I like your perspective here. We don't need a "liberal MAGA" movement. We don't want Gavin Newsom to be the Democratic Ron DeSantis.
However, I do think Democrats need to acknowledge that messaging in the internet age is endless trench warfare. You have to show up every day. You have to be punchy and entertaining. You have to be "authentic" and not overly-polished. You have to use a wide variety of media to saturate coverage with messages that the median individual in different demographic groups can appreciate and understand. You have to be relentless and willing to run up the score whenever you can. You can't assume that any media organizations are going to call balls and strikes fairly. Again, this doesn't mean that Democrats should lie or bullshit the public, but they can't afford to tout their policy achievements on legacy new outlets and assume that this will be enough.
All good points. Is it your impression that liberals *can* operate in that trench warfare environment? Or is there something about their—our—approach to politics that makes us ill-equipped to operate on that front? Curious to hear your thoughts.
The Democrat brand has become tarnished by all the left-wing hate that's on display on social media. Just a couple of examples I've seen in the past few hours:
Some Democrats seem to think that oppression of women / people of color which occurred literally decades ago should act as a blank check, for them to say whatever nasty things they want about broad demographics of humans that didn't vote for their candidate in sufficiently large numbers.
Sure, Harris herself doesn't endorse left-wing hate. She was all about unity -- that's great. But the hate affects the Democrat brand nonetheless. And voters are rational to wonder whether these haters are the sorts of people that Harris is likely to fill her cabinet with.
I would respect Harris a lot of she made a public statement, telling her supporters to rein it in with mindlessly lashing out against the groups that are perceived to have cost Harris her win. That's easily the most valuable thing she could do if she wants me to be enthusiastic about voting for Democrats in the future.
In your post, you describe Trump as the "enemy of the liberal order" who is opposed to "freedom of the press". Presumably you think the Democrats are the opposite. Yet Kamala was unambiguous that she wanted to crack down on Elon Musk's X, which sounded to my ears like a clear violation of freedom of the press / the 1st Amendment. The left has consistently been *against* freedom of speech -- seems very authoritarian -- and compared to Trump, they have a stronger tendency to follow through with their illiberal threats.
I don't think the Democrats have to be very ambitious from a policy perspective in order to win more elections. They're talking the talk about how they're the party of freedom, institutions, equality, and non-discrimination. But they say that out of one side of their mouth, while sending a totally different message with the other side of their mouth. Literally just be who you claim to be, and lots more people would be enthusiastic to vote Dem. That's my prediction.
And finally, to your point about overcorrection -- I think the illiberalism is so entrenched within the left in the US that we shouldn't be worried about overcorrection in this area. Undercorrection is a much bigger risk. If this moment is finally what it takes for moderate members of the Democratic coalition to have the bravery to stand up against their illiberal brothers and sisters, and tell them they need to shape up and actually stand by the party's creed consistently, instead of enforcing it in a hypocritical and selective manner, then so be it.
I don't disagree with this, but I'm not sure it actually gets to the central issues of addressing the need to identify and reexamine those aspects of liberal political culture that unnecessarily alienate many voters who seem happy to vote R against what would seem to be their interest. The MAGA cult is as much an anti-Commie-groomer-woke cult as a pro-Trump cult, and while liberals, progressives, and Never Trumpers aren't in control of Trump they are in control of their uneasy coalition.
I think Polis is absolutely on target (after having thought about this since . . . Tuesday night)--the strategy should not be "resistance," which is largely about political theater (I don't mean the term dismissively), it should be competence: demonstrating in Blue states what government can do for people. For example, I think every Democratic governor should be working asap to develop a plan to deliver a Romney-care proposal to the state legislature the day after Trump signs a repeal of the ACA. If Democrats can produce constructive results in the midst of federal chaos, I think 2026 will start the Blue wave that can check the momentum of federal damage and begin repairing the damage in January 2029. (And I do expect the damage to be enormous, systemic, and global.)
Polis’s experiences are edifying. Similar to how Walz has succeeded as governor of Minnesota. The important caveat, though, is that Colorado and Minnesota have Democrat trifecta control and operate at the somewhat less polarized state level. The U.S. govt, by contrast, is often more divided by party, plagued with virulent partisan warfare and disinformation that come standard with our nationalized political environment nowadays, and requires 60 votes in the Senate to pass anything. The question is how Dems can earn enough power in Congress and the White House to accomplish what Polis has while also telling their story above the din of federal politics.
All true. But don't discount how present the forces of polarized politics were even in a setting like Colorado—and yet it fared much better in the end. Trump was holding crunch-time rallies in Colorado to scaremonger about entire cities being captured, and in the end the state just withstood it pretty well. But what you've said is right, of course.
One can also read Yuval Harari's texts regarding liberalism, humans, and stories, such as his book " 21 Lessons for the 21st Century." It is important for liberals and other individualists to remember that our world is still better in many ways today than in 2014, 2004, 1994, etc.
While there's no liberal version of Trumpism, there can certainly be a liberal version of populism -- though the UnPopulist insists on denigratng populism by persistently including auhoritarianism, meanness, and bigotry in its definition, as a poison pill.
You can't get more "populist" than that -- with not a trace of Trumpian meanness in sight.
No less a moderate than David Brooks recognizes what's at stake here: "The rest of us need to look at this result with humility. American voters are not always wise, but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us.... Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable."
I've also addressed this in some comments on Matt Johnson's purported takedown of Joe Rogan, and I won't repeat myself here, except to add:
The remedy for Aunt Sally isn't an "improved" ("anti-racist"?) Aunt Sally. It's Huck Finn.
The remedy for Nurse Ratched is most decidedly NOT a "revitalized" Nurse Ratched. It's McMurphy (and the fact that Trump is a PHONY McMurphy -- an oligarch and authoritarian in his own right -- only makes his lying, his meanness and his swaggering [along with his seemingly-implicit discrediting of populism] all-the-more obscene).
I'm getting sick and tired of watching the UnPopulist run interference for the nomenklatura -- of "anti-authoritarians" who'd like to see us all living in a Brave New World that's run like a hospital -- with its rigid hierarchy and reliance on credentialed "experts" and clipboard-wielding administrators, perhaps the most authoritarian sort of institution (other than the military) that humanity has yet devised.
