ignorant economics, hypocritical wokesterism, disrespect of the nation's founding ideals and the smug arrogance of many rank and file Democrats toward fellow citizens [...] I've been waiting and waiting and waiting for Biden or Harris or Warren or Sanders or anyone with a Democratic brand name, to give us a Sister Souljah moment [not making this up -lk]. For at least one Democrat to loudly call out the excesses of BLM, for one of them to LOUDLY defend the police against the lunatic calls to defund them.
College educated, white woman living in Applachia. Married to a working class guy (trucker, veteran and genuinely good man) who voted for Biden because he hates Trump and illiberality of the GOP right now. But I won't be shocked if he just doesn't vote in 22' or 24'. He feels disdained by the Democratic party. The problem is, locally in my neck of the woods I am encountering more and more people who voted for Biden but are increasingly done with the democrats. And I don't even think it is the party itself - I think it is public voices that have nothing to do with actual, working democratic politicians but instead are voters themselves. And they are louder than the elected officials and they are obnoxious, condescending and extremely off-putting. These Twitter folks are louder than any policy we can put forth and the party doesn't see or can't get ahead of how hated these voices are. They are effectively the new Democratic Party in absentia and they have likely already killed our chances in 22' and 24'.
Obviously you have to take this dubious stuff with many grains of salt, but I really am amazed by this powerful need not to feel condescended to by famous strangers. I mean... is it my "education" or "elite" status that insulates me from feeling cathexis towards politicians and celebrities? I don't think I was educated out of feeling like politicians didn't, and shouldn't, give a shit about my feelings. People get to middle age without having this realization? And indeed: am I wrong to think that condescension doesn't really mean shit in terms of the outcomes these voters will actually see, given the objective stakes of giving power to one party vs the other?
Gswift is the one guy here whom I associate with the Shoresque, stop-alienating-common-folk position, and I think he's made himself perfectly clear in the past. But it's so hard to gauge how uncomfortable and insecure people like the commenters above actually are: are they truly frightened of epochal changes in politics, economics, and climate, or are they basically secure in their lives regardless of who gets elected? Even here, I think a lot of us suffered psychologically under Trump without experiencing much practical oppression until the pandemic began. Comfortable yet sensitive people, of all races, are tough to work with.
Huh, here's an interesting practical example. I just had a campaign e-mail show up in my inbox (from the Attorney General, who should be re-elected easily, but probably has aspirations for higher office). Subject line, "Join me in my fight against racial discrimination"
My team just won a major civil rights victory.
Last year I sued Greyhound, the national bus line, over their failure to warn passengers that they were allowing warrantless and suspicionless immigration enforcement actions on its buses running through Spokane.
My legal team spoke to Washingtonians forced to endure embarrassing searches of their possessions in front of other passengers, despite having done nothing wrong. Immigrants were detained and separated from their families because they chose to buy a ticket from Greyhound. Some were even deported. These warrantless searches seemed to target people of color and delayed travel for thousands of Washingtonians.
Greyhound chose not to warn its customers of these risks.
I told Greyhound that if it implemented a list of corporate reforms ending its consent for these warrantless and suspicionless searches, it could avoid a lawsuit. Greyhound refused.
So I filed a lawsuit.
...
The text fits fairly well into the "race class narrative" framing. Really the only question is the subject line -- "Join me in my fight against racial discrimination"
Again, taking race out of it because the candidate I'm talking about is black, Eric Adams who is a kind of corrupt tool of the worst parts of the NYC political machine just beat a couple of candidates whose policy positions I agreed with a lot more, and while I'm not sure what exactly happened there, it seemed to be that he was better at appealing to voters who aren't happy with liberal rhetoric. If Maya Wiley could have sounded more like Eric Adams, so as to pull in a couple of percent more voters, I would have been super happy. And she literally was talking about moving funding away from the police, which I think is terrific as a matter of policy but I kind of wish she'd weaseled away from saying forthrightly because I wanted her to win.
I admit to deleting every campaign email I get.
I'll give people money, but I'm not going to read that much.
I admit to deleting every campaign email I get.
I generally do as well. I opened that one because it related to this thread and I do think the body of the e-mail does a good job of framing the issue.
Really the only question is the subject line -- "Join me in my fight against racial discrimination"
You're presumably on his list of reliable Dem voters. People on the swing voter list get a different subject line, and probably a different email text even if it's on the same subject.
I don't delete campaign emails but I do unsubscribe.
Yeah, I just unsubscribed from one list and left a snotty comment about how the hysterical subject lines were embarrassing and annoying and I'd give money anyway without the cringe. God, they're embarrassing.
45: Let's disambiguate. When we talk about "the Democrats" we are talking about three things: The institution of the Democratic Party; the Activists; and the Voters.
Of course, these groups overlap. I propose that Shor wants you to think he's talking about the Democratic Party, but he's really talking about Democratic Activists, which he incorrectly conflates with the party. (Certainly the takeover of the party by the Activists would be news to the Activists.)
To the extent that Shor's message is actually for the Party, it looks like the sort of thing that Bouie or Douthat or Upetgi are proposing. To the extent that he's talking to the Activists, there's no way that they are going to listen -- yet.
Which means that tactical changes along the Shor lines are inevitably going to be seriously evil.
Evil is a hard word. I believe Bill Clinton did roughly what was necessary in his moment. I think Shor is ultimately right that if the Activists (and Voters and Party) don't fall in line, then we're fucked. But all that means is that we're fucked.
Bill Clinton could abuse Jesse Jackson and Sister Souljah because Black people -- after having made significant advances -- understood after a grim 12 years that they were dealing with a powerful backlash, and they were willing to surrender a certain amount of dignity to hold what gains they could.
Liberals and gays and pro-abortion folks and other Activists aren't there yet, but Shor's argument will only become more powerful as they become more abused. I suspect they'll come around, but I don't want them to have to.
Shor likes to portray his position as a matter of practical necessity, but it's wildly unrealistic to suppose that he is going to convince the people he needs to convince. So the only practical course available today is to fight -- though Shor is likely right that the effort is doomed.
I was accepting pf's framing of Shor's position, but thinking about it some more, I don't think it's fair. I've read multiple interviews with Shor, and he pretty much just says that Democrats should message on economic issues, and they should frame things largely in economic terms. His message is not targeted at Biden (who pretty much does that), but the broader sea of political types in which Democratic politicians float.
55: To the extent there is a constituency of people who are both the audience for Shor's arguments and don't already know them, "staff on underdog campaigns in NYC Dem primaries" is probably it. And maybe reaching those people just is the goal of a lot of popularism advocates, many of whom do of course live in places like NYC and want to see better leadership there. I think Shor himself has larger aspirations, though, and sees his arguments as important on a national scale. I'm skeptical.
To 63.1, let me just put Ezra Klein's conclusion here:
To a debate full of inelegant coinages -- "popularism," "viralism" -- let me, with apologies, add one more: partyism. The core problem Democrats face is that almost all politics is now national. They are one party facing electoral disaster, and they will rise or fall together. Democrats cannot escape one another, no matter how they might try.
This, to me, is the most important part of Shor's argument: He is right to insist that the Democratic Party is an institution that is composed, at the top, of a narrow group of people and that is afflicted by many of their blind spots. Whether he is right about what those blind spots are or his critics are right that he is adding some of his own is a secondary concern. For the Democratic Party to chart any course out of the peril it faces, it must first accept that in the minds of most Americans, it is a party, a singular entity. And before that party can shape what voters think, it must find a way to see itself clearly and act collectively.
It's pretty daunting. But whether either or both claims are true, the idea that "almost all politics is now national" is intimately connected to the idea that "almost all media is now national."
I don't actually know myself, maybe it's not true at all. But as I understand the argument, it's that democratic campaign staffers someplace like Ohio tend to be the sort of people who are from places like NYC (that is, they're from the big diverse cities in Ohio), but they need to talk to people in the rest of Ohio, and that's where there are tactical gains to be made that possibly don't require being blindingly evil.
Clinton could attack Sister Souljah because the average black person didn't really give a shit about Sister Souljah. Her statement was completely indefensible on the merits, and the only real argument to make against what Clinton said is that he was nutpicking (avant la lettre), because her comment had no real constituency.
Clinton '96, with calls to "end welfare as know it", really is closer to being evil, and might be what Douthat has in mind, but I doubt it's what Shor has in mind.
66 cont'd: and the "national" nature of media like the NYT or Fox News is not especially meaningful, since the nationwide ideological boundaries are so thick.
When I was door-knocking in a California district in 2018 (that we successfully swung), our message was health care, health care, health care.
Gswift is the one guy here whom I associate with the Shoresque, stop-alienating-common-folk position, and I think he's made himself perfectly clear in the past.
CharleyCarp has this position too, I believe.
Anyway, I think Teo is right in this thread.
63.last: Shor: "I'm only pulling the ladder up after myself so it doesn't get rusty in the rain."
I've now read the Klein and Bouie pieces. They're both very good. They don't change my opinion on anything I said above, though.
67: That's one (particularly generous) way to put the argument, and if true it would be problematic in the ways Shor says. It really isn't true, though. The people running those campaigns know the electorate they're working with and target it in ways they think will work. See Moby's 50 for a concrete example.
So, your take is that Shor is right about what the necessary tactics are, but just completely wrong that there's any meaningful degree to which they aren't being followed already?
Pretty much, yeah. Like one of the guys Ezra quoted said, one part of the elite discourse criticizing another part of the elite discourse, but totally disconnected to what happens on the ground.
Part of the problem here is the media environment. I just googled what Biden had to say about violent protests and indeed he frequently condemned them, it just didn't really penetrate the news cycle much.
I've been looking for a way to say 79. Biden (and all democrats) will be tarred as radicals by Fox/OAN etc., and the non-Fox-ish media will report on that tarring, regardless of what anybody on the left does or says.
