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.
Since you are someone who has repeatedly argued that progressives have rhetorically contributed to Trump's win with things like defund and trans stuff and DEI, I assume you realized how silly it was for you, specifically, to post this, and left it up out of principle, for which I applaud you.
I think most of #2 are anti-Trump enough not to vote for him. These are people like Chait and Noah Smith, who probably vote Democrat at the state and national level pretty consistently. I mean, I'm sure some of them were angry enough at DEI to vote for Trump. But even if they didn't vote for Trump, they've contributed to his win rhetorically.
I'm saying the way GG played out, and who was part of it (demographically, but also specific individuals), looks a lot like the way anti-DEI has played out. Hell, at this point, Mar-a-Lago face is like the real life version of female characters in games having to have a certain look.
I think there are three main groups of "Anti-DEI" folks:
1) Racists and misogynists, which comprises the bulk of the right wing anti-DEI block.
2) People genuinely concerned about both the optics and the actual bad programs, which comprises some or perhaps most of the centrist anti-DEI camp.
3) Anti-woke leftists, who were under a previous terminology, anti-identitarian leftists, who are comprised of about 25% people who actually feel like identity obsession leads to division within the working class, and this limits class solidarity and action at the class level, and 75% racists and misogynists.
The genuinely concerned centrists and genuinely concerned leftists are outnumbered by the ones on the right, by a lot, and the ones on the right have pretty much all the power now, which means, in effect, that the centrists (less so the leftists, because there are so few of them that they're not culturally or politically relevant in anyway) have just been carrying water for the racists and misogynists. To me, this makes the differences in reasons behind their anti-DEI stances irrelevant, because the end result is always racists and misogynists winning.
This is also a helpful way of painting over socially unacceptable beliefs: convince yourself that the reason a person thinks your a racist or a misogynist is not because you've been openly misogynistic or racist, but merely because they disagree with you.
Gamergate did provide a really nice example of what the anti-"woke", anti-"CRT," and anti-"DEI" movements would look like conceptually, and even a hint about what sorts of people would be pushing these movements.
I suppose it says something positive about our society that we've reached a point at which misogynists and racists have to wrap their bigotry and hatred up into packages that they can, at least among themselves, argue is about something other than what it's clearly about.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
And this past year we were told a 60-year old Harris was young. How times have changed.
"
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.
"
What's wild is he had approval ratings that high despite never winning a majority of the popular vote.
"
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.
"
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.
"
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.
"
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.
"
Since you are someone who has repeatedly argued that progressives have rhetorically contributed to Trump's win with things like defund and trans stuff and DEI, I assume you realized how silly it was for you, specifically, to post this, and left it up out of principle, for which I applaud you.
"
I think most of #2 are anti-Trump enough not to vote for him. These are people like Chait and Noah Smith, who probably vote Democrat at the state and national level pretty consistently. I mean, I'm sure some of them were angry enough at DEI to vote for Trump. But even if they didn't vote for Trump, they've contributed to his win rhetorically.
"
I'm saying the way GG played out, and who was part of it (demographically, but also specific individuals), looks a lot like the way anti-DEI has played out. Hell, at this point, Mar-a-Lago face is like the real life version of female characters in games having to have a certain look.
"
I think there are three main groups of "Anti-DEI" folks:
1) Racists and misogynists, which comprises the bulk of the right wing anti-DEI block.
2) People genuinely concerned about both the optics and the actual bad programs, which comprises some or perhaps most of the centrist anti-DEI camp.
3) Anti-woke leftists, who were under a previous terminology, anti-identitarian leftists, who are comprised of about 25% people who actually feel like identity obsession leads to division within the working class, and this limits class solidarity and action at the class level, and 75% racists and misogynists.
The genuinely concerned centrists and genuinely concerned leftists are outnumbered by the ones on the right, by a lot, and the ones on the right have pretty much all the power now, which means, in effect, that the centrists (less so the leftists, because there are so few of them that they're not culturally or politically relevant in anyway) have just been carrying water for the racists and misogynists. To me, this makes the differences in reasons behind their anti-DEI stances irrelevant, because the end result is always racists and misogynists winning.
"
Hoping for some induced demand.
(I realize I'm using this term figuratively.)
"
This is also a helpful way of painting over socially unacceptable beliefs: convince yourself that the reason a person thinks your a racist or a misogynist is not because you've been openly misogynistic or racist, but merely because they disagree with you.
"
Gamergate did provide a really nice example of what the anti-"woke", anti-"CRT," and anti-"DEI" movements would look like conceptually, and even a hint about what sorts of people would be pushing these movements.
I suppose it says something positive about our society that we've reached a point at which misogynists and racists have to wrap their bigotry and hatred up into packages that they can, at least among themselves, argue is about something other than what it's clearly about.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
OPM doesn’t have the legal authority to make that request.
I just don't think this matters anymore.
"
You can't have mature capitalism without a welfare state.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.