I think people would be fine with the tax required to, say, give us a truly universal healthcare system, because for most of us at least, it would cost us less, because so much of our compensation is in the form of health insurance, because our health insurance costs on top of that are so high, and/or because even with health insurance, we still have to pay out the ass for healthcare and medicine. I also think the American people are smart enough to understand that. I think the center right (the wing of the Democratic Party Tony Blair feels most sympathetic to) have a vested interest in making sure they never do understand that.
After every election loss, for as long as I can remember, the moderate Democratic strategy has been "Become Republican Lite," and then people start saying, "There's no real distinction between the two parties," and moderate Democrats get very upset.
I realize, of course, that the non-Republicans here are overwhelmingly within the moderate wing of the Democratic electorate, and spend pretty much all of their reading time reading others who are at least as far right as they are, but the most popular Democrat in the country remains the party's most visible left liberal, and his ideas remain incredibly popular not only among the Democratic Party base.
It makes perfect sense to talk to people where they are (the moderate Dems' gun shows and tailgate parties), and to talk to them about what is happening in their lives, but it's so weird to me that so many Democrats, and so many people here, feel like the job of a political party is to do what the electorate wants (which, at least last year, was vote for Republicans), instead of to convince voters that their ideas are better on the issues that voters care about. Why even have two parties? We can just fight out all of these disagreements in Republican primaries.
This looks bad, because it's in front of the cameras, but I suspect this is the way he's been talked to by the U.S., maybe without the Trump histrionics (e.g., the Hunter Biden references and "Don't tell me how we'll feel!"), since he came into power. And I don't think he's the only world leader who gets talked to like this by us.
This might be the only time I will ever link to a Larry Summers tweet positively, but this sounds about right:
I think there really was a battle for the soul of the GOP, and American conservatism generally, starting before the 60s, when Dixiecrats begin turning to the Republican Party, then continuing into the 60s with the fallout from the Civil Rights Act, the paleo-neocon battle, and their beginning to really cater to Evangelical/Christian conservative voters in the late 60s and 70s. I think you could probably say that's when they started on the path that leads to Trump (Christian conservatives are a big part of MAGA), or that it started with Reagan, or the Contract With America, but I think you really start to see the old political norms erode in such a way that a Trump becomes possible under Dubya, and in particular after 9/11. We just became a different country, politically, after that, as evidenced by the unadulterated awfulness of the Bush administration pretty much from that date on.
That, at least, is when a lot of people on the left, including progressive Dems (hell, even some centrist ones eventually), and a lot of libertarians, began warning that we were headed down a dangerous path of increased executive power and an increasingly divided polity (especially after the invasion of Iraq began to go south, but probably inevitable even without that given the 50+1 strategy). Throw in financial instability, continued outsourcing, increased inequality, etc., and you have a recipe for, well, now.
Obama was super popular among a certain type of liberal, but his approval ratings never rose far above 50% his entire second term, and were at times in the 30s. In fact, I think his approval ratings were in the mid-to-low 40s the entire lead up to the 2016 election. I'm sure a bunch of people wish they could have voted for him in 2016, and hell, maybe he'd have beaten Trump, but he was not popular, and I don't remember many people saying they wish they could vote for him a 3rd time the way they did with Clinton in 2000.
I continue to believe Obama's talent as a politician and his popularity among progressives convinced a lot of what is effectively the Dem base (white, educated, middle to upper middle class people) that everything was fine and dandy with the Democratic Party, even though he basically didn't accomplish anything for the last 7 years of his presidency, and the Democratic Party as a whole was a rotten-to-the-core gerontocracy that no longer seemed to have any principles, messages, or really any ideas whatsoever, much less the hope that got Obama elected. This made both the rise of Bernie Sanders, someone who does have principles and a message (and remains one of, if not the most popular politician in the country as a result, even if centrists hate him for the same reason), and Donald Trump, a complete nihilist, possible.
Dude grew a beard and started writing, making movies, and talking about the climate, and suddenly seemed like a completely different person. I suspect he got a lot of bad advice during that campaign. Imagine how bad your advisers have to be for you to fire Mark Penn and then your campaign gets worse!
Coincidentally, I met Gore in the early 90s when I was in Youth Legislature, and he was still a Senator. He seemed like a perfectly nice and funny guy talking to us, but was stiff as a board as Vice President and then as a presidential candidate.
I suffer from this problem as well, so I can't blame them too much, but as someone who voted for Nader (I don't even like Nader; in fact, I really dislike him, but that's how much I disliked Gore, and I'm from Tennessee), it drives me nuts.