Twitter is another part of the problem, I think, for people (including me!) who live there. I believe, as others have said above, that Shor's argument is properly addressed at activists rather than candidates or campaign managers. But those activists have always been on the left side of the party, and their role has always been to pull the agenda toward them over time, not necessarily setting it in the moment. Twitter makes it look like people with lots of followers and some social-media skills have more power than they do in the real world; I think this is what makes Shor say that the activists need to tone it down.
It's a paradox, kind of: he thinks they're too influential to play their old advocacy role, but at the same time he sees that they're not influencing voters to adopt their views, so how powerful are they, really?
But it's mostly Fox News's fault.
Pretty much, yeah. Like one of the guys Ezra quoted said, one part of the elite discourse criticizing another part of the elite discourse, but totally disconnected to what happens on the ground.
I broadly agree with this, but would add two things.
In one of the conversations with gswift, I made the point that you can't just expect politicians to never talk about issues like trans rights, police violence, or systemic racism. Because they need to be able to handle those subject comfortably when they come up and that requires (in sports lingo), "getting reps" and saying things to different audiences and getting comfortable.
Bouie (I think) made the point recently that it used to be easier for politicians to address comments to segments of the audience -- they'd go on TV in Atlanta and could make remarks with the assumption that they would go to a mostly Black audience and nobody else would cover it. But in this era of partisan media, twitter, and nationalized campaigns those comments get picked up.
I don't have any specific advice, but thinking about both of those I have a lot of sympathy for the difficult skills of being a politician. It's really hard to try to connect to one audience while simultaneously calibrating your remarks so that they don't ruffle anybody else's feathers (and to act natural while doing it), and (as the quote in 66 alludes) that's an easier task for Republicans because they have less to lose when they say thing that annoy people outside of the base -- it just doesn't matter as much for them.
81.3 is a really great point.
Relatedly, I think Democratic politicians lie a lot less than they used to. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like it used to be that there wasn't a big dishonesty gap between the parties, both parties lied to make themselves more popular and that was just part of being a politician. But now Republicans lie about literally everything, and Democrats have somehow convinced themselves that it's better to be truthful and consistent. But the way that they're truthful and consistent is only appealing to voters with high-education, what low-education voters want is simple lies over complicated truths. When people say they want you do be straightforward, what they mean is they want you to oversimplify. Obviously Clinton is a thousand times more truthful than Trump, but voters see this as lawyerly vs straightforward and prefer the latter.
I just googled what Biden had to say about violent protests and indeed he frequently condemned them, it just didn't really penetrate the news cycle much.
Decent post on that (the beginning is also a good summary of the whole debate which covers a lot of ground that this thread has already been over.
The second problem is this: while Republicans spent decades building a massive media operation to deliver their messaging directly to their voters, Democrats continue to rely on the traditional media as the primary means of distribution. This is a real problem as David Roberts, the author of the Volts newsletter, pointed out on Twitter:Between Ds & voters is a giant mediating layer, & right now, transmitting messages through that layer, such that they arrive at voters with original intent & meaning intact, is virtually impossible. For all intents & purposes, the layer is *devoted to preventing that*.In other words, the success of any Democratic messaging depends on the whims of mainstream media executives like Jeff Zucker and Dean Baquet. The challenges of adhering to this old model of communication are present every single day. A CBS News/YouGov poll shows the Democratic message on Biden's Build Back Better agenda is not breaking through to the public at large.
It's hard tack to a Fox news model if you actually believe that voters should be getting their information from independent journalists.
One more not-necessarily-endorsed link (to Twitter) for discussion, and then so help me I will uninstall my goddamn browser for the rest of the month. It begins:
I think there's a risk in getting too hyperliteral with polls. Dynamic effects matter - not doing the auto bailouts would have been in line with working class views at the time, but would have been electoral suicide given economic impacts
That's not really an argument about campaigning, but rather about governing (and possibly about budgetary obstructionism as we are currently enduring it). The excellent point about the media in 83 is a big part of this dysfunctional situation with Sinema and Manchin too, though, and the vindication their "moderate" supporters seem to be experiencing from the obstruction. There's apparently always an audience people like that can play to!
Right, there's a weird thing where you have to do *unpopular* "moderate" things in order to get the press to call you moderate. And although swing voters aren't "moderate" in the same sense, they do like the idea of moderation.
Upetgi, I think you're closer to it in 79 than 82. When Obama said you can keep your healthcare plan, that was literally Politifact's Lie of the Year -- even though something like 2% of people had to change plans, often to something cheaper or more comprehensive.
Obama had to apologize. He's a Democrat and the media were going to keep after him until he did. Trump, meanwhile, rises to national prominence with a raft of lies - most obviously, that Obama was born in Kenya. And who cares?
Shor, I assume, approves of the fact that the Democratic Party soft-pedaled Obama's Kenyan birth. If only the party today could come out against looting ...
63: I believe Bill Clinton did roughly what was necessary in his moment.
I would like to believe otherwise. I feel like Bill Clinton had a really negative effect on US political culture. He gave me (and I think a lot of people) the impression that Democrats were a bunch of cynical liars who just wanted power for its own sake and were either unwilling or unable to be real allies for workers or oppressed people. It took me a long time to grow out of that impression, and I think many people never have gotten past it. I have trouble thinking that what Clinton did was "necessary."
What's the counterfactual, if Bill Clinton never became president? Would the world today be any worse if the Democrats had nominated a more liberal candidate who lost in '92? It seems nearly impossible to guess.
I'm biased because Shor is a friend from Civis, but honestly I think a lot of the problem is that he's expounded the position publicly in interviews and tweets, instead of writing even like a medium-length magazine article. He's trying to change the discourse one person at a time instead of taking the time to lay things out clearly.
Klein had some interesting followup thoughts on Twitter, which I thought I wanted to say something about but it hasn't gelled yet: https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1447993825301983236?s=21
92 that is a good thread. I'd be curious about your thoughts if they gel.
The idea that there is no moderate, there's just low information who makes snap judgments whenever they pay attention goes a long way to explain the handful of 'supported Obama but then went full QAnon Capitol insurrectionist.' My litmus test is usually how X plays in the Pittsburgh suburbs. This isn't about information, it's about what the suburban white middle class is feeling tribally. And +1 to what teo says; campaign staffers figured out code switching a while ago. I occasionally get really weird political ads based on I'm guessing data about my location, gender, and race. (At least no one's trying to sell me doterra.)
That's ridiculous. It takes forever to get through the Liberty Tubes.
Shaler isn't bad, but Millvale and Etna are supposedly trendy.
I guess Dormont is kind of trendy too.
100. To pick up Qanon support, the Democrats need to rebrand body parts associated with the uterus as the Liberty Tubes.
"There's a ectopic collision in the Liberty Tubes."
Politics is a team sport and it seems to me that building a strategy around having half the team talk shit about the other half of the team is going to negatively affect the team's ability to win.
Which half is perpetually the shit-talkers? Isn't it mutual?
The real treasure is the shit you take along the way.
They both talk shit but I think when the left does its, mostly that's a defensive reaction to the strategy the center has built around punching left and stomping on all their priorities.
The left doesn't want to have to talk shit about Joe Manchin, whereas Joe Manchin takes glee in talking about how he's never been a liberal like those other crazy socialists in the party he belongs to. Which, enough of that tends to undermine the party over time.
I want to like and agree with David Shor because I'm a sucker for Stats/Data/Monyeball branding, but at the same time I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to know the secret sauce to get people elected as I suspect 90% of the time it's just cover for whatever the person personally prefers.
I'm coming around to the idea that nobody knows anything and that all data is crap.
I am so far off from the general public on that. I thought Dukakis or John Kerry seemed like great guys and I did not like Bill Clinton on a personal level even before the whole thing.
108: It's funny. I don't know which side is worse, or who started it, or how it affects the overall political calculus of trying to get things done. But my own politics are pretty far out on the left edge of the Democratic Party, although god knows there's plenty of space further to my left and the people I talk to about politics are mostly at least as far left as I am or further. And somehow, listening to lefty types shit-talking normie Democrats makes me so hopelessly miserable it makes even thinking about politics unbearable. I don't know quite why I find it so upsetting -- part of it is that if the normie Democrats are that corrupt and evil there's no hope of ever accomplishing anything, but that's not the whole reaction -- but I really do.
But that's not a thought about political strategy or anything, just something that makes me hate talking about politics with lots of people who I agree with about 98% of everything.
Again on a personal level, I found Bush 2.0 to be much less likeable than his dad.
Like, if you have baseball-stat quality data maybe you can lay out some models about the relative value of hits vs bases-on-balls, but data like that doesn't exist in the real world and all the data we do have is hopelessly polluted in ways we either don't really understand or have motivation to ignore. Nobody knows what the fuck is going to happen in November 2022.
Nate Silver may go way out of his wheelhouse these days, but at least he showed his work coming up.
538 is still quite transparent about what goes into their models. It's easy to quibble with their decisions about how to model things, and many do, but they definitely do put it all out there. Shor's lack of transparency in comparison is disconcerting, although some of it is definitely due to his background in the world of campaigning rather than that of journalism. Very different norms and standards.
Perhaps relatedly, and this is definitely not a knock on Shor personally, in general the quality of the data used in campaigns is terrible compared to what you find in other fields.
105: right, and perhaps an even more important point out of this isn't even the content of the message, it's just boring old message discipline. That means not picking intra-party fights, mindlessly repeating whatever message was decided on, and not being diverted from that message come what may, especially not by intra-party stuff. It's very very boring and cringey but, dammit, it works and the US just had a massive demonstration of it working with Joe Biden - Joe Biden, literally the personification of political cringe - winning the damn election. I find this debate a bit weird given that it comes within months of Biden's inauguration.
Despite all the excitement, by the way, Dominic Cummings' campaigns were exactly like this. Absolutely no blue on blue, repeat the cringey talking points, if in doubt, repeat, keep repeating until polls close. We were all so very clever and futurey and a knock-off of whichever US campaign of the high TV era Tony Blair copied in 1997 just ripped right through us.
