@saul-degraw you won't find any disagreement from me that such a stance is obtuse, and depending on the source, probably wilfully so. I think that's where looking at every racial, political, and class group as monolithic inevitably leads us- faulty analysis and obviously incorrect conclusions.
That may be the case, and @jaybird 's point below probably also has some truth to it. I'll readily admit it's easy for me to be dispassionate in this instance. I'm a fellow traveler with the broader left in the sense that I'm part of the blue demographic and, despite having a lot of libertarian instincts, have made my peace with the welfare state.
That said I know I'm not really part of the tribe and therefore critiques of it never feel personal to me.
Points 1 and 2 I largely agree with. Point 3 is a bit more complicated. Trump seems to me to have run on an economically populist (even if incoherent) platform. It isn't clear to me how popular scrapping or privatizing the welfare state really is outside of the conservative intelligentsia.
Points 4 and 5 is where I think there is a big oversimplification going on in the broader mainstream left (or at least the upper middle class, media savvy left). I think you're right, that culture matters, and it's hard to envision policy changes in a culture that is overwhelmingly hostile to the beneficiaries of the policy or finds it immoral. However, where I think progressives are getting it wrong is the belief that culture is always in the driver's seat. I see it as a factor (which itself is always evolving) along with economics and policy decisions.
From a pragmatic perspective relying on cultural conversion alone is never going to be enough to win. IIRC you yourself have referenced John Mcwhorter on this. It's ridiculous to think that a country the size of a continent with over 300 million people is ever going to uniformly adopt the culture of the coastal college educated urban class. Relying on that seems to me like a recipe for defeat. All I hear Freddie and the Bernie supporters saying is that the broader left needs to be willing to work with people who aren't part of the culture and digging in with snark and disdain the way the right has is counterproductive.
On point 6 I don't really have a strong opinion. I'm not on Twitter so all I know is what I observe, and what I observe is that the progressive side is as vicious as anyone in online exchanges.
I guess I just read it differently. He's never struck me as particularly abrasive (just direct). His critics on the other hand (at least that I've read) have always seemed to me to go much more for the ad hominems and fail to address his points in intellectually honest ways.
Regarding taking his advice well... I'd just say that people who have made similar points to Freddie are looking a lot more prescient right now than the folks going apoplectic.
Well I don't entirely disagree but I'd quibble that I do think it's fair to call the EC flawed at this point. It's increasingly giving disproportionate influence to a smaller and smaller part of the population at the expense of the more populous and economically important parts of the country. Now I would agree that there is a means of changing that, and the Democrats had as good a chance as any in 2009 to push that. For that reason I do think it's tough to take the complaints now particularly seriously.
I think Saul is right in that the complete and utter panic by mainstream progressives is unjustified. A flawed system produced a bad outcome. At some point, sooner or later, Democrats will return to power. Our system is set up to be slow and gradual, and while Trump will nudge things in certain directions, absent something both unprecedented and unlikely he won't be able to remake the country anymore than any other president.
Of course all of this isn't really Freddie's point. His critique has always been that progressives, particularly in media, have gotten into a bad habit of putting culture before policy and it's become an impediment to effectuating positive change. I can never understand why this gets under so many people's skin, especially when the same side often makes similar criticisms about right wing echo chambers in talk radio or Fox News.
I also think the whole 'white middle aged males have problems with HRC because reasons' is really disingenuous given how often those reasons have been discussed. Even then I think the vast majority of people here would've preferred her to win.
I'm not Hispanic but I would hazard a guess based on experience with relatives who immigrated here from Europe in the early 50s. There is such a thing as a flag waiving immigrant. They take a lot of pride in having done things the right way, and aggressively embrace their new nationality. From this perspective, it can be pretty easy to view those who did not follow the rules in both a very emotional and a very negative light.
From their perspective the appeals to nationalism and respect for the rules may resonate sufficiently that they can overlook the racist overtones, especially if they're far enough on the path to assimilation that they don't hear the insults as directed at them. Anecdotal but a good friend of mine whose parents immigrated here legally from El Salvador has expressed conflicted but at times very negative attitudes towards individuals in the country illegally. Identity matters but it isn't everything to everyone all the time.
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.
It's clear to you and me that your average Democrat is not a communist but we aren't the ones who need convincing. My proposal is to see if we can figure out why it isn't so obvious to people who aren't like us and if there's anything we can do about it. To be clear, this isn't about being selfless it's about being very disturbed by what just happened.
It isn't clear to me that they're doing a great job locally given the losses in state level government. I mean, per the conversation above it isnt even clear who is going to lead the party now.