Something I've thought about a lot over the last few months is the difference between the typical Trump voter in 2016 and 2020 vs the typical Trump voter in 2024. The hardcore MAGA have been there all along, and their ranks have swelled and shrunk and swelled again over time, their cult of personality turning people who, at least among those I know, had previously been pretty decent, into rolling balls of hate and cruelty, but most Trump voters aren't MAGA. A lot of them felt completely abandoned by the last administration, for one reason or another, through the pandemic (with its uncertainty and its uptick in crime), inflation, etc.
What I wonder is, where do those voters go, when Trump policies start to affect their lives. Does cognitive dissonance cause them to go even deeper into Trump, maybe even become MAGA, and blame the Democrats for what their own (lyin') eyes clearly see as Trump's actions? Do they abandon Trump, and go to the Democrats, who have so far given them no reason to think they'll work for them any more than they have in the last few years? Do they drop out of politics altogether?
The way I remember it, he even got rid of most of the Clinton people in his campaign, and did so pretty early, as a signal that he was going to run a campaign independent of Clinton. I remember him dropping Mark Penn, which is an unqualified good thing, but as close as Penn was to the Clintons, that was a pretty clear sign of Gore's intentions. Looking it up, I found this, which includes this bit revealing the mindset of the Gore campaign:
Perhaps more important, Penn does not believe that "Clinton fatigue" is a major factor in 2000 politics, say those familiar with his thinking. This was an assessment at odds with some critical voices in the Gore camp who believe that overcoming the nation's weariness with Clinton is the key challenge confronting the vice president.
As political miscalculations go, thinking they had to distance themselves from a remarkably popular president turned out to be about as big as they get.
But to this day, liberals still blame the left and Nader.
It wasn't uncommon in 2000 to hear people say they'd vote for Clinton for a 3rd term if they could, which I think was a reflection of both how popular Clinton was and how unpopular his two potential successors were.
Hell, I think if he had been able to run in 2000, it might have been the first time he won a majority, and it may very well have been a Reagan-level landslide. For the last few years, the economy had been good, we hadn't gotten into any real land wars, just bombing and No Fly Zones, and Clinton and tacked hard to the center after Republicans won Congress, so that even a sex scandal and impeachment couldn't really touch him.
In hindsight, the groundwork for everything that came after was already there: The "War on Terror," the bursting of the Dot Com bubble and the recession that followed (and the much bigger recession that would follow that), rising costs and inequality, resurgent far and religious rights, climate and energy battles, etc., etc., but if you were in the middle class and nearsighted, as we all are most of the time, things looked pretty damn good.
Yeah, the general explanations for Gore's "loss" in 2000 were:
1) Bush spoke in soundbites, while Gore gave lectures. In other words, one was good at messaging and the other was bad.
2) Gore failed to capitalize on the popularity of Clinton.
3) Nader and his voters stole Gore votes, ultimately costing him key swing states.
Coincidentally, liberals are still convinced that the main reason they lose elections is messaging, and especially that Republicans are better at it than Democrats. See, e.g., the narrative that voters were tricked into believing the economy isn't perfect.
It was in many ways the opposite. By the election, Clinton was incredibly popular, but Gore's team convinced him to distance himself from Clinton under the assumption that Clinton must be toxic because of the impeachment and the scandal around it (people were not yet all that worried about how he'd treated Lewinsky). Gore received a lot of criticism afterwards for not taking advantage of his association with a president who by then had approval ratings way higher than either Gore or Bush.
Fair enough. The top 10% originated at UT-Austin, I believe (the % has since varied based on the size of the student body and the number of applications; I believe it's at 5% now), where it has seriously reduced the racial and ethnic diversity of the undergraduate population.
I understand that college administrations tend to move at a glacial pace, so, e.g., gender-based factors in admission are ridiculous in 2025 (with some possible exceptions based on major), and they still tend to miss underprivileged black kids entirely despite having programs that are supposed to help them. I'm perfectly willing to say we should be working on programs that actually help people who are at a disadvantage through no fault of their own.
Put me in camp 3 then. Disparities exist, but that’s fine and expected if they’re the result of a fair system.
Well, at least we don't have to worry about them being the result of a fair system.