118.1 Two of the leftiest Democrats in Congress, Sanders and AOC are really good at this.
I assume many of you know of David Broockman's survey data about 'moderates' holding a range of extreme opinions that average out to be in the center.
I am not persuasive because when people repeat to me lies, I tend to say they are lies. Like the Democrats did not generally campaign on "defund the police" and that people in antifa generally neither trust nor like the Democrats. I find that no matter how often I tell someone there are plenty of self-defined socialists who reject the Democrats or that Nancy Pelosi has explicitly said that the Democratic Party is pro-capitalism, they cannot hear me.
Yes. People who don't understand the difference between what the Democratic party says and what the Republican party says the Democratic party says should not run the Democratic party. It's abetting the "make them deny being a chicken fucker" strategy.
120.last: I think a lot of the confusion comes from the fact that socialists have obvious reasons to strongly favor Democrats over Republicans, and it's difficult for people to understand when they don't. Also, I think you represent a pretty exotic tendency, even among Leftists, so if you are going to be understood, you're going to have to be patient about explaining yourself.
This applies to a lot of things. Those of us brought up as Catholics -- obviously a mainstream religion -- nonetheless have a similar problem. Transubstantiation is not an intuitive concept, nor is the Trinity. Even if you're very good at explaining yourself, and you're dealing with smart, open-minded people, these are counterintuitive ideas and are difficult to grasp.
I think most Democrats know there are plenty of socialists who reject the Democrats, because that's how George Bush got to be president.
Americans don't have that kind of memory span. We remembered that until roughly 2005. Maaaaaybe through 2008.
I think it's important to keep in mind that although real-life "moderates" aren't like NYTimes moderates and have a mix of extreme opinions, they do still *identify as moderates* and think moderation as a concept is a virtue. That both sides are equally bad is a deeply-held quasi-religious core belief of a lot of people. Calling yourself moderate and being called moderate by other people really does help with swing voters (and also with the majority of Democratic voters, especially voters of color, who identify as moderate).
My parents have always had weird political views and were registered as Republicans. My Mom's - like everything else about her - are not coherent. The only thing that really is consistent is she's anti choice and anti war.
But, here's where it's kind of confusing, my parents lived in The Finger Lakes region of New York for a while, and someone came to their door to canvass during a Senate race on behalf of a challenger to Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Their response was: "But we love Senator Moynihan." And the person was surprised.
(Part of this is cultural fir my Mom about the changing meaning of being a Republican in the Northeast. Her father with whom she was very close was a Republican. But he didn't actively espouse racism. He served as a trustee of Howard for 20 plus years, starting in the 50's.
Getting back to Moynihan, he's used to send out mailings that were essays with his thoughts on a wide range of issues, including foreign policy. My Dad devoured them. My parents represented a minuscule constituency, but here's my question. Moynihan wrote all these thoughtful, erudite pieces which made him look like the Harvard Professor he had been. How did he still manage to win?
The thing I think of as Moynihan's political legacy is the report in which he pointed out in his thoughtful and erudite way that the problems black people in America were suffering from were the results not of current racism but of their pathologically damaged family structures. That's a position that's pretty easy to sell to Republicans.
119. AOC supported a challenger to D incumbent Cuellar, and he explicitly in retaliation prevented her appointment to an influential committee. She's learning and is talented, but has a long way to go.
128: Yeah, some of what he said about deviance was *awful* and got picked up by neoconservatives in the 90's. Bill Kristol, maybe, and the New Criterion, and I thought about mentioning that but did But the point is that he was everything people say you are not supposed to be stylistically, and he still won. He can't have only appealed to educated people. So, how did he get enough votes from everyone else?
123: Not one socialist voted against Gore in that election. Surely you recall that Bush won 5-4.
I kid, but Nader pulled less than 3% of the vote that year, and only some fraction of that was from socialists. Moreover, the 2000 election convinced most of even that small group that rejection of Democrats wasn't such a great idea. By 2016, the socialist in the race ran as a Democrat, and the leftist splinter vote amounted to about 1 percent of the total.
130: I mean there's a lot of anti-egghead feeling in this country, and he overcame that.
It's usually rude to make fun of giant Irish heads.
Back to 118, which notes that Biden is the epitome of this stuff, and Teofilo and others generally saying that politicians are doing all of this already. I'm interested in this because I want to have a feel for the potential of candidates like Biden, hoping they don't have to be old white men.
That is, I was badly disappointed when Biden won the election because I thought he was way to the right of either of my favored candidates, Sanders or Warren. And in practice, while he hasn't been perfect by any means, he's been much better than I expected -- I was relying on his signaling that he was the boring moderate centrist candidate to figure out what he'd do policy-wise, and I was kind of wrong. I would like to get to a place where voters like me aren't penalizing candidates like Biden at the primary level.
That is, I was badly disappointed when Biden won the election because I thought he was way to the right of either of my favored candidates, Sanders or Warren. And in practice, while he hasn't been perfect by any means, he's been much better than I expected -- I was relying on his signaling that he was the boring moderate centrist candidate to figure out what he'd do policy-wise, and I was kind of wrong.
Something I think about idly (and would be curious about the opinions of the commenters here.
If Warren (my favorite candidate by a significant margin) or Sanders had won the primary (1) Would they have won the presidency, (2) would Democrats have won the two Senate seats in GA, (3) would they have done better with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, (4) would they be doing better negotiating with Congress on bills reflecting Democratic legislative priorities.
Tentatively my answers are:
1) I think Sanders would have won, I'm really not sure about Warren.
2) I doubt both Ossoff and Warnock would have won Senate seats (with either Warren or Sanders).
3) I don't think either would have managed the Afghanistan withdrawal better.
4) I don't think either would do better negotiating with Congress (particularly if there were only 49 Democratic Senators).
Convince me that I'm wrong . . .
You could add (to 135) would either Warren or Sanders have managed the politics of COVID and vaccination better than Biden? I don't have a confident answer for that one.
One more follow-up to 135. The run-off elections in GA happened because neither candidate had over 50% of the voter in the general election. The Purdue / Ossoff results (on Nov 3) were
David Purdue: 49.7%
John Ossoff: 47.9%
My prediction is that if Sanders or Warren had been at the top of the ticket Purdue would have received over 50% of the original vote, and the election would not have gone to a runoff.
(again, I'd be happy to be convinced that I'm wrong here).
134: I'm not sure what you're asking exactly, but in general I think it's important to look at both the individual characteristics of a politician and the political context they're operating in.
As I've said elsewhere, politicians are actors reading scripts. That sounds dismissive, but it really isn't meant to be. Politics in a democracy is fundamentally a popularity contest, and playing a role that people like is a crucial skill that not everyone has.
But even more importantly, the scripts change even if the actors don't. A good politician is able to shift seamlessly to a new script that plays better to the current audience while maintaining their established persona that appeals to their existing fans. This is essentially what Biden did in the 2020 primary. (Obama did a similar thing in a different direction in 2008.)
135: I think you're correct on all points. I think Warren would also have won but it would have been even closer than with Sanders or Biden.
Like you, Nick (and like Shor, I suppose) I'm inclined toward a pessimistic view of the politics of being a leftier Democrat. But I won't sign on to the implied consequence: That one ought not support lefty Democrats against centrists in primaries.
I won't go quite as far as Spike's 110, but there is a lot of uncertainty around these things, and a USA that makes Bernie Sanders the Democratic nominee is a different country. Who can really say what that country is like?
In governance, I'm more optimistic about lefties, but again, I acknowledge huge areas of uncertainty and happily give credit to Biden for what I think is excellent work. But I suspect the lefties would be pounding the need for vaccination really, really hard. (Not that Joe has been silent or equivocal.) That's a place where even the American media would line up in support.
Anyone other than Biden would have managed the withdrawal worse than Biden did because they wouldn't have withdrawn. Biden standing up to the generals because he was in the room arguing against them 10 years ago is the only reason we're not still there fighting a full on war with the Taliban.
137 is clearly right. Also, Biden's biggest gains were with white men who were Obama/Trump voters, it's hard not to imagine that a bunch of them won't vote for a woman.
It's just a stereotype that Catholics are more likely to use withdrawal.
142 was me. Anyway I think Sanders or Warren would have won the popular vote reasonably handily, but probably would have lost or tied in EC (GA, WI, AZ were around half a percent, and would have flipped if it was generic D vs generic R). I'm more confident about this for Warren than Sanders, maybe Sanders would flip some different voters and keep it close enough to squeak through.
I think it's important to keep in mind that although real-life "moderates" aren't like NYTimes moderates and have a mix of extreme opinions, they do still *identify as moderates* and think moderation as a concept is a virtue. That both sides are equally bad is a deeply-held quasi-religious core belief of a lot of people.
This describes my colleague who I do the gerrymandering stuff with. He does all the computer programming and does not know much about politics, and I find myself getting irrationally irate whenever he does choose to spout off. It's always some ultra-pessimistic both-sides-equally-bad nothing-to-be-done crap that just infuriates me.
The thing I've been most unhappy about with Biden is his AG appointment. I think Warren would definitely have made a better choice.
ultra-pessimistic both-sides-equally-bad nothing-to-be-done crap
This seems like a big drawback of a two-party system. As long as there are only two parties, lots of people will think that they are basically the same---everything that is true of one must be true of the other, just with a minus sign attached. I wonder if the belief is as common in other countries with two-party systems. But I'm not sure there is another country with a two-party system as rigid as ours.
I don't even think he thinks they're equal-but-opposite. More like "actually the same, if you squint".
If, as I've heard, time is relative, you can compare what the Republicans did yesterday with what the Democrats did in 1898. Then they are the same.
149: Why does he even care about gerrymandering? Does he just find it interesting as a mathematical/programming exercise?
Yes. Just the math and programming of it.