Regarding policy I think there's an emphasis issue. The ACA has a pretty good chance of dying here, but assuming that doesn't happen, I'd have people in southern and midwestern states advocating like crazy for the Medicaid expansion as issue number 1. Take North Carolina for example where theres this big battle on the bathroom issue. My recommendation is that theres a similarly big if not bigger battle over the fact that there is federal money ready to aid in the health care of working class and poor families and the state wont take it for nakedly partisan reasons. Maybe they're already doing things like that but if so I haven't heard about it.
See my comment above to North. There are parts of the party that realize the issue but someone like Clinton was never going to be able to deliver the message. There's too much history and baggage.
Edit to add I don't think you necessarily need to make impossible promises but you do need to run someone who isn't the epitome of who this demographic is flipping the bird at.
Generally I agree that HRC did not run on cultural liberalism, but I think there's a lot of guilt by association for anyone who is part of the establishment, which she very much is. The people supporting Trump, rightly or wrongly, see her as someone who got rich and powerful without playing by the rules (there's definitely some disonance going on with support for Trump but at least he speaks their language and claims to care). From their perspective Clinton is part of a bipartisan elite running the country that to varying degrees puts the interests of bankers, big business, urbanites, minorities, and foreigners ahead of theirs.
In terms of how to deal with it I think that the party needs to start rebuilding at the local and state level by recruiting and cultivating leaders from these blighted areas who understand the problems, the perspective, and the culture. That is going to require some flexibility on cultural issues and an acceptance that candidate's like this probably wouldn't fit in at a Brooklyn dinner party or brunch at a DC restaurant. Part of the point of this strategy is to render accusations about being communists or Kenyans or whatever conservative media says to be transparently ridiculous.
Whether he could have won or not is impossible to know and I take no position in that question. My point is that he was able to expose where her weaknesses were and maybe provide a path forward even if he himself isn't the candidate to lead it.
Progressives in urban enclaves created for themselves the exact kind of echo chamber they regularly and rightly criticize on the right and convinced themselves that Clinton's shortcomings weren't nearly as significant as they were.
This morning a blogger I follow wrote 'The people want jobs. The elites want genderless bathrooms.' I don't want to imply that the Democrats should leave marginalized groups to fend for themselves but for the national party I think the reshuffle needs to be about finding economic answers for people left behind in the post industrial world. Sanders showed there's a constituency for that, and some of it lives in the Midwest where Clinton really lost this election. The next two pieces for the national party I think need to be reigning in the establishments appetite for military adventurism, and being more willing to talk about controlling illegal immigration (albeit in a much more humane and pragmatic way than the Republican enforcement uber alles approach).
I know it isn't the answer a lot of people who want to push cultural liberalism would like. However I think the national party needs to accept that those battles need to be fought first and foremost at local and state levels, and that some parts of the country are going to move faster than others.
I think you and jr are dead on. This was a bad outcome but the melodrama this morning is absurd. America isnt (yet) any different than it was yesterday. All we learned is that the Democrats did exactly what Bernie Sanders warned them about and nominated someone who doesn't take the trade and immigration concerns of the white working class seriously. It cost them winnable votes in Pennsylvania and the upper Midwest that would've turned the election. Chris Matthews of all people made some very insightful points to this effect around 2 AM last night on MSNBC.
The response is to push back the same as during the Bush years. Progressives have more allies and means of asserting power than they think, and for God's sake this campus style emotionalism, identitarianism, and helplessness needs to stop.
I think it's important that progressives acknowledge that in order to regroup. They fell behind a very compromised candidate and all the identity politics and appeals to establishment credentials weren't enough, even when the opponent was a demagogue and buffoon. Loss of those upper Midwest states and Pennsylvania speaks volumes.
I'm not sure I agree. We've been watching that show for the last 6ish years. No one has blinked and now we have one presidential candidate openly advocating disregarding the system and another who has a history that suggests a disquieting comfort with disregarding rules she doesn't like.
I see no reason to be optimistic that continued brinkmanship will lead to good policy or an improved political climate.
On “Freddie: they’re going to keep losing”
@saul-degraw you won't find any disagreement from me that such a stance is obtuse, and depending on the source, probably wilfully so. I think that's where looking at every racial, political, and class group as monolithic inevitably leads us- faulty analysis and obviously incorrect conclusions.
"
Oh believe me I know. I'm in-house. If I wasn't very patient with non-attorneys/willing to teach I'd be out of a job very quickly.