If liberalism means your right to move your arms ends where somebody else's nose begins, these are the sorts of folks whose "solution" is to put everybody in a straitjacket. They're the people who want to take you out of the driver's seat -- and who'll call you "NIMBY" if you want your (increasingly multi-ethnic) neighbors to HAVE their own backyards. (That condition qualifies as"sprawl" only to those looking down on it. Next up for the Condescension Crew: "Latinx"?)
These are also the sorts of apparatchiks who constantly invoke "the most vulnerable" (on behalf of their rich Foundation benefactors) as a scourge on our beleaguered, ever-shrinking middle class.
I don't agree with Sanders on every issue (and far less so with The Squad), but I understand why he won Joe Rogan's endorsement -- and I'm fully on-board with that.
No, I don't ever listen to Fox. In fact, much of the above is in response to the time I've spent with NPR.
And yes, I consider myself a liberal, whether you like it or not.
Thanks, as always, for reading, Mitchell. Even if you have sharp disagreements about what we write.
I have big disagreements with Bernie Sanders both stylistically and substantively. But in this article I wasn't so much criticizing him as contextualizing why using him as an example of how liberals might have success on Joe Rogan is misguided. Sanders has enough of an independent, anti-system streak to him that cannot be replicated by mainstream liberals—not in an authentic way. For example, they can't govern as independents who happen to be caucusing with Democrats. Sanders wanted to primary Obama in 2012 and was only stopped from doing so at the last minute. Rogan finds this "against the empire" ethos endearing. But it doesn't come naturally to mainstream liberals, and no artificial attempt to embody it will be able to pass the smell test.
When it comes to current discourse around "populism" online, there is certainly some talking past each other that I'm regularly noticing. Keep in mind that we operate with a conceptualization of populism that isn't merely interchangeable with "anti-elite." It is possible that what you take populism to be isn't something that we would necessarily think is beyond the pale, politically. Even in our surveys, we only categorized as populist respondents who qualified for that label under a multi-part schema.
I have no theoretical objection to you calling yourself a liberal, and have no reason to doubt your self-identification. Though there are some non-negotiables we'll minimally have to subscribe to to count as meaningfully liberal, not all liberals are going to agree even on other important matters. This site and its parent organization are actually on the vanguard of our political realignment away from the stale left/right division and toward a liberal/illiberal direction. Our conference in July hosted people on vastly different parts of the political spectrum. Stick around. I personally value voices like yours.
Thank you for your very civil and thoughtful reply!
Liberals can certainly disagree, The problem, IMHO, isn't with liberalism per se, but with its reification as ossified, self-credentialed bureaucracy -- and I often get the impression that the UnPopulist seems to be shilling for "the Empire," or what Joel Kotkin calls the Clerisy (i.e., what I've called the nomenklatura) and their corporate (and "philanthropic") sponsors.
As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr wrote: "The technical necessity for organization, as Robert Michel wrote long ago, sets in motion an inevitable tendency toward oligarchy. The leadership after a time is bound to have separate interests from the rank-and-file…. No loopholes have yet been discovered in the iron law of oligarchy.”
Thus, we enter our own Era of Stagnation. And that's what propels a guy like Joe Rogan.
For that matter, some see Populism in the (late 19th Century) US as itself rooted in liberalism. Indeed, this remains a matter of significant controversy among historians -- and those differences in perspective might (arguably), in turn, reflect the respective historians' personal biases and preconceptions. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Party_(United_States)#Debate_by_historians )
Speaking of second thoughts: It would be interesting to see if the UnPopulist would be willing to run a piece by the aforementioned Joel Kotkin -- if you can draw him in before he goes over completely to the (NatCon) Dark Side. Or if that's a bridge too far, maybe Musa al-Gharbi...
But meanwhile, I'll likely stick around (and you're likely to be stuck with me) as long as you haven't lost Yascha Mounk. ;-)
The Democrats totally DO need to overcorrect because we are so far off base in so many dimensions.
The first thing we have to realize is that WE are not that much different than those who voted for Trump despite his moral, legal, character, and decency shortcomings. WE (like the bulk of Trump voters) tend vote for our own self interest as we perceive them. This includes and subsumes our noble notions regarding protecting and building a more inclusive democracy. “Protecting democracy” (as they understood it) was also top of mind for many Trump voters.
The second thing we have to realize is that too many of our elder statesmen, elites, and so-called experts don’t (deep down) value “winning” over every thing. Nor do they value the interests of the bulk of the American people over everything. They value their own class interests and their connections and access to corporate money and power — and yes this goes for the consultant class too (maybe more than any other group who you might imagine care about a winning track record.)
The third thing we have to realize is that even if we consider ourselves white collar, highly educated, and enlightened specimens, most of us are actually working class in the sense that the bulk of our income comes from employment. And if we do have access to savings that might hold us over for more than a few months of no one being employed in our family, than we are still just a highly privileged member of the working class. Our education levels and ability to manipulate abstract symbols or deal with bureaucratic complexities and office politics actually cuts us off from large segments of the potential electorate that could have turned out for Harris but didn’t.
And, that brings us to the FINAL thing we should remember about this election. Trump won this election with fewer votes than he lost the last two times he ran for president. Harris lost this election because with a few shining exceptions (New Hampshire being a shining exception) voter turnout dropped precipitously. A lot of this was not under the control of Biden Harris who did do a lot for the working class (and for which the next president will get the credit because that’s when the results are going to start to be substantiated. The inflation burst was not under Biden/Harris control, but we can still learn some lessons from Trump who is a master of entertainment and political theater. We can also argue about the Gaza genocide and whether or what the current administration should have done differently. But neither Biden nor Harris could really make the majority of the population feel like they even saw them, never mind truly cared about them. We can learn a bit from Trump, but we should try very hard to learn A LOT from Bernie. Sidelining him and campaigning with a war monger and corporate shill like Liz Cheney was a perfect way to demonstrate that Harris could not be trusted — especially when her racial and gender status gave so many people motivation to find “reasons” not to vote for her.
