The senior senator from Hawaii thinks it's past time to panic:
I swear there’s a whole cottage industry around telling people to not freak out even after a @&# insurrection and the number 3 R is getting ousted this week and there are voter suppression laws passing across America. It is time to be alarmed. It is not always savvy to be chill.
— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) May 10, 2021
Fair enough. But without aiming my response at Schatz in particular (it's a very broad response, as you'll see), what are you willing to do about it?
As near as I can tell, progressives are willing to support any idea that's completely hopeless. DC will not become a state. Neither will Puerto Rico. The electoral college will not change. The Senate will not be abolished. The filibuster will not be eliminated. Gerrymandering will not go away. Rupert Murdoch will not have his assets stripped and be hauled off to the dock in the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity.
I have said this before, perhaps enough times to be tiresome, but the basic political lay of the land hasn't changed in a century. Every state, including the small ones, gets two senators. There are 435 congressional districts, many of them in rural areas. Only 25% of Americans self-identify as liberal. The rest of them hear Larry Kudlow say stuff like this and they nod along:
Those folks on the far-left who insist that America is a bad place are trying to tear down our system. That’s why they talk about systemic racism.
And they’ll do anything. Like packing the Supreme Court, intimidating juries, ending the filibuster, defunding the police, etc. etc. Because what they really want to do is transform this country from the greatest and most prosperous democracy in the history of history into some kind of socialist command and control autocratic country that would presumably support their left-wind ideological whims.
I don't care what you think about this. It remains a fact that there are indeed some on the left who support all these things and more, and that scares the hell out of a lot of people. It makes men afraid of making one wrong move and losing their job to a charge of harassment. It makes white people afraid of accidentally offending anyone with dark skin. It makes gun owners afraid that we'll take their guns away. It makes middle-class suburbanites afraid that we really will defund the police. It makes rural communities afraid they'll be subject to a tidal wave of illegal immigrants.
But wait. This is all ridiculous, isn't it? There are extremists on the right too, and they're a lot scarier than extremists on the left. Sorry, but no they aren't. Not to most people. That may be wildly unfair, but it's the way things are.
Like it or not, there's a reason that 75% of Americans don't identify as liberal. It's because they're scared of what we liberals have on offer. And that in turn means that if we want to win, we have to do the one thing so radical, so extreme, so completely outlandish, that even the specter of Donald Trump isn't enough to get us to do it: adopt more centrist policies.
This is Politics 101, and it explains why Joe Biden is president, not Bernie Sanders. For some reason, though, an awful lot of people have forgotten it. At the very moment when liberals should be on the verge of taking on an imploding conservative movement and smashing it to bits, we've instead chosen to move leftward—usually in the clumsiest possible way—and turn every election into a nailbiter. And then we wonder why we lose elections in North Carolina and Florida and Iowa.
I can't begin to tell you how depressing this is. I sure wish I were wrong. But a century of the most basic political science says I'm not.
So, if opposing Republicans is going to cost you elections, what is the point? We should all just become Republicans like you. Or just don't bother voting? That's what I'm going to do.
It's always super to see textbook examples of logical fallacies, here The Fallacy of the Excluded Middle.
Of course Drum is simply saying, "Oppose Republicans by taking the center ground they ceded" and "realize Lefty Lefty Progressive Cities and Online Twitterati are unrepresentative of Broader electorate" so manage your communications for selling better to broader electorate.
Of course the response to these data supported observations by Drum is going to be temper tantrums and denial or outright Fallacy of Excluded Middle....
+1
+2
If the Republicans had merely ceded the center ground, there might be some benefit to sacrificing some farther left principles to get more votes.
But the Republicans moved quite a bit to the right in the last 40 years. The "center" they ceded is solid Republican territory from the 1980s. So when Democrats go there, they are sacrificing an awful lot.
The " Lefty Lefty Progressive Cities and Online Twitterati are unrepresentative of Broader electorate". They are also unrepresentative of the Broader Left, and the vast majority of elected Democrats. If you have solid statistical evidence proving me wrong, bring it on. If you don't, (i.e. just anecdotes) you are helping spread the right wing disinformation .
You know how Democrats are guaranteed not to pass any policies of any sort at all? If they lose elections.
Lose - Don't pass any policies.
Win - Don't pass any policies.
Seems to be the only point of elections is to enrich yourself and your buddies.
No, it’s:
Lose: pass no policies, watch Republicans eviscerate democracy at the federal level.
Win: pass policies that aren’t ideal but are better than now, prevent Republicans from doing the dirty to democracy.
If you can’t see the difference…
No, it's pass no policies: lose. When they hold power, the Democrats have to do things that will take effect before the next election. Obamacare is a horrible example; it was the only significant thing the Democrats did from 2008-2010. It was a great legislative initiative but too slow to take effect. If the whole package had taken effect in 2009 so people could have seen the benefit by the 2010 election, the results of that election would probably have been very different. As it was the rollout wasn't complete until 2014, and people didn't really see the benefits until after the 2014 mid-terms. By 2016 people were no longer giving the Democrats electoral credit for it. Note, however, that the Republicans didn't succeed in getting rid of it.
I should also add that Obamacare could have been a MUCH more popular program if it hadn't been sabotaged by conservaDems like Lieberman and Nelson.