More seriously, I used to do disparity studies looking at racial access to various things, like contracts, credit, etc., and one of the most consistent findings is that, even if you hold all of the things that lenders say they look at constant, black people are approved for credit at a much lower rate. You can throw in zip code into the model, and still, being black is a huge impediment to getting credit. Other researchers have shown this with housing, hiring, etc. The system isn't fair, so we don't even need to think about what we'd do in a fair system.
Take admissions to, say, elite colleges: do you think grades, GPA, school, and, say, extracurricular activities are the only things that should be taken into account, or should factors outside of the students' control that impact those things also be taken into account (poverty, discrimination, etc.)?
I mean it is a straw man in that very few liberals actually want "group rights," in the sense that being in a group entitles one automatically to something. Even the pre-DEI racist bugaboo, "Affirmative Action," didn't involve "group rights" in this sense.
The question is, rather, are their historical disparities that we can take steps to make up for, or should we let them just disappear very slowly over time. Even the libertarians, when they still existed, tended to admit the disparities existed, but believed that the market would get rid of them, and if left alone (to a reasonable extent), it would get rid of them quickly. The anti-DEI folks seem to fall into two camps, those who deny any racial or gender-based disparities still exist, and those who think that we should just let them die on their own, slowly, and painfully for those still subject to them. Pro-DEI folks want to try to alleviate, if not eliminate, the disparities now.
By invoking an individual vs group rights framework, you elide all of those questions entirely, which is awfully convenient.
I don't feel the need to defend any one of the three concepts that makeup DEI. I suppose we could quibble about specific programs, if there are ones you have concerns about. I think they're pretty basic societal values, the sharing of which are necessary for the common ground required for conversation and in fact the basic fairness and justice, from a liberal (broadly construed, not the American political version) perspective. Hell, back when libertarians existed, one of their claims was that you got those things through markets, so when I say liberal broadly construed, I mean to include the folks who used to call themselves classic liberals, may they rest in peace.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/3/2025”
I think people would be fine with the tax required to, say, give us a truly universal healthcare system, because for most of us at least, it would cost us less, because so much of our compensation is in the form of health insurance, because our health insurance costs on top of that are so high, and/or because even with health insurance, we still have to pay out the ass for healthcare and medicine. I also think the American people are smart enough to understand that. I think the center right (the wing of the Democratic Party Tony Blair feels most sympathetic to) have a vested interest in making sure they never do understand that.
"
I have shamelessly joined the pile-ons of both The Democrats and the Third Way Dems:
https://x.com/MixingChris/status/1895850328098271336?t=ryugv2tu5jc3uGVNrrgwEw&s=19
https://x.com/MixingChris/status/1896578900681224356?t=YO_fZYJwSBNd7t2nM2EiLA&s=19
I'm not gonna vote for them anyway, but I'd at least like to see the opposition party act as a competent opposition.
"
After every election loss, for as long as I can remember, the moderate Democratic strategy has been "Become Republican Lite," and then people start saying, "There's no real distinction between the two parties," and moderate Democrats get very upset.
I realize, of course, that the non-Republicans here are overwhelmingly within the moderate wing of the Democratic electorate, and spend pretty much all of their reading time reading others who are at least as far right as they are, but the most popular Democrat in the country remains the party's most visible left liberal, and his ideas remain incredibly popular not only among the Democratic Party base.
It makes perfect sense to talk to people where they are (the moderate Dems' gun shows and tailgate parties), and to talk to them about what is happening in their lives, but it's so weird to me that so many Democrats, and so many people here, feel like the job of a political party is to do what the electorate wants (which, at least last year, was vote for Republicans), instead of to convince voters that their ideas are better on the issues that voters care about. Why even have two parties? We can just fight out all of these disagreements in Republican primaries.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
This looks bad, because it's in front of the cameras, but I suspect this is the way he's been talked to by the U.S., maybe without the Trump histrionics (e.g., the Hunter Biden references and "Don't tell me how we'll feel!"), since he came into power. And I don't think he's the only world leader who gets talked to like this by us.
This might be the only time I will ever link to a Larry Summers tweet positively, but this sounds about right:
https://x.com/LHSummers/status/1646967949297700872?lang=en
On “In Times Without Norms, All Laws Fall Silent”
I think there really was a battle for the soul of the GOP, and American conservatism generally, starting before the 60s, when Dixiecrats begin turning to the Republican Party, then continuing into the 60s with the fallout from the Civil Rights Act, the paleo-neocon battle, and their beginning to really cater to Evangelical/Christian conservative voters in the late 60s and 70s. I think you could probably say that's when they started on the path that leads to Trump (Christian conservatives are a big part of MAGA), or that it started with Reagan, or the Contract With America, but I think you really start to see the old political norms erode in such a way that a Trump becomes possible under Dubya, and in particular after 9/11. We just became a different country, politically, after that, as evidenced by the unadulterated awfulness of the Bush administration pretty much from that date on.