@ Joe Panzica writes: "Our education levels and ability to manipulate abstract symbols or deal with bureaucratic complexities and office politics actually cuts us off from large segments of the potential electorate that could have turned out for Harris but didn’t."
Hmmm... Those who survive by manipulating bureaucratic complexities and office politics?
Here's what Jefferson had to say in 1785: "Corruption of morals… is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.... It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution."
TRANSLATION: A nation of whores can expect to be ruled by a pimp.
Which actor in the play has enough clout to suggest changes in the provided script? I am tossed spinning in the spun gloss of the voting event. Months of expressed fear regarding the day of voting,with threats and MAGA promises of how they will be present to "monitor" the voting at the polling places. This is what they said, we know what they meant. Volumnous fancy prancing political players in the "problem states" were conniving twisted legal changes to help out, you know, prolifically. Messaging from proMAGA
thugs were full of intimidations, carefully, subtly hid in double-speak. Suspicions of voting chicanery by many relevant political players were rampant everywhere, were prioritized on MSM, with declaration of legal challenges in legal defense promised. This rhetoric occupied daily media theatre. The only word I can choose to describe my shock is 'astounding' when I watched the election coverage. No trace of problematic behavior, apparently none at all. Whoosh. The election results were like a honeyed movie, with no trace of the drama proceeding the election. Not a word of it. The coverage made Trump look like Jimmy Stewart, dipped in smooth. Very, very smooth.
Well, but that's because we were expecting a closer election. We had been noting for a while that right-wing claims of electoral interference would only rev up, would only kick into gear, if the election was close or if Trump was losing. It became clear fairly early in the evening that Trump would not need to activate his election delegitimization playbook.
This piece appears to operate under the premise that losing coalitions have a tendency to overcorrect. That certainly did not happen in 2016. And the implication that Biden's win in 2020 can and should be chalked up to incumbency disadvantage is actually not a positive case for liberalism at all. Trump was running during a pandemic that he managed atrociously, and yet he won with such a tiny margin of error that he threatened US institutions as he challenged its result. Biden's campaign did no such overcorrecting, and the Harris campaign was merely a continuation of the same, trying to make an affirmative case for a historically unpopular administration. To imply that not only do liberal institutions learn from their mistakes, but in fact are susceptible to learning too much, does not appear to be based in recent history.
Furthermore, you rightfully bring up that the incumbency disadvantage does not explain all of Trump's victory, and that he diversified his coalition across a range of demographics. That is an incredible counterargument given exactly what those demographics are and how Trump was able to co-opt them. Yet it receives little attention in this piece, despite truly being the key to puzzle of why the premise on which it is based is fundamentally flawed.
We then go into a bulleted list of what liberals need to avoid. With all due respect, again, do you believe that a liberal movement is susceptible to any of these points? I may argue that the Biden/Harris administration and campaign already falls victim to point number 3, in its disastrous attempt to tack right on immigration in order to capture the mythical moderate. None of these points are credible threats to a left-wing movement, and I fear this piece does not adequately make the case that they are worth considering. I recognize that the comments about Buttigieg and Newsom are jokes, but just how unimaginable those images are should have disqualified the inclusion of the overall point(s) in a serious election postmortem.
I think your points about the narrative war are thoughtful and well-said. Democrats have historically failed on this front and have learned nothing to this regard. Biden's narcissistic, ego-driven unwillingness to step down as presidential nominee precluded any possible attempt to redefine the narrative of a Democratic presidency, and voters saw through what was ultimately a dishonest, consultant-driven construction of popularist policy positions, which were designed in an attempt to maximize swing-state vote share. And we saw how that went. What this piece doesn't do is consider what that narrative might be, or if it does (like with the Polis example), grasp why liberals have completely failed to allow that narrative to take shape. See: why Democrats have been too beholden to corporate interests to campaign on the economic issues that voters care about, and for the most part have not actually delivered in a way that is tangible to voters. Unfortunately, the approach that this piece advocates for (if there is one) will always lose out to fascism, every time, thereby enabling its creep into US institutions.
[And somewhat as an aside: We should talk about illiberalism in a discussion of how Bernie Sanders was outcast from the party despite being the only politician in recent history to mobilize voters from a broad coalition under a cohesive narrative and collective vision of what the future may hold and how that future could be realized. Sure, I recognize that this publication is part of an attempt to rethink partisanship, but when it's fascism we are up against, incrementalism will never succeed.]
Yes, don’t correct. This way republicans will continue to win overwhelming victories. Stay uncorrected. Remember when you are not correct, you are wrong! Lol
Here's something to ponder that is from Heather Cox Richardson. "[Amanda] Marcotte recalled that Catherine Ramped and Youyou Zhou of The Washington Post showed that before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris's policies [which resembled Polis'] to Trumps IF THEY DIDN'T KNOW WHICH CANDIDATE PROPOSED THEM. [my caps}. If that doesn't tell you what fueled Trumps win -- misogyny and racism -- nothing will.
However don't forget that Hillary Clinton did get more than 50% of the popular vote in 2016. Trump won the Electoral College because of 77,000 votes spread across three states.
Remember that more people voted for Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016 and that Joe Biden BARELY won the Electoral College by 50,000 votes spread across 3 states in 2020.
Also more people voted for Trump in 2024 than they did in 2020.
When the counting is over it will be interesting to see what the margin was in the swing states but it looks like Trump won most of those by significant margins so that Harris was never even close to an Electoral College win.
All this tells me there is something other than racism and misogyny, the economy or Trump's criminality going on here.
Perhaps the Democratic brand has become so toxic to many Americans that even identifying as a Democrat is too great an obstacle to overcome for enough people regardless of how good the candidate is or how well their issues poll.
When Florida and Nebraska voters approved referenda on raising the minimum wage (usually a bread and butter issue for Democrats) in the same election they elected and reelected Republican candidates who are philosophically opposed to idea of a minimum wage.
In other words they will vote for politicians who do not legislate in their best interests because they perceive Democrats to be worse by default.
The idea that competent blue state governance will convince these voters is simply not going to work because the Red voters in their own states won't see it that way.