> adopt more centrist policies.
Yeah, it's okay if we continue to increase carbon emissions for the next 50 years.
It's okay if police continue to shoot our kids every year.
It's okay if people can't get health care.
It's okay for percentage points of the population to sleep on the streets.
It's okay if not every can easily vote.
It's okay if there's a little bit of sexual harassment in the workplace.
Yay centrist policies!
It;s most certainly Okay if Purity Pony hard Left people then make bizarre caricatures of centrist policies and ram ahead with self-defeating sloganeering.... rather than grappling with how to massage and win the center. (much better to yell at them and berate them for being non-Lefty, that's such a winning strategy...)
And here we have one more post on the need to "adopt more centrist policies" without a hint of what those policies would be and who among our coalition would be thrown under the bus in the process.
yup. which of the "scary" liberal policies that the biden admin is proposing are we talking about dumping. i'm open to that discussion if kevin tells is what exactly he's referring to. but "let's be more centrist" is meaningless without specifics.
one thing i am in favor of is along the lines of the recent carville interview (which was i think poorly headlined as an attack on "wokeness") where he talked about reframing the language party officials and activists use. we sound like assholes when we use language 90% of people don't use and many don't even understand wtf we're talking about. which helps republicans caricature and lie about democratic policy goals. simple, plain language messaging is important. politics is in large part marketing.
Very true. One of Biden's big advantages is that he doesn't talk like this.
Not sure what this means in practical terms, though. The party mainstream already talks like normal people. No one can realistically paint Joe Biden as scary. And as far the activists, are we going to boot, say, Cori Bush out for saying "birthing people" or whatever? If, like Kevin in this post, we're trying to talk about realistic solutions that might actually happen, expecting our activists to stop being activists to make a bunch of scared white people feel less uncomfortable is in no way realistic.
I think in practical terms mainstream politicians sometimes talk like normal people and sometimes less so. And some are better than others. The GOP seems much more effective in sticking to talking points across the board. Now, their non-government activists are much more propagandists, so it's easier. I expect and am fine with activists saying what they want but the party itself shouldn't be scared to say "no, that's wrong. i disagree". I think the dem primary debate on immigration policy is a good example, where activist language and framing was too far to the "left" and too quickly adopted by most of the candidates. Biden resisting that is, I would guess, part of why he won the primary and the presidency.
Uh, since he mentioned quite a few policies in the post itself, I'm not sure what you're on about.
He makes no policy recommendations in the post.
He mentions specific problematic policies in the post -- writing up complete recommendations would have made the thing thousands of words long.
You're really just throwing a tantrum because you don't like his point.
I don't like the post because it offers no solutions.
Sure it does. You just don't like them.
Do you mean policies like:
"DC will not become a state. Neither will Puerto Rico. The electoral college will not change. The Senate will not be abolished. The filibuster will not be eliminated. Gerrymandering will not go away. Rupert Murdoch will not have his assets stripped and be hauled off to the dock..."
That's not centrism - that's just giving up on checking undemocratic unfairness that stacks the deck for Repubs.
Or are you talking about the part about people being afraid of offending a Black person or losing their guns? Is that where we should compromise? How many more violent racist incidents or mass shootings do we need to assuage those fears?
If there's other policies we're talking about compromising, please describe. I'm really not saying KD is wrong; I want to know *where* we are supposed to meet the cons.
@Total
Kevin's problem is that he assumes anything that Republicans think is a threat should be off the table. He is stuck in the mindset that Dems should not offer policy solutions unless Rs are willing to go along. In Kevin's world, Ds need to self-censor themselves. That way Rs remain in charge even when Ds hold a trifecta in government. Then Kevin can be comfortable.
Kevin: It makes gun owners afraid that we'll take their guns away.
For chrissakes, Dems are not proposing to take Rs' guns away. Ds support a few common-sense, widely popular reforms, and the R propaganda machine lies about. The idea that Ds are doing it wrong because Rs are scared they'll lose their guns is terrible political analysis. After many years of doing this, he should be smarter than that.
Both of you have managed to prove KD's point quite effectively. Yes, it's horrible that people believe a lot of the things they do, but guess what? They do, they vote, and the Dems are going to lose elections until they figure how to appeal to those folks.
(And throwing around poll numbers about how popular Dem policies actually are doesn't prove anything except that people vote differently than what they say to pollsters).
@Total
Wrong.
@Total
Right.
I live in a very liberal city, so my Nextdoor feed is a bit of a peak into the uber liberal mindset:
1. White transplants from suburbia telling long time African American residents they are "privileged" because they don't support defunding the police.
2. People complaining that our high property taxes aren't high enough.
3. People calling an old lady racist and worse because she mentioned the syringes all over the place. Never mind that the almost entirely white junky diaspora were all invited in by the progressive city council that can't virtus signal loud enough with shelters and methadone clinics. But they can't get streets plowed in the winter either.
4. Pushing to remove natural gas when electric heat costs three times as much more more. And any complaints just prove you hate Earth. And are racist. Because yelling racist and privileged is how they end every discussion.
Electric heat is not three times more costly than gas. And you're also not taking into account externalized costs.
Wow. Way to prove their point.