Our department is small, so I think he was glad that he could collaborate on something and he didn't necessarily care what the topic was.
I feel like the "both sides are bad in the same way" problem is to some extent US-specific and tied to our dysfunctional outdated constitution which has so many veto points that nothing happens. I think it's less sustainable to think both sides are the same if you live in a country where winning an election means you get to actually do stuff.
Sorry to have mostly missed this. A few short thoughts.
We can nsver know of course but I think Sanders might well have lost the general. It's true that rigt wing media did its best to brand Biden a socialist, but i think you have to credit him whatever slice of votwrs it is that don't like socialiats, but knew Biden wasn't one.
The Dems who shittalk the left do so because they think it will help them beat the Republicans. Or at least minmize the harm.
I would say that Nader's impact went far far beyond the number of people voting for him. He did a great job selling people on the idea that the parties are the same, which gave a whole lot of people permission to vote for Bush. Similarly, Sanders laid good ground for tje Wurltzer to act like Hillary was the dishoneat crook, whle Trump wasa business guy who was going to pivot away from the whacky shit he waa telling ths rubes.,
I would say that Nader's impact went far far beyond the number of people voting for him. He did a great job selling people on the idea that the parties are the same, . . .
I've probably mentioned this before, but I stopped reading The Nation in 2000, for precisely this reason, and I still hold it against them.
The thing with Nader is, whatever I might have thought of him in 2000, by 2004 he was an obvious paid agent of the Republican Party.
158. I was dumb enough in 2000 to vote for Nader in California, because I was pissed that Bradley hadn't won the nomination, and universal healthcare was my issue. I would not have voted for him in Florida, and I realized it was a mistake I. 2004.
I think I left the line for US Senate blank because it was Feinstein.
unhappy about with Biden is his AG appointment
I thought Garland (originally recommended by Orrin [expletive] Hatch as a compromise candidate) was a bad SCOTUS pick, and hit my head on the desk when he was nominated for AG.
I didn't vote. I had moved to North Carolina, but gotten an absentee ballot before leaving Ohio. I decided not to crime and it was too late to register in North Carolina.
I think it may have just been too late to register regardless.
I was really hoping for Doug Jones as AG instead of Garland. They are both politically moderate but Jones is, you know, someone actually willing to be aggressive against Republicans.
163 I think that's right. Maybe it's 4 dimensional chess to let Breyer's favorite judge have a little Circuit experience so he can retire in 2022.
154: Maybe not both sides are the same, but all corrupt or bad at governing. Then people just vote Conservative like they would anyway.
I guess I do kind of think all our parties are the same because corruption/selling out is needed to like govern, but I'm more of a left/centre person.
Hard for me to take Shor seriously because he portrays Trumpism as fundamentally filling a void created by the Democratic donor class, as opposed to primarily being a GOP phenomenon. Also, I have a hard time believing that it's his quant background that makes him think that the only elements with agency in American politics are the "wokes" (everyone else has a fixed set of preferences).
Isn't it less "only ones with agency" and more "only ones who have any reason to listen to him"? That is, the argument as I understand it is (1) the policy preferences of the left-most portion of the Democratic Party (the people you're calling 'wokes' are best served by getting Democrats who share some of those preferences elected; (2) the rhetorical positioning 'wokes' prefer is counterproductive for getting candidates elected; (3) in order to serve their policy preferences, 'wokes' should moderate their rhetorical preferences. Step 2 is the step I'm unsure about, so it may be bad advice, but it's advice for 'wokes' on how they can get what they want.
167: Well yes and no. For example the nice separation of concerns into "substantive" and "rhetorical" is either obvious or ridiculous. On the obvious side, all politicians are putting their best foot forward, highlighting popular positions, trying to get as many votes as possible. On the ridiculous side, it's not a viable strategy to loudly say "we can't do anything about climate change" to win votes and then quietly pass meaningful legislation to address climate change in the background. So the only substantive move here is to look at an array of interest groups that are competing for politicians' attention and tell one of them that their concerns are superficial and frivolous and counterproductive.
And interestingly this is basically the same group that Fox News would say is superficial and frivolous and counterproductive! And in some sense this proves that Shor is right because obviously Fox News sees some advantage in whatever they're doing to portray Dems like they do, but then he's wrong because they're going to do exactly that no matter what -- there's no "one simple trick" to solve Fox News if you're a Dem.
Charley can't type on phones.
WORST-WRITTEN REBOOT EVER.
Charley can't type on phones.
WORST-WRITTEN REBOOT EVER.
there's no "one simple trick" to solve Fox News
This is the key point that Shor misses -- and that he has to miss if he's going to keep getting consulting gigs.
Democratic messaging is, to a large extent, not done by Democrats. What if, say, the critical race theory controversy works poorly, electorally, for Democrats? What do you do? Shor has two answers, and both are dumb:
1. Politicians should stop promoting critical race theory. Dumb because politicians aren't promoting it.
2. Scholars in universities should stop teaching it. Dumb because it won't happen. Dumb because it requires liberals to do the work of Fox News for it. And dumb because it wouldn't work anyway. Fox News would just move on to something equally ridiculous.
You know what I want to see? I have no confidence that it would work, but I'd like to see some Democratic politicians at least experiment with the idea of brutally abusing the media -- working the refs the way the Republicans do.
I am left wondering how many middle-aged, churchy Black women Klein and Shor (and possibly many commenters here) have in their lives. I don't have many left, after 30+ years away from south Louisiana, but every one that I talked to about their primary vote said something along the lines of "Uncle Joe, of course." Sometimes with a slight snort like how clueless did I have to be to even ask.
Unless and until Shor and Klein talk to people like that, they are going to miss where the Democratic party is and where it is going, and probably miss badly.
I think there's a place for people advising the Democratic Party on how it can best make the best of a ratfucked situation.
That place is probably not as much in the public eye as Shor likes to be, though.
Hard for me to take Shor seriously because he portrays Trumpism as fundamentally filling a void created by the Democratic donor class, as opposed to primarily being a GOP phenomenon.
This isn't my impression. Looking at the NY mag interview from last year, for exampe:
... But stepping back, if you look at all the polling and all of the evidence, I think there is a story that taking unpopular positions really hurts. You can see it as a time-series story too. If you look at AOC's initial polling, or Bernie Sanders's polling in 2016, or Warren's standing in the Democratic primary, they were all much more popular before they started embracing a bunch of really unpopular issues.
The best example though might be Donald Trump. His approval rating rested in a very narrow band, for basically this entire election, particularly among non-college-educated whites. There was only one time that shifted, in the course of his entire presidency, and that was when they tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. His approval rating among non-college whites specifically plummeted. We were tracking Obama-Trump voters; this was the only time when they came home in large numbers. And the reason is that a lot of these voters agree with Democrats on Obamacare, and they were very angry about attempts to repeal it. (And then they stopped being angry because it failed and everyone in politics has a short memory.)
and
You can see this in Georgia. Nothing really unique happened there. The state behaved as you would expect given that we had already bottomed out with non-college-educated whites and had room to grow with college-educated whites, who were alienated by the GOP's Trump-era brand as conveyed by mainstream reporting. And we know that this is a national, structural phenomenon -- and not primarily a product of state-level actions or micro-targeting -- because the gains we made in the Atlanta suburbs were nearly identical to gains we made in similarly educated counties in other parts of the country.
So he thinks that Trump faces the same political constraints as other politicians (just targeting a different audience). He isn't saying that Dems drove people to Trump, just that Trump did well when he talked about things that were popular (to his voters) and badly when he talked about things that were unpopular (like ACA repeal) or needed voters that he had already turned off (like college-educated voters in the ATL suburbs).
173.2: I think that those individuals support Shor's argument. Surely Jim Clyburn is the model for what Shor would like to see from folks promoting the interests of various parts of the Democratic coalition.
I think young educated white people wildly overestimate the importance of fancy language and yard signage, and wildly underestimate the importance of personal relationships with actual Black people. Biden's always said a lot of poorly phrased things, but he never batted an eye at playing second fiddle to Obama (even after Obama kinda threw him under the bus in 2016), and he's always had great relationships with the Black community in his state. You aren't going to be a lifelong Democratic senator in Delaware without building strong connections to actual Black leaders and voters, and it shows.
Unless and until Shor and Klein talk to people like that, they are going to miss where the Democratic party is and where it is going, and probably miss badly.
Elaborate on that a little bit? I have no doubt they're out of touch with middle-aged, churchy Black women, but in this particular case I think Biden is a fairly good example of what they're arguing for*.
* [Or that Shor is arguing for and Klein is conflicted about].
178 in agreement with 176.
177 IIRC correctly Hillary Clinton had strong connections to actual Black leaders and voters (and that did matter).
178: Right, I thought the Shor position included not just pandering better to "moderate" non-college whites, but also pandering better to churchy black women and men and conservative Latinos and Asians -- everyone who's a possible-to-likely Democratic voter but thinks activisty kids are a bunch of weirdoes.
172 last -- I have no hope for that. Real Americans are white men and the women who look after them. Everyone else is Special Interests. Real Americans have real grievances, which need to be plumbed, understood, and addressed. Special Interests just have special pleading.
There's no one weird trick out of this either. Media that isn't owned by, and designed to serve the interests of, Real Americans is probably a really good idea. But even then it'd have to break out beyond the special pleading.
In political terms, there are very few jurisdictions where a person can be elected without the support of a very substantial number of Real Americans, a great many of whom demand to be treated as such. IMO, pretending that this isn't so -- and it certainly should not be so -- is folly. And there we are.
To digress about Biden, while I can't see how anyone else would duplicate it because it was both weird and true, I think in retrospect that the Corn Pop story probably worked really well for him. Although whatever point he was trying to make was formally pro-equality/anti-racist, the story itself was so bizarre and (I am using this word as a term of art here, but I have a lot of thoughts about how it's generally pernicious) cringey that it projected very clearly that he's an old white guy who's not up to speed on how lefty people talk about race, and that's appealing to people who don't like how lefty people talk about race. On the other hand, it seems to have been true and there's no particular way telling it injures anyone -- I think he got about half the benefit of a Sister Soulja moment without having to attack anyone.