Well, sure, but keep in mind that Democrats have held the White House for 12 of the past 16 years. In four years, the picture will look different, certainly. It'll be closer to a 50/50 share across the two-decade stretch, then. But hardly the stuff of, *the Democratic brand is unfixably toxic* (not what you said, but what some have said).
When you write, "The idea that competent blue state governance will convince these voters is simply not going to work because the Red voters in their own states won't see it that way," do you think that's where a better messaging apparatus comes into play? One that can consistently, aggressively, and competently convey Democratic or liberal successes?
What do you mean by, "Trump’s losing effort in 2020 significantly outperformed his winning effort in 2016"? Obviously, he did not outperform his 2016 performance, or he would have won again! He lost the popular vote much more resoundingly that time, and of course lost the electoral vote as well. Do you just mean that he overperformed among certain demographics?
"The Democratic vote total went up only in 2020, then went back to what it was every election before or after."
I'm not sure what vote totals you're looking at, forumposter, but they certainly aren't the current ones. Harris has 70m+ as of now and Hillary had 66m. With California less than 2/3 in and the other Coast states having counting to do too Harris will probably finish with about 74.5m+ (to Trump's likely ~77m).
No, you heard an idiotic lie from social media and believed it and are now parroting it without checking if it was true. You can check the current vote counts for yourself! The "20 million" thing was made up by people too stupid to realize that as you count more votes, the vote totals get higher.
I calculated the unusual rise in democrat votes per election. I was looking at a chart "I made" of votes per election. I see the count rise disproportionate to population growth and enthusiasm for the Democrat candidate. I find it interesting that anyone who states a different opinion always gets a response from an obvious individual inflicted with TDS of calling the other an "idiot" or "parroting" and/or "too stupid to realize". I am also equally disappointed that there is a great disparity in those that report the total vote. I am equally disappointed that the percentage of voters in certain key democrat cities jumped substantially and disproportionately to the citie's population during the Biden Trump election despite the fact that the enthusiasm for Biden was monstrously less than that of the enthusiasm for Obama beforehand.
Confucius said, "find some willing to learn, teach him. Find someone who thinks he knows, shun him".
Hi Mr. Re. Just a small point. Confucius may be the most misquoted of all thinkers. We don't actually know what he really said about anything, but this is one of thousands of examples that aren't even in the traditional canon of his sayings--someone just made it up and it sounds Confuciusy. One of the things that Confucius was at an early date recorded as saying, however, was: "To know and know that you know it, and not to know and know that you do not know it: that's knowledge." It's a pretty good saying for all of us to reflect on.
You didn't "calculate" anything. You used a fake data point (Harris got a lot more than 66 million votes like you claim) to claim that something must be wrong with the 2020 election. And I know you're just parroting what you heard from social media because I've seen every right-wing account on social media parroting the exact same thing using the exact same fake data point for the last few days. So spare me the indignation about being called stupid or accused of parroting. That's objectively what you're doing.
> Confucius said, "find some willing to learn, teach him. Find someone who thinks he knows, shun him".
You just posted false data that you thought you knew was true despite not checking it, and are trying to pretend you know the 2020 election was stolen despite having no evidence for it. So apparently Confucius thinks I should shun you. You're certainly not willing to learn when you've consistently ignored the fact that the data point you posted is false and continued to pretend that it was true.
I'm a little lost here, Mr. Re. I was using AP figures, which at this hour now have Harris at 70,374,000 votes. The 2020 vote count (81,286,454) is the official figure. Could you explain where you have found the "20 million extra" figure you refer to?
2016 Trump wins with 62 million 2020 Trump gets more and looses but Biden gets 83 million. Then 2024 70 million wins. Statistically speaking Biden got about 20 million more votes than would have kept the voting graph growing in an orderly fashion.
Mr. Re, First of all, in 2024 the leading number (Trump's) now stands at 74.3, not 70, and is projected to grow to ~78 by the time all ballots are counted. Second, Biden's vote total exceeded the average leading total of the three previous elections by 14 million votes, not 20. 14m is a big spike, but Trump's trailing total exceeded his own training total from 2016 by 12 million votes, so there is nothing unusual about Biden's total that was not also unusual about Trump's. Turnout was up across the board.
Finally, the outcome in 2020 was about 81m-74m, and the projected outcome in 2024 is in about 78m-76m. There is *nothing* that does not fit a normal "voting graph" (whatever you think that term means) in those two sets of election results.
Look at the numbers. They speak for themselves. The anomaly is obviously Joe Biden 81 million. Sleepy Joe 81 million but the energy and enthusiasm for Obama 69 million. Take 20 million away from Biden and the graph is perfect. OK, let’s use your 14 million even better. That’s what I’m talking about couple of this with 18 of the 19 Bellweather counties, for the first time, got it wrong. Worse yet, Valencia County, which never got it wrong since 1950 also got it wrong. In the words of Ricky Ricardo; you got some “ splianing” to do Lucy.
It didn't go back down to what it was every election before. Harris's 2020 vote total will be way higher than Clinton's. It's estimated to be somewhere in the vicinity of 75 million or more.
We need to address disinformation. Without disinformation, there is no Trump, no MAGA. With disinformation, we can’t address any of the problems we have
Harris didn’t really have a chance. Here every word was monitored and minor gaffes were multiplied and exaggerated through a weaponized right wing media scape, which a feckless MSM wasn’t (and isn’t) equipped to combat, nor did it try very hard
Berny--
I like your perspective here. We don't need a "liberal MAGA" movement. We don't want Gavin Newsom to be the Democratic Ron DeSantis.
However, I do think Democrats need to acknowledge that messaging in the internet age is endless trench warfare. You have to show up every day. You have to be punchy and entertaining. You have to be "authentic" and not overly-polished. You have to use a wide variety of media to saturate coverage with messages that the median individual in different demographic groups can appreciate and understand. You have to be relentless and willing to run up the score whenever you can. You can't assume that any media organizations are going to call balls and strikes fairly. Again, this doesn't mean that Democrats should lie or bullshit the public, but they can't afford to tout their policy achievements on legacy new outlets and assume that this will be enough.