That, at least, is when a lot of people on the left, including progressive Dems (hell, even some centrist ones eventually), and a lot of libertarians, began warning that we were headed down a dangerous path of increased executive power and an increasingly divided polity (especially after the invasion of Iraq began to go south, but probably inevitable even without that given the 50+1 strategy). Throw in financial instability, continued outsourcing, increased inequality, etc., and you have a recipe for, well, now.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
I do hope that one of the lessons Democrats have learned from the last 5 or 6 weeks is that it's actually possible to do things.
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Ah, so it's the building, not the call for a global intifada, that you're objecting to?
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Would it then also cover this then?
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Obama was super popular among a certain type of liberal, but his approval ratings never rose far above 50% his entire second term, and were at times in the 30s. In fact, I think his approval ratings were in the mid-to-low 40s the entire lead up to the 2016 election. I'm sure a bunch of people wish they could have voted for him in 2016, and hell, maybe he'd have beaten Trump, but he was not popular, and I don't remember many people saying they wish they could vote for him a 3rd time the way they did with Clinton in 2000.
I continue to believe Obama's talent as a politician and his popularity among progressives convinced a lot of what is effectively the Dem base (white, educated, middle to upper middle class people) that everything was fine and dandy with the Democratic Party, even though he basically didn't accomplish anything for the last 7 years of his presidency, and the Democratic Party as a whole was a rotten-to-the-core gerontocracy that no longer seemed to have any principles, messages, or really any ideas whatsoever, much less the hope that got Obama elected. This made both the rise of Bernie Sanders, someone who does have principles and a message (and remains one of, if not the most popular politician in the country as a result, even if centrists hate him for the same reason), and Donald Trump, a complete nihilist, possible.
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And this past year we were told a 60-year old Harris was young. How times have changed.
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Dude grew a beard and started writing, making movies, and talking about the climate, and suddenly seemed like a completely different person. I suspect he got a lot of bad advice during that campaign. Imagine how bad your advisers have to be for you to fire Mark Penn and then your campaign gets worse!
Coincidentally, I met Gore in the early 90s when I was in Youth Legislature, and he was still a Senator. He seemed like a perfectly nice and funny guy talking to us, but was stiff as a board as Vice President and then as a presidential candidate.
"
I suffer from this problem as well, so I can't blame them too much, but as someone who voted for Nader (I don't even like Nader; in fact, I really dislike him, but that's how much I disliked Gore, and I'm from Tennessee), it drives me nuts.
"
Something I've thought about a lot over the last few months is the difference between the typical Trump voter in 2016 and 2020 vs the typical Trump voter in 2024. The hardcore MAGA have been there all along, and their ranks have swelled and shrunk and swelled again over time, their cult of personality turning people who, at least among those I know, had previously been pretty decent, into rolling balls of hate and cruelty, but most Trump voters aren't MAGA. A lot of them felt completely abandoned by the last administration, for one reason or another, through the pandemic (with its uncertainty and its uptick in crime), inflation, etc.
What I wonder is, where do those voters go, when Trump policies start to affect their lives. Does cognitive dissonance cause them to go even deeper into Trump, maybe even become MAGA, and blame the Democrats for what their own (lyin') eyes clearly see as Trump's actions? Do they abandon Trump, and go to the Democrats, who have so far given them no reason to think they'll work for them any more than they have in the last few years? Do they drop out of politics altogether?
Times like this, I wish we had an organized left.
"
The way I remember it, he even got rid of most of the Clinton people in his campaign, and did so pretty early, as a signal that he was going to run a campaign independent of Clinton. I remember him dropping Mark Penn, which is an unqualified good thing, but as close as Penn was to the Clintons, that was a pretty clear sign of Gore's intentions. Looking it up, I found this, which includes this bit revealing the mindset of the Gore campaign:
As political miscalculations go, thinking they had to distance themselves from a remarkably popular president turned out to be about as big as they get.
But to this day, liberals still blame the left and Nader.
"
It wasn't uncommon in 2000 to hear people say they'd vote for Clinton for a 3rd term if they could, which I think was a reflection of both how popular Clinton was and how unpopular his two potential successors were.
