A One Party Nation
A Parade of Horribles for the Democratic Party
The party of Donald Trump is poised to have more control over the levers of power than any political party in United States history. This is the absolute pinnacle of power that any political coalition has ever seen in since the founding of the Republic.
On the state level, Republicans now hold 68 of the 99 state legislatures, including control of both chambers in 33 states. They control 33 Governor’s Mansions. The number of states where Republicans control both state legislative chambers and the Governorship (known as a trifecta) currently sits at literally half of the Republic: 25 states. How many trifectas do Democrats have? Six. Six!
On the Federal level, Republicans command a majority of the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate. The 4-4 Supreme Court will have its conspicuous vacancy filled from a nomination by Donald Trump – who will control the Executive Branch, replete with all the accumulated power the Presidency has scooped up over time through court rulings and congressional dithering.
This didn’t all happen in one election. The trend has been incremental but steady. Republicans took the House in 2010 by winning a whopping 63 seats at once. They took the Senate in 2014 and expanded their House majority. Over the course of the Obama Presidency, Democrats lost more than 900 state legislative seats. (!!) In the election that happened last Tuesday, there were a total of 93 state executive seats (state attorneys general, etc.) up for grabs – Republicans won a solid 56 of them.
A One Party Republic
In the 2018 mid-term elections, the situation becomes even more dire for Democrats, as they will be defending an incredible 25 of the 33 contested seats. That places them in a more substantial defensive posture than any party has experienced in modern Senate elections. They will be defending states like Montana, West Virginia, North Dakota, Florida, and Missouri. No easy hill to climb to regain a majority, and a grave threat that could potentially permit Republicans to pass the magic 60 mark – eliminating any odds of a traditional filibuster for the minority party.
Despite winning substantial Electoral-College and popular-vote majorities two times in a row, Presidential excitement never truly turned into success in down-ballot races. And now it seems that the “Demographics are Destiny” mantra that has been repeated ad infinitum the past 8 years is no longer a viable calming balm during election season for the Democratic Party. Especially when at least 7 million voters from the Obama coalition didn’t even bother to participate in the most consequential election in world history.
It’s is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the premise that the United States is a two party nation. Maryland and Massachusetts have Republican Governors. Even Bernie Sanders’s Vermont has a Republican Governor. For 8 years, the massive losses among Democrats were masked by having power at the tippy top. Now that this mask is being ripped off, the starkness of the devastation is more obvious. The Presidency, despite sweeping GOP control of other areas of Government, elicited from the citizenry a continued illusion that problems could be thrown at the President’s heels – and Republican opposition was more than happy to encourage such dramatics.
Republicans no longer have such a foil. They will have to govern whether they like it or not, and they will have broad leverage and mandate to govern good and hard. Even after replacing Scalia to restore the court to its previous 5-4 orientation, one must consider that Justice Ginsburg is 83 years old, and Stephen Breyer is 78 years old. In four years those ages will be 87 and 82. As another shrimp to the GOP gumbo, there does not seem to be any writing on the wall that could harm them in the foreseeable future. Certainly, control of this much government will demand accountability to some extent, with potential electoral consequences. But for 2 to 4 solid years, their control will be impenetrable, and with gerrymandered districts just to be sure. Even with a successful impeachment, the party of the Presidency does not change hands to a different party.
There have been other times when a political party had widespread power. But never this broadly based, and not in the information age – where coordination and communication is instantly possible and infinitely easier.
This scenario is bothersome. It’s not how we generally think of checks and balances, or even federalism. There’s a reason for that.
Federalist Paper #10
The constitution was designed in-part to “break and control the violence of faction.” James Madison conveniently proferred a definition for factions:
[A] number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
Re-read that one more time, and see if that definition doesn’t entirely apply to this situation, in your own estimation. Pay particular attention to the “…adversed to the rights of other citizens” phrase – and keep in mind all the policy proposals that Donald Trump has thrown around which meet the definition.
Mass deportations, higher suspicion for certain religions, callous indifference to a free press, disdain for speech and assembly, punishing women who terminate their pregnancies, bringing back waterboarding, illegal trials for Americans, bombing innocent families, a casual attitude toward misogyny and sexual assault, and on and on. Add to this, the existing platforms and proposals of his party – the privatization of Medicare, the un-funding of women’s healthcare, and bringing back the notorious HUAC committee specifically to investigate Muslims. None of these things are made up accusations of a liberal, they are the documented facts.
Madison laces Federalist #10 with other pieces of definition throughout the document. Do these look familiar?
- “…a zeal for different opinions concerning religion”
- “…much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.”
- “…enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”
Madison goes on to say there only two cures for factionalism. One is to entirely destroy liberty, and so he quickly dismisses it as worse than the disease it cures. The other is to accept factionalism as a democratic reality, but to “control its effects.” Among those features that control the effects include the division of a central government with the various states, the implementation of representative democracy rather than direct, and finally – the maintenance of a large Republic so that through the sheer force of numbers and geographic distance it makes it difficult for a movement to obtain a majority. He intimates that in a large republic the voters will have a greater diversity of options and may thereby select more competent candidates for office. His actual words are striking:
Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.
The above paragraph describes, explicitly, what has happened. A political majority has been mustered in elective positions across the board – on the state and federal level – they share a national platform (common motive) – and in the information age they are empowered to act in unison and coordinate unlike ever before – and they are led by a man who wishes, by his own admission, to invade the rights of other citizens.
Madison wrote Federalist #10 to defend the Constitution, and to support ratification by explaining that this was unlikely to happen under the governance of the document he played such a critical role in drafting. He has been more or less right for the past 235 years.
On November 11, 2016 things changed. This is the most dangerous game, and we get to see it play out in real time.
As a foreigner, I suppose the question that arises is why?
Are the Republicans better organised? That seems unlikely since we’re so used to being told that the Democrats have a superior political machine.
Is the Republican base more coherent and more motivated? This seems more likely.
Does Gerrymandering play an outsized role in the GOPs success? I can’t really say that I know enough about this particular subject to comment.Report
The Democrats failed to care about anything other than Hillary Clinton since 2008.
Read it and weep.Report
I don’t think Kim is wrong about this. Democrats have spent most of the last 8 years planning HC’s inaugguration and also complaining about how mean everyone was to Obama. (Putting on my partisan stereotypes here) Liberals in general have always been kind of obsessed with celebrity, and there’s that whole Hollywood thing. I think they got way too focused on the one job at the top…and gave Republicans everything else.Report
Like libertarians?Report
Political parties do lots of things simultaneously. If we’re going to talk about how Dems have no policy or don’t care about the working class, we need to talk about how bailing out Detroit, making health care more affordable for poor people, changing overtime rules to get higher pay for workers, raising the minimum wage, and just generally delivering eight years of declining unemployment and eventually wage gains etc. don’t count.
Seems to me the unspoken assumption here is that WWC voters only care about tone, affect, etc., an assumption that makes it much harder for me to discount race and other prejudice in our analysis.Report
@don-zeko
The problem is that there was very little salesmanship of those accomplishments. HC didn’t spend the last two years praising Obama’s policies. She mostly just acted as though he was the warm up to her main event.Report
True! And perhaps a different message would have succeeded. So if we’re talking about what the Dems should do in the future, is the argument that they should talk more about the ways their policies benefit working people without changing those policies? If they should change, then which ones and how?Report
The Midwest already had the highest rates of health insurance coverage in the country before the ACA, outside of Massachusetts, although Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa statistically had similar rates of coverage with Massachusetts. Link to 2008 US Census report. The benefits of the ACA mainly went to places along the Southern border with high rates of uninsured, and places with high insurance rates were more likely to complain about the disruptions.Report
The tone conversations amuse me. The most common “tone” lectures I’ve come across come from people treating rural voters as if they’re infantile, unable to get past “tone” to come to grips with issues.
Of course, there’s a lot of “calling them racist made them racist” lectures from similar circles, which implies GOP voters are mentally 5 years old.Report
“there’s a lot of “calling them racist made them racist” lectures from similar circles, which implies GOP voters are mentally 5 years old.”
haw. “when you call black people inferior, that makes them believe it!” “So, like when I angrily scream that someone’s a racist, they figure maybe they are?” “Well if you’re a RACIST MORON you might think that way.”Report
Don,
The Powers that Be wanted an election where Hillary’s platform was “I’m with her” not a single policy to her fucking name.
They got what they wanted.Report
Yes, kimmi, it was HRC and her website full of neglected white papers that had no clear policy content, not our President-elect who changes policies the way most of us change socks.Report
Kimmie seems to have turned up the dial a bit since the election. Not surprising. I believe her pre-election conspiracy was that Trump was a Clinton plant, and that Clinton’s victory was pre-ordained by the Illuminati-equivalent — you know, the ones that put a literal gun to Obama’s head.
(Because a black man cannot, of course, understand any threat more subtle).
I suppose some flailing about is to be expected, as the gears rearrange.Report
Pied Piper Strategy, as elaborated by Wikileaks.
It’s actually in published e-mails now.
You may or may not like the content, but it ain’t lies.
(If you thought what they did to Obama was awful, you should see what they did to Bernie Sanders’ wife.)Report
I propose a rule to deal with comments like these:
Unless there’s a link to a specific email, the assertion should be assumed to be a lie.Report
http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/
You’re welcome. and yes, by some strange coincidence, I was talking about this before it got published. Might have something to do with knowing someone who works for Clinton.
Just like I predicted the whole “electors bought off to vote for Clinton” angle that is unbelievably stupidly still running despite the “election wasn’t even CLOSE.”Report
Don,
Yes, her neglected white papers. Do you think if you pulled ten people off the street you could get them to tell you what, specifically, clinton wanted for Climate Change? How about Taxes? How about the VA?
DEMOCRATS couldn’t tell you, because that wasn’t the fucking strategy. Wall To Wall Trump, plastering every fucking progressive blog in the country.
Smoking the mirrors was the strategy (that and leading Bernie voters around by the Bernie). Running on actual issues was NOT the strategy.
I get this from clinton operatives (to be fair, my friend in her campaign did get fired at some point. probably after he suggested she needed to campaign in Wisconsin).Report
I’m going to have to go to Earth-2, where Mitt Romney beat Hillary in a squeaker, to answer these questions:
Are the Republicans better organised?
Absolutely. Mitt Romney’s managerial skills are top notch and he had exceptionally good polling to work with which allowed him microtargeting of ads. Like DOWN TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD. The guy two blocks away got different fliers than you got. It was a good thing that the Kochs and other mega-donors mega-donated. He couldn’t have done that without $100,000,000 walking around money.
Is the Republican base more coherent and more motivated?
Less coherent, but that’s a strength here. This allowed for all kinds of diverse areas that rarely had common cause to come out and vote at the same time for the same candidate. They benefited, of course, from the fact that Clinton was an awful, awful candidate.
Much of the motivation, of course, wasn’t particularly explored but is explained perfectly by the loss of Brad Avakian in the Oregon Secretary of State election.
Does Gerrymandering play an outsized role in the GOPs success?
An easier thing to argue if Obama himself didn’t have LBJ numbers at the beginning of his presidency but unless you count the states as gerrymandering, no. But maybe if the Republicans ran someone more charismatic, they’d have won the popular vote in addition to merely the electoral.Report
Three answers, I think:
1. Legitimate structural advantages. The GOP has long been the party preferred by rural Americans, while the Democrats have long been the party preferred by urban Americans. The nature of our system is that states like Wyoming, with no significant population (less than 600,000, and no large urban population) get two senators and a representative, while California (with a population of 38.8 million and huge cities) get the same two senators, and each of its 53 districts (i.e. each house representative) has a population of 732,000 or so (53 districts). This is not the result of any party’s decisions, but rather a vestige of a decision made in the Eighteenth Century at a time when no one could have foreseen such massive differences between “large” and “small” states.
2. Gerrymandering. The GOP has made the tactically-smart (though in my view bad governance) decision to leverage their popularity in state elections to gerrymander individual districts such that they get disproportionate representation in the house. For example, in South Carolina this year, approximately 40% of votes in house races were Democratic, but only one of seven reps is a Democrat. And it isn’t just micro-level. In 2012, for example, Democrats received 1.4 million more votes nationwide, but Republicans maintained a 234-201 advantage.
3. I think the Republican party has done a better job of encouraging down-ballot party-line voting. Democrats have real problems getting their relatively-younger voters to care about smaller elections, and to avoid ticket-splitting. That is going to need to change as the country becomes more partisan, and state officials become more closely aligned with the national parties, or the Democrats are in pretty bad shape. It’s hard to see a lot of Schwarzeneggers in our future (ran as a republican in CA, appointed liberal judges, and largely advanced moderate-to-liberal policy goals).Report
I would like to blame clinton for 2010, and the subsequent gerrymandering.
Competency isn’t her strong suit, and the people she had installed in the DNC just didn’t give a flying fuck.
(which isn’t to say the Dems wouldn’t have lost seats).
My friends in the know are happier with Ellison than Dean — they know more than I do.Report
With so much power in one party, a strategy for the extreme right, solidly at the core of that party, seems viable to get full control of ? of the states and then attempt to get rid of presidential term limits. That would allow them to have Trump as president for live. With Trump only interested in his own ego, the party extremist can essentially do what they like. In particular they could permanently dismantle the demographic time bomb by disenfranchising the votes for those minorities, and so assure themselves of support of xenophobic voters.
More moderate republican, those who actually believe in democracy, will go along for a long while as there conservative wishes are also being fulfilled. Until it is too late, and they too will be marginalized.
Just a possibility. Not even improbable. It has happened before.
Very scary stuff.Report
That’s not going to happen.Report
I’m old enough to remember when Barack Obama was elected, along with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and we were told that thinking he might abolish term limits was crack-brained conspiracy-theory thinking, nothing more than poisonous racism bubbling through inferior minds.Report
And did he ever so much as suggest he’d try to undo term limits?
No?
Then what’s your point?Report
I guess if you’re going to pretend that there wasn’t a post I responded to then I can’t really say anything else.Report
The distribution of Democratic votes is non-optimal; Republican gerrymandering–enabled by their smart strategy of taking over state governments–further exacerbates the problem; finally, the Democratic base is less likely to vote, particularly in the states where it counts. Also, a lot of smugness, and self-defeating choices.
Re: recent election; I blame Obama and the Democrats in Congress as much as Hillary. They *could have* bailed out the underwater homeowners. But they didn’t, and it took years for those homeowners to get out from under debt, or, at least, get it manageable again, and that was one long drag on the economy*
* don’t talk to me about moral hazard. moral hazard applies to lenders just as much as to homeowners, if not more given the asymmetries between lending institutions and individuals.Report
joke,
ARRA provision for “bailing out California” not big enough for you?
Fuck off, it was a bad idea to prop up the markets.
Jinglemail is something that I support.Report
I visit this OT because it is a bastion of reasoned considerate disagreement. Your comment, however, is neither reasoned nor considerate, and it does not belong in a forum like this. In fact, it completely misses the point (something hotheaded keyboard jockeys frequently do).
First, your reply did not address the main point of mine, which is about the political consequences of failing to bail out homeowners directly, not the merits of such a program itself. My point, to repeat, is that the Democrats were in charge and had an opportunity to directly help a lot of people; but they didn’t, and the Democrats have paid the price.
IMO, not letting the financial institutions crumble was a *good* idea. Unless, of course, you like massive economic depressions. However, bailing out the banks, but not bailing out the homeowners was a deep error, both strategic and ethically. There are two parties to bad lending decisions; it was only the ones with political clout that were the primary beneficiaries.Report
joke,
So, um, you totally don’t want to talk about the actual bailout that happened?
Dude.
(That’ll be a free $8000 per house — it started at $16,000 and got talked down by de shmart guys, to help bail out those homeowners).
Sorry if you don’t want to talk about actual policy, but I’m not willing to allow your ignorance to go uncorrected.Report
I’m not sure what policy you’re talking about either, @kim, and @joke ‘s point about civility (“Fish off”) is well-taken. Where do you get the $8,000-per-house/$16,000-per-house number? That might be a good point to regain focus on the topic, though it sounds a bit like we’re litigating things that happened from 2007-2009 here.Report
A lot of effects are lagged. Both 9/11 and the financial crisis are still with us. Debt hangovers dampen demand.
I only know of the voluntary HAMP program, and the HARP. As of 2015, I think only about 1 million loan modifications occurred through HAMP; far below the number needed.Report
This was money on sale of house, actually.
“The refundable First-Time Homebuyer Credit was increased to $8,000”
(There, cribbing from wikipedia).Report
the political consequences of not bailing out the homeowners? Didn’t matter.
The people that voted for Trump in the places it counted have seen a large secular decline in their home values (relative, but sometimes on an absolute basis too) over 2 or 3 decades. (ever since the major metro area real estate divergence started in the early 90s).
They weren’t directly effected by the housing bubble because they were never in it directly*. Except for Florida, but Florida voted for Obama the last time. So the lack of bailout wasn’t an issue 4 years ago, why would it be one now?
*they were, though, affected disproportionately (for white people) by the job losses in the recession. And the jobs are back, but in sectoral shifts that have left some behind or just quitting the market altogether in their 50s.Report
I would say because Presidents are elected on personality to larger degree than are members of Congress, and Barack Obama is an exceptional personality. Democrats soon lost House, and then Senate.Report
@joke
Don’t let her get to you. She’s a carpet-bomb of nonsense conspiracy theories that should not be taken to represent the site.Report
No, this site should be represented by the people willing to listen to the Clinton Approved Conspiracy Theories, and none else.
Do you realize how long it took to explain to the Clinton Team that they couldn’t just “deny” the wikileaks e-mails? “Russia Did It” wasn’t their first strategy.Report
@joke
I think there is a good amount of truth to this. Democratic voters tend to be in major urban centers in a handful of states. Now these urban centers tend to be the driving force of the American economy but it also makes it easy to keep Democratic voters relatively to very isolated if one is committed to gerrymandering and ratfucking.Report
We’ve come full circle on this site. From the collapse of the Republican party to the collapse of the Democrat party. I think this is a bit over done though. Maryland and Mass are reliably Democratic. RELIABLY. MD has had two or three Republican governors in 30 years. The only reason they get elected is the Dems throw up someone who’s “due” the position by being a good party operative, sucks as a candidate, and runs a sucky campaign, aka Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. And any Republican in MD is generally far left of the generic national republican. I’m going to assume that’s the case in Mass as well.
However, I will say, again, and again, and again. It’s a travesty of democracy when your side looses and a triumph when your side wins. Take comfort in the fact that the number of people that 1) voted 2) voted for Trump is a minority of the eligible voters, so regardless of whether Trump or HRC had won the election, they don’t represent a “mandate” or even the “will of the people”.
And one last thought, since I’m a vindictive sort, although NOT a Trump supporter. Now the shoe’s on the other foot. Reap what you sow. Maybe next time you’ll want to remember that the wheel turns.Report
We’ve come full circle on this site. From the collapse of the Republican party to the collapse of the Democrat party.
Yeah. 2006 and 2008 were *REALLY BAD* for the Republicans. Obama had LBJ numbers when he was in office. Something unthinkable in 2004… the *LAST* time we were talking about a Permanent Republican Majority.
The pattern I see happening is a fairly bad 2018, because, as far as I can tell, the Democrats still have no idea why they lost and then we’ll see if 2020 looks any better. (No pun intended.)