That is exactly Berny’s point. 100% agree
All good points. Is it your impression that liberals *can* operate in that trench warfare environment? Or is there something about their—our—approach to politics that makes us ill-equipped to operate on that front? Curious to hear your thoughts.
The Democrat brand has become tarnished by all the left-wing hate that's on display on social media. Just a couple of examples I've seen in the past few hours:
* https://substack.com/@namrehcram/note/c-76400308
* https://substack.com/@kathighsmith/note/c-76455810?
Good explainer here: https://dennisonwrites.substack.com/p/democrats-have-a-problem-with-men
Some Democrats seem to think that oppression of women / people of color which occurred literally decades ago should act as a blank check, for them to say whatever nasty things they want about broad demographics of humans that didn't vote for their candidate in sufficiently large numbers.
Sure, Harris herself doesn't endorse left-wing hate. She was all about unity -- that's great. But the hate affects the Democrat brand nonetheless. And voters are rational to wonder whether these haters are the sorts of people that Harris is likely to fill her cabinet with.
I would respect Harris a lot of she made a public statement, telling her supporters to rein it in with mindlessly lashing out against the groups that are perceived to have cost Harris her win. That's easily the most valuable thing she could do if she wants me to be enthusiastic about voting for Democrats in the future.
In your post, you describe Trump as the "enemy of the liberal order" who is opposed to "freedom of the press". Presumably you think the Democrats are the opposite. Yet Kamala was unambiguous that she wanted to crack down on Elon Musk's X, which sounded to my ears like a clear violation of freedom of the press / the 1st Amendment. The left has consistently been *against* freedom of speech -- seems very authoritarian -- and compared to Trump, they have a stronger tendency to follow through with their illiberal threats.
I don't think the Democrats have to be very ambitious from a policy perspective in order to win more elections. They're talking the talk about how they're the party of freedom, institutions, equality, and non-discrimination. But they say that out of one side of their mouth, while sending a totally different message with the other side of their mouth. Literally just be who you claim to be, and lots more people would be enthusiastic to vote Dem. That's my prediction.
And finally, to your point about overcorrection -- I think the illiberalism is so entrenched within the left in the US that we shouldn't be worried about overcorrection in this area. Undercorrection is a much bigger risk. If this moment is finally what it takes for moderate members of the Democratic coalition to have the bravery to stand up against their illiberal brothers and sisters, and tell them they need to shape up and actually stand by the party's creed consistently, instead of enforcing it in a hypocritical and selective manner, then so be it.
I don't disagree with this, but I'm not sure it actually gets to the central issues of addressing the need to identify and reexamine those aspects of liberal political culture that unnecessarily alienate many voters who seem happy to vote R against what would seem to be their interest. The MAGA cult is as much an anti-Commie-groomer-woke cult as a pro-Trump cult, and while liberals, progressives, and Never Trumpers aren't in control of Trump they are in control of their uneasy coalition.
I think Polis is absolutely on target (after having thought about this since . . . Tuesday night)--the strategy should not be "resistance," which is largely about political theater (I don't mean the term dismissively), it should be competence: demonstrating in Blue states what government can do for people. For example, I think every Democratic governor should be working asap to develop a plan to deliver a Romney-care proposal to the state legislature the day after Trump signs a repeal of the ACA. If Democrats can produce constructive results in the midst of federal chaos, I think 2026 will start the Blue wave that can check the momentum of federal damage and begin repairing the damage in January 2029. (And I do expect the damage to be enormous, systemic, and global.)
Polis’s experiences are edifying. Similar to how Walz has succeeded as governor of Minnesota. The important caveat, though, is that Colorado and Minnesota have Democrat trifecta control and operate at the somewhat less polarized state level. The U.S. govt, by contrast, is often more divided by party, plagued with virulent partisan warfare and disinformation that come standard with our nationalized political environment nowadays, and requires 60 votes in the Senate to pass anything. The question is how Dems can earn enough power in Congress and the White House to accomplish what Polis has while also telling their story above the din of federal politics.
All true. But don't discount how present the forces of polarized politics were even in a setting like Colorado—and yet it fared much better in the end. Trump was holding crunch-time rallies in Colorado to scaremonger about entire cities being captured, and in the end the state just withstood it pretty well. But what you've said is right, of course.
It is better to cooperate with Ezra Klein than with Dan Klein
One can also read Yuval Harari's texts regarding liberalism, humans, and stories, such as his book " 21 Lessons for the 21st Century." It is important for liberals and other individualists to remember that our world is still better in many ways today than in 2014, 2004, 1994, etc.
What's your problem with Bernie, Berny?
While there's no liberal version of Trumpism, there can certainly be a liberal version of populism -- though the UnPopulist insists on denigratng populism by persistently including auhoritarianism, meanness, and bigotry in its definition, as a poison pill.
Anyone remember this Sanders ad?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nwRiuh1Cug
You can't get more "populist" than that -- with not a trace of Trumpian meanness in sight.
No less a moderate than David Brooks recognizes what's at stake here: "The rest of us need to look at this result with humility. American voters are not always wise, but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us.... Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable."
I've also addressed this in some comments on Matt Johnson's purported takedown of Joe Rogan, and I won't repeat myself here, except to add:
The remedy for Aunt Sally isn't an "improved" ("anti-racist"?) Aunt Sally. It's Huck Finn.
The remedy for Nurse Ratched is most decidedly NOT a "revitalized" Nurse Ratched. It's McMurphy (and the fact that Trump is a PHONY McMurphy -- an oligarch and authoritarian in his own right -- only makes his lying, his meanness and his swaggering [along with his seemingly-implicit discrediting of populism] all-the-more obscene).
I'm getting sick and tired of watching the UnPopulist run interference for the nomenklatura -- of "anti-authoritarians" who'd like to see us all living in a Brave New World that's run like a hospital -- with its rigid hierarchy and reliance on credentialed "experts" and clipboard-wielding administrators, perhaps the most authoritarian sort of institution (other than the military) that humanity has yet devised.