It can be pretty maddening. A bunch of white union guys out in eastern Montana wouldn't vote for Democratic candidates because those candidates would let AOC take their guns away. Or, and honest to God, I got this campaign mailer, knock down Mt Rushmore. Then, the Republicans these guys elected try to institute Right to Work, and unions and Dems are able to get a minority of the Republican caucus to cross the aisle and vote it down. What will happen next cycle? It'll be AOC, guns, and Mt. Rushmore again.
Union leadership has pretty much stayed with us throughout. They can't break through the Fox News distortion field, though. So what hope does whoever Shor and Klein are talking to have?
Keeping union leadership has required some compromises. The easy example is the big pipelines. Union leadership needs statewide elected Dems to support pipelines, which means that those elected Dems have to disappoint Indigenous and other supporters. Most everyone gets this, and understands that the pipelines have to be defeated in a different forum. From time to time some Activist will try to make a splash with how awful elected Dems are for not opposing pipelines, but so far it hasn't stuck. And between the courts, and having a national Dem administration, there's real hope of victory without torching the bond with union leadership. Which isn't as useful as it might be, but is still definitely a big deal.
182 I knew Biden would win when it turned out the Corn Pop story was true
It was epic. By the end of it Uncle Joe was in a parking lot ready to rumble with a razor-blade armed Corn Pop, protected only by the length of chain he had wrapped around his arm. Joe, undaunted, was ready to fight if necessary, but first had to man up and apologize for having called Corn Pop a girl. The most ridiculous thing, overall, I have ever heard.
To follow up on my union leadership can't break through comment, I get really annoyed when pundits go around acting like we're all Pauline Kael or something. Everyone I know has close relatives who are Trumpers. We might not be welcoming discussion with those folks, but it is not like they are some kind of alien culture we know nothing about. It runs the other way too: after the 2020 debacle here, there was a lot of talk about how 'urban' Dems needed to spend more time in the rural areas -- going to the Fourth of July fundraiser for the volunteer fire department and the like -- so those rural folks would see that we're not like the cartoon characters portrayed on Fox News. But they already know that! They all have friends, nieces, siblings, etc that have not consumed the kool-aid. They know and love people who support Dem politicians because of shared values. Just as we all know, and love, people who are Trumpers because of a different value equation. The idea that having a good time and the local pig roast is going to help our candidates is, imo, just a foolish unwillingness to grapple with the actual problem.
What, then, is the actual problem? Fear of loss of status seems a decent shorthand. 'Fuck 'em, they don't deserve that status,' while true, may not be an effective pitch.
I'm going to have to Google corn pop.
Anyway, the main thing I use Facebook for, aside from seeing pictures of the nieces and nephew, is to make sure the people I grew up with and the various relatives know at least one really Pennsylvania voter was strongly for Biden.
When I say it was all true, I don't know if the details were vouched for, but when Biden told the story the immediate reaction was an eye rolling assumption that he'd made it all up, but then a chorus of locals from the area showed up with "right, sounds like Corn Pop, everyone remembers old Corn Pop. Just died a few years back."
155: Bill Clinton did a great job convincing people that both parties were about equally bad. Nader just came along and gave people who had been convinced of this someone to vote for.
I remember how radical Howard Dean sounded in 2004 just by saying he was from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. It was like, whoa, imagine if the Democrats actually stood for something.
175: but I don't disagree with anything in those excerpts, they're vacuous! Of course taking unpopular positions hurts. The trick for Shor is to answer the question, was it bad for the Dems to pass the ACA back in 2009 when it led directly to a midterm bloodbath? Thia is where the faix-profundity of "just do popular things so that you control support and can get your agenda passed" falls apart.
Dean really crushed Sharpton in the 2004 non-binding DC primary. He should have been able to find a way to win New Hampshire, and did pretty well, but not quite well enough.
189 I can't and won't try to dig them up now but there was a contemporaneous newspaper account of their encounter
The trick for Shor is to answer the question, was it bad for the Dems to pass the ACA back in 2009 when it led directly to a midterm bloodbath?
I would hope that Shor's position would be that he isn't the person to answer that. His expertise is polling, not policy analysis. What he has said, repeatedly, is that health care is a good issue for the Dems and they do well by talking about it.
I've been trying to think about what I find useful about Shor's ideas, and mostly they're reminders of things I already believed.
The two things that I've been convinced about, based on Shor's work are:
1) That there's an increasing education polarization, with college-educated voters trending Democratic, and voters without a college degree trending Republican.
1a) This is an international phenomenon. So, even though there is evidence that much of what shows up as an education sorting can be better captured as sorting based on racial attitudes, that isn't the entire story. The trend isn't just driven by US politics around race,
2) That immigration, specifically, is a politically tricky issue for the Dems, and there are way more opportunities to lose votes on immigration than to pick up votes.
Beyond that, I connect his ideas to:
1) The pundit's fallacy: don't assume that policies will be popular, just because you think they're a good policy.
2) The line I attribute to Mark Schmidt, "It isn't what you say about the issues; it's what the issues say about you." Voters are much less attuned to policy debates than their sense of, "what does this person care about, and why do they care about it."
3) That the political landscape is asymmetrical in two important ways. First, Republicans can win (and win big) nationally with less than 50% of the vote, Democrats can't. Second, Because the Democratic coalition contains a wider range of groups, more of the intra-coalition disagreement happens in public, and that makes the Democrats look less organized. Both of these are unfortunate, but they aren't going to change any time soon.
I just saw this linked on Twitter -- while I don't know the writer, it seems to lay out the Shor argument as I understand it.
Actually linking the thing would help. This: https://vulgarmarxism.substack.com/p/how-to-win-comrades-and-influence
I'm afraid if I go to Substack, it will start a chain of events that leads me to giving $5 to MY.
195: DC had an incredibly active volunteer- led Dean group, mostly anti-war and healthcare. A friend of mine was involved and even went to the trouble to get himself elected to the Democratic Committee for award 2. I think he got frustrated with that after a couple of terms and is now active in trying to make cycling in DC safe. One of the other active Dean volunteers is now the Ward 6 Council Member.
183: So, I know to vote Democratic in the General election always, but now I'm not sure how to be sophisticated about the best way to oppose a pipeline.
197: I've always assumed that the cynical bastards who run for office and jockey for power know all this stuff instinctively; it certainly seems a bit extravagant to call Obama / Biden immigration policy "Shor-ism." And while I agree that it's dumb to say "I don't understand why politicians don't just pass my preferred policy X, it would not only help people but make the politicians popular, rich, and invincible", the real pundit's fallacy is to act as if we all are members of Biden's inner circle whose primary job is to secure power for Biden. Kinda weird and not-savvy to put the sausage-making process on Twitter. Also the negotiation between a politician and an interest group is just that, a negotiation; I just find it disingenuous to act as if one is just neutrally presenting facts in that situation. To go back to my ACA question, surely Shor the pollster could see that the ACA was costing the Dems support. Of course he could retreat and say that he's just a pollster and you can't draw substantive conclusions just from polling data, but then that kind of undercuts his take on anything beyond literal polling questions, doesn't it?
Immigration activists are surely aware that (a) that they can't push Biden too far, because immigration is a minefield (b) they still have some power to push Biden, and they need to push him in order to make some progress toward their goals. They fall in line based on their sense of how strong or weak their position is. To portray them as misguided ideologues who don't realize that their positions are unpopular is not a neutral "quantitative" act, it's a political act that attempts to de-legitimize their cause and negotiating position.
If you just start shutting out constituencies because they are inconvenient, every constituency is going to become concerned that they might be next. That pits your constituencies against each other and can lead to defensive and unhelpful behavior among those who are nominally on the same side.
That's why pushing out the least popular constituencies is a mugs game, and the better strategy is to establish solidarity among groups, so that even those elements that are vulnerable know that they can count on the support of the broader coalition.
talk about how 'urban' Dems needed to spend more time in the rural areas
I hate this take so very much. Cities are fucking filled with people who moved there from rural areas. FFS, it isn't *urban* populations that are in a bubble.
205 last -- Right, but this doesn't work for single issue people. Indigenous nations here know that Jon Tester is a good ally on a whole host of issues, and they're willing to understand his need to go against them on pipelines to be able to stay in office to work with them on everything else. This looks really different to the people who've decided that the fight over pipelines is worth going to the absolute mat for, and anyone not with them is against them and probably fatally compromised by fossil fuel money. A Democratic executive has a lot of authority on pipelines, as we've seen in recent years, and so one is much better off pushing Sec. Haaland than Sen Tester. And when there isn't a Dem executive, then you have to hope that Dem appointed judges will help hold the line (and I don't think much more could have been hoped for from our Judge Morris).
The other team is in a similar place with abortion. For decades elite Republicans said the words but weren't willing to go to the mat. They've gradually been replaced, at every level, with people who will do the will of the folks who elected them. And who don't brook much at all in the way of contradiction. I guess they let Sen. Collins wink and nod about it, so long as all the judges get confirmed, the Hyde amendment passes, and nothing hindering their forward movement gets out of Congress.
206 It wasn't so we'd learn about them, but so they'd learn about us. But they already know you, and know you're not going to lift a finger when AOC comes to take their guns away. No matter how much fun you are at the pig roast.
204 This gets to the question of who these guys are talking to. I think the answer isn't the candidates, their strategists, or issue activists (who mostly understand the politics of their issues perfectly well). Rather it's the twitter halo that gathers around those people, being extremists either for the lulz, or because they're not responsible for anything but their own feelings, so why shouldn't they given them full rein?
I was talking about this with a professional activist friend today -- specifically about the word 'homeless' because that's what she's working on right now. Her view was that changing out the word really does matter, but it has to be done slowly, and with a lot of grace. And that our side often lacks grace.