But, where we are right now? The Democrats are in *GREAT* position to be able to say “Hey! It wasn’t *OUR* fault! We weren’t in power!”
Which is a good position to be in, if you don’t know why you lose elections.Report
Forget 2006 and 2008—weren’t people were talking about the total breakdown of the Republican party like a week ago?Report
Technically, yes.
But they were believing things and then seeing things afterwards.
If we don’t believe things until after we see them, where do we end up?Report
If history is any guide (Andrew Jackson), the only way the Democrats can extinguish themselves would be to redefine themselves as an anti-Trump party, and slowly lose coherence.
The red flag though is whether this election was a realigning election in the Midwest. There were a lot of Senate races in the Midwest, and I believe in each of them the Republican candidate for Senate outperformed Trump, whether or not they outperformed their Democratic opponent, which more often than not they did. The Minnesota legislature became Republican, the Republicans picked up seats in the Illinois state legislature and are aiming to take at least one house in the next off-year election. Personally think the Democrats need a more populist appeal in the Midwest, but perhaps they think they’ll do better in the South going forward.Report
AZ, GA, and TX went from 9-8-16 point Republican margins to 4-6-9; in percentage terms, Trump’s Texas margin was smaller than his Iowa margin. It’s conceivable that the next Democratic President will win AZ and GA but lose IA and OH.Report
The Texas results were weird. It’s not like she was running serious GOTV here.
Our local county…Treasurer? Sheriff? I forget which…got the boot (he was Republican) and a Democrat took the office for the first time in decades.
In his concession, the incumbent blamed “The Hillary Effect” for his loss.Report
Certainly agree its possible that any realignment could have other effects outside the Midwest, and they be related, as African-Americans are leaving Chicago and other major Northern cities for the South, Atlanta in particular.Report
“If history is any guide (Andrew Jackson), the only way the Democrats can extinguish themselves would be to redefine themselves as an anti-Trump party, and slowly lose coherence.”
hey-ho, guess that’s happening now
pretty much the consensus on progressive Twitter is that there was no reason other than racism and there never was, that the US is racist and always has been and always will be, and the only reason that a white woman lost the election was…uh…something something RACISM, OKAY, IF YOU WON’T ADMIT THAT THE US IS A RACIST NATION RUN BY RACISTS THEN DON’T EVEN TALK TO ME.Report
At the risk of breaking several internet rules, I agree with @densityduck that racism is a bad explanation.
I’m not in a place where I can explain why so many non-college-educated people broke towards Trump, but I think there are a lot of answers better than that they were all racists. I think one is that they didn’t care Trump acted like a racist, because they had more pressing concerns. I think another is that a lot of people just couldn’t pull the lever for a woman (I’ll observe that the 19th amendment took a full fifty years after the 15th). And I think another is that too many people have absorbed the constant rage peddled by talk radio, Fox, and (to a lesser extent other media sources) and their political views are therefore grounded in some kind of incoherent anger that doesn’t mesh with Democrats’ message.
I’m sure there are plenty more reasons, and that we don’t have to pick one.Report
Oh, please, please, please don’t say that people couldn’t vote for a woman.
Please.
Do I need to mention LIbby Dole? Do I need to mention Heidi? These are from places that pulled HARD for trump! I can go on, but I’d need to pull the fucking numbers.
Hillary was uniquely bad, and it wasn’t because she was a woman. Believe you me, it wasn’t that.
Hillary failed to run on ANY issue other than “I’m not him, and I’ve got a vagoo, so all you bitches better vote for me.”Report
That’s a lie flatly contradicted by paying the least bit of attention to anything she said all election, or her website. You should be embarrassed to say it.Report
nevermoor,
Pardon me for expressing what Clinton campaign pollsters have been saying. Yes, indeed, pardon me.
If no one can pick out a specific policy position, then she doesn’t have one that she’s running on.
Did she say who she was going to appoint to the Supreme Court?
Did she say what she was going to do with climate change?
Did she say what exactly she was going to do with gun control?
I’m serious here. If I stood up and asked my workplace, they wouldn’t be able to tell you what she was FOR. O was for Healthcare for All.
Hell, remember Billy Clinton? Campaigning on School Uniforms? That’s at least a campaign. Or Dole on cutting the damn deficit.
These are big, splashy “This is What I’m About” policies. Name one of those for Clinton.
Clinton ran more on conspiracy theories than on actual facts. “Russia made up the e-mails!” “Wikileaks is going to have a Whopper out a day before the election!” (whopper is slang for lie, did you notice?)Report
I don’t believe she ever released a list (nor would that have made sense, since her party had a pending appointment).
Yes.
Yes.Report
Do you think it says something that I can’t tell you about her views on climate change?
Because I do. (And, seriously, here on this site? Nobody was discussing it. At all. With O, we had tons of good discussions on obamacare, on the wars, on guantanamo).
Her strategy this election wasn’t about policy, it was all about smoking the mirrors, and Trump Is EVUL, don’t vote for Trump.Report
I have a hard time squaring the concept that the voters want someone who feels the incoherent rage they’ve been propagandized to feel, and the fact that Obama got elected. If the rage machine weren’t quite turned up to eleven in 2008 and 2012, maybe, but I don’t recall that being the case. The same kind of batshit crazy conspiracies about Kenya and secret-Muslim-Manchiran candidate were in circulation back then, and Benghazigateghazi got added to the mix in 2012.
Democrats do have a message that will get votes out. Hillary Clinton did not convey that message. Age, race, energy, eloquence, temperament, character, career record, strategic decisions — these things all go into how Obama could carry that message and command winning majorities while how Clinton’s majority failed in critical areas, costing her the Electoral College. So in 2020 there will obviously be a different candidate, and the question will be whether that candidate can tap into the political power that Obama did.
N.b., Bill Clinton in 2015 advised aggressively pursuing rural working class votes and was shut down by other advisors in the Clinton campaign. You’d have thought that a former President whose loyalty to the candidate would be unquestioned would have earned a bit more deference, but that’s part of what happened. He found a way to connect with voters like that, too. So it’s not just Obama.Report
I think the propaganda machine didn’t really start until after Obama’s first election, when unified Democratic governance caused the need to de-legitimize absolutely everything.
I think 2012’s issue was that no one was less likely to connect with inchoate rage than Romney. And the rage machine kept building afterwards.
Hillary Clinton, of course, did deliver the message that got votes out. She’s already up almost a million votes, with reason to believe that’ll hit two million before its all over (since a LOT of uncounted ballots are in California, where even our conservatives have some sense). I think there are a lot of lessons to take from this election, one of which is that charisma matters a lot more to most voters than it does to me. And Hillary doesn’t have that connection. I hope we are soon able to find a woman who does, because I want to have a different morning-after conversation with my daughter than I did this time.Report
It wasn’t the propaganda machine that delegitimized anything. It was the Democrats who pushed forward with Obamacare, and the reaction of horror from substantial demographics of the American people, not all of them Republicans by any shot, who were confronted with the horror of the realization that the widespread unpopularity of Obamacare(s) as a _bill_ was not necessarily going to stop it.Report
That’s a symptom, not a cause.
Obamacare was, and is, a good law (just like it was when Romney deployed it as a Heritage Foundation idea) in the sense that it improved the individual healthcare market and insured 20 million Americans. Its unpopularity (in the sense of “do you like the Affordable Care Act”) is the result of the smear campaign. Evidence is that the actual things Obamacare does (coverage to 26, preexisting conditions, no lifetime caps, etc) are quite popular.
Of course, Obamacare wasn’t and isn’t a perfect law, which is why a responsible administration would improve–rather than destroy–it. Unfortunately, well, you know.Report
Well, that’s a slightly different subject, though it’s still wrong on its own terms.
But imo it’s more important to acknowledge the wrongness of your original point, which was that there was some nebulous propaganda machine that discredited all of President Obama’s significant moves in his first term.
In reality, the situation was much simpler. Specifically, that the desire of the American people to not have Obamacare was given no consideration at all by what was then called the netroots. And given their influence on Obama, this lack of democratic legitimacy extended to him as well. This created the opportunity for the Republicans to gain credibility, which they took.
Without the destruction of crucial norms of democratic governance by the Obama Administration, things could have worked out very different.Report
That isn’t true.
Obamacare was a clearly expressed campaign promise that was delivered. It was popular enough to get him elected easily, and its provisions are popular to this day. And it has achieved a great many of its goals at lower than projected costs, thereby functioning just like the good-but-imperfect policy it always was.
The propaganda effort also wasn’t nebulous. McConnell was clear about it from before Obama took office.Report
No, not even close. Mr. Obama defeated John McCain for any number of reasons, most of which had nothing to do with Obamacare. And Obamacare as it came from Congress was much different than what candidate Obama promised on the campaign trail anyway, ie, keeping your own doctor and no individual mandate.
Moreover, it’s irrelevant even if it were true. The American people don’t give up their sovereignty (or least didn’t until Obamacare) just because an election is over.
Most importantly, above all else, President Obama and the Democrats don’t have to concern themselves overly much with the reasons behind why Obamacare was supposedly unpopular when they had the obligation to recognize the simple fact of it, and the constraints implied by that.
The whole business about Mitch McConnell and the like is also irrelevant. Whatever Mitch McConnell intended is limited by his ability to execute, and that was limited by his lack of seats in Congress and the White House held by the other party.
Mitch McConnell can oppose or obstruct whatever, but if President Obama had something that the people wanted, none of it would have made a difference. Like I read somewhere about the business of Trump conceding (or not), it doesn’t matter. The Cubs didn’t have to wait for the Indians to concede (or refuse to) in order schedule the bus parade. They don’t have control over any veto points.Report
He did have something that the people wanted. He had lots of things the people wanted. That you disagree matters about as little as the fact that I believe Bannon shouldn’t have a job at the white house does now.
People elected Obama by a huge margin, along with a democratic house and 60 democratic senators. And that crew passed a good-but-not-perfect law. What you call “sovereignty” is really a demand that your preferences get veto power over elections. Which is nonsense.
The only real tragedy is that Kennedy died (and then the MA dems shat the bed), so we didn’t also get cap and trade.Report
Please no. Please please no. I want to say that you don’t believe this yourself, but it’s even worse than that to the extent that it’s even worse if you do.
When the American people speak in as clear and loud of voice as they spoke regarding Obamacare, they have the right to the expectation that their voice will be heard, election or no election. Simple as, end of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayU5kw7Kf5U
Like Ernie Johnson above, this is an important opportunity, now more than ever, to move forward in a spirit of togetherness and mutual interest as Americans:
“I, as lib, who have done so much damage to the body politic have the opportunity to start making amends in the hope of better times in the future for all of us.”Report
How did Obama get elected by the margins he did if he didn’t have policies (including expanding health care) that people wanted?
You realize a sizable (but hard to nail down) percentage was against it because they supported a public option or medicare for all.Report
Obamacare was carefully timed to roll out after the election, and there were other issues. Election-wise the ACA has been an amazing gift for the GOP.
Ted Kennedy’s seat was given to a guy for the explicit purpose of preventing it; Wave after wave of GOP politicians has been elected because they denounced ACA; Wave after wave of Dems have been thrown out of office for voting for it.
Obama himself is popular, everyone else supported the ACA at their own risk.
And these are the people who are throwing Dems out of office and putting in GOP politicians who promise to get rid of the ACA?Report
Obamacare was carefully timed to roll out after the election,
Yes, of course. All the intense House-Senate infighting and Lieberman Vetoes were mere theater.Report
Republicans certainly gained seats in the the midterm, but lost the presidency and seats in both the Senate and house in 2012.
There’s also polling that asked indirect questions to get at people’s reasons for opposition.Report
The cost of the ACA goes way beyond a few seats.
The Dems went from a super majority because the GOP was (rightfully) despised to losing control of the House (at the next election) and then the Senate as soon as enough Senators who’d voted for the ACA faced election.
If the ACA had been popular, or if the dems had just backed off and done nothing, they would have kept their super majority MUCH longer because there’s no way Ted’s seat would have gone to the GOP.
If the Dems had enacted popular legislation they would have kept the House, they might or might not have lost their Super Majority but they’d still be in the majority in the Senate and thus would now have tilted the Supreme Court Left. The Elderly Leftist Supremes might have been convinced to retire and be replaced by Obama.
The GOP taking power in 2010 across multiple states was huge because of the Census and gerrymandering, the Dems would have been the group doing that if they could have stayed the party of fiscal responsibility for two years.
Imagine the Tea Party never existing because Obama governed like a fiscal conservative (or at least moderate) and the GOP was still burdened with the reputation of being the party of incompetent war, big, irresponsible spending and irresponsible tax cuts.Report
“Imagine the Tea Party never existing because Obama…”
The latest start date I’m finding for the Tea Party movement was in January 2009… within days of Obama taking office.
Add the Tea Party to Isis on the list of things he miraculously founded.Report
Democrats often time travel to cause catastrophes. The first known instance was FDR causing the Great Depression.Report
Hmm… looks like I got the President right but the incident wrong.
The movement began following Barack Obama’s first presidential inauguration (in January 2009) when his administration announced plans to give financial aid to bankrupt homeowners. Following a February 19, 2009 rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for a “tea party,”[11][12] over fifty conservative activists agreed by conference call to coalesce against Obama’s agenda and scheduled series of protests, including the 2009 Taxpayer March on Washington.[13][14] Supporters of the movement subsequently have had a major impact on the internal politics of the Republican Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement
Although granted, they were pretty irritated over lots of things Bush did.Report
That Republican politicians, media, and (by extension) voters would not have opposed anything President Obama did with respect to Healthcare does not pass the smell test for me.
I mean there was lockstep opposition to a plan that was at least modeled off of a Heritage plan, and was significantly more centrist than the many in the Democratic party wanted (who, remember, had just won a wave election). I mean a plan that was fine for Romney in Mass. was suddenly the death of liberty when enacted by the federal government. That is at least circumstantial evidence that the lockstep opposition from politicians and the media to the ACA was driven by the political goal of making Obama a one term president rather than a principled decision based on the merits of the ACA.Report
The key word there is “Massachusetts”, not “Romney”. The rest of the Country is no where near as liberal as the state which kept Ted Kennedy in power for 47 years.
That some Dems wanted something more to the left is irrelevant, they put together a plan as far to the left as it was possible to pass. The reported price for GOP input to the plan was supporting “the public option”. And shock, what was middle of the road in Massachusetts was far left in much of the rest of the country.
Most politicians follow, as opposed to create, public opinion. The President is one of the few with a good sized budget and the ability to connect to the media, and that wasn’t close to being enough.
Absolutely the GOP did what they could to fan the flames, but the core of the ACA is to expand coverage to a minority of people at the expense of the majority who were happy with what they had. If I ask “what is in it for me?” and your only answer is “higher prices so we can cover someone else”, that’s not going to be popular.Report
@dark-matter
The key word there is “Massachusetts”, not “Romney”. The rest of the Country is no where near as liberal as the state which kept Ted Kennedy in power for 47 years.
No, the key word there is *Heritage Foundation*.
As someone who had paid attention to health insurance reform since we were screwed out of it in the early 90s, the ACA *was the right’s ideas*.
Exchanges, mandates, the lack of pre-existing conditions, and tax subsidies were the right’s *only ideas*.
If you were to wander into think-tanks on the right in 2003 and ask them ‘How do we fix health insurance?’, they would have said: The left’s plan for Medicare-for-all is stupid. People need to be required to take personal responsibility for themselves, so we’re going to require everyone to buy them health insurance, and we’re going to make insurance companies sell to everyone, and we’re going to give them subsidies if they can’t afford it. And people will be able to get a big list of insurance companies in the states and their rates and pick the one that they like.
That was, really and truly, what the *right* was saying.
Here’s a funny little personal history lesson: I was in one semester of *debate class* in my high school in 1991. And the debate topic for that year was, tada, Clinton’s health care reform. When debating against it, we *used the Republican idea* to shoot it down. And, as I said, the Republican idea was…the ACA, basically, where everyone keeps their existing plans(2), insurance companies have to sell to everyone, and if you can’t afford insurance we just give you subsidies.
Arguing about ‘Massachusetts’ is pointless. The ACA is not the Massachusetts plan. But what the ACA did, all the concepts in the ACA (3), were the stated ideas of the right ‘to solve health insurance’ at the time the ACA was written.
And this is pretty easy to prove, because faced with replacing the ACA, they haven’t come up with anything, in six years, that is enough of an alternative to even *pretend* it’s different enough to be something else. (Except floating the *left’s* plan of Medicare-for-all/single-payer.) This is because what the ACA does is pretty much the only ‘free market’ version of health care reform they have ever come up with, and they came up with it in the early 90s. (Or possibly earlier, I dunno.)
1) Of course, their ideas, like trading carbon credits, were something that the right came up with only so they could compare it to the left’s plan, so that would fail and they wouldn’t have to pass any legislation. The second the left goes ‘Fine, we’ll do it *your* way, at least that will be something.’, the right suddenly doesn’t like *their own* way either.
2) Just as much a lie then as it wasunder the ACA, in your plan was a thing offered by private corporations and you could keep it as long as they felt it was profitable.
3) Except the Medicaid expansion. Sometimes the think-tanks liked it, sometimes not and they wanted to extend the credits all the way down where people could basically get private insurance for free. Fair enough.Report
Where, other than Mass, was this attempted, much less implemented?
Lack of Transparency prevents consumers from knowing how much something costs. Force the publication of all costs.
Lack of Transparency also prevents consumers from knowing how safe a doctor or hospital is, and it’s a real challenge to figure out who is good at what. How many surgeries of type X does Doctor Y do a year? What is his success rate?
3rd party pays prevents consumers from having any skin in the game, figure out a way that they do, the HSA isn’t a terrible way to do it but there are others.
In the news recently are drugs off patent (epi-pens for example) which increase in price to crazy levels. Why do we have one pen while Europe has 9 or so? Regulatory capture? Standards set too high?
And yes, I shouldn’t lose my insurance just because I have to move across state lines, so letting insurance be sold across state lines would be good.
And yes, defensive medicine is a bad thing, so tort reform would be good.
Medical mistakes are a problem. There are better ways to address this than lawyers, where the doctors are incentivized to hide their mistakes so other doctors can make the same mistakes. Something like what we do for vaccinations would probably work, and/or what the Air Force(? I think) does for mistakes. Reviewed them, examine them, don’t blame the guy who did it, blame the system and fix it.Report
Where, other than Mass, was this attempted, much less implemented?
It wasn’t. As I said, the Republican’s idea of health care reform was one of those Republicans inventions where the left wants to do something, and the right invents a ‘free market’ concept to argue with so *nothing gets done*. Heaven forbid they actually push to do their own idea themselves.
Lack of Transparency prevents consumers from knowing how much something costs. Force the publication of all costs.
snipped other ways to reduce costs
The base that the ACA (And the Massachusetts plan) was built on was the Republican ideas, of a mandate and subsidies, but the ACA also contains a hell of a lot of cost control measures, something the Heritage Foundation ideas *didn’t bother with at all*.
In fact, as the Heritage Foundation plan attempted to remove many people from Medicaid, which *does* have all sorts of cost control measures in it (Which is why doctors don’t like Medicaid.), it arguably would have made things worse.
The ACA, as it is, has a lot of cost control in it, and has bent the increasing cost of medical care downward, and probably would have bent it more if Medicaid had been expanded everywhere.