If liberalism means your right to move your arms ends where somebody else's nose begins, these are the sorts of folks whose "solution" is to put everybody in a straitjacket. They're the people who want to take you out of the driver's seat -- and who'll call you "NIMBY" if you want your (increasingly multi-ethnic) neighbors to HAVE their own backyards. (That condition qualifies as"sprawl" only to those looking down on it. Next up for the Condescension Crew: "Latinx"?)
These are also the sorts of apparatchiks who constantly invoke "the most vulnerable" (on behalf of their rich Foundation benefactors) as a scourge on our beleaguered, ever-shrinking middle class.
I don't agree with Sanders on every issue (and far less so with The Squad), but I understand why he won Joe Rogan's endorsement -- and I'm fully on-board with that.
No, I don't ever listen to Fox. In fact, much of the above is in response to the time I've spent with NPR.
And yes, I consider myself a liberal, whether you like it or not.
Thanks, as always, for reading, Mitchell. Even if you have sharp disagreements about what we write.
I have big disagreements with Bernie Sanders both stylistically and substantively. But in this article I wasn't so much criticizing him as contextualizing why using him as an example of how liberals might have success on Joe Rogan is misguided. Sanders has enough of an independent, anti-system streak to him that cannot be replicated by mainstream liberals—not in an authentic way. For example, they can't govern as independents who happen to be caucusing with Democrats. Sanders wanted to primary Obama in 2012 and was only stopped from doing so at the last minute. Rogan finds this "against the empire" ethos endearing. But it doesn't come naturally to mainstream liberals, and no artificial attempt to embody it will be able to pass the smell test.
When it comes to current discourse around "populism" online, there is certainly some talking past each other that I'm regularly noticing. Keep in mind that we operate with a conceptualization of populism that isn't merely interchangeable with "anti-elite." It is possible that what you take populism to be isn't something that we would necessarily think is beyond the pale, politically. Even in our surveys, we only categorized as populist respondents who qualified for that label under a multi-part schema.
I have no theoretical objection to you calling yourself a liberal, and have no reason to doubt your self-identification. Though there are some non-negotiables we'll minimally have to subscribe to to count as meaningfully liberal, not all liberals are going to agree even on other important matters. This site and its parent organization are actually on the vanguard of our political realignment away from the stale left/right division and toward a liberal/illiberal direction. Our conference in July hosted people on vastly different parts of the political spectrum. Stick around. I personally value voices like yours.
Thank you for your very civil and thoughtful reply!
Liberals can certainly disagree, The problem, IMHO, isn't with liberalism per se, but with its reification as ossified, self-credentialed bureaucracy -- and I often get the impression that the UnPopulist seems to be shilling for "the Empire," or what Joel Kotkin calls the Clerisy (i.e., what I've called the nomenklatura) and their corporate (and "philanthropic") sponsors.
As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr wrote: "The technical necessity for organization, as Robert Michel wrote long ago, sets in motion an inevitable tendency toward oligarchy. The leadership after a time is bound to have separate interests from the rank-and-file…. No loopholes have yet been discovered in the iron law of oligarchy.”
Thus, we enter our own Era of Stagnation. And that's what propels a guy like Joe Rogan.
For that matter, some see Populism in the (late 19th Century) US as itself rooted in liberalism. Indeed, this remains a matter of significant controversy among historians -- and those differences in perspective might (arguably), in turn, reflect the respective historians' personal biases and preconceptions. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Party_(United_States)#Debate_by_historians )
Speaking of second thoughts: It would be interesting to see if the UnPopulist would be willing to run a piece by the aforementioned Joel Kotkin -- if you can draw him in before he goes over completely to the (NatCon) Dark Side. Or if that's a bridge too far, maybe Musa al-Gharbi...
But meanwhile, I'll likely stick around (and you're likely to be stuck with me) as long as you haven't lost Yascha Mounk. ;-)
The Democrats totally DO need to overcorrect because we are so far off base in so many dimensions.
The first thing we have to realize is that WE are not that much different than those who voted for Trump despite his moral, legal, character, and decency shortcomings. WE (like the bulk of Trump voters) tend vote for our own self interest as we perceive them. This includes and subsumes our noble notions regarding protecting and building a more inclusive democracy. “Protecting democracy” (as they understood it) was also top of mind for many Trump voters.
The second thing we have to realize is that too many of our elder statesmen, elites, and so-called experts don’t (deep down) value “winning” over every thing. Nor do they value the interests of the bulk of the American people over everything. They value their own class interests and their connections and access to corporate money and power — and yes this goes for the consultant class too (maybe more than any other group who you might imagine care about a winning track record.)
The third thing we have to realize is that even if we consider ourselves white collar, highly educated, and enlightened specimens, most of us are actually working class in the sense that the bulk of our income comes from employment. And if we do have access to savings that might hold us over for more than a few months of no one being employed in our family, than we are still just a highly privileged member of the working class. Our education levels and ability to manipulate abstract symbols or deal with bureaucratic complexities and office politics actually cuts us off from large segments of the potential electorate that could have turned out for Harris but didn’t.
And, that brings us to the FINAL thing we should remember about this election. Trump won this election with fewer votes than he lost the last two times he ran for president. Harris lost this election because with a few shining exceptions (New Hampshire being a shining exception) voter turnout dropped precipitously. A lot of this was not under the control of Biden Harris who did do a lot for the working class (and for which the next president will get the credit because that’s when the results are going to start to be substantiated. The inflation burst was not under Biden/Harris control, but we can still learn some lessons from Trump who is a master of entertainment and political theater. We can also argue about the Gaza genocide and whether or what the current administration should have done differently. But neither Biden nor Harris could really make the majority of the population feel like they even saw them, never mind truly cared about them. We can learn a bit from Trump, but we should try very hard to learn A LOT from Bernie. Sidelining him and campaigning with a war monger and corporate shill like Liz Cheney was a perfect way to demonstrate that Harris could not be trusted — especially when her racial and gender status gave so many people motivation to find “reasons” not to vote for her.
@ Joe Panzica writes: "Our education levels and ability to manipulate abstract symbols or deal with bureaucratic complexities and office politics actually cuts us off from large segments of the potential electorate that could have turned out for Harris but didn’t."