Electric heat is not three times more costly than gas, if you can afford to put in a heat pump. That's why most talk is about requiring new construction to be electric heat, not so much conversion of existing buildings. Unfortunately the D's get bogged down in details like this, while R's just take the general overstatement and run with it.
"Electric heat is not three times more costly than gas, if you can afford to put in a heat pump"
Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Working Class voter, we're going to make you spend thousands of dollars ripping out your perfectly good NG heating system to put in a heat pump. Vote for us!
Right now about 40% of electricity in the US is generated by natural gas power plants, and another 19% by coal. Each of these typically has about 35-42% conversion efficiency. So you have to generate burn more than twice the amount of CO2 producing fuel to get the same energy output, not even considering transmission loss.
Until a lot more renewable watts are generated, making people switch to electricity, or even using building codes to force new build to install electric heaters, is counterproductive. There is plenty of demand for electricity as is to make a market for renewable based therms.
nextdoor is, in my experience, rampant with the worst of the worst complainy a-holes. but i think your point still stands in that the worst of the worst are usually the loudest and can end up inaccurately defining democrats/liberals, particularly when fox news et al are dedicated to doing just that.
Yes. There are some lefties who are idiots. If you can show that 40% of lefties hold those views, you will have a point. If you can show that 20% of elected Democrats hold those view, you will have a point.
Until you do that, you have anecdotes.
If you base policy on the fact that .01% of liberals have views outside the mainstream, so we have to swing to the center, then you are making a mistake.
If you base policy on the fact that a policy might be outside the mainstream, so we can't advocate for it, then you are making a mistake.
Sure, we need to tailor the marketing to make it more accessible, and we need to educate the public on what we are really doing, not what the Republicans claim we are doing.
But we should not sacrifice our principles. I believe the actual Democratic principles, not what the GOP says, but what they really are, are mainstream enough to win fair elections (not gerrymandered, not Jim Crowed).
The Republican Party is imploding because they are clearly, hopelessly unreasonable to a majority of America. Now that we've got that anchor off our foot, we finally have a chance to move to the real center, which is far, far to the left of where we've been for the last 20 years.
The Republican Party almost took back the House in 2020, barely lost the Senate, and lost the Presidency when they were running Satan as a candidate. They picked up non-white voters (especially Hispanics) and are quite likely to take back both houses in 2022. If that's imploding, could the Democrats do some of that?
No, large numbers of people are not scared that Democrats are going to bring in actual socialism. Most people are in favor of actual Democratic economic policies such as higher taxes on the rich and a public option for health insurance. What they are afraid of is their race, their religion and their party losing ascendancy. Among extremists on the left there is some actual fear of black people and liberals swarming out of the cities (inner or other) and taking over their towns and suburbs (most Republicans do not live on farms, they live in cities and suburbs and towns like almost everyone else). This is one reason they buy guns, especially pseudo-military weapons.
The more prominent Republicans still can't say that they stand for preservation of white Christian privilege - even Trump refuses to admit that he is racist. But when they talk about the dangers of "socialism" everybody knows that they mean the power of non-whites and non-Christians. They are not making economic arguments, they are just appealing to basic tribal instincts. The reaction is to the actual progress of racial and religious equality, which is still slowly going on.
"among extremists on the right", not "extremists on the left"
And the point of KD's post is that the Democrats still have to figure out how to win some of those votes.
"What they are afraid of is their race, their religion and their party losing ascendancy."
Why shouldn't they be? Like it or not, white, Christian people (at least culturally Christian) founded and for the most part built this country. Sure, during the brief cotton boom slave labor was important, but in general the South was an economic backwater. Sure, some Chinese worked on the railroads, but so did a lot of white people, even on the Pacific side (and who do you think built the tracks from the East?) Sure some 'Hispanics' are descend from people for whom 'the border crossed us' is true...I had CCD from one of them, the sadly decreased Jamie Yorba. But when the Yankee took over California there were something like 3,000 Spanish speakers and another 30,000 Amerinds.
So basically the US was white, and Christian. And saw itself that way. And had naturalization and immigration policies to keep it that way up until the mid 1960s. And you know what...well, look at Mexico or Brazil and see what could have happened (and what is happening now)
I still haven't given up on filibuster abolition or at least significant, impactful reform. I also don't think dems have "chosen to move leftward—usually in the clumsiest possible way", and biden's election is case in point. yeah, there are some loud, far left voices in the party, but they don't define the party. and again, having biden in the white house is a great way to make sure we don't scare moderate voters off.
Since you bring up Joe Biden, let's have a look at our newly minted President. He is flooding the zone with stimulus checks, infrastructure investment, funding for child care. And this stuff appears to be wildly popular.
According to our traditional understanding of politics, this is pretty left-wing. Big government, massive intervention in the economy, welfare spending, et cetera. Where are the "centrist policies" here? I mean, sure, you can always propose something even further left, but by the standards of United States politics, Biden is pursuing the most liberal policy agenda of any President in decades.
The main lesson I take from the last few years is that style trumps substance in politics... pun intended. Biden *seems* like a moderate, he defined himself in opposition to the Democratic left, and so he gets a pass for stuff that would have everybody screaming socialism if it were Bernie Sanders doing it.