No matter how much fun you are at the pig roast.
Apparently, the idea is not to mock the pig.
The gun thing is still weird to me. I grew up around people who liked to shoot or hunt, but owning a fuckton of different guns or military-style weapons or carrying a gun in their daily life was not a thing I saw.
206 is also a pet peeve of mine. I'd love to see a map of votes in the US by where you graduate high school instead of current residence. Republican politics is abusive parenting and school bullying continued by other means.
My take on this is that a whole lot of gun ownership/carrying is about owning the libs. For example, our legislature depriving the regents of the power to forbid guns most places on college campuses. No one thinks kids need more guns. But it sure pisses of everyone involved in higher education.
A graduate of my high school has pleaded guilty for what he did in the failed coup. Not my year, but I knew his brother.
So basically they are afraid the libs (AOC) are going to take away their favorite tool for owning the libs?
Its too bad they are afraid of AOC, the Green New Deal was the best option going for how to square the circle of getting union jobs to build non fossil-fuel based infrastructure. Bringing labor on-sides in the global warming debate would be huge, and may be the best option to curtail pipeline building in the long run.
173: Adding to what others have said, you have Shor's argument backwards. He argues that Democrats pay too much attention to young White liberals, and not enough attention to working-class Black people.
Bringing labor on-sides in the global warming debate would be huge, and may be the best option to curtail pipeline building in the long run.
But is AOC still going to get to knock down Mt Rushmore?
This gets to the question of who these guys are talking to. I think the answer isn't the candidates, their strategists, or issue activists (who mostly understand the politics of their issues perfectly well). Rather it's the twitter halo that gathers around those people, being extremists either for the lulz, or because they're not responsible for anything but their own feelings, so why shouldn't they given them full rein?
Yeah, this. It all feels like a "Twitter isn't real life" insider discourse that somehow escaped from Twitter into the New York Times.
This is pure unfounded speculation, which is almost certainly not importantly related to the serious political issues at stake her. Shor seems to be doing great now, and any injustice to him in the past is almost certainly not important from a societal point of view. But the reason why I learned his name was that he got fired from Civis for, as far as could be seen in public, tweeting about some respectable research showing that (IIRC) public demonstrations on racial issues with a violent component had a negative effect on electoral success for Democrats, because his tweet was perceived as racist.
Now, I only know about this because it got picked up by the kind of jerk who thinks "cancel culture" is the biggest problem in the country these days, which is patently false. And I don't think the individual injustice to Shor, if there was one, is a big deal.
But if my impression of what happened is reasonably accurate, and if it wasn't just a giant fluke but represents a tendency within Civis and similar left-wing political organizations (and those are both real ifs. I'm speculating) it looks as though there may be some pressure within that sort of organization not to consider the electoral costs of failing to pander to normies (I keep using this word, and I don't like it, but I'm not sure what else to use. I mean possible-to-likely Democratic voters who find some lefty rhetoric offputting, including churchy black ladies and conservative Latinos as well as white working class 'swing' voters), where the rhetoric necessary to do so (exaggeratedly deploring violence arising in the context of protests) would be in conflict with their political stances.
There have been a number of people in this thread (Teofilo, Disingenuous Bastard) saying, roughly, that this whole discussion is pointless because people working to get Democrats elected are already pandering as hard as they can. That may be true for campaigns (outside of specific cases like Maya Wiley's campaign for mayor of NYC). But is it possible that Shor sees this as a significant issue because it is a meaningful issue in the kind of thinktank where he was working?
I will just chime in to say that per several above the extent to which Dems have very little ability to control what anyone says about anything* can not be overemphasized.
It is important to figure out how to work the margins to barely keep Ds head above water, but one of the waves will surely drown us all. A world where Solyndra** is a well-known "scandal" while 666 Fifth Ave. is known to a few Vanity Fair/New Yorker readers is not one where any of this really works beyond barely live to fight another day. It's all about unforced errors by the other side. I of course usually go all in on the media on this stuff (and yes, fuck them hard) but it is a wider cultural thing. And I don't think most "swing/R" voters I know actually are that attached to democracy anymore. Just low taxes, stock market stays high, and keeping their (and their kids') advantages. Squicked out by Trump but bothered more by Dem "incompetence" and hurtfulness (which they are willing to find in anything the Rs and media harp on.). Demagoguery wins sometime. I know I need to find productive channels (my main efforts are voter registration and education at HS and Colleges, but it seems paltry.)
*You know, other than when Dems actually do get in disarray, then the ahole Dems are listened to. OT, I think Sinema ends up an R---question is when.
**A random trivial example of which there are thousands. I do think the asymmetry in attention is underestimated.
208.2: See, I think this is an obviously insane opinion, and it's to the detriment of the Democrats that we take people like this at all seriously. It's about as effective of a policy for solving homelessness as beating up random people in the street. Democrats fetishize "activists" the way that Republicans fetishize Real Americans. Activists frequently have terrible ideas that they hold with total sincerity, and we find that kind of sincerity irresistible. We should resist it more.
Activists are the only reason we ever have any progress as a society. Same-sex marriage exists because of activism. Legal weed exists because of activism. Those were considered terrible, unpopular ideas that Democrats wouldn't touch until activists made them happen.
223: there are plenty of people who support both of those who also bring with them a range of other, terrible ideas. Zealotry is a character trait.
Now they do, sure, but it took zealots to crash the gates.
Making raising corporate taxes your red line should get you expelled from the Democratic Party. If the Senate didn't hang in the balance, obviously.
I like Spike providing an example of the exact kind of fetishization that I'm talking about. The heroic story of all the wonderful things activists have done is like the Democratic mom and apple pie. Activists are right sometimes, and wrong sometimes. Like everyone else. In the 70s, there were a lot of activists that were Maoists. It's good that they didn't manage to crash the gates on that one.
Yeah, instead the Reagan activists crashed the gates for the other side and its been 40 years of their shit.
To go back to my ACA question, surely Shor the pollster could see that the ACA was costing the Dems support. Of course he could retreat and say that he's just a pollster and you can't draw substantive conclusions just from polling data, but then that kind of undercuts his take on anything beyond literal polling questions, doesn't it?
This seems disingenuous, but perhaps I'm just going by your pseudonym.
Thinking about it, I don't see how the ACA question poses a particular problem for Shor, because it's a difficult question for anybody. Do I think the ACA was good policy and worth doing (and worth suffering the losses in the midterms)? Yes. Knowing what I know now, would I prefer a world in which there was no ACA, the age for medicare eligibility was lowered to 50, and Democrats got to fill the 3 Supreme Court seats that Trump filled? Of course, that would be an easy trade-off for me, but there was no way to guarantee that trade-off or know in advance what the best strategy would be. I don't think Shor could know that, but I don't think anybody else does either.
Secondly, LB's link in 199 is good and correct (and going along with my 197) that there's actually a lot of overlap between Shor and his critics. If you decide that the distinctive elements of what Shor is saying are only and precisely the parts where he doesn't overlap with other people you're going to have an impression of his views that looks weird and not very convincing. But I'm inclined to think that much of what he's saying is providing another angle on fairly conventional wisdom -- I don't think that angle is always useful, but I do find it often interesting and worth engaging with.
223 made them happen by getting normie Democrats, including wwc men, to not be afraid of the social (as opposed to political) consequences.
There's a conviction among some left activists that all meaningful social change comes from violence or threats of violence. IMO examples that disprove this are many, and yet it's nearly impossible to argue people out of faith-based views.
222 My friend is not insane, and works at getting homeless people into homes. If she tells me that there's some sort of research suggesting that saying homeless people sounds like a Them problem rather than an Us problem, and switching the frame to your uncle/nephew/someone you know's nephew/uncle makes a difference, I'm willing to try, in public, to have that frame in mind. Maybe this is an unthinking and unspoken invocation of what made gay marriage or legal weed work: people you know -- even people like you but for a roll of the dice -- are affected.
So, I voted today. Went for the 3% municipal tax on weed, went for the 3 judge candidates who want to stop jailing poor people for crimes of poverty, and for the 4 term mayor and my incumbent alderman. Did not go for the thin-skinned law student with all the sexual misconduct (harassment through assault) allegations against him, the poor handling of which has lead the dean and assoc dean of the law school to resign. Guy wants to cut spending by a lot, refuses to identify anything in particular. Wants to force homeless people either into treatment, or onto busses elsewhere. He'll win the Trumpists, who think going for an unqualified nutball to own the libs shows their strength as a culture.
I don't see any contradiction between saying some activists are dopes and activists are key agents of change. Maybe we can all agree that when activists are being dopes, they ought to stop it. Spike's praise of activism certainly doesn't require him to line up with the Jan. 6 invaders of the Capitol, and I'm thinking he's probably aware of that.
So I guess my question is for Walt: Is the advice linked in 16 roughly on target? What should the general enlightened attitude be towards the folks who, for example, would prefer a term like "Latinx"?
I'm not clear on who I should be fetishizing.
I think that you will find left activists calling for violence are far fewer than right activists calling for violence.
I know that BLM gets accused of promoting violence but before any "riots" ever even happened, Colin Kaepernick was doing a non-violent protest to warn everyone that this was a problem and getting worse. He was right and Democrats turned their back on him, to their shame. They chose to push back against his message because something something patriotism and the flag.
Years of inaction later, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were kneeling in the Capitol Rotunda but it was too late to make a difference.
233: I've heard butts are the thing now.
232: I think the way to analyze it is in terms of concentric circles around actual politicians. Politicians should have a set of issues ranked by importance, and should be pandering to "normie" (still hate the word, but it's filling a gap) voters as hard as they can where it's meaningless, and as hard as they have to on their lower ranked issues so that they can get elected and do good policy on their higher ranked issues. At the greatest distance from politicians are activists, who should be advocating wholeheartedly for their issues without regard for the electoral ramifications.