Hmmm... Those who survive by manipulating bureaucratic complexities and office politics?
Here's what Jefferson had to say in 1785: "Corruption of morals… is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.... It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution."
TRANSLATION: A nation of whores can expect to be ruled by a pimp.
Hmmm.
Which actor in the play has enough clout to suggest changes in the provided script? I am tossed spinning in the spun gloss of the voting event. Months of expressed fear regarding the day of voting,with threats and MAGA promises of how they will be present to "monitor" the voting at the polling places. This is what they said, we know what they meant. Volumnous fancy prancing political players in the "problem states" were conniving twisted legal changes to help out, you know, prolifically. Messaging from proMAGA
thugs were full of intimidations, carefully, subtly hid in double-speak. Suspicions of voting chicanery by many relevant political players were rampant everywhere, were prioritized on MSM, with declaration of legal challenges in legal defense promised. This rhetoric occupied daily media theatre. The only word I can choose to describe my shock is 'astounding' when I watched the election coverage. No trace of problematic behavior, apparently none at all. Whoosh. The election results were like a honeyed movie, with no trace of the drama proceeding the election. Not a word of it. The coverage made Trump look like Jimmy Stewart, dipped in smooth. Very, very smooth.
Well, but that's because we were expecting a closer election. We had been noting for a while that right-wing claims of electoral interference would only rev up, would only kick into gear, if the election was close or if Trump was losing. It became clear fairly early in the evening that Trump would not need to activate his election delegitimization playbook.
This piece appears to operate under the premise that losing coalitions have a tendency to overcorrect. That certainly did not happen in 2016. And the implication that Biden's win in 2020 can and should be chalked up to incumbency disadvantage is actually not a positive case for liberalism at all. Trump was running during a pandemic that he managed atrociously, and yet he won with such a tiny margin of error that he threatened US institutions as he challenged its result. Biden's campaign did no such overcorrecting, and the Harris campaign was merely a continuation of the same, trying to make an affirmative case for a historically unpopular administration. To imply that not only do liberal institutions learn from their mistakes, but in fact are susceptible to learning too much, does not appear to be based in recent history.
Furthermore, you rightfully bring up that the incumbency disadvantage does not explain all of Trump's victory, and that he diversified his coalition across a range of demographics. That is an incredible counterargument given exactly what those demographics are and how Trump was able to co-opt them. Yet it receives little attention in this piece, despite truly being the key to puzzle of why the premise on which it is based is fundamentally flawed.
We then go into a bulleted list of what liberals need to avoid. With all due respect, again, do you believe that a liberal movement is susceptible to any of these points? I may argue that the Biden/Harris administration and campaign already falls victim to point number 3, in its disastrous attempt to tack right on immigration in order to capture the mythical moderate. None of these points are credible threats to a left-wing movement, and I fear this piece does not adequately make the case that they are worth considering. I recognize that the comments about Buttigieg and Newsom are jokes, but just how unimaginable those images are should have disqualified the inclusion of the overall point(s) in a serious election postmortem.
I think your points about the narrative war are thoughtful and well-said. Democrats have historically failed on this front and have learned nothing to this regard. Biden's narcissistic, ego-driven unwillingness to step down as presidential nominee precluded any possible attempt to redefine the narrative of a Democratic presidency, and voters saw through what was ultimately a dishonest, consultant-driven construction of popularist policy positions, which were designed in an attempt to maximize swing-state vote share. And we saw how that went. What this piece doesn't do is consider what that narrative might be, or if it does (like with the Polis example), grasp why liberals have completely failed to allow that narrative to take shape. See: why Democrats have been too beholden to corporate interests to campaign on the economic issues that voters care about, and for the most part have not actually delivered in a way that is tangible to voters. Unfortunately, the approach that this piece advocates for (if there is one) will always lose out to fascism, every time, thereby enabling its creep into US institutions.
[And somewhat as an aside: We should talk about illiberalism in a discussion of how Bernie Sanders was outcast from the party despite being the only politician in recent history to mobilize voters from a broad coalition under a cohesive narrative and collective vision of what the future may hold and how that future could be realized. Sure, I recognize that this publication is part of an attempt to rethink partisanship, but when it's fascism we are up against, incrementalism will never succeed.]
Yes, don’t correct. This way republicans will continue to win overwhelming victories. Stay uncorrected. Remember when you are not correct, you are wrong! Lol
The piece is not saying “don’t correct.” It’s saying “don’t overcorrect.”
Here's something to ponder that is from Heather Cox Richardson. "[Amanda] Marcotte recalled that Catherine Ramped and Youyou Zhou of The Washington Post showed that before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris's policies [which resembled Polis'] to Trumps IF THEY DIDN'T KNOW WHICH CANDIDATE PROPOSED THEM. [my caps}. If that doesn't tell you what fueled Trumps win -- misogyny and racism -- nothing will.
However don't forget that Hillary Clinton did get more than 50% of the popular vote in 2016. Trump won the Electoral College because of 77,000 votes spread across three states.
Remember that more people voted for Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016 and that Joe Biden BARELY won the Electoral College by 50,000 votes spread across 3 states in 2020.
Also more people voted for Trump in 2024 than they did in 2020.
When the counting is over it will be interesting to see what the margin was in the swing states but it looks like Trump won most of those by significant margins so that Harris was never even close to an Electoral College win.
All this tells me there is something other than racism and misogyny, the economy or Trump's criminality going on here.
Perhaps the Democratic brand has become so toxic to many Americans that even identifying as a Democrat is too great an obstacle to overcome for enough people regardless of how good the candidate is or how well their issues poll.
When Florida and Nebraska voters approved referenda on raising the minimum wage (usually a bread and butter issue for Democrats) in the same election they elected and reelected Republican candidates who are philosophically opposed to idea of a minimum wage.
In other words they will vote for politicians who do not legislate in their best interests because they perceive Democrats to be worse by default.
The idea that competent blue state governance will convince these voters is simply not going to work because the Red voters in their own states won't see it that way.