What a bunch of nonsense. The majority of Americans support these policies, even when you factor in the inevitable loss of support from poll to actual policy effort. The people who do buy into that Kudlow crap are a minority even in most "red" states, but we have a political system that entrenches their power.
The only nugget of truth in this is that we need to win a percentage of those folks, and the best way to do that is to avoid unpopular culture war topics and focus on stuff like health care and economics.
Not sure what those “unpopular culture war issues” would be, as it seems like the majority of Americans support liberal positions on transgender rights, gay rights, women’s rights, immigration, and race relations. But I guess the media has stereotyped the Liberals being “out of touch” with working class Americans so that’s what we gotta believe.
Political analyst David Shor has talked about this. Basically, talking up certain issues during a campaign tends to hurt Democratic numbers, while others help them - he points out that Biden's hispanic support actually went down when he focused on immigration rather than talking about schools and education.
The idea is that a percentage of white voters in "red" and "purple" states can switch over to voting Democratic if they think Democrats will help them in concrete ways, even if they staunchly disagree with Democrats on cultural issues.
That doesn't mean you don't do anything on this issues. It just means you play them down in the general election, focusing on stuff that helps you win.
And then you have to actually focus on those things you campaigned on after you win, as (for instance) Bill Clinton did. Otherwise, you're out again after two years.
Ever heard of the Bradley effect?
Maybe there should be a Kennedy effect too, after the ex-Justice. You know, no matter what social conservative -- small C -- legislation we pass, it will be overturned. After all, Prop 8 won in California, not by a landslide but pretty handily. And so did Prop 187.
Democrats should not be abandoning either progressive economic policies or the fight for racial equality, but they should not be adopting a culture of blame. The message should not be "you are evil and stupid and forever condemned because you pursued the racist conventions of the past", but "you should be aware of how thing have been and still are for people in other groups". Too many people in comments and on social media think they are being constructive by expressing hatred for the other side - that wins no votes. As Kevin says, Biden won both the nomination and the general election largely because he does have a generally inclusive attitude.
There should be a sharp distinction between Republican politicians, who have cynically chosen to use a devisive strategy, and voters even on the right who are the victims of this strategy.
Yeah, I'm afraid i gotta call BS here. Setting up a dichotomy between "liberal" and not "liberal" is pretty much stacking the deck.
Of course defining oneself as a "liberal" is a minority position. So is defining yourself as, say, "rightist," which is probably about the opposite term. In fact, defining oneself as pretty much anything, except maybe "moderate," is a minority position. And when it comes to "liberal," Republicans have been working for literally decades to make that term poisonous, so it's a particularly bad one to choose as some sort of defining line. I'm almost surprised there are 25% of people willing to sign up to it.
C– at best.
Except Kevin Drum is just wrong because Joe Biden’s approval rating is now 63% in the latest poll, meaning that of that 75% of people who are apparently totally conservative and appalled by Joe Biden’s radicalism, for some reason half approve of the job he’s doing. I wonder how Kevin explains this?
What part of "Joe Biden is seen as a moderate" that KD pointed to did you not understand? Biden's popularity proves the point -- the Dems nominated an old white guy moderate and won the election.
The whole point of this post is that Biden and the Democrats are being “too radical” as 75% of Americans don’t literally identify as “liberal” and so therefore the vast overwhelming majority of Americans are conservative leaning and appalled by what the Democrats are doing right now, ignoring the fact that most of what Joe Biden’s doing has been vastly popular because most Americans are liberal-leaning even if they don’t literally identify as “liberal,” which, as an above commenter pointed out, is stacking the deck.
Did you actually read the article?
“ adopt more centrist policies.
This is Politics 101, and it explains why Joe Biden is president, not Bernie Sanders.”
“ At the very moment when liberals should be on the verge of taking on an imploding conservative movement and smashing it to bits, we've instead chosen to move leftward—usually in the clumsiest possible way—and turn every election into a nailbiter. And then we wonder why we lose elections in North Carolina and Florida and Iowa.”
Liberals already are the party of greater prosperity: better economy, better job growth, better stock market, lower deficits.
Basically: wanna get rich? Vote Democratic. Not that they ever say that (but word is clearly getting around nevertheless).
Wanna keep the people currently in charge of the country club, in charge forever, even at the cost of your children's future? Vote Republican.
I'd say that, looked at from this perspective, the Dems are just as centrist as they need to be. They make capitalism work and run a good society.
I mean if you want mass disease and death and wars that cost a fortune and achieve nothing, the GOP is the party for you. No wonder they spend all their time talking about how the cultural left wants to take away your hamburger. Under the GOP you can't afford a hamburger anyway, and the hamburger stand is closed because they let the virus run wild to prove their "theories".
The Democrats...party of Jimmy Carter and LBJ. And every single inner city in this country.
Kevin Drum: We should boldly march back to Clintonian/DLC Republican Lite triangulated policies.
Because that worked out so well for Hillary in 2016. And because Republicans didn't react to Bill by spewing lies about him being a criminal out to destroy America.
Worked pretty well for Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and Obama in 2008 and 2012, though.
Kevin Drum: We should boldly march back to Clintonian/DLC Republican Lite triangulated policies.