Are costs still going up faster than inflation? Yes. Will this need fixing? Yes. Is there more we can do? Yes.
Will repealing the ACA undo all the new cost controls? Yes. Is there any evidence the Republicans care about cost controls? Not really.
And yes, I shouldn’t lose my insurance just because I have to move across state lines, so letting insurance be sold across state lines would be good.
This is all well and good for ‘not losing insurance’ if you happen to be in the tiny population of people who live close enough to a state line, but you do realize it will do nothing about *costs*, right? Costs in health insurance are almost entirely due to medical network costs.
Medical mistakes are a problem. There are better ways to address this than lawyers, where the doctors are incentivized to hide their mistakes so other doctors can make the same mistakes.
If you want to argue that reducing medical mistakes will reduce costs, you are correct. The ACA has a lot of things that attempt to reduce mistakes, and awesomely, a few of them are now ‘baked-in’ to the health care industry, like requiring electronic record-keeping. (Even if the ACA is repealed, no one is going back to paper.) And doctors and hospitals actually started doing a lot of things *themselves* two decades ago, changing a lot of the medical norms to stop mistakes.
The problem is the mention of ‘lawyers’, and the implication that the problem is lawsuits. The thing is…medical malpractice lawsuits are not why medical costs have gone up, as evidenced by the obvious fact the amount of those lawsuits, and the costs of malpractice insurance keep dropping.
http://truecostofhealthcare.net/malpractice/
In 2003, 4.7 million was paid out in malpractice claims. In 2014, 3.6 million was…and let’s not forget, the population *not only* expanded, but the portion of the population accessing medical services went up due to the ACA.
Something that appears to be declining as various industry changes happen is probably *not* the cause of rising health care costs.Report
Again, that’s an explanation of why Obamacare was unpopular, which is irrelevant against the fact that it was unpopular.
As far as the broader question goes, it could be that a significant fraction of Americans simply changed their mind. As it happens, I don’t believe that. My theory is that a lot of Americans took the Demo side of the health care debate not too much differently than the prospect of Mexico paying for a border wall with the US.
When it came to being a serious possibility, they evaluated it seriously.Report
@koz
When the American people speak in as clear and loud of voice as they spoke regarding Obamacare, they have the right to the expectation that their voice will be heard, election or no election. Simple as, end of.
I agree!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/16/most-americans-want-to-replace-obamacare-with-a-single-payer-system-including-a-lot-of-republicans/
Koz, as you haven’t been here for a while (apparently?), you’ve probably missed some of the background truths we all accept about ‘dislike of the ACA’ that no one has bothered to repeat to you:
1) Americans, while opposing ‘Obamacare’, have much less opposition to ‘the ACA’, and when dissecting even further, have very little opposition to specific *parts* of the ACA. If you list the individual things in the ACA and don’t tell them where they are from, they like *almost* all of them.
Which rather indicates their opposition is, to put it politely, ‘philosophical’, and to put it bluntly, ‘they have been told they hate Obamacare over and over so it must be true’.
2) There are, basically, two parts of the ACA they *don’t* like:
a) The mandate. As most people (I say, although Congressional Republicans are about to prove me wrong.) are aware, that is needed to make the law work.
b) The involvement of private insurance companies. They either want a public option or single payer, even if they don’t know to call them those things. Sometimes these are people on the left saying the left should have pushed harder, and sometimes these, inexplicably, are people on the right who are calling for Republicans to replace the ACA with a ‘more liberal’ plan and don’t seem to notice that. (See the start of this post.)
That’s it. Those are the parts of the ACA that, if you put in front of people, they sometimes say ‘Yeah, we don’t like that part’. The mandate, and the involvement of private insurance companies, are objected to by moderate amounts of people. I don’t know if it’s a majority, it depends how you ask them, but it’s significant.
The *other* parts of the law, everyone is fine with, and fine with by pretty wide margins, like mid-70%. Like ‘Big majorities of Democrats, and almost a majority of Republicans’.
Now, whether or not you *agree* with those dislikes is not really my point. I’m just telling you those thing I just said is basically where the *entire site* is coming from. It’s the base assumption here when people talk about how the ACA is ‘disliked’. nevermoor made a reference to this that I think you missed.
You can’t just blithely state ‘It polls really badly’, this site is somewhat past that. A perfectly valid response to that is ‘Well, let’s keep the ban on pre-existing conditions and keep the subsidies, drop the mandate, and watch the government go bankrupt trying to cover the death spiral, because that’s what *the voters* seem to want. Because the voters are dumb.’
(And none of this has anything to do with whether or not it’s a good law or should or should not be replaced. This is about why people in general *dislike* it. People can dislike good laws, or like bad laws, or even dislike bad laws for stupid reasons.)Report
Fully endorsed.Report
No, no. It’s been a long time since I participated here but I was here for that. RealClearPolitics published an aggregation history for PPACA and the results very clear as it pertained to its unpopularity. It was like a Presidential election in that there were several polling organizations involved, I’m sure some methodologies polled for “ACA” and others for “Obamacare” but it didn’t make a difference. They were all bad.
And let’s note that the unpopularity of Obamacare went way beyond polling as well. It’s also in the intensity of the opposition that it created. Many ideas from the government are unpopular, but ACA had some measure of uniqueness in the mobilization that it created against it.
That’s to say, that it wasn’t something that the opponents of ACA among the American people were willing to shrug and let slide. And the fallout from the passage of ACA has poisoned our politics since then.Report
@koz
No, no. It’s been a long time since I participated here but I was here for that. RealClearPolitics published an aggregation history for PPACA and the results very clear as it pertained to its unpopularity. It was like a Presidential election in that there were several polling organizations involved, I’m sure some methodologies polled for “ACA” and others for “Obamacare” but it didn’t make a difference. They were all bad.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/27/poll-obamacare-vs-affordable-care-act/
And, you missed the actual point that regardless of the name: Americans vastly liked the *actual policies* in the plan. Even *Republicans* are vastly in favor of a few of them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/republicans-support-obamas-health-reforms–as-long-as-his-name-isnt-on-them/2012/06/25/gJQAq7E51V_blog.html?tid=a_inl
80% of Republicans like having exchanges.
78% of Republicans like no pre-existing conditions.
57% of Republicans like subsidies.
54% of Republicans like requiring companies with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance.
52% of Republicans like letting children stay on parent’s insurance until 26. (The lowness of *that* actually startles me a bit. I could have sworn that was up there near 80% also. That’s one of the few things even *Ryan* is willing to keep.)
Again, that’s *just Republicans*, and they like that stuff the least. When you include everyone, even those last three have a pretty solid majority.
The mandate wasn’t listed there, but it polls negative among Republicans and independents, and has somewhat weak support among Democrats. Of course, this is akin to polling if taxes should be lower, while all government services remain at the same level. It’s magical thinking. You can’t have no pre-existing conditions without a mandate.
And let’s note that the unpopularity of Obamacare went way beyond polling as well. It’s also in the intensity of the opposition that it created. Many ideas from the government are unpopular, but ACA had some measure of uniqueness in the mobilization that it created against it.
Yes, in that it is literally the first large proposal ever passed where the opposition party continued to attack for years *after* it was passed.
Surprisingly, if people are constantly told they should hate something, they hate it. Weird.Report
Why are you supposing that I should care about one poll taken in 2013 when there was a wall of contemporaneous public polling results on this subject when it was topical?Report
Finally, you are quite right in that just because Obamacare was unpopular in 2009-10, doesn’t necessarily mean that a total repeal in 2016 will be popular. Or, in general, that the enactment of Trump campaign promises will be popular with Americans, or even Trump voters.Report
@davidtc
I’ll second what Koz said.
Further, IMHO the dems’ leadership was counting on entitlements being almost impossible to remove after enacted to safeguard the ACA. Of course I also think they believed the ACA would work better than it has at reducing expenses and so forth, and that the political expense wouldn’t be this extreme.Report
I don’t think the political expense actually has been that extreme. It’s not like Trump ran exclusively on a “repeal and replace” platform and THAT’S what got him elected. (That’s yer Grandpa’s conservatism…) In fact, he wants to keep the central element upon which the ACA is structured: guarantee issue. And frankly, there’s just no way to keep that in place in the individual market (except cynically, that is, without community rating) without something exactly like or equivalent to the mandate or an more extreme mandate.
Most of the provisions in the ACA poll very well. The only one that doesn’t is the mandate, for obvious reasons. But this is where I think the GOP puts politics in front of good governance: people who don’t need insurance must pay into the system for the entire model to work, whether that system is private or public. Eg, if young healthy employees were allowed to opt out of employer sponsored insurance the whole healthcare insurance delivery system would collapse very quickly.
I mean, let’s get real here (again!): the increase in year over year healthcare costs won’t be mitigated by moving to subsidized private-insurance premiums for the olds and HSAs for the young. Those shots at Freedom!! completely miss how the engine driving increasing insurance and healthcare costs works.Report
Btw, it’s just astounding to me – strenuously astounding – that the GOP persists in this fantasy that healthcare (rather than the politics they’ve created around it) isn’t a primary concern for Americans, but I’m even more astounded that their solution is to not just minimize, but eliminate government involvement in the healthcare delivery “market”.
It boggles. Really.Report
Eg, if young healthy employees were allowed to opt out of employer sponsored insurance the whole healthcare insurance delivery system would collapse very quickly.
Everywhere I can remember working pre-ACA, employer sponsored insurance was an optional benefit. I knew people who declined because they could get coverage cheaper elsewhere, most often through a spouse. I knew people who declined because they couldn’t afford the employee share of the premium.
Everywhere but one place, decades ago, where the company picked up the entire cost. But that was a peculiar self-insurance plan, where the company paid 80% of everything until you reached an out-of-pocket limit, and then the company paid 100%. If you were young and healthy — me at that time — I paid nothing in advance, and didn’t cost the company anything.Report
Is that true generally? Everyone I’ve talked to has said they don’t get a say in whether they want it, just a vote on what type of group plan they get. If even that. Often it’s decided for them.
NEVERTHELESS Michael (clears throat awkwardly…) all things equal, if healthy people drop outa the insurance market the premium price for covered individuals goes up. IOW, healthy people who don’t incur expenses subsidize those who do, and that’s what drives down cost.Report
Michael,
Let’s suppose that’s right, that most employers have an opt out If so, then the problem is even worse than I thought!Report
@michael-cain
Everywhere I can remember working pre-ACA, employer sponsored insurance was an optional benefit.
It would perhaps be more accurate if Stillwater said:
If young healthy employees were *forced to pay the entire cost of their insurance*, while still giving them the change to opt out of their employer sponsored insurance, they would. And then the whole healthcare insurance delivery system would collapse very quickly.
People on employer insurance are not paying their full cost, though. For one thing, no income taxes, which automatically means it’s 30% cheaper. (Assuming anyone who has actual benefits is at least in that tax bracket, which seems reasonable.) For another things, employers almost always cover some of it…and you usually can’t opt out of *that*, as far as I know. You don’t get insurance, you just don’t get the money they would have spent on your insurance.
And most importantly, the people who can work are, by definition, *not* the higher users of health care. Some of them are *somewhat* sick, and others get very sick and are covered by the insurance for a while and then CORBA-ing for a bit more, but eventually drop off. But it’s not the super-duper-sick, the people who cost absurd amounts of money. And the rates show this.
On top of that, even if people with jobs with insurance were *equally* likely to have medical problems as everyone else, handing insurance to a random subset of a group of people is always better, statistically, than giving insurance to a self-select subset of the same group that want it. People that *want* insurance probably have some reason for doing so. People that were just handed insurance at a huge discount and shrugged and said ‘Sure’ often don’t.Report
Excellent post. Very insightful.Report
We’ve been through about three election cycles where it’s been a serious issue, and has caused Dems to either retire or lose elections. Incumbents losing elections is seriously rare.
This is the wrong discussion, and was the wrong discussion back when the Dems did the ACA.
What the country needed was medical reform (i.e. cost), not medical insurance reform (coverage).
The Dems turned the system upside down, promised all sorts of things, including that costs would go down, and delivered increasing costs, a government mandate on my person, and a broken website.Report
Dark,
What the country needed was medical reform (i.e. cost), not medical insurance reform (coverage).
What is “medical reform”? I’ve never heard that term before.
All I’ve heard from conservatives at this point (apart from dismantling Medicare) is a) HSAs and b) open up competition across state lines and c) “torts!”.
I don’t think any of those constitute medical reform, even on a charitable interpretation. What am I missing?
Add: Ahh, I get it now. Medical reform = costs, yes? The reform the country needed was to reduce cost. Hell, that’s easy…Report
It was my understanding that cost increase slowed over the last five or six years. Thought whether that had anything to do with the ACA is above my pay grade.
We have been through two mid-terms where Republicans picked up seats, a presidential election where Democrats won, and this election, where democrats picked up seats in the Senate and House but lost the strangest presidential election probably ever (though won the popular vote). How you turn this into a clear refutation of the ACA, and the democratic politicians that voted for it is beyond me.
ed. this was supposed to be a response to Dark MatterReport
Conservatives? The liberals wrote the ACA, aren’t there any liberal ideas for reducing cost short of single payer and price controls? Having said that, let’s make a partial list on why the market doesn’t work and go through it.
Lack of Transparency prevents consumers from knowing how much something costs. Force the publication of all costs.
Lack of Transparency also prevents consumers from knowing how safe a doctor or hospital is, and it’s a real challenge to figure out who is good at what. How many surgeries of type X does Doctor Y do a year? What is his success rate?
3rd party pays prevents consumers from having any skin in the game, figure out a way that they do, the HSA isn’t a terrible way to do it but there are others.
In the news recently are drugs off patent (epi-pens for example) which increase in price to crazy levels. Why do we have one pen while Europe has 9 or so? Regulatory capture? Standards set too high?
And yes, I shouldn’t lose my insurance just because I have to move across state lines.
And yes, defensive medicine is a bad thing (how bad is unclear).
And so are medical mistakes. There are better ways to address this than what we’ve been doing.
I’m sure I’m missing things but this is the conversation which we should have had, and it would have been impossible for the GOP to not get involved because reducing medical costs is something everyone wants.Report
Yeah, this. Personally, I think Repealing Medicare and replacing it with insurance coupons for the olds would piss just about everyone off, but most importantly (cuz we’re talking political logic here) the old white folk who consistently vote R. Beyond that, I think getting rid of what’s in place rather than figuring out how to bring down the cost is politically dicey since blowing the thing up and replacing it with HSAs might pass the political smell test for a few months, but not much longer than that….
Add: Problem is, Freedom! demands that no Merkin is coerced into paying into the healthcare pool, even tho Freedom! requires access to that pool for a reasonable price when needed….Report
Every Medicare voucher plan I’ve ever seen put seriously forward exempts those that are already on Medicare, or within ten years of being on.Report
So, the olds who oppose it but not for themselves are gonna be OK!Report
Yep. Medicare voucher plans, one (usually unstated) feature of which is that over time the cost of the policy will be greatly shifted to the individual, are written to not apply to people on/near Medicare. Privatized Social Security plans only ever apply to people some/many years from taking benefits. Such plans would totally screw the generation behind that group, who has to pay taxes to cover the PAYGO SS and Medicare bills, while trying desperately to save enough to cover their own retirement and old-age health insurance.
Just for the record, note that the Baby Boomers, so often blamed for everything wrong in government policy, have been in that bind for most of their working lives: covering the costs of their parents’ and grandparents’ SS and Medicare, while accumulating a $3T surplus in the SS trust fund.Report
That law has cost the Dems a lot of elections. The American people spoke up at the time, Obama rammed it through anyway, and the Dems have been losing elections ever since.
That pieces of the ACA poll well doesn’t change the fact that a lot of politicians have lost their jobs over it.Report
This continues to be one of the things that everyone on the right side of the spectrum believes is true, but is not even remotely proven. The Dems lost quite badly in 2010 and again in 2014 and 2016, but did well in 2012. It’s likely that the ACA’s polling effected the magnitude of some of those losses, but it wasn’t even close to the only issue at play in those elections. Particularly in 2010, where the economy was barely out of free fall, and 2016, where the Dems had held the presidency for two terms, fundamentals-based models suggested likely Republican victories.
On top of that, there’s the question of what the counterfactual looks like. If the Democrats had pushed for healthcare reform only to have it stall and fail in Congress after organizing their party around reform as their main domestic priority, do you really think they would have done any better in 2010? oh, and of course this is all setting aside the crazypants notion that the ACA poisoned American politics, when the GOP had already adopted a strategy of total opposition before anybody voted on the ACA at all. The fact is that the Democrats were going to tend towards losing seats across Obama’s presidency because governing is hard. Their decisions could probably have effected the scale and nature of those losses, but it’s a two-party system. Nobody lives forever, certainly not in our hyper-polarized times.Report
So McConnell hadn’t committed, in advance, to organizing lockstep opposition to everything the Dems and Obama proposed no matter what it was? Odd that he then went and said the opposite.Report
I don’t know. I do know that Mitch McConnell is one Senator, with one vote, and public sentiment being equal, his situation was much weaker than the President’s.Report
Just keep digging, dude. He was the minority leader, who was both able to set GOP strategy and get his entire bloc to follow that strategy.Report
Well, yes
Because it was the right strategy, which is Republican colleagues in the Senate could see was the right strategy, which was vindicated at the time and in several elections since then.
Mitch McConnell is imo the most competent political operator in Washington but still, he’s not Jesus. He doesn’t turn a couple of fishes and loaves into a wedding feast.
Mitch McConnell didn’t make Obamacare unpopular. Obamacare made Obamacare unpopular. Mitch McConnell crystallized the perception widely held by many people throughout America, that Obamacare was something that could be opposed root-and-branch. That the results of the 2008 election did not mean that American people were forced to accept some kind of collectivization in the health care economy as a fait accompli.
It happened that way because of bad people who did bad things for bad reasons.Report
McConnell was certainly tactically smart to prefer losing a full-blown opposition over compromising with a VERY willing president to pass a bipartisan bill. It has paid off politically ever since.
I sure hope there’s a way to change that fundamental fact, though, because it will lead to nearly endless gridlock going forward.Report
Just like every other opposition party has done with every other first term President.
The Dems on this forum have been making suggestions for how to make Trump a one term President (or even less than that), I’m reasonably sure the professional Dems are plotting against Trump as well.
Bush x2 opened with nasty feelings which didn’t go away until 911. He was often referred to as “Commander and Thief”.
Here’s something they were saying about Reagan: The meeting occurred as delegates praised Cuomo’s stern warnings that continued divisions within the party could enable President Reagan to win a second term and subject the nation to the threat of “economic crisis . . . fiscal disaster or . . . nuclear holocaust.”
Good Presidents work around that sort of thing, normally by mobilising public support for whatever they want to do.
Obama didn’t have that skill set going into the office. The talk of him uniting everyone was in defiance of his history and resume which showed no such skills.Report
There’s a reason you haven’t discussed the actual behavior of Congressional Republicans after Obama’s election in comparison to the opposition party after any other President’s election in modern history. The difference between the two is so stark and so well documented that I just don’t have the energy to recap it again here. Instead, might I point out that you’re comparing what anonymous democrats on the internet said about George W Bush to what Mitch McConnell, the then-Senate Minority Leader, said and did re: Barack Obama?Report
I think the propaganda machine didn’t really start until after Obama’s first election, when unified Democratic governance caused the need to de-legitimize absolutely everything.