The question is the intermediate levels -- political non-profits, Democratic Party staffers, primary voters. How much pandering to normie voters should they expect, and when should they punish politicians for pandering, or for failing to follow activists as far as the activists want them to go. And I think there's a plausible argument, although I'm not sure of the facts at all, that there's room for people in this intermediate category to support and encourage more pandering.
What should the general enlightened attitude be towards the folks who, for example, would prefer a term like "Latinx"?
If you don't like the word don't use it. I don't.
Latinx is weird, because I am sort of Shor-curious in general, and the people who are into this kind of thing are really hostile to the word Latinx. But on that specific thing, I can't see how it could be doing much damage at all. Like, Sally is in sort of activisty political Latino circles with young Latinx people, and I don't think anyone at all is pushy about wanting normies to use it; it's just used to communicate that the speaker isn't privileging the generic masculine and/or is actively including non-binary genders. That's the sort of thing normies think of as weird, sure, but there's not, as far as I can tell, any effort to define Latino/a as generally disfavored for ordinary use.
Tl:dr -- people getting excited about "Latinx" seem to be to be telling activists not to activist, rather than telling politicians to pander.
The Republicans don't seem to have this concern on their side. There figured out how to include people with the weirdest, most out-there, and indeed horrifying ideas in their coalition and it appears to be working for them.
I don't even see legal weed.
I don't see it here in NC, unfortunately.
We have only medically-legal weed, which seems like a bother.
I still have to drive across state lines to get mine. Because somehow Taxachusetts is freer than New Hampshire.
People don't like homeless people for the intrinsic qualities that homeless people possess. Whatever new term they come up with, will end up possessing the exact same negative connotations that homeless people has now. So we'll get twenty years of activists switching to a new term, and people signaling that they are one of the cool insiders who know the new lingo, and then you'll have uncool outsiders bitching about Orwell, and then we'll be exactly where we are today, except we wasted 20 years not fixing the problem of homelessness.
238-last Or telling non-Latin activists not to get too far out in front of Latin normies.
Nobody cares or should care what I think of "Latinx." If the use of the term is a red flag for normie Latinos in the Rio Grande valley, though, all of us have a pretty serious interest in how forward-leaning activists are about it.
It seems like there's an amorphous trade-off between the speed with which our society can normalize the use of terms that make room for non-binary people, and the speed with which our society can get to true universal health care. More correctly, I think one can fairly say that the people saying that there is such a trade-off are not bad faith actors. Obviously different people are going to make different value judgments about what's important, and politicians and campaign strategists are going to have to find nuanced ways to finesse that. But I guess the target audiences for these articles is those exasperated by the people who say 'nonsense, we can have everything, because having everything is self-evidently right.'
234.1 Absolutely. And keeping it that way is a good thing, imo.
244 No serious people are thinking that changing the words is a substitute for changing the infrastructure. Unfortunately, in our era, unserious people have a great big megaphone.
Nobody cares or should care what I think of "Latinx." If the use of the term is a red flag for normie Latinos in the Rio Grande valley, though, all of us have a pretty serious interest in how forward-leaning activists are about it.
Maybe, but I kinda feel like this is an issue for people of Latin American descent to work out among themselves. There is plenty of toxic machismo within Latin communities that a word like Latinx directly challenges, and I don't think white people taking sides in the New York Times adds any particularly helpful voices to that discussion.
245.1: Sure, but Latinx is used by members of the identified group -- e.g., Sally's sophomore-year roommate is LA Mexican and identifies herself as Xicanx (this baffled me for a couple of seconds until I remembered initial X is pronounced "ch") on social media. The division here really isn't white activists against Latino/a normies, it's activisty types regardless of race.
On this specifically, I've seen a lot of argument that normies don't use it, but not much evidence that activisty types are actually annoying normies bu using it.
238: That's a really useful example; it sounds very analogous to people who include their pronouns in their twitter (or discord) bio, or insist that there be more than just he and she stickers to do so at conventions.
I do know Hispanics who are annoyed by it, fwiw.
244. My dad lost his job when he got sick (I was 18, just before I left for college). His employer denied that he was sick for some years. His unemployment ran out, he lived in section 8 housing. If it hadn't been for section 8 and there being a place that took it, he would have been homeless. My friend's little brother is probably homeless.
Walt, what's the closest that you personally are to someone who's either been homeless or barely managed to stay under a roof, seeing it as a real prospect? I don't like junkies, homeless encampents are a blight, but those are people that live in them.
248.1 -- That her friend uses a similar term is not material to my point. How do her parents self-identify? What do the guys her dad socializes with think?
The whole political discussion is not what do the people already voting for our candidates want, but what do the people not voting for our candidates want, and is what they want within the range of things we can do without losing people already in the boat. If you're Jon Tester you can build up enough good will on a range of issues that you can go against some constituents on some issues, and they'll stay in the boat. What doesn't help this kind of thing work, for pretty much all concerned, is for twitter activists to convince low-information voters (and that's where elections are won and lost in a lot of places) that a compromise the principals are not happy about but can live with is in reality an unacceptable betrayal.
244 probably shouldn't have said that the homeless have "intrinsic" qualities that people in general dislike. The homeless are a diverse population. But obviously a significant number of homeless people act obnoxious and/or smell bad, which makes those people unpleasant to be around, which means that any term for homeless people, such as unhoused, will end up having the same negative connotations as "homeless" now has.
and this more or less circles back to my first comment in this thread. I am down with moving languages and frames away from centering men/white people, etc. There are people, though, for whom 'the language does too much to center you and people like you, and we need to change it so that everyone understands that you're not the center of the universe, but other people are here too' is a precursor to the loss of status they are afraid of. We're living out -- maybe humanity is always living out -- Fiddler on the Roof. Rather than the Leave it to Beaver of our (white men's) dreams.
252: I was making the limited point, not that the use of Latinx is politically harmless, but that it's not imposed by white outsiders on a Latino/a population. The irritating activists who are using it are in many cases the children of the middle-aged Latino/a people who don't use it.
253 which is why changing the word isn't the whole project, but merely a piece of a much larger effort
220: I think that is absolutely correct about Shor personally and why he does what he does. And maybe it is helpful on the margins for his arguments to make inroads at places like Civis. But I think that mostly just emphasizes the extent to which places like that are plugged into elite discourse but disconnected from the nuts and bolts of practical politics. Which is not necessarily a criticism! Elite discourse has an important role in politics; it's just a limited one with effects that are mostly subtle and indirect.
What makes me continue to be interested in this, then, is that the kind of elite organization where maybe this sort of thing is a problem is supposed to support and advise politicians, right? Maybe they're completely useless and have no effect on anything, but if they're affecting politicians, it seems possible that they're affecting them in the direction of pandering not enough, or pandering wrong.
251: You're reading into my comment. I am trying to make a neutral observation that people don't like the homeless for being homeless, and everything that goes along with it, not because of connotations of the word. It's the US. People hate the poor. Maybe with enough years of Republican policies we will all have a homeless relative and will learn sympathy, but right now most people don't have that sympathy.
it seems possible that they're affecting them in the direction of pandering not enough, or pandering wrong.
This (and 220) reflect my interest in his departure from Civis. As I learn more about him, though, I'm more willing to consider the hypothesis that he's just a dick.
People hate the poor.
I don't know how true this is. There's definitely a lot of class anxiety-- people are afraid of themselves or their kids becoming poor, sure. I don't see essentialist fatalism as all that useful, nor funny. People don't hate the elderly, attitudes towards gay people have changed, wortsening is not inevitable.
People don't hate the elderly...
How much am I paying for Medicare for people who keep voting against me getting affordable health insurance outside of employment?
Shor got cancelled not because he highlighted some research about polling related to street violence, but because he did so at a really bad time and in a way that undermined broader solidarity on the left against escalating injustice. He went against the team and the team made an example out of him, pour encourager les autres.
Was his cancellation extreme and unfair in relation to the offense? Maybe. But, given his subsequent actions, maybe the cancel brigade had the right read on him all along.
The dude's shtick seems to be sewing distension between the center and the left. We don't need that.
You certainly don't need to pay people to do that.
263: That seems very wrong to me -- not as a matter of justice to Shor, who I don't care about individually, but as a matter of political practicality. There are going to be times when pandering to the sensibilities of normies isn't worth it, even if there's a political price to pay. But I don't think there's ever a time that it should be wrong to point out when there is a political price to pay for not pandering, and if people get punished for pointing that kind of thing out, as Shor did, they're going to be reluctant to do it.
I mean, highlighting it at a bad time means exactly highlighting it when it was politically relevant. That might make him a dick, but sometimes you're going to want to hear from people being dicks like that.
The summer 2020 was a very difficult time when police were using violence against BLM on the regular. People were in the streets getting their ass kicked because they stood up to respond to intentional provocations from law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels.
Picking that time to admonish people in the street that there actions might poll bad was perhaps not the best reading of the room. Fair or not, it was just not the right time to be punching in the wrong direction.
Here is Shor in 2018 saying Colin Kaepernick protests were a trap for Democrats. So he went from minimizing the cause that Kap was trying to warn people about to casting shade on the inevitable results of inaction.
When the hell did we turn into the party of "People should be fired from their jobs for failing to read the room"?
He plausibly did say that somewhere else, but the thing you linked is by someone else and doesn't mention him.
Assuming he said something similar, though, I think it was probably right. I don't know what to do about it, but my focus group of elderly white Democratic voters (that is, my dad) absolutely despised Kaepernick. That means that Dad is kind of an ass on race issues, but he's a reliable Democratic voter. Someone wobblier, political focus on the anthem protests might push them toward voting R.
This is awful -- no one should react this way, and the voters who do are awful. I am not sure what to do about it in any specific political situation: sometimes being brave enough to do the right thing and support protesters would be right, sometimes not. But if being shitty about Kaepernick would have, e.g., gotten Max Rose re-elected in Staten Island in 2020, we'd all be better off. And if you punish people for saying there's a political price to pay for supporting protests, then the politicians who rely on them are going to have a harder time making the calculations they need to make.