Because that worked out so well for Hillary in 2016. And because Republicans didn't react to Bill by spewing lies about him being a criminal out to destroy America. /s
LALALA, KD. The fingers in their ears crowd can't hear you.
"adopt more centrist policies"
Sounds good, but for progressives and liberals as soon as a centrist policy is passed a push to replace it with a more leftward version begins. Clinton passed welfare reform with work requirements, and that had to be done away with. Obamacare passed, but now people want Medicare for all instead. Civil rights laws sought race neutrality in laws, but now CRT tells us the laws are filled with systemic racism and must all be rewritten. And so on.
If you want centrist policies, they have to be believed in and sustainable. Social Security and Medicare fit that description. Obamacare could eventually be that too if people would lay off the Medicare for all push. Obamacare can be expanded to cover everyone without throwing it out.
This is rather like a boss who wants to know why is it suddenly a problem that he tells lewd jokes. Guess what, it was always a problem, even if the first focus was to make him stop patting his female coworkers on the fanny or brushing against their boobs.
Clinton's welfare reform turned out not to be the panacea the people pushing it (not liberals) said it would be. Surprise, the people who predicted its problems are still not happy.
Obamacare passed, and the people who wanted Medicare for All then still want Medicare for All.
Civil rights laws sought and are still seeking race neutrality. After centuries of overt legal racism, racism permeates the system. Working towards removing the barriers that keep marginalized groups marginalized is like fixing up an old house -- you pull off the drywall for a small remodeling job and discover rot in a support beam.
"Civil rights laws sought and are still seeking race neutrality"
LOL
"racism permeates the system"
Many on the left now make sweeping claims like this about our laws but rarely give any concrete examples.
One thing to keep in mind, Kevin. If you were writing this column a few years ago, you would have added to your list of things that were never going to happen:
"Harry Reid is never going to modify the filibuster in order to get President Obama's judicial and executive branch nominees confirmed".
Admit it, I'm right.
Schatz is complaining about Rs moving towards Fascist Authoritarianism.
Your response is to complain about people who don't get that Liberals aren't all that popular and that our expectations are wildly out of step with reality.
Seems like a non sequitur.
Sigh. No, KD's point is that unless the Democrats want to lose elections to the Fascist Authoritans, they have to figure out how to sell themselves to more than just the Twitter crowd.
I’m confused as well. How is “adopting centrist policies” going to work when Republican election officials refuse to certify elections that democrats win and Republican state legislatures seat their own electors?
How are any policies going to work in that case?
Right, and that’s what Schatz is talking about. Hence Dork’s non sequined comment.
No, it means that your point is irrelevant.
No, it’s definitely irrelevant.
It’s hardly irrelevant. It’s the core of the issue that Schatz is identifying. Kevin’s post is not responsive to that issue. If you want to whistle past the graveyard and claim the problem is that liberals aren’t “selling themselves” well enough, that’s fine. We just disagree on what the core problem is.
So KD said his post wasn’t directly responsive to Schatz’s point bc he wanted to make a broader point and your response is that his article don’t respond to Schatz’s point? Uh yes, moron. Well done.
...progressives are willing to support any idea that's completely hopeless.
...DC will not become a state.
...The filibuster will not be eliminated.
...Gerrymandering will not go away.
Yes, they're not going to happen this Congress. But those are reachable goals. A few more D senators and reps and they (or reforms like them) become a reality.
Progressives may be proposing ideas out of reach in the short term, but they have a better diagnosis of the problem than Kevin, who seems to think Dems should table any plans to make our democracy more democratic. The structures of our elections and government are so tilted toward the minority that normal functioning of the government is too often thwarted pushing society near the breaking point. We are way past the time we should accept the imbalance as normal and that it's always the Democrats' job to lean over backward and accommodate Republican ideas for the sake of having a seat at the table. If this historical moment means anything, it's that Democrats can rule in a progressive way without apology.
Kevin: It remains a fact that there are indeed some on the left who support all these things and more, and that scares the hell out of a lot of people.
When "these things" include things like court reform and ending the filibuster, what is Kevin's objection? That because implementing long-overdue democratic reforms is a threat to Republicans? The weeniebabies in the R party feel threatened when you wish them "Happy Holidays." Screw them. Stop defining what's right and necessary by whether Rs will go along with you.
I do agree that liberals can go too far at times, and "defund the police" is a good example. As a slogan and practice it's a negative politically, not just because it's opposed by Republicans but (as I recall) it's not even supported by Democratic constituencies like the African-American community it was designed to help. Pushing to enact single-payer healthcare immediately would also be counterproductive, alienating not just R voters but many D voters too. I have my share of other ideas on the left where I don't agree.
But Joe Biden is president, as Kevin points out. Anything on the fringe left is on the fringe left -- it's not the core of the Dem party. The R party, OTOH, is completely unhinged, this week ousting one of its leaders for failing to lie about how won the last election.
We have a highly asymmetrical political divide: a mostly centrist D party on the left and a mostly radical neofascist R party on the right. And what does Kevin see as the big problem? Outspoken progressives. Wow.
If Kevin wants to know why elections are nail-biters, it's got more to do with undemocratic institutions in need of reform than liberals being liberal. (His posts on Fox get closer to the problem than this one.)