Exactly.
I think 2012’s issue was that no one was less likely to connect with inchoate rage than Romney. And the rage machine kept building afterwards.
Yes, this.
As we’re nearing the week mark, I’ve become less and less worried. I had worried that I was wrong about all sorts of things, like where the demographics were leading us.
But I’ve basically given up on that worry, for a few reasons. One, the current mixture of President and Congress are going to be a *disaster* of epic proportions in trying to do anything.
But most importantly, the thing I really only internalized a few days ago: The left can’t be the targets of the rage anymore. We’re out. We’re done. Your turn.
It’s why the right, right now, is focused on *demonstrations*. Or talking about Hillary Clinton still. It’s why they’re still trying to find things to complain about. The rage still exists, and it will continue to exist. None of the people operating the rage machine have any real incentive to turn it down.
If Donald Trump knew what was going on, he could maybe do something about that, but Donald Trump, I am starting to become convinced, is, on in addition to all his problematic personality traits, sorta really stupid. Like maybe dumber than Bush (Who was not really that stupid.) stupid. Con-men don’t have to be *smart*.
And at some point, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of their lives, the Trump administration and Republican Congress will do something stupid, either jointly or by having a war with each other.
And the rage machine will *tear them apart*.
I am halfway wondering if Trump’s cabinet choices are already doing that.Report
Hoo, boy. Another 4-8 years of hearing about how dumb the Republican President is.Report
Y’know, nobody ever accused Bush the Elder of being dumb. Out of touch, sure. But, never dumb.Report
Is he wrong? Or are you happy to ignore accuracy, facts, or truth if you think you can score a point? (Score on who, or for what game, or who is even keeping score I dunno. But clearly, it’s a game some people love).Report
I would like it on the record that I have *repeatedly*, both before and after Bush left office, said he wasn’t dumb, at least nowhere near as dumb as people seem to think he is. Not a particularly coherent speaker sometimes, yes, dumb, no.
He was a guy who was *incurious* about a few specific aspects of the presidency, and thus Dick Cheney managed to get a few things over on him before he caught on, but he was not dumb. I mean, I don’t know if he beats Clinton intelligence, but it might be interesting to have some sort of contest.
Trump is *also* not particularly coherent speaking, in an entirely different way, but that’s not why I think he’s dumb. (Although any *intelligent* person would have, perhaps, stopped saying ‘big league’! Really?)
I think he’s dumb because he is apparently is so superstitious that he didn’t want to jinx himself by trying to figure out any of his future job responsibilities before winning the election.
I think he’s dumb because he thinks he can continue to live in New York.
Now, it’s *possible* those are all media lies. A slander campaign or something, I dunno. But to continue…
I think he’s dumb because he doesn’t seem to understand that his cabinet choices are *insanely bad* WRT his campaign promises.
I think he’s dumb because he doesn’t seem to understand that if he promises that his business interests will be run by his kids, he can’t then have his kids as advisers.
I think he’s dumb because he’s managed to fundamentally alter his transition team twice in a single damn week.
I think he’s dumb because he’s declared war against some of the #nevertrump advisers who have, in horror, tried to extend an olive branch to someone who has no idea what he’s doing because they realize that this is the actual real-life situation we’re in.
It is entirely possible I’m wrong. But this isn’t me deciding ‘Oh, Bush screws up his words, he must be dumb’ or ‘Trump can’t talk in a straight line, he must be dumb’. This is me looking at his actual behavior in just one week, and realize it’s a *complete mess*. Just multiple WTFs.
Not that it wasn’t a mess before, but *before*, he was balancing all sorts of competing interests and, in theory, try to manipulate the press and stuff. The transition, I would argue, actually gives us a much clearer view of the real Trump…and it’s a guy that is completely and totally over his head.Report
Well, much like using the term “fascist” to describe McCain, and Romney, and Bush for that matter, it kinda sucked that, by the time that Trump showed up, “fascist” lost its sting.
Pity about Dumbya spending 8 years being dumb, and Reagan being dumb. HW was kind of smart, I guess, but he was one of those Ivy League guys who just didn’t give a crap about anybody but people who were already the Boston Brahmin. He flew above the wreckage from Hurricane Andrew in a helicopter, for God’s sake!
What do you mean the townspeople aren’t showing up?
Wolves are very, very bad things!Report
And Kerry was an unamerican wuss who probably didn’t deserve those purple hearts anyway. And purple hearts are sort of stupid and shameful anyway, so lets mock the whole idea.
This is a fun game, but other than Jaybird being Jaybird I’m not sure why we’re playing. Do you not think Trump is kind of stupid? If so, please show your work. That would be interesting.Report
“This is a fun game, but other than Jaybird being Jaybird I’m not sure why we’re playing.”
Jaybird, the thing you need to realize is that the people talking about Trump’s racist fascist supporters actually do believe that the large majority of Americans are fascistic racists. They aren’t just engaging in rhetorical excess. They honestly do believe that five of every seven people you meet thinks black people are genetically inferior and the police should have total freedom to do anything they want.Report
I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.
I think I’ve been clear about what I actually believe (which is different from your invented strawman), but part of what I believe is that you can’t have voted for Trump unless you valued other things more highly than you value your politicians not being overtly and vehemently racist. Which is different, but also not great.Report
You say the word “racist” and I translate that into “not a Democrat”.
I didn’t vote for Trump for other reasons, but the “racist” charge has been used so often and for so little reason that it’s been devalued.Report
“We’ve been called out on racism so much, it’s getting easy to ignore.”Report
If anyone cares: This link deconstructs Trump’s history with racism…
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/Report
Just wait until the left elects an actual anti-American socialist president.Report
The dems had a shot at nominating one and he would have beaten Trump, I tell you what.Report
Nah. I read a “counterfactual analysis” earlier this morning that concluded Bernie wouldn’t’ve performed any better amongst blacks, hispanics, whites, any other race, any of the various income brackets, any of the various genders, or any educational levels or religions, than Hillary did.
I could link it for you. Then you’d know it was true.Report
I think that Bernie would have held the Blue Wall.
At least, I think he *MIGHT* have campaigned there.Report
I think there a number of ways Bernie woulda had a better shot than Hillary. For one, his approvals don’t seem to consistently drop over the course of a campaign. For another, his approvals wouldn’t have started at a historically low level.
But I might be biased since I’ve been saying this and related since the primary.
Add: to your last point: exactly.Report
Maybe… but we’re running the risk of thinking that anyone other than HRC could have beaten Trump.
Time after time after time I proclaimed Trump couldn’t go any further, and I was always wrong. At every step I underestimated him, at some point I have to wonder if it’s something other than luck, especially with people like Scott Adams dissecting his moves.Report
The last time the GOP was in charge we got an expensive new entitlement, war poorly fought, and an unpaid for tax cut. I used to joke that they were spending money like drunk dems.
We’ll see if they’ve learned their lesson and will do something for the economy rather than spending other people’s money.Report
Want to put some money on that?Report
IMHO we’ll be very lucky if we get one useful overhaul of anything before the spending begins.
Trump didn’t run on a pro-growth platform, that sharply limits his ability to make structural changes, assuming he even knows what would be useful which is also doubtful.Report
Trump didn’t run on a pro-growth platform, that sharply limits his ability to make structural changes, assuming he even knows what would be useful which is also doubtful.
Trump ran on a pro-*great* platform, and growth is great, right?
Trump promised tariffs, and trade wars cause growth if by growth we mean ‘not growth’, right?
What limits his ability to make structural changes is the fact he has very little idea how anything at all works. He is, basically, the opposite of a wonk. He is an anti-wonk in every field, with perhaps an exception in real estate tax law. (I mean, hypothetically, he *might* be good at that?)
Also limiting his ability: Congress is going to want to do specific stuff that they already thought of. Trump ran on some policy positions that we might, in some former life, call ‘compassionate conservative’. I.e., he wants to get rid of the ACA, but he wants to make sure everyone is cared for.
And I think, possibly, we’ve been underestimating him, in the sense that he really does think he can help everyone, and when Congress shows up with a bill turning Medicaid into *smaller* block grants, or with a bill just repealing the ACA, he might say ‘Wait, okay, this needs changing, sure, but you can’t just throw these people under the bus. I said I wasn’t going to do that.’
It’s really hard to tell with Trump. Trump is the kind of guy who will steal from lesser people, but he *does* care, to some extent, what people think of him, that they think he’s a good guy, (Witness his totally absurd attempts to be seen as much more charitable than he is.) and, more importantly, that money isn’t going into, or coming from, *his* pocket.
In fact, thinking about it, this has jumped to the top of my personal list of ‘reasons Trump will go to war against Congress’: Congress is going to try to do some sort of entitlement reform, and Trump will say no. (This replaces my previous entry, which was ‘Trump tries to build a giant wall and Congress points out he’s insane.’)Report
Where we might see something useful is him stealing other people’s ideas (not a horrible skill for a politician). Ryan makes a proposal, Trump puts a “made by Trump” sticker on it to make it “the best ever” and we’re off.Report
Yeah, I think Obama/Trump voters in places like WI, PA, MI are pretty simple – the economy was literally falling apart in 2008, Mitt Romney was possibly literally the guy who laid you off in 2012, and Hillary Clinton’s along with her other foibles is the bitch you’ve been told to hate since 1992 by the vast majority of the media.
I forget who said it, but a reporter who talked to a RNC operative said there was internal polling that showed that if McCain would’ve went explicitly racial and populist ala Trump against Obama, he might’ve had a chance to beat him, even with the economy collapsing.Report
Very much agreed.Report
That’s the conclusion that I’ve drawn from years of watching voters remain “undecided” until just before the election. They’re not interested in the policies or the history of the candidates. They’re looking for some sort of weird alpha monkey tribal mojo to come through their TV screens during the debates. Hell, voters even prefer taller candidates.Report
And yet, after 2008, the Republicans redefined themselves as an anti-Obama party, and triumphed.
People were right to be skeptical about the “Death of the Republican Party” theories that I read in last month’s Atlantic and they should be skeptical about the “Death of the Democratic Party” theories they’ll read in this month’s Atlantic. Lots of people will oppose Trump and the notion of a two-party system is now ossified into our culture.
The Whigs had another problem contemporary Democrats do not have: they couldn’t form a consensus among themselves about slavery. I don’t see an equivalent issue inducing such dramatic schism today. Like the Whigs, though, Democrats do seem to suffer from a lack of focus on any particular issue: the Whigs as a whole never rallied behind Clay’s American Plan, for instance.
Perhaps today’s Democrats shall find that equality — something along the lines of demanding that the government treat people alike and with dignity, regardless of sex, race, religion, national origin — can become their party’s mission. That sounds like a rededication to the ideals of LBJ’s civil rights era Democratic party, but it’s the most credible mission for it that I can see at the moment.
That will require a credible response to the Fear Of The Other which appears to be the motive force behind Trump’s coalition. So far I neither know what that might be nor have I heard of any plausible proposals.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t exist.Report
@burt-likko
Well, yes and no. They won the whole shooting match this year, no doubt. But they’re still a fractured party, and the man that was elected to the White House ran on a series of positions that were largely foreign, if not downright the opposite, of what the party’s stated goals and values have been for many decades.
They run a lot of things on a state level, but I’m not sure how much that means. More so than any other party in my lifetime, there’s no real idealogical cohesion from state to state, or at least from region to region. The Republican Parties up here in Oregon and Washington shares almost nothing other than name with their namesakes in Ohio or PA, and those guys don’t share that much with the folks in the South, who are pretty different from the SW.
At this point the Republicans are almost more of a brand. Other than opposing liberals (not liberalism), I’m not sure I can name a thing the party stands for at this point. Maybe abortion? Maybe. Past that though, there’s not much.Report
I tend to agree. The Republican party will be ascendant until one day it isnt, and if history is any guide, the day it isn’t is a lot closer than panicking progressives think.Report
Newt Gingrich just told CBS that Stephen Bannon can’t be an anti-Semite because he worked in Hollywood.
Welcome to the politics of emotion and nostalgia, brought to you by the hard-right and hard-left. They seem to use one another’s arguments with alarming regularity nowadays.Report
This mirroring behavior, and the reflexive propensity to immediately lens everything the other tribe does in the worst light, is why I’m calling this the Era of Bad Feelings.Report
Sounds like a pretty awful era!Report
Indeed. We are cursed to live in interesting times. Let us pray they become ordinary once again.Report
It’s mostly a boring era, but everyone feels like it should be better so it seems terrible.Report
To be fair, the Era of Good Feelings was when everyone agreed slavery was fine and Native American genocide positively good.Report
Mexicans/Latinos/Hispanics and Muslims will bear the largest shares of Othering in the Era of Bad Feelings, and it remains to be seen how Jewish people fare — will the “Judeao-” prefix be forgotten as the in-group’s cultural favoritism of “Judeao-Christianity” accelerates? Similar with the LGBTQ community and women: while I don’t think regression on their advances is a high priority with the incoming government (abortion rights excepted) it’s very easy for me to understand why they’re nervous.
All of these people are Americans, damnit. No one should have to feel that way about their own government, even if their favored party is out of the majority.Report
Well, let’s make sure we LISTEN TO and HONOR the people who disagree with this, and think all the various “others” should have to feel that way about their own government, because the Trump party is in the majority (or, at least, didn’t care enough about the issue to vote against tax cuts for the rich).
I can’t wait to hear their views.Report
I think there is a lot of truth to this. We are a nation of partianship driven by negative thoughts. I admit to being as guilty as this as anyone else.
It seems to me that for a democracy to work. There need to be compromises along the lines of “Policy X is very important to the opposition. Even though I really oppose it, I will support the existence of the policy for the purpose of comity.”
I don’t think anyone is willing to do this anymore. We seem to be in an age of wanting to destroy everything the opposition holds dear or trying to.Report
Having Bannon come on board, which means not only mainstreaming the alt-right but putting them front and center for policy and public messaging, can only heighten the contradictions which I have been informed by people not expecting to suffer from such heightening, to be a good thing.Report
The big issue for the Democrats is the Big Sort. We actually have more Democratic voters than Republican overall, they’re just really concentrated in the urban areas. Evidence for this is that the Democratic candidate for president garnered the popular vote total in 4 of the last 5 and 6 of the last 7 elections. The Republican candidate has won twice by the E.C. overruling the popular vote.
This is entirely structural and I have no idea what the Dems can possibly do about it. Honestly, our best hope in the short to medium term relies on a fairly predictable over-reach by the Republicans followed by a backlash, if not in 2018 then in 2020. I’m going to predict that Trump is a single termer, quite possibly primaried out by his own party if not impeached. Remember, while the Republicans certainly enjoy being in charge of everything they (as in the Party establishment) don’t like him much more than the Dems do.
What we’re witnessing this cycle is the failure of the Republican party to prevent his nomination along with the failure of the Democratic party to nominate someone who could effectively counter his candidacy. The Republicans sorely wish they had super-delegates and the Dems are wishing theirs had been smarter.Report
A living breathing DNC would help a LOT. Gerrymandering from 2010 (aka Hillary ain’t caring about anybody but Hillary) cost the House in 2016. And probably will in 2018 as well, barring calamity and catastrophe (which ARE on the table, we’re talking global recession here)Report
The Democratic Party picked up Senate and House seats in this election and received more votes than the Republican Party. The reason why they aren’t in control are structural. For the Presidency, Clinton lost the electoral college by losing some key states by razor thin margins. If we didn’t have the Electoral College or some more Democratic voters came out to vote than Clinton would have won. Republican voter suppression efforts in states like North Carolina or Indiana did not help.
The big sort hurts the Democratic Party in Congress, especially in the House. Since Democratic voters tend to be concentrated in urban areas, where most of the American people live, it creates a sort of natural gerrymander that helps the Republicans. Actual gerrymandering is given a boast by the Big Sort and the Republican Party basically demonstrated it doesn’t want to play fair. They perceive the Democratic Party as such an existential threat to what they consider American ideas that they are willing to do a lot to prevent the Democratic Party from wielding power.
The real area where the Democratic Party is failing is on the state and local levels. A lot of work gets done on the state and local levels, so ignoring them prevents the Democratic Party from carrying out long term primary goals. We are having instances where Republican state legislatures are using their power at state level to stymie Democratic goals at the county or city level in terms of anti-discrimination legislation, minimum wage laws, and even public transportation spending. State and local politicians also form the farm league for the federal level.Report
Possible, but bracketing the wisdom of forcing federal politicians from having to campaign in the entire geography, and thereby address regional concerns (albeit sometimes contradictatorily)… we just don’t know how the messaging and strategy would change to focus on certain areas/concerns would impact existing votes and factions.
It’s like the Bernie scenario… assuming nothing changes maybe he wins; but once you get Bernie, maybe you get Bloomberg… does he still win?
Maybe voters in CA who might vote Republican but don’t because, well CA… maybe they vote. In a message calibrated for 100% maximal Coastal Resonance… do votes in the midlands flip?
There is no such thing as a Democratic voter, only voters who might vote Democratic.Report
I am not sure about the last sentence. Why do so many people doubt that there can be such a thing as a proud Democratic voter? Do you doubt the existence of rock-ribbed Republicans? Do you think that there is no such thing as a Republican voter, only voters who might vote Republican.
Believe it or not, there are lots of people, including people outside of major cities, that are proud to vote for the Democratic Party and proud to call themselves Democratic voters.Report
“Do you doubt the existence of rock-ribbed Republicans?”
Like the National Review Online?
Yep, I deny their existence… or, I contingently deny their existence until they vote.
When it comes to political factions, I am a dyed in the wool Humean.Report
@saul-degraw
I don’t think comity is a necessary part of democracy (we don’t really have comity on policy issue in New Zealand), but it is necessary for your system where one party isn’t given full control of the government.Report
My pet solution is for Maine’s successful ranked choice voting system to sweep the nation, so Bloomberg (or whatever other independent candidate you like) could run without handing the election to Trump.
It would be very interesting to see what taking away the true observation that not voting for a Democrat or Republican is akin to not voting would do.Report
Sure, I’m personally open to systems that allow for a multi-vectored factionalizing of the parties (or better, more parties!). But, I’m not sure if ranked voting is that or really just a way to make sure that the safe bet (e.g. incumbent/establishment) always wins.
I could be persuaded, but I’d have to get the simulation app first and see how it plays. I say you moot it at the convention you’re calling for below.Report
Rank voting works best when combined with multiple winners – if you’re voting for several seats, the top coalitions divide those seats in proportion to their share of the population. Australia does this for some elections. How exactly you hand people seats has an effect on who gets the last seat, but if most seats aren’t the last one, then that’s not a huge problem. In general, rank voting for multiple winners promotes compromise candidates by making it hard to engineer a particular winner and reducing the value of having any one person win. It’s still game-able (an election that is invulnerable to conspiracy necessarily either gives disproportionate power to some voters or contains a random element), but actually gaming the election by coordinated voting requires a very large conspiracy among the voters, and doesn’t really get them much.
This isn’t really possible to implement in the US – all of our seats are required to be elected independently. Hypothetically a constitutional amendment could make it work for congressional districts, though. The problem is that many states only have a single congressional representative. For this reason, I think the US is probably a bit too big to really function well. If I were rebuilding the government from the ground up, I would insert another layer between the states and the federal government to even out the representation ratios in Congress, but I haven’t really thought this all the way through.Report
You don’t need a constitutional amendment for multimember districts. You’d need to repeal a federal law or two, though.