Hell, I think if he had been able to run in 2000, it might have been the first time he won a majority, and it may very well have been a Reagan-level landslide. For the last few years, the economy had been good, we hadn't gotten into any real land wars, just bombing and No Fly Zones, and Clinton and tacked hard to the center after Republicans won Congress, so that even a sex scandal and impeachment couldn't really touch him.
In hindsight, the groundwork for everything that came after was already there: The "War on Terror," the bursting of the Dot Com bubble and the recession that followed (and the much bigger recession that would follow that), rising costs and inequality, resurgent far and religious rights, climate and energy battles, etc., etc., but if you were in the middle class and nearsighted, as we all are most of the time, things looked pretty damn good.
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What's wild is he had approval ratings that high despite never winning a majority of the popular vote.
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Yeah, the general explanations for Gore's "loss" in 2000 were:
1) Bush spoke in soundbites, while Gore gave lectures. In other words, one was good at messaging and the other was bad.
2) Gore failed to capitalize on the popularity of Clinton.
3) Nader and his voters stole Gore votes, ultimately costing him key swing states.
Coincidentally, liberals are still convinced that the main reason they lose elections is messaging, and especially that Republicans are better at it than Democrats. See, e.g., the narrative that voters were tricked into believing the economy isn't perfect.
"
It was in many ways the opposite. By the election, Clinton was incredibly popular, but Gore's team convinced him to distance himself from Clinton under the assumption that Clinton must be toxic because of the impeachment and the scandal around it (people were not yet all that worried about how he'd treated Lewinsky). Gore received a lot of criticism afterwards for not taking advantage of his association with a president who by then had approval ratings way higher than either Gore or Bush.
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I don't like it. It makes a lot of sense in theory, but in practice has pretty significantly reduced the diversity of the undergraduate population.
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Fair enough. The top 10% originated at UT-Austin, I believe (the % has since varied based on the size of the student body and the number of applications; I believe it's at 5% now), where it has seriously reduced the racial and ethnic diversity of the undergraduate population.
I understand that college administrations tend to move at a glacial pace, so, e.g., gender-based factors in admission are ridiculous in 2025 (with some possible exceptions based on major), and they still tend to miss underprivileged black kids entirely despite having programs that are supposed to help them. I'm perfectly willing to say we should be working on programs that actually help people who are at a disadvantage through no fault of their own.
"
Put me in camp 3 then. Disparities exist, but that’s fine and expected if they’re the result of a fair system.
Well, at least we don't have to worry about them being the result of a fair system.
More seriously, I used to do disparity studies looking at racial access to various things, like contracts, credit, etc., and one of the most consistent findings is that, even if you hold all of the things that lenders say they look at constant, black people are approved for credit at a much lower rate. You can throw in zip code into the model, and still, being black is a huge impediment to getting credit. Other researchers have shown this with housing, hiring, etc. The system isn't fair, so we don't even need to think about what we'd do in a fair system.
"
Take admissions to, say, elite colleges: do you think grades, GPA, school, and, say, extracurricular activities are the only things that should be taken into account, or should factors outside of the students' control that impact those things also be taken into account (poverty, discrimination, etc.)?
"
I mean it is a straw man in that very few liberals actually want "group rights," in the sense that being in a group entitles one automatically to something. Even the pre-DEI racist bugaboo, "Affirmative Action," didn't involve "group rights" in this sense.
The question is, rather, are their historical disparities that we can take steps to make up for, or should we let them just disappear very slowly over time. Even the libertarians, when they still existed, tended to admit the disparities existed, but believed that the market would get rid of them, and if left alone (to a reasonable extent), it would get rid of them quickly. The anti-DEI folks seem to fall into two camps, those who deny any racial or gender-based disparities still exist, and those who think that we should just let them die on their own, slowly, and painfully for those still subject to them. Pro-DEI folks want to try to alleviate, if not eliminate, the disparities now.
By invoking an individual vs group rights framework, you elide all of those questions entirely, which is awfully convenient.
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What sorts of DEI initiatives would you be in favor of?
"
I don't feel the need to defend any one of the three concepts that makeup DEI. I suppose we could quibble about specific programs, if there are ones you have concerns about. I think they're pretty basic societal values, the sharing of which are necessary for the common ground required for conversation and in fact the basic fairness and justice, from a liberal (broadly construed, not the American political version) perspective. Hell, back when libertarians existed, one of their claims was that you got those things through markets, so when I say liberal broadly construed, I mean to include the folks who used to call themselves classic liberals, may they rest in peace.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.