If he had objections to specific D policy proposals because they are not good proposals, that might be useful. I may agree with him. But he frames a broadside attack against progressives as a threat because they may offend oversensitive conservatives. Boy, that really misses the point.
+1
I love that you just wrote 800ish words to pretty much agree with KD.
Studies of party platforms show the Democrats have moved very left, and the GOP slightly left. All one has to do is view a Clinton speech on immigration (remember, he actually built a long section of 'wall'), or recall that Obama was against 'gay' "marriage" until Nov 15 2012 or so.
As for Cheney, she wouldn't just shut up. If your party (arguably) makes a mistake, you don't keep ranting on about it, you shut up. Think about how Cuomo has survived his sex scandal in NY.
I don't want to get into the liberal vs centrist debate today because your headline is not about either. The Trumpized GOP is very alarming. They are outside "a century of the most basic political science". This has nothing to do with liberal or centrist or even conservative. You are wildly underestimating the danger here. One candidate and the Still. Indeed, Trump and his closest allies say he won. And the GOP as a whole is either muttering comments that there were "irregularities" or staying silent. The few - very few exceptions - who won't go along are getting pushed aside. This is what needs to be addressed. Over and over again. Every single Republican should be grilled about this every time they appear in public. Every time until this extremely dangerous nonsense is stopped. McCarthy, McConnell, Blackburn, Blunt, Thune, Barrasso, Scott, Ernst, Rubio, Cruz, Hawley, Cotton, etc and everyone one of those frauds in the House
should not be asked about anything else by anyone in the media until they are forced to answer for this. Like this:
Do you accept the results of the last election as fact ? If you can't show it's false, have no evidence but bs on the internet then why aren't you calling out Trump ? Why are you allowing a lying and dangerous demagogue to lead your party ? Your voters need to know the truth.
Kevin, writing as someone very similar to you who's regularly followed you from your Calpundit days, I've been having some trouble with your return to your own personal site because I've developed the distinct impression that you're indulging your inner TNR-esque centrist contrarian now that you are unleashed from editorial control.
You're not exactly wrong. In the past, you've regularly reminded your readers that, yes, there are a whole lot of other Americans who don't see the world as we progressives do — yes, this really is something we should be reminded of from time to time.
Beyond a certain point, however, these kinds of repeated warnings from the same person begin to be both, as a practical matter, counterproductive, and, personally, a bit self-incrimating.
I'm only slightly younger than you, male, grew up middle-class, am white and straight, dropped out of a physics program and ended up elsewhere outside of STEM, once managed a Radio Shack, and had a career apogee in the dotcom era (including being one of the more-rare-than-commonly-thought beneficiaries of a spectacular IPO) while having worked in various engineering and non-engineering positions. I've been out of the industry for 20 years and while I'm not a cancer survivor, I am disabled from an inherited illness. In the blogosphere, you and Josh Marshall are the people I've most identified with — because of demographics, educational and personal history, intellectual temperament, politics, and so forth.
One thing that most separates us, however, is where we've grown up and lived. I come from the part of NM that might as well be Texas, and have lived in NM, TX, and most recently here in Missouri. With very few exceptions, all of my immediate and extended families, high-school friends, and most of the people I've worked with (even in Austin) self-identify as Republican and/or conservative. My college friends have been my sole refuge of progressivism.
*Of course* you and I are very aware that most people don't see the world as progressives do... because most of the people we've known live in a bubble around the intersection of *multiple* axes of privilege. But I bet I've known far more overt racists than you have. I bet there are far more Trumpsters in my extended family than yours.
As a progressive since young adulthood, I've not had the comfortable delusion that most of the people around me might become my political allies if only I were mote empathetic and diplomatic and logical and if they were a bit more informed and open-minded. No, what I've learned is that their political beliefs, like most people's, are a thin facade over deeply-entrenched, barely questioned notions of social identity about who are "us" and who are "them". For the most part, reaching out to those around me is a waste of both my time and theirs.
More to the point, though, is if it's the case that progressives are a minority of Americans, it's also the case that people like me and you and most of the people we know and have known — white, Protestant, straight, middle-class — are *also* a minority. A minority that's shrinking.
Do progressive cultural values appeal to Latinos/Hispanic? Not really.
While an increasing awarenesses of racism in American society appeals to most Black people, are they on-board with whatever "critical race studies" implies/entails along with the rest of the "woke" progressive cultural agenda? Not really.
But if many or most of these folk find *some* parts of progressivism appealing but many other things off-putting, it's sure as hell not the place of white progressives to decide for those folk what progressivism could mean to them. It's egregiously patronizing for white people to attempt to do so, especially given that so many Latinos and people of color are, and long have been, in the trenches fighting the bloodiest progressive battles.
More generally, if progressivism ought to be more pragmatic and more accommodating for centrists to be politically successful — a defensible argument — it's an argument that we who are the most privileged progressives have very little business making. Why? Because it's the nature of progressivism and the nature of privilege that *we* are the very people whose personal self-interests are most served (or protected) by acting thusly. Our credibility is questionable and the abuse of our extreme privilege egregious.
If amongst us there are progressives who *aren't* old, white, straight, cisgender, educated, middle-class men who think that standing athwart progressivism and yelling "Stop!" is what's needful at this particular moment, I'm willing to listen.