You can do IRV with single-member districts. It doesn’t produce the same multi-party system, though it can help stray candidates here and there along.Report
There are several reasons I think our constitution is reaching the end of its useful life. The paramountcy of rural over urban areas and states was baked in since the beginning. But what might have made sense at the end of the XVIII century, when land and real property was still the main source of wealth, does not reflect XXI century realities.
Just as the rural America does not like, and it’s fightingthe changes in culture, society, and the economy, using the excess leverage the Constitution gives them, urban America will start to resent being a political minority when they are the majority of the population, and generate and hold the majority of its wealth.
The Constitution we have is an improved version of the Holy Roman Empire at its peak (before the Reformation and the Thirty Years War turned the emperor into nothing but a nominal figurehead). But what worked for a federation of quasi sovereign states with limited interaction between them (look at the states’ sizes and distances with the eyes of an XVIII century traveler) no longer works in a homogeneous consolidated economy, and a society of instant communication and fast mobilization.
The Big Sort is just exacerbating the contradictions. Wealth and economic growth, both personal and societal, are concentrating in a few states, and a few regions within those states.At the same time, these regions, all of them urban, are losing more and more political power. The rural regions are usually NG their built in advantage to, through gerrymandering, dilute or concentrate the urban vote is less and less circumscriptions. 2020 will continue this trend.
This is unstable, to say the least.Report
Our constitution is more like an idealized and republicanized version of the British monarchy after the Glorious Revolution. The Glorious Revolution Parliament even passed a Bill of Rights somewhat similar to our own but more limited. The President more or less has the same powers that the British Monarch was supposed to have after the Glorious Revolution with the veto being like the Royal Ascent. Congress is Parliament with the Senate replacing the House of Lords and the Representatives being the Commons.
The people who wrote the Constitution did not take into account all the political changes that occurred in the United Kingdom after the Glorious Revolution. By the time the Constitution was written, the United Kingdom was well on its way to parliamentary government. The post of Prime Minister already existed along with the idea that the Prime Minister needed to be able to support the majority of the House of Commons even if the Commons didn’t quite select the Prime Minister yet. The Cabinet and ministers with distinct portfolios was also in embryonic form at the time.Report
I think the Senate and the Electors are more like the Imperial Diet (an assembly of the different constituent units of the Empire ) and the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire than like the House of Lords (which was an assembly of individuals, instead of political units)
But this can become a very nerdy discussion.
Suffice to say that the Constitution had baked in itself several premises about what the country and the world would look like that were becoming obsolete even before they shaked the sand off the paper.Report
It may be that I am too upset at the concept of such a notion, too married to my own oaths to uphold it, and education about the nobility and philosophical utility of the concepts within the Constitution, to accept this without reflexively rebutting. Our Constitution (as the OP points out) is built to set up mechanisms to bake into the system checks and balances against the excesses of faction. We’ll likely have to use those backstops for the next four years, but I still think those backstops are there. I’m old enough to have seen the pendulum of political power swing back and forth more than once in my lifetime, so unless we start seeing some abrogration of the underlying mechanism, I’m not prepared to grab my musket, emigrate to some other nation, or otherwise get out of the system.
If I’m wrong, and your notion is right, then at least let the reform be peaceful and legitimate; if there must be schism, let Czechoslovakia rather than Yugoslavia be our model. Let us not forget that we have been neighbors and fellow-citizens all along, and that even if the nation spins in different directions, that we may still find common cause and common ground notwithstanding our differences of opinions.Report
We might see if the Linz thesis applies to the United States. The Constitution used to work because for a long period of time, the parties were not explicitly ideological. A Republican from New England was not the same as a Republican from the West. A New York Democrat was not like a Democratic politician from South Carolina. Both parties have been undergoing a slow process of becoming more ideological. It started during the 1960s or even earlier and has accelerated since 2000. The Civil War and Reconstruction era was the last time the two parties were so polarized in their views.Report
Which do you have in mind? The filibuster isn’t a constitutional backstop (and is likely not long for this world). It’s hard to have a lot of trust in the courts on partisan political issues (which, I know, is not most of judicial dockets), since we are about to be back to the 3 hyper GOP-partisans, Roberts, Kennedy bloc that seems unlikely to undo many political questions. And when I met RBG five months ago she was looking pretty frail.Report
If the political branches do something contrary to the Constitution because it is popular to do so, and the courts don’t stop them because the people appointed to the bench can’t themselves transcend partisanship, then yes, we’re well and truly fished.
And yes, it’s happened before that the courts have let us down (Korematsu v. United States), just as it’s happened before that the courts have transcended partisanship and saved us from the demons of our political impulses (Brown v. Board of Education, Texas v. Johnson).
I wish we didn’t have to say, “It’s come to this,” but it’s come to this, likely for at least the next four years.Report
Indeed @burt-likko
In fact, we have seen some of those checks and balances in the last few years. And though they were met with howls of rage, they were used successfully.Report
And will similarly have your voluble support if/when used to block policy you like yes?Report
Absolutely @northReport
@burt-likko
You are probably taking an extreme view of what I’m saying. I myself I’m a child of the Enlightenment and see in our Constitution an embodiment of what that one of the best ages of Mankind brought forth.
As I’ve argued in other threads, the biggest issue with the Constitution is entrenching the [albeit limited] sovereignty of the states. Unlike Europe (*), the states in the USA are not the product of separate historical processes (**). The states add very little (polite way of saying “nothing”) as intermediaries between the Federal Government and the individual in an environment where our economy is completely homogeneous from sea to shining sea, where the 14th Amendment equalized all persons in the polity no matter what state they were, and where, like it or not, our culture is much more alike than different, and even when it’s different, the differences are sorted out in a centralized way -everybody gets to watch the same Fox News, hear the same Rush, and laugh or cringe at the same SNL sketches.
The states are not laboratories of democracy, either. The cities have been playing that role for decades now, with cities at the fore of gay rights, minimum salaries reviews, drug and immigration reform, and even at the fore of conservative politics (Joe Arpaio is a city product too).
At this time, the states are an anomaly blocking democratic expression, and a major source of corruption and patronage. Their still excessive power in our constitutional system will have to go. Hopefully sooner than later, hopefully gracefully. And be replaced by cities and counties with stronger, better defined powers to bulk against the federal government.
(*) Where the non national regions (like Scotland, Catalonia, the Veneto, Bavaria, or Kosovo) reflect real nations with a separate identity, language or religion, and a separate historical process that brought off a distict national identity
(**) Even if a handful of states have a distinct historical origin -mainly confessional- two centuries of immigration and internal migration have erased those. No one will argue Maryland is a state defined by its Catholic identity or Massachusetts by its low church Puritanism. The founders of Massachusetts are probably turning in its graves that Boston is deemed the peak of USA Catholic identity today. (***)
(***) HI, AK and perhaps LA are an exception, and so will a future state of Puerto Rico.Report
Then Dems should call for a constitutional convention. How can you claim it is too late if you haven’t tried to fix it ?Report
There are about forty requests for a Constitutional Convention (no one knows because Congress has not properly tallied them). The Senate twice approved one, but the House didn’t vote on it. So, yes, I’m all for it.
But a Constitutional Convention will heighten the contradictions of the Big Sort even more. Approval in an Article V Constitutional Convention is supposed to be based on states, not on people. CA and WY are the same, and so are TX and VT. We would likely end with a less democratic Constitution that would further entrench the power of the countryside over the cities (*)
(*) See The discussions about the Repeal of the 17th Amendment, which would take the election of senators away from one person-one vote and move it back to “gerrymanderable” state legislatures, where a majority of rural districts could overcome the majority of the population, concentrated in the urban areas.Report
Well this is right, but query if the Framers would have considered it a bad thing.
Once you’ve addressed that query, the next query is “With all due respect for their achievements, who gives a fig what they would have wanted?” After all, if we’re going to re-write that provision of the Constitution, we are the Framers, not those dead guys whose work we are overtly rejecting.
And once you’ve answered that query, you need to get to a fundamental issue, which is how shall we govern ourselves? When you confront that issue, you ought to look beyond what is to the short-term advantage of my political faction and instead try and reach some sort of system that you can live with both when you and your fellow-partisans are in the majority and when you and your fellow-partisans find yourselves the minority.
If you can get yourself to that mental place, well, now you’re thinking like the Framers. Should you be able to attain that perspective, I imagine that you’ll look at the political mess that would come out of new conventions, and say to yourself, “Before we fix this thing, let’s make really sure it’s broken in the first place.”Report
I thought all we had to do was cite “General Welfare” and be done with it. Problem solved, right?
So what have I missed? Apparently not much.Report
I call for a constitutional convention. Who’s with me?Report
You might recall this experiment.
Or this board game.Report
I sure didn’t recall that.Report
Me either.Report
Dude! It was your post!Report
I’m busy! And I used to write a lot of posts!Report
@rtod
https://ordinary-times.com/2012/02/09/hear-ye-hear-ye-the-constitutional-convention-of-the-loog-is-now-in-session/#comment-236592Report
I’d forgotten that one. I recall now being surprised that out of 600 or so comments, the word “exit” wasn’t used even once.Report
Well, back then we hadn’t yet thought of making “exit” sexy by adding letters from another word in front of it, a la Brexit.
If we’d come up with that back then, I bet we’ve have seen some advocates.Report
Just as the rural America does not like, and it’s fighting the changes in culture, society, and the economy, using the excess leverage the Constitution gives them, urban America will start to resent being a political minority when they are the majority of the population, and generate and hold the majority of its wealth.
While there are arguments against direct democracy in the form of ballot initiatives, at the state level such can act as a safety-valve in this type of situation. So we see red Arizona do urban-favored things like an independent redistricting commission, a minimum wage hike, and mandatory paid sick leave. In 2004, after the Republican-controlled state legislature in Colorado did not take up renewable energy, voters put in place a mandate for renewable elecricity.
Mind you, I think initiatives on a national scope would probably be a disaster.Report
Of course, had the DNC not been so overly committed to electing the first woman right after the first black man, they might have encouraged a larger primary contest. There were only 6 Dem candidates in the primaries, 2 of them were never really serious, and 2 others never really got any momentum.
The GOP had 17 and as far as I can tell, no favored candidate. So by the time Trump starting to gain traction, the DNC had no one they could pivot to.Report
@oscar-gordon
This is something I don’t have a good sense of. Is it that the DNC decided Clinton was going to be the candidate and blocked everyone else (which I would have no problem with morally, but in retrospect was a mistake tactically) or is it that the Democrats “backbech” (to borrow a term from the politics I am used to) was too weak to support other candidates. It worries me that people on social media were calling for Michelle Obama to run for President in 2020. Is that because they really want her to run, or is she just the only Democrat under 70 they can think of?Report
The latter plus a bit of Obama nostalgia. (“It’d be like Obama was President again, when things weren’t terrifying!”)
People don’t know a lot of politicians. I’d have to google my US Rep, to be honest, and I’m pretty into politics.
Actual politicians or people doing politics for a living (reporters, staffers, etc) can probably name you all sorts of talent, some going up, some going down, etc. But the average citizen? They know the name of the President, and what party he is, and after that?
Very little.Report
I have either voted for my rep, or not voted for my rep, twenty times. Yes sir, I do have his name memorized. Mike Doyle, who still can’t get a passport made (actually, State doesn’t know why they can’t make that passport.)Report
@james-k I think @morat20 ‘s answer is true enough, but I would add this: I think people are also talking about Michelle Obama for the same reason they were talking about her husband after the 2004 convention. She gave a convention speech that succeeded doing three things simultaneously. Her speech..
1. Felt honest and sincere to those watching,
2. Clearly communicated basic party and American ideals worth building on,
3. Did so in a way that connected not just with both wings of the party, but with people outside of the party as well.
That’s an incredibly difficult hat trick to pull off.Report
That’s helpful, thanks @rtod and @morat20Report
Dude, how can’t you not know Sheila Jackson Lee
Bad Houstonian, dude, bad HoustonianReport
I’m near Houston, not in it.
The last redistricting packed my particular neighborhood into a really safe GOP district. I’m in the 36th, which stretches from just outside Houston to, IIRC, the border of Texas. It’s, last I checked, like R+25.
Compact communities of interest, right?Report
Isn’t gerrymandering great!!
I’m at the peak of a crescent that avoids a lot of where I shop and work, and move around, and do my life, to join me with the Port of HoustonReport
Oh, and a new rep too.
To be fair, I’m in the district that gave us Santorum. (since redistricted to be Pittsburgh Democratic District)Report
First,
Hillary’s team actively tampered with the voting machines in the primary so she could win. This is actually not illegal, surprisingly enough. (Do you have a problem with this? You state above that Clinton blocking others is not something you have a moral problem with.)
The DNC has been hillary’s team since 2008. They LOST the fucking backbench because they didn’t give a fuck about redistricting in 2010.
The people who know a bit are saying Liz Warren, or Franken, or Feingold, or half a dozen liberal lions. I’ll throw Heidi and Tester and a few other folks into the mix.
People don’t really want Michelle Obama to run. No, they really don’t.Report
It’s possible this was just a really bad year for viable & interested candidates for the Democrats, I don’t know enough about what names were getting floated before the primary race began.
My impression, once the race began, was that the party leadership really wanted HRC to have the nomination, and that they tolerated the also-rans so they could maintain the appearance that the primary voters were making the actual decision.
Now that I think about it, given the lackluster voter turnout, I have to wonder how much of that is a residual effect from the primary contest.Report
Pollster suggests it was more a response to hillary voters crowing about how their candidate won the primary, and all the bernie bros were sexist sods.
Of course, Pollster also says that Hillary didn’t win the primary, Bernie did (after you factor in all the “perfectly legal” tampering with the voting machines she did).Report
I’ve come to the conclusion that the (D) bench is thin for a couple of reasons, both self-inflicted.
(1) The Dem caucuses in Congress place much more emphasis on longevity. Some years back, the Republicans intentionally changed their caucus rules in order to season potential young stars. A Paul Ryan — chaired Budget, chaired Ways & Means, Speaker, still under age 50 — can’t happen for the Dems.
(2) Geography. The Dems are currently strong in the NE urban corridor and the West. The Dems haven’t elected a President from the Northeast since 1960 (56 years), but TPTB for the party are NE urban corridor folks and they keep trying. To some degree, Governor or US Senator is as high as a western Dem can realistically hope to go, absent a western “lightning in a bottle” case similar to Obama.Report
I’ve said it before, the idea of Chuck Schummer as Senate Majority (or Minority) Leader bugs me physically. He might be popular in NY State (I’m glad he’s doing things for his constituents) but he presents the image of a lot of what is wrong about politics.
Were I a Democratic Senator, I wouldn’t vote for him as Leader ever. But apparently, it’s his turn.Report
J_A,
there hasn’t been a leader of the senate since LBJ. People learned.Report
James, I’d submit that Hillary had it mostly in the bag from 2012 on and was starting to put out feelers as early as 2009. After she lost the 2008 contest she presciently threw her political machine and support behind Obama; took a role in his administration then spent the rest of his presidency roaming the Democratic Party basically doing good works. In 2012 Bill lit the convention on fire in his speech on behalf of Obama; it was so good even the GOP at the time was left rubbing their jaws and saying “Man it would be nice if we had one of him on our side.” By the time people started even thinking about who would come after Obama most of the party actors were already assuming/favoring Hillary. That meant that most of her plausible opposition for the nomination basically either said “I don’t want to beat her for the nod this time” or “I don’t think I can beat her this time” and sat it out. By the time the actual primary got under way Hillary had already mostly sewn up the nomination.
Add in the partisan calculations and the simple fact that the Democratic Parties core base voters affirmatively liked her and that’s how you ended up with HRC. She basically won the nomination through raw massive long term logistics.
It certainly did not serve the party well; she was evidently unsuited to face Trump and made some massive both long term and short term errors that weakened her further against him but it was not in any particular way nefarious and it’s also not repeatable. The path HRC took to gain the nomination is was unique to her personal and her party’s history.Report
I like Heidi. We need more folks like her.
Democrats are decently good at fighting the winnable fights, even if that means getting a representative out of Idaho.
No more Dean though — he’s been coopted by the Clinton Machine.Report
On the upside, it’ll be nice to have an adversarial press again.Report
Ain’t going to happen. We have a court press and they aren’t going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. If the actually start doing their jobs and investigating Trump and other Republicans and even criticizing them or asking tough questions than Trump will just cut off access.Report
Part of me does kind of wish that the press hadn’t sold its birthright for a mess of pottage, but you don’t need Trump’s permission to be adversarial.
It’s more likely that the NYT will have no idea why people voted for Trump and run stories like “White Urban Professionals in New York are Troubled by Trade Deal which Limits their Access to Ylang Ylang” on the front page but, hey, maybe they’ll figure something out.Report
Its television news that is the worst. The NYT has heavily criticized Trump as much as they could even though they paid more attention to Clinton non-scandals than they should have. The Washington Post was excellent in reporting on Trump. Its TV news that was the most fawning because Trump is ratings gold for them. Having the press take an adversarial stance means that television news is going to have to forsake profits for its gate keeper and investigative role.Report
One problem with this take is that his own words were supposed to disqualify him. So showing hours of his unedited id should have been the best thing to happen to the Democrats. Sure, the GOP primary electorate would go for that racist sexist vulgar stream of consciousness – I mean, that’s what they gobble up on talk radio every day.
But the general electorate was supposed to be different. Better even.
I mean, remember when everyone said Hillary Clinton’s best campaign ads were to just show Donald Trump speaking on the stump? Remember when Clinton more or less *actually* did that in her campaign ads? Remember the debate jokes “Secretary Clinton, would you like to respond?” “Nope, I’m good. (grin)”Report
Clinton’s strategy on focusing on Trump’s negatives did not exactly work as expected. My idea is that Democratic leaning voters tend to respond more to a positive or optimistic message than one based on fear and hate. She and future Democratic candidates need to focus more on what they are going to do for people rather than what Republicans are going to do if they loose.Report
It turns out that the old adage that you can never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people was really really true.
I really did believe the general election population would be better (and they were, just in a poorly distributed way for the electoral college, and not as much better as I had hoped).Report
I was thinking this afternoon in the car, listening to the Obama press conference, (where Obama was trying his mightiest to polish the turd of having Trump as his sucessor – and doing a fair job of it), of those times in the campaign where Trump was interviewed by a friendly, but not devoted interviewer (e.g. Hewitt, Wallace), who tried to spin for Trump right there in the interview, and Trump was having none of it.
Like the one time:
T:”Obama and Clinton founded ISIS”
H:”Oh, what you mean is that their sudden withdrawal from Iraq caused ISIS to form in the power vacuum”
T:”No, I mean Obama and Clinton founded ISIS”Report
Ah, the classicsReport
I heard some of that myself, although the conversations before it were far more fascinating.
It was a bunch of seemingly rational people all agreeing the “bad Trump” (you know, the one that endorses war crimes, wants to leave NATO, build a wall, deport all Muslims, and brags about sexual assault) is bad, but thankfully he can be channeled into “good Trump” which, in dim light, passes for something that might be in the same general genus as a Republican. But only when, basically, his staff sits on him and makes him do it.