"
Take it a step further and imagine what a client would think if you snidely added 'it isn't my job to explain this to you, educate yourself!'
"
That may be the case, and @jaybird 's point below probably also has some truth to it. I'll readily admit it's easy for me to be dispassionate in this instance. I'm a fellow traveler with the broader left in the sense that I'm part of the blue demographic and, despite having a lot of libertarian instincts, have made my peace with the welfare state.
That said I know I'm not really part of the tribe and therefore critiques of it never feel personal to me.
"
Points 1 and 2 I largely agree with. Point 3 is a bit more complicated. Trump seems to me to have run on an economically populist (even if incoherent) platform. It isn't clear to me how popular scrapping or privatizing the welfare state really is outside of the conservative intelligentsia.
Points 4 and 5 is where I think there is a big oversimplification going on in the broader mainstream left (or at least the upper middle class, media savvy left). I think you're right, that culture matters, and it's hard to envision policy changes in a culture that is overwhelmingly hostile to the beneficiaries of the policy or finds it immoral. However, where I think progressives are getting it wrong is the belief that culture is always in the driver's seat. I see it as a factor (which itself is always evolving) along with economics and policy decisions.
From a pragmatic perspective relying on cultural conversion alone is never going to be enough to win. IIRC you yourself have referenced John Mcwhorter on this. It's ridiculous to think that a country the size of a continent with over 300 million people is ever going to uniformly adopt the culture of the coastal college educated urban class. Relying on that seems to me like a recipe for defeat. All I hear Freddie and the Bernie supporters saying is that the broader left needs to be willing to work with people who aren't part of the culture and digging in with snark and disdain the way the right has is counterproductive.
On point 6 I don't really have a strong opinion. I'm not on Twitter so all I know is what I observe, and what I observe is that the progressive side is as vicious as anyone in online exchanges.
"
I guess I just read it differently. He's never struck me as particularly abrasive (just direct). His critics on the other hand (at least that I've read) have always seemed to me to go much more for the ad hominems and fail to address his points in intellectually honest ways.
Regarding taking his advice well... I'd just say that people who have made similar points to Freddie are looking a lot more prescient right now than the folks going apoplectic.
"
Well I don't entirely disagree but I'd quibble that I do think it's fair to call the EC flawed at this point. It's increasingly giving disproportionate influence to a smaller and smaller part of the population at the expense of the more populous and economically important parts of the country. Now I would agree that there is a means of changing that, and the Democrats had as good a chance as any in 2009 to push that. For that reason I do think it's tough to take the complaints now particularly seriously.
"
I think Saul is right in that the complete and utter panic by mainstream progressives is unjustified. A flawed system produced a bad outcome. At some point, sooner or later, Democrats will return to power. Our system is set up to be slow and gradual, and while Trump will nudge things in certain directions, absent something both unprecedented and unlikely he won't be able to remake the country anymore than any other president.
Of course all of this isn't really Freddie's point. His critique has always been that progressives, particularly in media, have gotten into a bad habit of putting culture before policy and it's become an impediment to effectuating positive change. I can never understand why this gets under so many people's skin, especially when the same side often makes similar criticisms about right wing echo chambers in talk radio or Fox News.
I also think the whole 'white middle aged males have problems with HRC because reasons' is really disingenuous given how often those reasons have been discussed. Even then I think the vast majority of people here would've preferred her to win.
On “Linky Second Tuesday After The First Monday In November”
Not just hubris. Its also where thinking only or primarily in terms of identity politics becomes quite patronizing.
"
My mother and grandmother are themselves examples of the phenomenon.
"
I'm not Hispanic but I would hazard a guess based on experience with relatives who immigrated here from Europe in the early 50s. There is such a thing as a flag waiving immigrant. They take a lot of pride in having done things the right way, and aggressively embrace their new nationality. From this perspective, it can be pretty easy to view those who did not follow the rules in both a very emotional and a very negative light.
From their perspective the appeals to nationalism and respect for the rules may resonate sufficiently that they can overlook the racist overtones, especially if they're far enough on the path to assimilation that they don't hear the insults as directed at them. Anecdotal but a good friend of mine whose parents immigrated here legally from El Salvador has expressed conflicted but at times very negative attitudes towards individuals in the country illegally. Identity matters but it isn't everything to everyone all the time.
On “A One Party Nation”
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.
On “So. That Happened.”
It's clear to you and me that your average Democrat is not a communist but we aren't the ones who need convincing. My proposal is to see if we can figure out why it isn't so obvious to people who aren't like us and if there's anything we can do about it. To be clear, this isn't about being selfless it's about being very disturbed by what just happened.