Oops, my bad. That 2018 column is not by him.
And I don't care even a little if Shor was treated justly. There's a lot of unfairness in the world, and if a little of it happens to some guy I don't know it's not anywhere near the top of the list of things I need to worry about. I care if people in jobs where they're advising the politicians I am hoping will be able to reduce the amount of misery in the world on how to get elected, are failing to give accurate advice because they're "reading the room".
When the hell did we turn into the party of "People should be fired from their jobs for failing to read the room"?
I don't know, when did we become the party of powerful influences should never suffer fallout from the thing they are trying to influence? The guy has made a career of building arguments that push people on the left off the team. One time the left pushed back and from all appearances its the best thing that ever happened to him.
I care if people in jobs where they're advising the politicians I am hoping will be able to reduce the amount of misery in the world on how to get elected, are failing to give accurate advice because they're "reading the room".
Well sure, but that's a different roll than "tweeting stuff." You can give politicians candid advice in private without publicly undermining a struggle for justice.
Yeah, I don't think that's true. Or, I think if something is toxic enough that saying it in public can get you fired, saying in private, in front of some of the same people who would fire you for saying it in public, is going to be something you're going to be very reluctant to do.
Probably the difference between saying it in public and saying it in private is the difference between getting paid little bucks and getting paid big bucks.
I think 277 really fails to grapple with the moment we're in. Lots of people can let stuff slide in private that they'd be impelled to reject in public, if made to take a stand.
I agree with 275, and reject the whole concept that meaningful campaign advice -- especially when it takes the form of 'you should favor constituents in group A over constituents in group B on this one' -- is usefully given in public. And who is the audience, really, for campaign advice? 40 people? You're not publishing to reach 40 people.
You're publishing because there's a market for 'you're doing it wrong' and 'stop paying attention to the left.'
It'll surprise no one that I think 'calibrate the attention you pay to the left' is generally sound advice, but it's just stupid to say that aloud, if you want to be taken seriously, that is have your advice followed.
'Calibrate the attention you pay to the left' is something I recognize in my politics but paired with 'the left is mostly right about a lot of this stuff.'
OT: As I read the signs, this means the pee tape is about to come out.
Right about policy or right about winning elections? Relying on the leftmost policy position to be the best is a reliable (not absolutely infalible, but very reliable) rule of thumb. But that's not what we're talking about.
Right about policy mostly, but I don't think the center has the secret sauce to winning elections either. The "lets shit on the left" strategy doesn't seem to be paying great dividends. It may work to pick up a few seats in the short term but the long term effect is corrosive to the party. When centrist dems say "I'm not like those other dems with their stupid ideas," voters will internalize "dems have stupid ideas" as the truth, and that just makes things harder for the next candidate. Get enough of that over time and you will barely be able to get to 50 senators in a wave year.
273: So now that the left has enough power to abuse it, we should celebrate that the left immediately abused that power the first chance it had?
I suppose this is a dead thread, but Schor's proposal, along with his global warming zinger, return me to one of my darkest fears -- that in the US there's no longer much overlap between what needs to be done and what it is possible to do. When something as simple as vaccination against a pandemic disease becomes a clusterfuck, what hope is there for anything more difficult?
Schor and his ilk define themselves a tough minded realists I'm sure, but the tough minded realism of 2022 electioneering turns out to be kamikaze raving in terms of (let's say) 2050 physical reality. Or earlier.
"So now that the left has enough power to abuse it, we should celebrate that the left immediately abused that power the first chance it had?"
What terrible thing happened that isn't totally routine in American politics? Didn't "We must be better than them!" die 10 ir 20 years ago?
global warming zinger
Reminds me that I did not really quite understand his Global Warming position.
Better baked than under China's thumb (not sure why that is even the choice). And it is not really important except climate refugees will cause the whole developed world to go fascist, so the course should be we do nothing, but stay on the top of degraded world and bottle up those really suffering the effects in place.
Profit!
Maybe there's more to it than I see, but I think he's just being very stupid in two separate ways about policy -- while I've been talking up the Shor position on polling and political tactics as plausibly not worthless in this thread, those tweets are enough for me to think he's a complete idiot on policy. The only way that makes any sense is if (1) you have no idea how very bad 4 degrees of warming would be, in terms of mass death/refugee crises and so on, and (2) you had a paranoid and poorly based idea of how likely it is that there is any meaningful sense in which the US or the rest of the world is going to be "under China's thumb", and (3) you had an incredibly dumb belief that there was a necessary tradeoff between those two things.
It does seem very well calibrated to get the approval of the ownership of the NYT.
"So now that the left has enough power to abuse it, we should celebrate that the left immediately abused that power the first chance it had?"
There was actually a great back-and-forth between AOC and Bernie on this at the most recent Woke Subcommittee meeting of the Inclusive Soviet. AOC would like to extend Cancelation to include the Flaying of Hides but Bernie says that might cause some additional trouble in getting the reconciliation bill past Manchinima. In the end it was resolved that Flaying of Hides shall not commence until Build Back Better gets shot down.
I just saw a car with a Pokemon sticker, a female anime-head sticker, and a blue-line flag. I'm not sure what to make of it, but if it's a guy's car, I strongly recommend nobody date him.
So: When the thing that needs to be done proves to be politically impossible, what is the appropriate response?
Watch as matters eventuate? I mean, if "politically" impossible means "there's some acceptable non-political strategy that might work" then do that, but otherwise impossible is impossible.
As far as 4 degrees of global warming go, "Kiss your ass goodbye" and "Die before the shit hits the fan" (my plan) seem most rational. Perhaps I should return to the high-cholesterol diet.
Along with "Eat, drink, and be merry" and "Run amok" I suppose.
295 last. This is why the word impossible is wrong here. Take two things one might think need to be done: abolish the filibuster or abolish equal representation in the Senate. Neither can be accomplished right now, but the facts on the ground that need to be changed to make the one politically possible are pretty radically different from the other.
On the filibuster, the options are to organize around getting 50 current senators to vote to abolish the filibuster, or organize around having there be 50 senators will to vote to abolish the filibuster on January 3, 2023. These are pretty different tasks: the latter involves real involvement in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and even Florida, and likely the use of more carrots than sticks.
I mean, if "politically" impossible means "there's some acceptable non-political strategy that might work" then do that, but otherwise impossible is impossible.
If it stays impossible long enough then at some point George Washington Hayduke will start blowing up refineries. That's not actually a version of the future that would be good for anybody. And as Shor would point out, it likely would poll poorly for Democrats.
"Impossible" isn't my word. It's the word of Shor and all the other careerist realists. I've spent 30+ years being told that my goals are impossible to attain and that I should be more realistic. And even with no filibuster I'd still be told that.
Hillary as Secretary of State came back from a conference where she represented the US as one of the few holdouts on some global warming measure, and she was utterly contemptuous of the environmentalists who criticized her. They just didn't understand.
One would hope that even fictional characters are aware enough to understand that the Right is so desperate -- for good reason -- for violence or threats of violence from the Left that they are constantly making them up, or wildly exaggerating what little there is.
Spouting childish fantasies isn't going to get 50 current senators to do a thing, or help there be 50 senators to do a thing in 2023. But it's apparently catnip.
299 Oh, come on. What is possible is fluid, and depends on a whole bunch of things. Was Clinton right in whatever year that whatever it was wasn't possible in the then current US political configuration? You don't say. Lots of things are realistic today that were 'impossible' in 1990. Lots of things are still 'impossible.'
Oh, wait, Clinton was mean. That definitely means that no effort to move forward is useful.
What Hillary should have said but never would is "Right now our nation, the most powerful nation in the world, is one of the bad guys in what is possibly the most important long term global issue there is, and I just had the pleasure of telling the rest of the world that we were going to continue on that course". But she got huffy with environmentalists.
Yes, her poltiical realism was correct, because the US has in fact decided to be an environmental bad guy, with no letup in sight. We're jsut a nation whose political realists do harm globally. What's politically realistic is real-world toxic.
One would hope that even fictional characters are aware enough to understand that the Right is so desperate -- for good reason -- for violence or threats of violence from the Left that they are constantly making them up, or wildly exaggerating what little there is.
One would hope. But the right is also plenty ready to unleash violence themselves. If that happens, is silly to expect there wouldn't be any reaction from people on our side. As a nominal pacifist I don't that's a good way to go and would like to forestall it but its a case that becomes more and more difficult to make.
What would help if there was a way to get to 50 votes in the Senate for some basic action that would demonstrate a commitment to taking on climate change. Absent that, we've got a constituency with genuine and righteous anger that isn't likely to end up heading in a positive direction.
303 I don't think the case is difficult to make at all. The coup of Jan 6 failed, and the institutions held, because the anticipated, provoked, and hoped for violence from the Left did not emerge. On the other hand, a small minority of people in places like Portland were able, through their own convictions about direct action, and against the repeatedly expressed wishes of local BLM leadership, to largely derail the BLM movement nationwide. Violence from the left is poison to anything and everything the left wants. This is more true now than ever before, with the forces of reaction having completely taken over a political party, and hold not only the leadership of institutions like police forces, but nearly all the members as well.
I'm not saying there won't always be Unabombers, there will. The right hopes for more. Everyone else hopes for less, knowing that the Unabomber -- that person to whom the case was just impossible to make -- isn't any help at all.
304 is right. Or at least how I figure it.
So what's to be done about West Virginia?
West Virginia should be brought back to its socialist roots.
In the short run, (1) find Manchin's price and pay it; and (2) win Wisconsin.
Socialism would be good for WV. But they'll have to accept civil rights too, and that seems to be the heavier lift. And seems to me to be the bigger obstacle to solving Spike's passive voice problem.
288-9: it's a daft thing to say because it isn't an either/or. Chinese hegemony would mean extensive global and local environmental damage.