And no one said “This is insane. We’re letting saying “It’s not so bad when his staff keeps him acting vaguely normal” instead of saying “He’s so crazy it takes a dozen people treating him like a child throwing a tantrum to make him seem vaguely normal”.
It then went into his 60 minutes bit on health care. Which was “here’s my plan: Better, cheaper. It’s gonna be great”.
He has no plan. Although Paul Ryan has a plan, which is to turn Medicare into the ACA, which is hilarious, because he’s simultaneously getting rid of the ACA. (Medicare for people not on it: Subsidies for private insurance. A product that’s about to stop existing).Report
heh. I’m looking forward to “people are still racist, we need to have more government prohibitions against being racist, maybe we can repeal that First Amendment thing that’s just something racists invented to enable racism”.Report
There are those who advocate that already.
They’re taken as seriously as those who say the First Amendment ought to be repealed because it allows non-Christians to be all non-Christian and stuff like that.Report
Pretty much the big theme of gamergate was “all those awful men can keep saying mean, vicious lies without any fear of repercussion, and they keep pointing to the First Amendment as the reason why they can just keep doing it.”Report
Really? We’re still on that?Report
Gamergate never ever ends because the incoherent rage behind it can never be sated.
I could speculate why, but I’d hurt their feelings and they’d have to retreat to their girl-free safe spaces.Report
There are people out there arguing that Gamergate won the election.
Lotta people out there who wanted a safe space but didn’t have one, I guess.Report
I don’t remember the press being adversarial in the Bush years.
The NYT made a mockery of itself by refusing to print the word “torture” for instance. Apparently it took them through 2014 to agree to call a spade a spade.
http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/08/07/the-executive-editor-on-the-word-torture/?_r=0
And nothing in there says that they won’t change their mind againReport
There is some hope for the NYT if they are denied WH credentials.Report
Its amazing how hard it can be to use the word torture anymore. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an exhibit on Jerusalem during the 12th to 15th centuries right now. Its a generally good exhibit but one of the placards used to explain something is really off. It describes how Helena, mother to Emperor Constantine, discovered the True Cross by subjecting to Jews to “enhanced interrogation techniques” rather than saying Jews were tortured by Helena.Report
You’re joking, right? They don’t actually uses the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques”. (Also, why does an exhibit on medieval Jerusalem take about someone who lived in the 4th century? Something about the Crusaders? )Report
I’m not posting. Posted a photo of it on Facebook.Report
@mike-schilling
Lee is not joking. I saw the exhibit as well and Lee posted a picture on facebook. You can probably find it in his or my timelines.Report
Wow.
Some kind of attempt to turn the euphemism treadmill half a step, so you can’t speak in favour of “enhanced interrogation” without sounding like a monster?Report
That’s what I’m thinking, An attempt to minimize it wouldn’t quote that precise bit of dishonestly.Report
Oh, well. There goes that idea.Report
I can’t help but notice Tess’s Freudian slip about November 11th. That’s really what’s happening here: for a significant portion of the population, they’re reacting as they did to the terrorist attack. Or reacting as many people did. There’s the same sense of catastrophe, that history has changed, that what we knew as our country is over. That we can be attacked by the Other.
It took me a while to realize this. I couldn’t account for the reactions. I mean, I can understand them intellectually, and having been through election losses before, I can sympathize. But there’s a depth to them that I haven’t seen before, and a passion now that I didn’t see on the left side during the election. When I’ve been involved in elections, I’ve never experienced an increase of emotion afterwards.
Anyway, this is more than grief. This is fear. And not normal, political fear. It’s a 9/11 type reaction.Report
Pinky,
Fear makes wonderful astroturf, yes. But this is paid stupidity, not unpaid stupidity.Report
I know that these days anything that happened before last week is gone and forgotten, but doesn’t November 11th ring any bells? Say,
Report
Of course. It’s St. Martin of Tours’s feast day. But look around at the reaction to this election, and you’ll see the 9/11 dynamic. This whole article is written in the “nothing will ever be the same” genre.Report
Many thanks… I had forgotten that verse and now go to add it to my Lost Causes music mix.
Though on the subject of bells…
Report
Why lost causes? His side won.Report
Did it?Report
I’m pretty sure.Report
Damn I hate that poem. In particular, I hate the exact section of it quoted here.Report
I much prefer Abraham Lincoln walks at Midnight.Report
I wasn’t familiar with that poem, Kim. Thank you for that!Report
anytime!Report
How do you feel about
Report
Oh, I like that poem.
War is hell.Report
That’s also very good. Pretty much the crystallization of my objection to In Flanders Fields.Report
It ties up with the Big Sort.
Many people, in both sides, saw this election as a referendum on two cultures: the urban, “cosmopolitan”, personal freedoms, new services and intellectual value added economy society versus the rural, “Real American”, communitity standards, old industrial economy (*).
The latter culture won, breaking a trend, even though most people belong to the former. The question for the urban culture is “what will the rural culture do, with all this political power? Will they try to force a change of the trends, even over the objections of the urban culture?”
The election was not run as a political contest. It was presented mostly as a cultural contest. Most of the arguments in both sides were cultural: women rights, religious freedom, the Supreme Court, PCism, elites, Middle America. And these cultural issues drove mos votes to the polls.
(*) I’m trying to be descriptive here. I’m not arguing that one is better than the other.Report
There have been many elections where rural America tries to hold the tide back and usually they are successful in the short-term but not the long term.
1928 was another election where rural America refused to vote for a different candidate because Al Smith was urban, Catholic, and a wet who opposed prohibition. Here is a good essay on the subject of rural political power:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/11/rural_americans_just_chose_a_president_who_won_t_help_them.html
Cover Story
Read this first.
Nov. 13 2016 5:00 PM
Trump Country
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928
3.5k
Rural Americans have the power to pick our presidents. They just chose a politician who’s unwilling and unequipped to help them.
By Henry Grabar
Trump Country
“Trump!” is spray-painted on an abandoned house in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.
Mark Makela/Getty Images
Let’s talk about the cities, those warrens of cosmopolitans who failed to see the red wave until it washed them away. For nearly half a century, Democrats have worked to position themselves as America’s metropolitan party. After the Dems fractured over civil rights and Vietnam, leaders came away touting the New Politics, a platform for college-educated idealists worried more about quality of life than class warfare. The 1980s brought the Atari Democrats, a faction of market-friendly liberals interested in tech. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council in the early 1990s, sought to build the platform for suburban moderates. Jesse Jackson disparagingly referred to the DLC as “Democrats for the Leisure Class,” and he wasn’t wrong. The party seduced and depended on wealthy suburbanites, and on yuppies streaming back to the inner city. It worked, for a while. It didn’t work in 2016.
Henry Grabar Henry Grabar
Henry Grabar is a staff writer for Slate’s Moneybox.
Four years ago, Mitt Romney won just one U.S. county with a population density greater than 1,000 people per square mile, California’s Orange County. On Nov. 8, Orange County flipped to Hillary Clinton. While she lost some Rust Belt suburbs that Barack Obama had won in 2012, like Detroit’s Macomb County, Clinton made big percentage gains over Obama in and around Boston, Washington, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake City. For the Democratic nominee, running up the score in America’s densest locales was good enough for a popular vote victory—and a distant second-place finish in the Electoral College.
In winning the presidency, Donald Trump proved a national candidate could demonstrate not only a disregard for big-city concerns, but a gleeful, manic ignorance of how cities function and thrive. (His claim that the murder rate had reached a 45-year high, for example, was at once a race-baiting lie and a display of how little he cared to find out the truth.) The flip side to cosmopolitanism—the “rural consciousness,” in the phrasing of University of Wisconsin–Madison political scientist Katherine J. Cramer—is now both an identity and an electoral force. Trump won dominant support in rural America. He outran Romney by more than 40 percent in large swaths of the Midwest. His rural success was not confined to the Rust Belt.
Is this the world, envisioned by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes after Brexit, where politics is “a battle between cosmopolitan finance capitalism and ethno-nationalist backlash”? Not quite yet. But we’re approaching that binary. Trump’s core message was small-town nostalgia. Michelle Obama’s counter, that America is already great, is a line that only makes sense in America’s cities, where populations and incomes have continued to rise.
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I’ve long felt there was a rightward lurch (for lack of a better term) after the election of Obama similar to the one that happened after 9/11. It wasn’t just the knee jerk reactions to the events, but a (seemingly) permanent galvanization in political thinking.
It’s quite possible a leftward shift could be happening with the election of Trump, but that, of course, remains to be seen.Report
I would say that it could definitely happen, but for that to happen, there needs to be real, solid and positive work done to create the momentum. The Dems can’t sit back and wait for the R’s to “fail” they need to start creating a positive message. For that “failure” might be simply a matter of politics, not reality.Report
Well, this is anecdotal, but Obama’s election shook loose the racists something fierce. It’s as if electing a black man gave them the freedom to suddenly be really open about it.
There was a surprising surge of blunt racism coming from people I’d never suspected of thinking that way.Report
I don’t know. The losing side in a presidential election always rallies. There was an apparent rightward shift following the 2008 election, and there may be a corresponding appearance after this election. But does it reflect something real? I’m struck by the fact that since 1994 or so, the country has been almost perfectly split, with a slight edge to the Republicans. If you want to speculate that Obama’s wins in 2008 and 2012 were due to a higher black turnout (and I’d need to look at the numbers a lot harder), you’d have a pretty striking consistency in all the even-numbered years since 2008.Report
The Daily Beast compares SNL’s “Hallelujah” post-election cold-open with their “The Boxer” post-9/11 cold-open. Thomas Friedman calls the election a “moral 9/11”. Robert De Niro says he feels like he did after 9/11.Report
Got Im Himmel!
This is the post that we have been waiting for, thank you Tess! I haven’t read the comments yet, nor do I agree with you on all of your fears, but I wanted to get that out.Report
I’m very, very glad she’s given us another post too. And not just because Tess and I largely agree on the need to invoke the bedrock Constitutional principles of which she writes so skillfully.Report
Given that even liberals were noting the Democrats’ problems at local and state levels years ago, this was pretty much inevitable. What makes it so infuriating is that at the same time people were noting the Democrats were fucked, folks in the same publications were writing articles about the death of the Republican Party even as it was becoming the most powerful political party of my lifetime. This made it possible to ignore the very real disaster for the Democrats that was occurring at every level of government.
My brother suggested the following image: Democrats looking out the window of their house, see flame surrounding their neighbors, Republican Party’s house, and are laughing and toasting at the Republican house burning. Scroll out, and the flames are actually on the Democrats’ house, but because they’re inside, they can’t see this.
Atheist God, please let this be the death of the Democratic Party and the end of the career of every single liberal pundit. Amen.Report
I feel like we have pronounced the coming end of every major political party for as long as I can remember. Could it simply be that both parties will have support of about 45% of voters and thus will stumble onward with no real alternatives within the two party system?
What shocks me most of all is that Trump was, for all intensive purposes, a third party candidate. He simply seized control of a party that didn’t share much in the way of an ideological vision. Will a left wing/populist candidate be able to do the same with the Dems?Report
Right, when I say the death of the Democratic Party, I mean with its current power structure, dominated by wealthy, educated white people who are out of touch both with (and largely contemptuous of) both the people upon whose votes they depend and the people whose votes they shun.Report
The Democratic Party has to walk a very fine line. There many source of votes is with people of color and educated, middle class types living in major metropolitan areas. Among non-whites, African-Americans and Jews are the most loyal to the Democratic Party while Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans are willing to vote Republican in significant percentages. At the same time, the political views of people of color in the United States do not necessarily line up easily besides being against racism. When you have a diverse coalition forming a united platform isn’t easy.
Even with the above mentioned groups lined up, the Democratic Party still needs enough White Working Class votes to remain competitive. Without these votes, they could easily win the popular vote for President every Presidential election but loose in the Electoral College. You need White Working Class Votes to win the majority in Congress and state legislatures. Not all of these white working class voters are going to see eye to eye on social issues with the rest of the Democratic Party.Report
You know that thing that Obama did from time to time that drove Republicans *NUTS* and had them out screaming on television and sounding like crazy people?
I think that Trump might be good at that too.
If he’s really good at it, he’ll keep his coalition for a bit.
One of the things I see happening: “I would like to wish *ALL* Americans a very Merry Christmas.”Report
and…prospero año y felicidad
Cultural appropriation or outreach?Report
Oh, he should culturally appropriate something.
Not “write a book about being an African-American maid in the 1940’s” cultural appropriation, but “eating sushi” cultural appropriation.
Get Lena Dunham to make a Funny Or Die video about it.Report
Oh, I get it… sort of like “assimilation after internment camps isn’t so bad” sort of thing?
Yes, that would be tres drole.Report
Or he could eat Asian fusion, a Korean barbeque short-rib burrito, served with a large Coke.Report
Don’t forget the Borscht.Report
Mountain Dew.
Get people complaining that Trump is dog whistling to #gamergate.Report
There is a Korean burrito joint in the East Village. It is called Korilla.
I always assumed it was pronounced as if it rhymed with “Gorilla”.
I have since learned that it is pronounced as if it rhymes with “Tortilla”.
Which is, to say, it is pronounced, “Korea”.
This makes me angry in a way that I can’t describe.Report
Why angry?
Anyway, I assumed it was a joke, spelling “Korea” as if it were a Spanish word.Report
@mike-schilling
Because I imagine the people who came up with it spent several hours patting themselves on the back for just how clever they are and that makes my blood boil.Report
Wait… you hate clever things and people?Report
“you hate clever things and people?”
Welcome to the Republican Party, here’s your complimentary stars-and-bars flag.Report
@kazzy Maybe try a different narrative? Like they were sitting around after a hard day’s work trying to get the place ready by repainting and whatnot, in that nice fuzzy space between tipsy and drunk, jokingly bullshitting about the name for the store, and someone blurted out that? And they all said “HAHAHA….. owait,” and thus a name was born?
Seriously, if your imagination is making your blood boil, you may need to have a chat with said imagination…Report
@kazzy
Just because I am a Spanish native nerd
In Spanish, Tortilla and Gorila (Spanish spelling of gorilla) almost rhyme (except for the single/double l), but it does not rhyme at all with Corea. For a start, tortilla stresss the “i” syllable while Corea stresses the “ea” syllable.
For a Spanish speaker, Korilla (or Corilla – do you like that better?)is the only way to try to make a pun.
On a separate note, Mexican and Korean food align themselves very well in terms of flavors and ingredients, making interesting interesting fusion dishes quite possible.Report
We have a Korean-Mexican fusion place here that is so good that each day I have to tell myself, “No, you can’t eat there everyday.”
The kimchi fries are probably what the gods ate on Olympus once upon a time.
Oh, and its name is supposed to be clever too: Chi’lantro.Report
@chris
Oh, my goodness, Chi’lantro. That’s so disrespectful towards the Koreans (we can’t distinguish Koreans from Chinese people, see, they are all yellow squinty eyed; there’s even a Get Smart episode about that). Plus, it’s disrespectful towards the Han people too, using a white imposed name instead of their own self identification.
It is so bad, I’m going to have to cuddle a stuffed non-specied non-gendered happy creature to recover.
[I wonder if I was able to make my point -Thanks to @chris for providing the base material]Report
@maribou
Oh I’m mostly being silly. It’s my own anti-pun stance.Report
Man, you must hate me.
There’s a Chinese restaurant near me called Hunan First, which I’m pretty sure is an Abbot and Costello reference. I like it.Report
You’re JUST realizing this?
I’m indulging in some thick hyperbole. My eyeroll was painful but I am not actually bothered.Report
You know that thing that Obama did from time to time that drove Republicans *NUTS* and had them out screaming on television and sounding like crazy people?
Breathe?Report
Preside while black?
I kid, that’s totally unfair. Presiding while being Democratic was sufficient. The black thing was just the insult to injury.Report
Report
I guess I should add my two cents.
I need to point out that the Democratic Party and HRC did receive a larger number of votes than the GOP. Lee is right that we picked up seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Republican Party has a bare majority in the Senate. There are some Republican Senators in blue or purple states that are going to balk at the worst of Trump’s orders and possibly the worst of the GOP’s plans like privatizing medicare. Not saying that the situation is good but Trump is going to walk into a situation where he is not the boss in a traditional sense. He can’t fire politicians and judges who don’t follow his commands and orders.
I will also point out that the Democrats who won tend to be the new guard of the party and not the old guard. Kamala Harris and Tammy Duckworth won. Feingold did not. Even the odious Darrell Issa looks like he is holding on by only 3000 votes.
However, the Big Sort is real and Democrats are not at optimal distribution. However, 2016 was not a rout. It was a narrow defeat based on razor thin margins in a few rust belt states plus Florida.
The death of political parties is vastly overstated most of the time. There have been collapses like the American Whigs. There have been times when major political parties switch like when Labour replace the Liberals as the left big party in 1920s UK. But Karl Rove gloated about a permanent political majority in 2004 and by 2006, the Democrats took back Congress and held the Senate until 2014.
There are problems for the Democratic Party but imagining a total defeat seems like wailing in despair. The only way the Democratic Party goes away completely is if the Republicans manage a total right-wing coup and forcibly remove Democratic politicians.
Right now the Democratic Party is holding firm against Trump’s bigotry. Municipal and state Democratic politicians have vowed to protect minorities and are not moving to the right in defeat.
Another problem is that we seem to be in an era of bad feelings as Burt noted and treat the opposition as completely illegitimate.Report
By the end of every Superbowl, the commentators talk about how it’s the beginning of an unstoppable dynasty.Report
Here is an interesting passage that has been shared around the net by the left. It comes from Richard Rorty in Achieving our Century (1998):
[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers–themselves desperately afraid of being downsized–are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for–someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug beaurocrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesman, and postmodernists professors will no longer be calling the shots…
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion….All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”
There seems to be a lot that is true here. Trump’s vulgarity and his bigotry turned out to be a plus for many people. Mitt Romney was too patrician to appeal to rural America and his work at Bain Capital made him an enemy, an outsourcer in chief. Donald Trump fancies himself a builder and building is something that really can’t be outsourced so typical arguments against Republican business and economic arguments does not work.
The issue that has a lot of people (including myself) on edge is that we don’t know how much Trump and the GOP can really erase the forty years of gains. Yesterday the news was dictated by contradicting tea leaves. Trump announced that he plans on deporting as many as three million undocumented immigrants but Ryan had to go on TV and insist that there would not be a shock troop of deportation forces. Trump also announced that Steve Bannon would be a White House chief strategist and this alarms the left because of Bannon’s ties with the alt-right, his vulgar statements that Feminism is just bullshit from dykes at Seven Sisters schools, and his probable anti-Semitism based on the fact that he viewed Jews as “whiny brats.” He also seems to be a creature of pure rage.
On the other hand, Trump said he considers SSM marriage to be “settled law.” Though “settled law” can mean “Of course it should be illegal. I don’t know how the Supreme Court ruled the way they did.”