"
It isn't clear to me that they're doing a great job locally given the losses in state level government. I mean, per the conversation above it isnt even clear who is going to lead the party now.
Regarding policy I think there's an emphasis issue. The ACA has a pretty good chance of dying here, but assuming that doesn't happen, I'd have people in southern and midwestern states advocating like crazy for the Medicaid expansion as issue number 1. Take North Carolina for example where theres this big battle on the bathroom issue. My recommendation is that theres a similarly big if not bigger battle over the fact that there is federal money ready to aid in the health care of working class and poor families and the state wont take it for nakedly partisan reasons. Maybe they're already doing things like that but if so I haven't heard about it.
"
See my comment above to North. There are parts of the party that realize the issue but someone like Clinton was never going to be able to deliver the message. There's too much history and baggage.
Edit to add I don't think you necessarily need to make impossible promises but you do need to run someone who isn't the epitome of who this demographic is flipping the bird at.
"
Generally I agree that HRC did not run on cultural liberalism, but I think there's a lot of guilt by association for anyone who is part of the establishment, which she very much is. The people supporting Trump, rightly or wrongly, see her as someone who got rich and powerful without playing by the rules (there's definitely some disonance going on with support for Trump but at least he speaks their language and claims to care). From their perspective Clinton is part of a bipartisan elite running the country that to varying degrees puts the interests of bankers, big business, urbanites, minorities, and foreigners ahead of theirs.
In terms of how to deal with it I think that the party needs to start rebuilding at the local and state level by recruiting and cultivating leaders from these blighted areas who understand the problems, the perspective, and the culture. That is going to require some flexibility on cultural issues and an acceptance that candidate's like this probably wouldn't fit in at a Brooklyn dinner party or brunch at a DC restaurant. Part of the point of this strategy is to render accusations about being communists or Kenyans or whatever conservative media says to be transparently ridiculous.
"
Whether he could have won or not is impossible to know and I take no position in that question. My point is that he was able to expose where her weaknesses were and maybe provide a path forward even if he himself isn't the candidate to lead it.
Progressives in urban enclaves created for themselves the exact kind of echo chamber they regularly and rightly criticize on the right and convinced themselves that Clinton's shortcomings weren't nearly as significant as they were.
"
@leeesq I'm buying what you're selling.
"
This morning a blogger I follow wrote 'The people want jobs. The elites want genderless bathrooms.' I don't want to imply that the Democrats should leave marginalized groups to fend for themselves but for the national party I think the reshuffle needs to be about finding economic answers for people left behind in the post industrial world. Sanders showed there's a constituency for that, and some of it lives in the Midwest where Clinton really lost this election. The next two pieces for the national party I think need to be reigning in the establishments appetite for military adventurism, and being more willing to talk about controlling illegal immigration (albeit in a much more humane and pragmatic way than the Republican enforcement uber alles approach).
I know it isn't the answer a lot of people who want to push cultural liberalism would like. However I think the national party needs to accept that those battles need to be fought first and foremost at local and state levels, and that some parts of the country are going to move faster than others.
"
I like these ideas.
"
I think you and jr are dead on. This was a bad outcome but the melodrama this morning is absurd. America isnt (yet) any different than it was yesterday. All we learned is that the Democrats did exactly what Bernie Sanders warned them about and nominated someone who doesn't take the trade and immigration concerns of the white working class seriously. It cost them winnable votes in Pennsylvania and the upper Midwest that would've turned the election. Chris Matthews of all people made some very insightful points to this effect around 2 AM last night on MSNBC.
The response is to push back the same as during the Bush years. Progressives have more allies and means of asserting power than they think, and for God's sake this campus style emotionalism, identitarianism, and helplessness needs to stop.
On “Linky First Tuesday After The First Monday Of November”
I think it's important that progressives acknowledge that in order to regroup. They fell behind a very compromised candidate and all the identity politics and appeals to establishment credentials weren't enough, even when the opponent was a demagogue and buffoon. Loss of those upper Midwest states and Pennsylvania speaks volumes.
"
Wouldn't that be nice...
On “On Accepting The Results – Or Not”
I'm not sure I agree. We've been watching that show for the last 6ish years. No one has blinked and now we have one presidential candidate openly advocating disregarding the system and another who has a history that suggests a disquieting comfort with disregarding rules she doesn't like.
I see no reason to be optimistic that continued brinkmanship will lead to good policy or an improved political climate.
"
We've been living in Bonerland for some time now.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.