Otherwise, I'm thoroughly sick of this sort of finger-wagging from people like me who both have the most self-interest in doing so and a long history of self-appointing ourselves into this supposed advisory role.
I was with you until you got to your conclusion.
"More generally, if progressivism ought to be more pragmatic and more accommodating for centrists to be politically successful — a defensible argument — it's an argument that we who are the most privileged progressives have very little business making."
It bugged the heck out of me when Sarah Palin was telling us who the "real" Americans were. At the time I was working for a high tech company in Cambridge Massachusetts . Who is Sarah Palin to tell me and all the liberals around me that we weren't real Americans ?
Who are you or anyone else to tell me my opinion is less important ? I've been a liberal all of adult life and supported many progressive positions and policies and I think my opinion is is every bit as legit as anyone else's. Whether I'm white or Native American or a woman or gay or trans is interesting but immaterial in this instance.
Donald Trump and his followers are a threat to all of us.
"Donald Trump and his followers are a threat to all of us."
Indeed. Very much so
We live in a time — not unlike almost a century ago — of a globally rising tide of populist, nativist, nationalist authoritarianism, acutely so on the right. Trumpism is our local variety of this and you're quite right: it's a threat to all of us.
But this threat is not a response to liberalism or progressivism or "wokeness" or "cancel culture" or anything at all that the left has done — it's a response to the combined shocks and dislocations of terrorism and war, the globalization of trade and culture, global financial collapse, an extraordinarily rapid rise of socially-dominating extreme wealth, and a pandemic.
...Just as was the case almost a century ago.
We must treat both the disease of Trumpism and its symptoms — but I guarantee that the disease was not caused by leftism. Kevin doesn't explicitly assert this and perhaps he didn't intend to imply it — but to worry about how leftist rhetoric is sometimes counterproductive is like arguing what clothes to pack before we evacuate away from the incoming tsunami or wildfire. It is a distraction, and possibly fatal.
Your post basically tries to silence KD because he's saying unacceptable things. I have a phrase for that, and it rhymes with schmancel schmulture.
Don't respond to the troll folks. Or if you do, just kick it in the head and move on. As for the troll: When your entire schtick is "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?", you're going to lose. Every. Single. Time.
No, I don't believe in your pathetically transparent interpretations of what people are saying. I believe my own eyes, thank you very much.
Someone who doesn't have any idea how to answer a legit criticism often starts sputtering about 'trolls.' Saves them from having to think.
Chuckle. The last refuge of the troll. Pro tip kid: _you_ don't get to decide what other people think of your babble. And your babble doesn't become 'legitimate criticism' just because you say it is.
Unless ... You're Tucker Carlson AICMFP.
Truly amateur hour, this one is. 'Bye Felicia.
Oh good, you’re verbalizing your physical reactions. Next up, sov (picks nose).
I don't understand where white self-hate comes from. But this was a great example.
This is when KD gets all wobbly with his arguments. Now we can discuss rhetoric and procedural matters (e.g., filibuster reform) but what I want to know is which “liberal” positions on substantive matters scare most Americans. IMO the Democratic position on most issues are rather centrist and have the support of the majority like common sensical immigration reform, minimum wage hike, etc. So KD what are you specially talking about?
He's talking about the noise coming from the "professional left". He doesn't make it clear in this post, but the problem is more in the rhetoric than the substance. "Defund the police" is the best case in point: substantively it is very promising, but as a slogan it lost us who knows how many votes. It is this rhetoric from the left that gets amplified by Fox, and half the country ends up thinking it represents the party as a whole, and there go 100,000 votes from 100,000 potential Dem voters.
Listen, the country remains "center-right" -- as defined by by self-identification. But the genius of Biden's position is that stripped of these labels, the country is apparently center-left. Other posters here have referred to this primacy of the messaging, and I wish to concur. It's the woke uber-progressives who seem to be the worst messengers I can imagine.
As a white male, I fear I have little I can rightfully say to activists of color -- except to point out that I don't think your more radical over-educated pronouncements go over any better among communities of color. Be that as it may, I CAN say something to my white brothers and sisters on the Left: please consider how your rhetoric sounds to vast swathes of centrist voters who are currently weighing which way to vote next time. Keep it "simple-stupid" and above all REASONABLE to an average schlub who doesn't spend every waking hour probing political questions.
"Commonsensical" immigration reform in 1986 (2 million illegals) lead very quickly to 11 million illegals.
I agree with your basic premise but I think you're missing a couple of critical differences between the right and the left.
In general, political change comes from the "extremes", because those are the only people crazy and committed enough to spend the time and energy to try to effect change. The majority of people can't/won't engage unless and until there's a crisis (which is the source of the old adage "in a democracy, never waste a crisis").
Conservatives (broadly speaking here) have an easier time harnessing the energy of their extremists. Because they're "defending" not "attacking". Ultimately, conservatism aims to make tomorrow look like yesterday. While there often are arguments about just what yesterday was it's a fundamentally simpler problem to address than defining a new future.