I still have hope that Trump and his team will prove to be too incompetent and faction driven to do too much damage but the next four years are going to suck for many people.Report
That was Rorty summarizing (and perhaps expanding a bit upon) Luttwak’s Endangered American Dream. The quote is followed by a critique of the American left (not liberals, but left) and its love affair with theory. It basically says, “Start acting.” The irony here being that this year the left tried to act (through Sanders’ “movement”).Report
@chris
Interesting. I think the issue is that a lot of these problems are very hard to fix especially in the short-term with policy position and goals. The best liberals and the left can probably do is ease the pain as much as possible but “these jobs ain’t coming back” has been a saying for as long as I’ve been alive and it is seemingly true.Report
Perhaps the best thing liberals can do is listen. I think they’ll find that the issues facing the white working class overlap a great deal with the issues facing the people they count on but generally ignore anyway, because they are also largely working class. If the post-election rhetoric is any indication, however…Report
And maybe read this.
https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-classReport
I read that last night. I am not completely convinced. It seems very anecdote driven.
I’m not convinced that encouraging such strong anti-intellectualism is a good thing. Doctors are not quacks. They are people who spend years studying the human body and disease. Surely there are bad doctors but I’ve never understood why the right-wing talk-radio brigade insists on denouncing whole bodies of knowledge and information so much.
Obviously everyone wants to keep their mores and ways but just have more money. That seems to be human nature.Report
It was an interesting article. It rings true on a few points. The first being “straight talk”. I spent several years as a UAW temp union employee working on the line. Everyone at the plant was all about straight talk.
The smugness too.Report
That article wasn’t trying to convince you of the wisdom of dismissing professionals. It was trying to explain to you how those professionals are viewed by a significant demographic. Again, this is about understanding. If you don’t understand the how & the why a demographic thinks the way they do, how can you hope to engage them in a meaningful way?Report
Surely there are bad doctors but I’ve never understood why the right-wing talk-radio brigade insists on denouncing whole bodies of knowledge and information so much.
Maybe your own attitudes about economics can help you understand by analogy.Report
Listen? To someone who barely got a high school diploma before joining the military? As an *ENLISTED* soldier, not even an office?
Listen? To someone who can barely string two sentences together and couldn’t even imagine writing a five paragraph essay?
Listen? To someone who engages in manual labor rather than the much more difficult labor of being a thought leader?
Maybe they should be doing a better job of listening to *US* if they want us to listen to them.Report
@jaybird
We’ve gone through this several times. Here it goes again
Not all the message contents are the same. There are things like actual real physical knowledge.
Part of the problem is that a lot of people (different people in different sides) are unwilling to consider the message content just because where it comes from, or because it goes against my priors.
When people in the right say I should hear Middle Americans and their claims, that they are insecure, that the world is changing and leaving them behind, they are right, I should hear them.
When after I hear them, I say to them “the mines are not coming back, let’s see what else is available, but it won’t be the mines, and it won’t give you what the mines gave you”, they should hear me too.
Now, if all you want to do is win elections, then yes, by all means, hear what the voters say and tell them what they want to hear. Is not as if you can really open the mines, so it doesn’t really matter. You heard, and you answered accordingly
Now, if you want to solve the challenges we have, we ALL have to listen. ALL of us.Report
“the mines are not coming back, let’s see what else is available, but it won’t be the mines, and it won’t give you what the mines gave you”, they should hear me too.
I agree.
The problem is that Clinton’s message did not come across as “we’ll see what else is available to you because you are a valued member of our society and we want to help all of you, especially after a couple of centuries of you helping all of us” but “we’re gonna put a lotta miners out of work!”
It may seem like bullshit to the INTPs and (especially) the INTJs on the board, but the whole “tone” thing is important to normies. The difference between this phrasing and that one is the difference between being trusted and coming across as a right bastard.
And listening can help the speaker realize “what I am saying is being lost in how I am saying it” and maybe actually *CHANGE* how they are saying what they are saying in such a way that it is actually heard by the other people.
Plus there’s also the whole “huh, maybe they’re disagreeing because they disagree, not because I’m not phrasing it correctly” realization that sometimes helps.Report
Ah, yes, “listen”.
Clearly polling the working class doesn’t count as listening, even though it’s the best way to actually find out what the overall problems are. (Democrats do a lot of that). Nor is studying them and their problems (Democrats do a lot of that).
So how should they “listen”? Or do you mean “Appear to listen”, which is purely optics and PR?
I do like how the “white working class” has to be severed from “working class”. Are there special, whites-only, working class problems?Report
“Therefore, it made perfect sense to send Lena Dunham down to campaign for Hillary Clinton in North Carolina.”Report
@morat20
I semi-concur with @jaybird here.
One of the things that annoyed me about seeing my friends act during this election was that seemingly invincible belief in the power of celebrity endorsements.
In our fractured media, I am not sure that it matters if all of Joss Whedon’s favorite actors and Lena Dunham endorse HRC. This seems to be the suburbanite liberals saying “Ohh let me feel even better about my vote because my favorite actors also like HRC.”
But Jaybird should not dismiss the white supremacy in the Trump admin either but I am sure there are college students to blame somewhere.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/donald_trump_s_pick_of_stephen_bannon_means_white_nationalism_is_coming.htmlReport
With our fractured media, it doesn’t matter the Joss Wheldon and his stars support Clinton when you never watched a Joss Wheldon show in the first place. Liberals don’t care that Chuck came out for Trump and most of Trump’s voters don’t give a damn about Clinton’s celebrities.Report
I’ve literally never cared for celebrity endorsements and find them, frankly, annoying.
Nonetheless, I’m stumped by the “listen” message. What they want is known.
They can’t have it. The factories aren’t coming back, the coal ain’t coming back, and the 1950s aren’t coming back. I don’t mean “We don’t want to give it to them” I mean in the literal “It physically can’t happen”.
So lie to them or try to give them what you can. Trump went one way, Clinton the other — which is how both parties have gone, really.Report
@morat20
I saw this summary yesterday on LGM.
Democrats for the past 40 years: You can have a welfare state of sorts but those factory and mining jobs are not coming back and you might have to do lower-paying work. Also quit it on the bigotry. How gauche.
Republicans for the past 40 years: You can have all the bigotry you want but those factory and mining jobs are not coming back. Also forget unemployment insurances. Makes you lazy.
Trump: Why settle? You can have it all. The bigotry, the welfare state, and the factories humming again.Report
Here’s an editorial you’ll like. It explains that journalists aren’t out of touch. Rural people are out of touch.Report
@jaybird
Yep. I like it.Report
I think that celebrity endorsements matter a great deal, but negatively. Or, rather, this time around they played into an image that worked against the Clinton campaign. They added to the “us versus them” theme of the election in a way that I wouldn’t have thought possible. They made a billionaire New Yorker into an “us” for millions of small-town Christians.
ETA: I’m not sure but that might be what Jaybird is saying.Report
When Krugman’s endorsement shows up with a sudden inability to do math, I start to wonder whether they’re paying him, or actively blackmailing him.
Truly.Report
“Study”?Report
“I have started showing up at the bowling alley on Friday nights and the locals have responded to my presence somewhere between mild curiosity and indifference. I try to sit close enough to hear their conversations without intruding on them. They seem to be discussing social events that take place on Sunday mornings while, perhaps hypocritically, also discussing the television show NCIS. Their camaraderie, however, seems to be strengthened through their shared cultural experiences no matter how contradictory they may seem to me. More notes to come, I am going to attempt to stomach some of the fried fish this place serves on Friday nights…”Report
Actually, there are. They might not seem like legitimate problems to most of us (me included) but there are real.
The world is changing, fast. Physical Labor is being replaced by Knowledge Labor. Capital and automation are devastating the upper segment of working class jobs. Even being a car mechanic today means computer diagnostic and plug-and-play repair.
The bulk of no-formal-education working class jobs available are personal services, food industry, yard work, construction, trucking, and seasonal agriculture. Jobs that pay much less than the jobs that are gone.
Historically, minorities have been concentrated in the jobs that remain: they have been our maids, our short order cooks, our yard mowers, our fruit and vegetables pickers, our meat packers. For them, getting an increase in minimum salary, and access to health care is a big improvement.
The bulk of the jobs lost belonged to the white working class. They were paid several times the minimum wage, so discussions about 7 or 12 or 15 dollars/hour did not affect them. They had health insurance, so Medicaid or the Exchanges were not in their radar. Now we are telling them they have to line in McDonalds to turn in their applications.
The history of why the majority of good jobs ended in one race only does not need to be relitigated here. A system was put in place about one hundred years ago that reinforced this separation in the jobs each group had access to, and even when the legal limitations were stricken down fifty years ago, the system just continued sputtering for some decades. Probably, if the labor market hadn’t changed, the racial makeup of the jobs would have eased itself out some decades from now.
But the labor market changed. The minorities jobs, the shitty jobs, survived. They even grew -we have more fast food joints and Starbucks we could have dreamed of. The shitty jobs are improving in quality.
In the meantime, the mines closed, Caterpillar fired 90% of the work force in their Peoria Central Spares Parts Distribution Center, big factories moved away, and the good jobs dissapeared.
So when we talk about the White Working Class, we are actually talking about the (Former) Good Jobs Working Class. And what they are facing is not like the Shitty Jobs Working Class, slight improvement. They are facing ruin, and the destruction of their wealth, their livelihood, and their pride.
The fact that the (F)GJWC and the WWC correlate so much is an accident of history, and, regretfully, an added complication, because it brings Race into what should be just an Economics discussion.
And we still don’t know how to deal with race. Not in the right, not in the left.Report
+100!
ETA: The reason it’s bad to ignore this demographic is because these are people who, while perhaps not educated, are used to wielding considerable political power, and facing financial ruin may limit their ability to contribute to a campaign, but they are still used to exercising that power, and know how to do it.Report
Holy crap, this is an awesome comment.Report
Yes. It’s the best single analysis of this dynamic that I’ve seen.Report
@j_a
Good points but what if we combine it with your point above about how the mines and factories are not coming back and let’s look at what we have. What if what we have is the lower-paid stuff that normally went to minority members of the working class. What then?
We might be in a time with no good solutions.Report
How ’bout free education? When the widget factory closes and 1,500 people in BFE, Texas are suddenly unemployed in a place that has no jobs they can do, because they’ve never learned how to do anything but the jobs at a widget factory, and there are no more widget factories within 300 miles, we pay for every single one of them to go to school: technical school, community college, 4-year college, whatever, so that they can learn skills that they can actually use in this economy. Hell, let’s do the same thing for anyone!
Perhaps combine this with a robust social safety net, so that they can actually afford to not work, or work significantly fewer hours and/or at a significantly lower pay rate.
On top of that, let’s make sure they don’t go broke, or worse, with medical debt by creating a truly universal healthcare system.
Then let’s make sure that once they do get jobs, they make a living wage.
I feel like there was a candidate who proposed such things. I just can’t remember his/her name.
(“These things aren’t possible in today’s political climate.” How far has that reasoning gotten you? How far has the complete lack of such reasoning gotten the other side?)Report
The ideas have merit, but there is that one thing that makes them politically sticky, and that is the working/middle class in America still has an attitude that you have to earn something. The hand-up versus the hand-out, however you want to put it.
This is why I suggested before that we could do voc rehab in a manner similar to how we do unemployment, in that employers pay into a fund, and should they lay people off due to down-sizing, or relocation, or closing the business, the fund offers pay, education assistance, &/or relocation assistance. For some reason, a lot of people see this as an earned benefit and a hand-up.Report
The biggest issue with having voc rehab tied to dislocation is that it will only go to the people who got the (relatively) good factory/office/whatever jobs in the first place, so that the people who were never able to do so (due to geography, education, race, whatever) will be stuck outside of the voc rehab system for no good reason. In fact, we already have something of a system like this, funded primarily by the federal DOL, focused on “dislocated workers,” and mildly successful but extremely limited (I say mildly because to date the monitoring of eligible providers has been, let’s say minimal, so that some of them are pretty shitty and don’t put students in a position to get jobs).
I suspect that if you championed such policies, and explained them in a way that didn’t sound like, “Look, I’m an educated liberal technocrat, so I know best,” you’d find that, for all their belief in meritocracy, a lot of people would be in favor of them.Report
The problem with voc rehab is that it works basically on those young enough to be able to learn a new trade, move away, and start anew. We are probably talking about the under 35 yo lot.
Past that, voc rehab stops being a solution. I really can’t think about much that you can do with the older displaced. I’m running out of ideas beyond the pension them outReport
This is true. I think over 45 (or possibly 50), the biggest predictor of whether someone will get a job after a dislocation is their age (before that it’s things like race, education, job sector, and how long they’ve been unemployed).
However, there are ways to get around this as well, even if they’re not perfect. Subsidized employment, e.g.Report
I think Chris is probably closer to the right age limit, depending on how much of a deviation the education is from the students experience. Going from say, a shop mechanic to an SAE certified mechanic isn’t as much of a stretch as going from janitor to engineer.
As for those that can’t be rehabbed, I’m all for letting them retire early, perhaps with some kind of pension support.Report
There’s not just the problem of “how will they put food on their family” but also the problem of “how will they look at themselves in the mirror?”
I’d almost think that, instead of a pension, we create something very much like make-work that presents identically to almost a real desk job. Have metrics, morale meetings, the occasional potluck, and everybody spends all day digging holes and then filling them in.
Once in a while, have the boss chew out a worker. Once in a while, have the boss present a “Model Employee!” trophy.
Create powerpoints.
Give these people a paycheck with some dignity attached to it instead of merely a congratulatory pension.Report
SecondedReport
Man, the working class really does do things differently.Report
He’s quoting George W. Bush:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/bushisms/2009/01/ws_greatest_hits.htmlReport
Oh, God.
We’re going to have Trumpisms.Report
Do we need them, though? He’s kind of like a Magic 8 Ball. Pretty sure we can guess what all future Trumpisms will be without having to hear them.Report
We already do, biglyReport
They’re coming out of our ears, our whatevers.Report
The market is going to be yuuugeReport
A+Report
Wow, @j_a , that’s one of those rare comments that actually makes me go back and revisit a whole lot of baseline assumptions in my head.
Great comment.Report
@j_a
As many have said, a fantastic comment.
But I’m curious about this piece… “The fact that the (F)GJWC and the WWC correlate so much is an accident of history…”
That correlation does not seem an accident at all. In fact, it seems you admitted as much, noting how the racial segregation of these jobs was very intentional. Can you expand on what you meant by “accident of history” here?Report
@kazzy
It was absolutely intentional.
“Was” is the key word here.
The intentions (at least the institutional intentions) died some decades ago.
But history, and social trends, have inertia. The institutional intention of denying good jobs to Negros and Spics in the 1920s, 30s and 40s resulted in Blacks and Hispanics in the 60s and 70s having less social capital, less education (even in a world where high school graduation was the peak expected, many didn’t reach there, hell many didn’t reach functional literacy), less strong families and communities, which made them less able to reach the good jobs even when there were no institutional obstacles for them to do so.
When the (F)GJWC applied for their first factory job, there were no rules and regulations barring Blacks to do the same. Yes, there might be some petty (or not so petty) harassment in the dressing room, but it would be against the rules, and most people would follow the rules against the petty harassment.
But the Blacks didn’t apply in the same numbers as the whites did, because by that time their families were in shambles, the model of illegitimacy, baby mamas, ad all those stereotypes was there, their neighborhoods had been destroyed and were now dens of gangs (remember the Bronx?), their education was nonexistent. They weren’t factory floor material. They were barely short order cook material.
Those things didn’t happen by accident. They were the consequence of intentional decisions made in the 1920s-40s, yes. But the (F)GJW, though they benefited from this situation, were just born in third base. They didn’t implement those infamous policies. They didn’t even know them, they were off the books already. Someone that turned 18 and left high school in 1970 would be 64 this year and will be collecting SocSec next year. They benefited of a system put in place by their grandparents and actually dismantled by their parents.
There were two historical processes going on at the same time. The unraveling of the effects of generations of intentional discrimination, which itself would take several generations to be completed; and the outsourcing/automation revolution that destroyed the (Former) Good Jobs. The victims of the Second were (innocent) beneficiaries of the first, true, but (innocent) should also count.Report
@j_a
Another issue is that all of these concerns can still be closely linked to white supremacy. Some are valid but perhaps there are members of the WWC who oppose minimum wage increases because they make 22-30 an hour and don’t what minority members of the working class getting close to that number.Report
@saul-degraw
I would argue differently.
I would argue that their opposition was not based on “them uppity *^%#} should be glad we let them clean our toilets” but in “well, that’s going to make my hamburgers more costly, and probably bring up my taxes, and is not going to do anything for me. Is not as if I’m cleaning bathrooms, come on, I’m a senior welder. Nothing is stopping them from being welders”
There was selfishness involved, lots of FYIGMism, but I don’t think actual racism, hatred of the other, was a big drive. I really don’t think your typical white (former) senior welder would object to a non white also becoming senior welder. “Also” being the key operative word.
But no one is becoming senior welder nowadays. Have you seen what perfect welds you can do with laser guidance, X rays and robotic arms? I don’t need a senior welder. But I still need my bathrooms cleaned.Report
@j_a
I disagree. I said this would be an argument on the left in the wake of HRC’s defeat. You can even do it without any “We should have nominated Sanders” ism.
The argument within the Democratic Party and on the left as a whole is the economic anxiety won it for Trump vs. racism/white supremacy won it for Trump.
At the start of this election (which was oh so long ago), I argued heavily for economic anxiety but I’ve changed my mind. I think that there is a deep racism, sexism, and bigotry that is embedded in this country and it is going to be hard to win out. Trump won on heightened and raised white identity as a solidarity marker.
Trump’s entrance into the race was based on racism with his build the wall and make Mexico pay comments and his anti-Muslim rhetoric. Trump’s entire public life has been around one charge of racism or another.
I think there was plenty that prevented minorities from becoming welders or senior welders. There is the fact that there is a lot of nepotism in the trades (to be fair, there is nepotism in almost every field.) There are some unions where it is seemingly impossible to gain entry without being related to a member and this includes apprentice programs. This is a failure of the left. The “nothing stopping them” is a serious unexamined navel gazing.
I do believe in structural racism. And I think it is possible for people to want to keep the old order where the good working class jobs with union benefits and higher wages went to white people. See Ira Katznelson’s great books like When Affirmative Action Was White and Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origin of Our Times.
Your last point is the point I am trying to make. What if the neoliberals are right and those welding jobs are not coming back but the jobs that are around can be made bearable with a higher wage. What if this is the only thing we can do? I imagine that things are going to get ugly.Report
Sure, Trump run a racist campaign. And a lot of the WWC joined in.
But I think Trump just immanetized the fear and confusion of the WWC into a concrete Other that could be blamed (as the campaigned progressed, other Others beyond Mexicans were added to the list)
But a similar campaign could have been run without the anti Hispanic and anti Muslim racism (do note that the campaign was never anti Black, even when it allowed White Supremacists to read anti-Black in it). Perhaps an Anti Banker, or a more explicit Anti SJW campaign. Having someone or something to blame and scapegoat was the key Brexit was, after all, run as Anti Polish Plumbers. Most Polish Plumbers are, however, white, blond and blue eyed. They can join Stormfront with few questions asked.
Re Unions and nepotism and networking.
You are right. I just don’t need to add specific Racism to what is networking, no different than the “We’ll get young Campodetenis a job with your brother in law, the pyramid construction crew supervisor. There’s good chickpeas to be made in pyramid construction” that was going on in Egypt’s IV Dinasty.
Racism is a big word, like Fascism. I’d reserve it for big things, like Jim Crow.