That requires reaching agreement on policy and staying committed to implementing and executing it. And, as any Democratic leader will tell you privately, leading Democratic activists is like herding a bunch of cats. It's damn near impossible unless and until there's a crisis. "Everyone" has the "right" path forward to a better future...and isn't terribly willing to compromise on it. Defining a future, any future, is just inherently a very complex process.
I've read that military strategists often give the defense a 2:1 advantage over any attacker in war games (i.e., you need twice as many soldiers and stuff to attack a position than to defend it). When you couple that inherent advantage to our crazy federalism -- which further enshrines the conservative impulse -- it's amazing change ever happens.
Even with a crisis it takes another key factor to effect progressive change: leadership. Of the kind which can persuade, cajole, and, when necessary, coerce people into staying the course. FDR was a great exemplar of that. As was LBJ. Obama almost was but, IMHO, lacked or suppressed the necessary street fighting instincts. It'll be interesting to see how Biden plays out. He's clearly taking a somewhat different approach, one more akin to the "we can be best buds and I'll do whatever I can to help you or I'll gut you like a fish if I can" style of those earlier effective Democratic leaders.
But it all starts with political energy...which comes from the extremes. So while I agree the current liberal/progressive efforts could easily disintegrate, what we're going through -- including all the "throw it up against the wall to see what sticks" stuff -- is a required and necessary step to success. Of which there isn't ever any guarantee.
This is one of the most cogent analysis of sociopolitical asymmetry between progressivism and conservatism.
We often talk about the false-equivalancy fallacy, but exclusively with regard to policy and rhetoric. But it's also a fallacy to equivocate the relative inherent tactical positions of progressive activism and conservative activism — they are asymmetric and the conservative activists have a natural advantage.
This must be taken into account of the pragmatics of both our policies and our rhetoric.
Pointedly, recognizing this clarifies why it's often so easy for our conversative opponents to choose the ground upon which we fight.
No, no, no! Left-wingers are not scarier than right-wingers — conservatives are just more fearful than liberals; they’re predisposed to see threats to be fought, liberals are predisposed to see problems to be solved, and are not afraid of acting collectively to solve them. That puts Pres. Biden squarely in the liberal camp.
Right. If we're being empirical — and we should be empirical — one of the least shaky findings in recent social science is that conservatives are, speaking loosely, "fearful" than conservatives.
I suppose that some will conclude from this that, therefore, liberals as a practical matter simply must be more diplomatic and willing to compromise.
In my personal experience, however, I've found that gently cajoling the chronically reluctant only reinforces their tendency toward reluctance by perennially centering the matter around them.
Lead, shove, nudge aside, or ignore — if a thing needs to be done, the thing gets done because someone took the initiative and actually did the thing.
"Only 25% of Americans self-identify as liberal."
And then you poll them on policies they support, and tote them up, and find out that they lean liberal, sometimes quite heavily. But they'll insist they aren't liberal, because that means socialism.
You know, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."
Excellent, genius. Now tell us how to get their votes.
1. This ignores the reality that no matter what the Dems do Fox et al will lie about it and the rest of the media will pick it up because both sides.
2. This ignores the reality that Fox et al will dig up and amplify as "the left" any useful tidbit from the most obscure source that no one else has heard of.
3. We tried this. The Right rolled over for the Clintons, president Gore got two terms and Republicans realized that working with president Obama was the way to go. Oh, that was on Earth 2.
4. I believe some blogger pointed out that there were some persistent problems with Murdock and Fox. The Right is now run by the same sort who considered Eisenhower a Communist agent. There are no "centrist" positions that will finesse this.
Have you considered retiring?
'As near as I can tell, progressives are willing to support any idea that's completely hopeless. DC will not become a state. Neither will Puerto Rico. The electoral college will not change. The Senate will not be abolished. The filibuster will not be eliminated. Gerrymandering will not go away. Rupert Murdoch will not have his assets stripped and be hauled off to the dock in the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity.'
The EC can be made irrelevant by the National Popular Vote Initiative.
The For The People bill may be the one that eliminates the leg. filibuster (or at least its current idiotic form).
Virginia just did away with partisan gerrymandering.
Fox "News" is leaderless, and Carlson's popularity in no way obscures his white supremacist rhetoric, which is not sustainable.
People are running away from the GOP.
'But wait. This is all ridiculous, isn't it? There are extremists on the right too, and they're a lot scarier than extremists on the left. Sorry, but no they aren't. Not to most people. That may be wildly unfair, but it's the way things are.'
That's absurd. Who the hell are "most people"?? You think that the charge of "socialism" when it means actually receiving healthcare, is scarier than a violent overthrow of our government??
Only the stupid believe right-wing propaganda, so who are these "most people"?
Who are they? They're the ones who are going to vote in a Republican (ie. proto-fascist) Congress in about 18 months.
I wish for nothing more in this world than to be wrong about that.
"Violent overthrow of our government:
Jeez, they actually occupied the Capitol...if it were an 'overthrow' attempt you'd think they would have set up for a siege.
The whole 'insurrection' think is gaslighting. It was a protest gone too far, in the context of six months of political violence (see CHAZ -- 3 dead at least, and a real secessions). See cops abandoning a precinct --that's something I've never seen before. See barricades around the White House breached and the President and his family brought to a 'bunker' (much to the delight of the Left, #bunkerboy).