The left sees too much Racism. Which is the best that can happen to true Racists. Is like when the cartoon villain creates a hundred copies for the hero to fight. Who’s the true Racist, writing Stormfront posts, and who’s the guy annoyed that his nephew didn’t get to UT because of (he claims) Affirmative Action?Report
Could be both.
The WWC are not the only ones facing economic anxiety. I graduated law school in 2011 and the bubble burst has not recovered and might be getting worse. I’ve gone from freelance project to freelance project for 5 years. I’ve only had health insurance via a job for 7 months of my adult life since graduating from college in 2002. I see my friends buying homes and wonder if that will ever be me and often I doubt that it will.
You know what? I didn’t vote for the candidate who ran a racist campaign, who hired Breitbart’s CEO to be his campaign manage, who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals, etc. If you voted for someone who ran a racist campaign, you don’t get to declaim “not me” when his more racist supporters act up. Trump enabled them and so did the voters who voted for Trump while still expressing concerns over Trump’s racism.Report
I think your idea of economic anxiety and what @j_a is describing are very, very different.
Also, remember that a lot of the people who voted for Trump were not reading the same things about him that you were, in the same way that you were not reading the things about Clinton that they were. Don’t make the error of assuming that people looked at what you looked at and made the decision to vote for him. That’s not the way information works anymore.Report
I tried to say this in a previous thread and it didn’t seem to take. Hopefully it will now.Report
” I graduated law school in 2011 ”
Then you are not a member of the working class. Goodbye.Report
Um. Good… bye?Report
“The left sees too much Racism. Which is the best that can happen to true Racists. Is like when the cartoon villain creates a hundred copies for the hero to fight. Who’s the true Racist, writing Stormfront posts, and who’s the guy annoyed that his nephew didn’t get to UT because of (he claims) Affirmative Action?”
There’s grand theft robber and petty larceny. We don’t tell people who only lose $50 because a guy lifted their wallet that that’s not real robbery.
But OK, fine, racism is only when somebody is lighting a cross on your front yard. Anything less and you should just grin and bear it.Report
David Marcus has an essay in The Federalist explaining that one very important thing seems to have changed: Racial Détente.
Here’s an interesting graf:
The entire essay is interesting and worth reading.
Détente ending is a bad sign. It indicates “okay, we’re both going to start defecting”.Report
I agree with this. The big and it could be a very big down side in Identity Politics is that it gets the majority group to perceive its identity actively rather than passively. It used to be that simply being White Christian was the default American and when more minority Americans began to point out this wasn’t the case, the White Christian majority began fighting more and more for what it perceived as their groups rights. This happened before during the early 20th century. Prohibition and immigration restrictions were a result of Anglo-Protestant America perceiving itself as under siege from Southern and Eastern European immigrants who believed in things like socialism and anarchism and Catholicism or Judaism.Report
I have some problems with that article. The contract, on the white side, also included shunning people who were racist. I think this the key to understanding why the revised contract became untenable. The concept of racism was stripped of its meaning in the past 10 years or so, and that made it impossible to shun racists.
There’s a more complicated problem with the article. There was no discussion of the contractual requirement on the part of whites to actively eliminate racist practices and appearances. That may have been too big for the scope of the article.
Last problem worth mentioning: it was only about the black-white contract. All the perceived and actual bigotry in the 2016 campaign was related to Hispanics and Muslims. I don’t know offhand what that means, but it’s something that we really should be discussing as a society.Report
There was a John Adams quote flying around twitter today.
Report
You used to different words for the two different crimes, which kind of undermines your point. Also, no one is saying that victims a discrimination (both implicit and explicit) can’t raise their voices or complain. It’s just that, to use your analogy, if they get $50 swiped from their car, using the language of armed robbery is going to turn off some people or strike them as being overblown.
Also, swiping $50 is not a real robbery, which requires force or threat of force.Report
If it’s my $50, when I react to it, I’m not going to care about the difference between the precise legal meaning of “robbery,” “theft,” “larceny,” or “burglary.” (And I’m a lawyer who should be expected to be able to split those semantic hairs all on my own!) My emotion at having my $50 stolen from me by a criminal will overpower the analytical part of me that can sort out if I’ve been robbed, larcened, burgled, or thieved. The amgydala often governs the cerebellum, not the other way around.Report
First, that may all be true regarding how people react to it emotionally. It doesn’t change the fact that I (and I assume others) are going to take a person less seriously if they talk about petty crime as if it is the greatest travesty on earth. With that said, an analogy limited to Robbery/theft offenses may not be the best.
The problem as I see it is that we are trying to talk about very different and subtle aspects of discrimination and prejudice using a vocabulary that calls everything racist.Report
On the other hand, Bannon’s in at the White House.
He’s literally a white nationalist. So in general I’m happy to have the conversation about “Is that like burning crosses racist, or like crossing the street because black people are coming racist, or like unconscious bias on tests racist, or what”…
In this case, we’ve got Bannon. Which is not a subtle or unconscious form of racism. Nor did Trump really run on subtle racism. This is the man that eschewed dog whistles in exchange for just going at it like it was 1965.
I think all the complicated, nuanced conversation about race has been overtaken by events.Report
But that’s exactly the point. Let’s at least stop talking about unconscious bias on tests as racist. Ask people if they think their reading comprehension would be different if the passage in question dealt with something they have no experience with.
I mean both common sense and the academic literature tell us that challenging people personally by using words like sexist, misogynist, and racist turn people off from even listening to what you have to say. Why use those words when there are more effective communication strategies (other than signalling in group membership).Report
I get @gaelen point. If all theft is treated as Grand Theft, and everyone found guilty gets a hand cut off, you can expect backlash if the population has any kind of political power.
There is a profound distinction between the person who has some internal prejudices that color some social interactions with a subgroup, and the person jonesing for the opportunity to string one of them kinda folks up.Report
Economics versus racism? There’s a third option, you know. Hillary Clinton is a terrible speaker with questionable ethics and a Nixonian personality who oversaw the expansion of Sharia during her time at the State Department. And a fourth reason: you haven’t figured the socons into your formula.Report
oversaw the expansion of Sharia
What?Report
The advances made by Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria, the drift away from Kemalism in Turkey, the failure to support the protesters in Iran, the collapse of Libya and Yemen, the US support for the worst elements in Egypt, et cetera.Report
I like your use of “oversaw”. It implies so much.
It implies she was entirely responsible, as if she were king of the world, when she wasn’t even President of the USA.
It implies that it depended entirely on her efforts — that is, the success or failure of this expansion was solely due to her works.
It implies she wanted it to happen, like she was overseeing the expansion of a factory.
It implies she worked hard to make it happen.
So much implication in such a simple word.
In real life, she was Secretary of State when the region was destabilizing due to a rather poorly thought out war-of-choice undertaken years later, and was routinely criticized about being too hawkish at trying to stop it .
But we’re in a post-fact world, and one thing I’ve come to grasp as the new reality: The only person to blame for Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton. Not Donald Trump, not the GOP, not the sixty million people that voted for him, but Hillary Clinton.
Clearly the most powerful woman in the world.Report
That wasn’t intended. I tend to be verbose, and I couldn’t think of a better single word to describe it. “Was in office while these things happened”? I don’t know. Anyway, the context was more about perception – that is to say, how she was perceived as a candidate. She wanted to be seen as a skilled player on the world scene, but may have been seen by many as a failure.
I’d also add my suspicion that she would have been stronger in foreign policy than her record indicates. Maybe “oversaw the implementation of President Obama’s foreign policy goals which helped promote the following things”?Report
You’re still just assuming that she could have implied her personal will on the world there, and assuming there was in fact some way of actually avoiding this mess.
While still avoiding the fact that she wasn’t the person making the ultimate call anyways.
(In fact, in terms of this mess — Iraq was. They were pretty clear they wanted us out, and short of reinvading, out we went. A decision set in stone by the Secretary of State and President BEFORE Obama took office).Report
Libya falls on Clinton’s head. Iraq does not (GWB, totally).
I suppose we could have supported the kurds… Kurdish independent state.
But that’s wishy.
“The Mad Bomber” sure did like to drop a lot of bombs.Report
No, Morat20, I’m not still assuming that. I never assumed that. I don’t think my follow-up comment implies anything of the sort. Is “was in office while these things happened” so judgmental? Does “oversaw the implementation of President Obama’s foreign policy goals which helped promote the following things” imply that she made the ultimate call? No, that last comment of yours is completely detached from the comment it replied to.
Mike, I am sorry that you misunderstood my comment. I still can’t think of a way to put that much information into an already heavy sentence. Clinton was Secretary of State when these things happened. I’m not saying she can be blamed for them, but I am saying that campaigning as a former Secretary of State does put those things into the discussion.Report
Ah, OK. I had the same reaction to “oversaw” that Morat had.
Yeah, a lot of bad stuff happened on her watch. Putting Newt in charge is going to be a yuuuge improvement.Report
She’s… not crazy like Nixon was crazy. Her kind of crazy is borderline, his kind was more paranoid.
And don’t say “oversaw the expansion of Sharia”. Say “destabilized Libya for no fucking reason, leading to Benghazi, which was her fault, even if she wasn’t proximately responsible for that particular fuckup”Report
Well done, spot on.Report
I do like how the “white working class” has to be severed from “working class”. Are there special, whites-only, working class problems?
I wonder if you read my comment.Report
Why not? The left the last 20 plus years pushing identity politics but somehow whites cant have their own interests without it being racist.Report
I’m pretty sure that for getting elected, the only thing that matters at all is pretending to listen.Report
“Trump said he considers SSM marriage to be “settled law.” Though “settled law” can mean “Of course it should be illegal. I don’t know how the Supreme Court ruled the way they did.””
One of the fun things about the next four year is going to be watching people parse Trump’s statements so that they’re horrible.
“I am not a racist”. “Oh yeah? Well, you didn’t say you weren’t a WHITE SUPREMACIST.”Report
Notice how you ignored everything else I wrote where Trump promises to be as perfectly horrible as he was on the campaign trail.Report
Odd.
I was reading about how the Republican party was on their way out, and then this happened.Report
So, uh, hey guys. What’d I miss? 😉
Rather than responding to anything specific in the OP, I’ll just note that the dire Democratic straits Tess describes seem remarkably similar to some of the ones Our Tod predicted a while back in his “Sailing Away To Irrelevancy” series, which was shelved due to overwhelming negative response to their pessimistic view of the potential shellacking for which a complacent party might be headed. Well, who’s laughing NOW? 😉
I’ve also been wondering about something recently.
Humans learned at some point that preventing ALL forest fires was a bad idea – after a while you get such a buildup of old deadwood and brush that when the fire finally comes (and it always does, sooner or later), it will be an out-of-control inferno.
We learned that it’s far better to have regular, controlled fires, than no fires at all for twenty lovely years and then the Mother of All Uncontrollable Fires.
When I look at where we are: I wonder if the US political system has been so good at preventing small fires that it has led us to this one.Report
Hey stranger!
Re: Forest Fires
We know that, but we don’t actually practice that.Report
It’s Glyph! Welcome back!Report
Good to see you.
I’m all for setting at least one branch of government ablaze every twenty years or so.
Good for the construction industry, if nothing else.Report
Or what if this *is* the controlled burn?Report
Willard: I don’t see any
methodcontrol at all, sir.ReportI’m not buyin’ it. I wrote a couple of days ago that for the medium-term, the Demo’s prospects are at least as good as the R’s. Or to put it another way, the R’s have a substantial built-in advantage, in terms of being likely to control almost all the offices from say 30-35 states. To put a number on it, let’s stipulate that it’s 5-10% tailwind for the GOP. But given Trump being President, the Republicans controlling Congress and the sort of issues that are likely to come up, I could easily see them losing 10+ percentage points of relative approval compared to the Demo’s.
Furthermore the Demo’s, who let’s face it basically have no ideas except multicultural grievance Pokemon point-scoring, don’t need them. They don’t need them politically, because the American people are going to be looking to the R’s for leadership, not the D’s. And the D’s get some downtime to talk amongst each other and figure out how they really want to present themselves to America given the results of Tuesday.
Specifically, the biggest meta-issue for the Trump Administration will be the pace of change, the frequency of signed bills, Executive Orders, meaningful personnel appointments, etc. And I don’t think the outlook is good for them. A normal Administration would have a honeymoon which Trump won’t get, because he’s Trump and also because his approval rating is sub-40% and may never get that high. And because Trump is so unprepared compared to other Presidents-elect, it will be hard enough for the Trump Administration to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Still, Trump’s voters will be expecting things to be getting done, and Trump will expect to get things done. And if things go poorly, I think it’s a relatively small slice of American who are invested Trump as a person.Report
It’s weird I basically agree with Koz. People are forgetting that Texas, Arizona, and Georgia moved left almost as much as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan turned right and that bluntly, if a rounding error of the population shifted one way in those three Midwestern states, we’d be talking about how Hillary is going to work to get corporate tax reform done with Ryan & McConnell.
People are acting like Trump won with a 49 state blowout, for some reason.
The path in 2020 is pretty simple – don’t care about policy, nominate somebody charismatic and with no record. Name somebody as VP who knows what they’re doing and go from there.Report
Jesse,
PA is still shifting blue. Please, please please hear me on this one. This is not a state shifting into more KKK talk. It really aint’.Report
Good comment Koz, on every level. The one part I want to highlight is the speed at which the New Conservatism rolls out policy. If I were a conservative advisor, I’d tell em to cool it over the first hundred days – maybe revoke some Obama executive orders, maybe pass a brand new Deport the Illegals Bill (who’s legislative wording is exactly the same as Obama’s policy), {{but don’t Repeal Medicare!!!}}, you know, throw em a few bones – since too radical a change too quickly will lead to a yuuuge backlash.Report
In terms of speed, it may not be a matter of choice. He can only go as fast as he can execute. If I were Trump, I’d be afraid of Sibelius-style “Websites for Dummies” scenario.
As far as the rest of it is concerned, I don’t think speed matters as much as the perception of progress, and that legitimate points of view aren’t being shut out. I think Trump’s immigration policies are actually much more moderate than the media has given credit for, I think it will be to everybody’s interest if they are enacted that way.
A couple other things. Politically speaking, it will definitely be to the Republicans’ advantage if come February or April of 2018, politics is boring. If that’s the case, the GOP’s structural advantages have the chance to do some real damage on the foundations of the Demo Party, and that I’m not sure if they can come back from.
Specifically, I see a scenario where Trump gets out of the gate pretty well, because there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit (including a SCOTUS nominee) available for him to get done. That could mean that the GOP Establishment lets down their guard, and becomes more directly associate with Trump. And at some point of frustration or petulance or whatever, Trump does his usual aggravations. I think that would be much worse for the GOP than if it happens now.Report
I think Trump’s immigration policies are actually much more moderate than the media has given credit for,
You mean that the media has made the mistake of believing that he means what he’s said?Report
No, just the opposite. Depending on the fine print of how they might be implemented, I think Trump’s immigration policies are quite reasonable. They are only being viewed as inflammatory because they are associated with Trump.
Building a border fence/wall, barring mass immigration from some Muslim nations, H1-B restriction/reform, E-Verify, visa entry-exit reconciliation, these are moderate things, conservative even, and should not be viewed in an inflammatory way.Report
Trump has said everything about every issue. Then people pick and choose what they want to hear, with the media picking one version and his supporters picking another. It’s all very Biblical.Report
@dark-matter
Trump has said everything about every issue.
That is an outright lie. Trump has *not once* proposed drilling into the earth so we can open trade negotiations with the mole people. (He has *always* demanded they drill up to us, and then pay us for living in our real-estate.)
It’s all very Biblical.
*quickly checks to make sure that Trump has not proposed building the wall so high that it reaches heaven*Report
Detroit was bailed out by the GOP (they control both Michigan’s governor and the government)
Everyone can not subsidise everyone. The working class sees their own healthcare insurance go up and understands they’re the ones subsidising the poor.
The economy is something they are giving you “credit” for, except “blame” might be a better word. It’s been 8 years, is it Obama’s economy yet or are we still supposed to blame Bush?Report
Well, in the span of one day, Republican views of the economy went from -65 Getting Worse to +5 Getting Better –
https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/798597671414022145
(Yes, also, Democratic views went from +26 to -1). In other words, polling on asking how well the economy doing is kind of worthless.Report
I’m a numbers guy, and the numbers have been 10 years without 3% growth, i.e. awful.
http://cdn.cnsnews.com/10_straight_years-gdp_growth-chart.jpgReport
Jesse – That’s one of those terrible questions that gauges how the interviewee feels at the moment toward the pollster, nothing more. There’s no reason that we should see a candidate’s foreign policy rating, for example, go up after a Supreme Court nominee is announced. But it happens. It’s good that we’re starting to take the math side of polling more seriously (margins of error, adjustments, et cetera) but you have to look at the results over time to figure out if the responses have any meaning.Report
Two thoughts on the “one party nation”.
First, I went to bed last tuesday convinced that the outcome of this would be the demise of the Republican party. I wasn’t the only one. In a matter of hours this gets spun into the opposite. Perhaps a better interpretation is effect and counter effect. Swings one way and back.
But more importantly, I would like to offer another framing of the “one party nation”. That is that in the minds of many people, the “mainstream media’, the political bureaucracy, the entertainment industry, academia and schools in general, this nation has already become a one party nation, and that party is the party of “progressive” ideology. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with this modern form of intellectual Scholasticism capturing these institutions, the comment still applies — Trump voters would probably believe it.
In this framing, we are seeing representative government as a backlash to progressive ideology capturing the other major public institutions. Thus the trend is actually away from one party.
Food for thought….Report
Aren’t you overlooking the subcultures in the US? Blacks watch different TV shows and movies than whites do. Hispanics watch in a different language. There are more country stations in the US than any other format, the next two most common being news/talk and religious. In education, there are millions of home-schoolers and parochial schools, and a community college is likely to be non-ideological. I’ll grant you the political bureaucracy.Report
Sure… but the same diversity applies to politics. The framing in the OP and in my response is around a dominant force, not a totally monolithic force.
The dominance of the left in “mainstream” media (aimed at large general audiences, like ABC and the NYT), hollwood, and especially academia (you are more likely to find a four leaf clover than a conservative in an Ivy League sociology or history department, and their research and writing reflects this). The similarities to the once dominant philosophy/framework of Scholasticism are apt. I believe this group think is damaging in every way, not just to those who don’t subscribe, but to the subscribers themselves.Report
Dominant versus monolithic – fair enough.Report
Sorry this is a bit off topic but I have a question and don’t know where else to ask it.
Why does it take so long to get an official total of votes cast in presidential elections? There is nothing for this year on what I assume is the official source http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/electionresults.shtml
Obviously they’ve counted enough to be sure Trump has a majority in the electoral college but there still seems to be uncertainty about the numbers for the popular vote, although almost everyone seems to think Clinton will come out on top for that. Apparently they are still counting in some places and there is even debate about whether postal votes are counted, counted late or only counted in the event of a tie.
In the UK, without any voting machines to speed up the process we get an official announcement within hours based on counting every ballot paper so I don’t understand how there can still be stories now about votes for both candidates still going up.Report
The reason is that votes aren’t tallied at the polling stations, but rather at a central processing area. Which means sealed votes need to be transported to this location, with all the issues that entails. Couple that with provisional and mail in ballots, and it can be fairly easy to get the majority of votes tallied, but getting each and every one counted is a much greater challenge.Report
Great articleReport