Well, sure, but keep in mind that Democrats have held the White House for 12 of the past 16 years. In four years, the picture will look different, certainly. It'll be closer to a 50/50 share across the two-decade stretch, then. But hardly the stuff of, *the Democratic brand is unfixably toxic* (not what you said, but what some have said).
When you write, "The idea that competent blue state governance will convince these voters is simply not going to work because the Red voters in their own states won't see it that way," do you think that's where a better messaging apparatus comes into play? One that can consistently, aggressively, and competently convey Democratic or liberal successes?
What do you mean by, "Trump’s losing effort in 2020 significantly outperformed his winning effort in 2016"? Obviously, he did not outperform his 2016 performance, or he would have won again! He lost the popular vote much more resoundingly that time, and of course lost the electoral vote as well. Do you just mean that he overperformed among certain demographics?
His vote totals went up.
The Democratic vote total went up only in 2020, then went back to what it was every election before or after.
Interesting huh. Dem 2020 total is the real outlier.
"The Democratic vote total went up only in 2020, then went back to what it was every election before or after."
I'm not sure what vote totals you're looking at, forumposter, but they certainly aren't the current ones. Harris has 70m+ as of now and Hillary had 66m. With California less than 2/3 in and the other Coast states having counting to do too Harris will probably finish with about 74.5m+ (to Trump's likely ~77m).
D votes:
2000 51.0m
2004 59.0m
2008 69.5m
2012 65.9m
2016 65.8m
2020 81.3m
2024 70.2m (partial --> ~74.5m) [Edit: Nate Silver now predicts 75.8m]
This vote count is not true. 2020 was a much bigger outlier. About 20 million extra. Sound like Xerox
No, you heard an idiotic lie from social media and believed it and are now parroting it without checking if it was true. You can check the current vote counts for yourself! The "20 million" thing was made up by people too stupid to realize that as you count more votes, the vote totals get higher.
I calculated the unusual rise in democrat votes per election. I was looking at a chart "I made" of votes per election. I see the count rise disproportionate to population growth and enthusiasm for the Democrat candidate. I find it interesting that anyone who states a different opinion always gets a response from an obvious individual inflicted with TDS of calling the other an "idiot" or "parroting" and/or "too stupid to realize". I am also equally disappointed that there is a great disparity in those that report the total vote. I am equally disappointed that the percentage of voters in certain key democrat cities jumped substantially and disproportionately to the citie's population during the Biden Trump election despite the fact that the enthusiasm for Biden was monstrously less than that of the enthusiasm for Obama beforehand.
Confucius said, "find some willing to learn, teach him. Find someone who thinks he knows, shun him".
Hi Mr. Re. Just a small point. Confucius may be the most misquoted of all thinkers. We don't actually know what he really said about anything, but this is one of thousands of examples that aren't even in the traditional canon of his sayings--someone just made it up and it sounds Confuciusy. One of the things that Confucius was at an early date recorded as saying, however, was: "To know and know that you know it, and not to know and know that you do not know it: that's knowledge." It's a pretty good saying for all of us to reflect on.
You didn't "calculate" anything. You used a fake data point (Harris got a lot more than 66 million votes like you claim) to claim that something must be wrong with the 2020 election. And I know you're just parroting what you heard from social media because I've seen every right-wing account on social media parroting the exact same thing using the exact same fake data point for the last few days. So spare me the indignation about being called stupid or accused of parroting. That's objectively what you're doing.
> Confucius said, "find some willing to learn, teach him. Find someone who thinks he knows, shun him".
You just posted false data that you thought you knew was true despite not checking it, and are trying to pretend you know the 2020 election was stolen despite having no evidence for it. So apparently Confucius thinks I should shun you. You're certainly not willing to learn when you've consistently ignored the fact that the data point you posted is false and continued to pretend that it was true.
I'm a little lost here, Mr. Re. I was using AP figures, which at this hour now have Harris at 70,374,000 votes. The 2020 vote count (81,286,454) is the official figure. Could you explain where you have found the "20 million extra" figure you refer to?
2016 Trump wins with 62 million 2020 Trump gets more and looses but Biden gets 83 million. Then 2024 70 million wins. Statistically speaking Biden got about 20 million more votes than would have kept the voting graph growing in an orderly fashion.
Mr. Re, First of all, in 2024 the leading number (Trump's) now stands at 74.3, not 70, and is projected to grow to ~78 by the time all ballots are counted. Second, Biden's vote total exceeded the average leading total of the three previous elections by 14 million votes, not 20. 14m is a big spike, but Trump's trailing total exceeded his own training total from 2016 by 12 million votes, so there is nothing unusual about Biden's total that was not also unusual about Trump's. Turnout was up across the board.
Finally, the outcome in 2020 was about 81m-74m, and the projected outcome in 2024 is in about 78m-76m. There is *nothing* that does not fit a normal "voting graph" (whatever you think that term means) in those two sets of election results.
Bill Clinton
45m
Bill Clinton
47m
Al Gore
50m
John Kerry
|59m
Barack Obama
69m
Barack Obama
65m
Hillary Clinton
65m
Joe Biden
81m
Kamala Harris
66m
Look at the numbers. They speak for themselves. The anomaly is obviously Joe Biden 81 million. Sleepy Joe 81 million but the energy and enthusiasm for Obama 69 million. Take 20 million away from Biden and the graph is perfect. OK, let’s use your 14 million even better. That’s what I’m talking about couple of this with 18 of the 19 Bellweather counties, for the first time, got it wrong. Worse yet, Valencia County, which never got it wrong since 1950 also got it wrong. In the words of Ricky Ricardo; you got some “ splianing” to do Lucy.
It didn't go back down to what it was every election before. Harris's 2020 vote total will be way higher than Clinton's. It's estimated to be somewhere in the vicinity of 75 million or more.
We need to address disinformation. Without disinformation, there is no Trump, no MAGA. With disinformation, we can’t address any of the problems we have
Harris didn’t really have a chance. Here every word was monitored and minor gaffes were multiplied and exaggerated through a weaponized right wing media scape, which a feckless MSM wasn’t (and isn’t) equipped to combat, nor did it try very hard
Ministry of truth, a truly "liberal" ideal *sarcasm*
Wow, u live in your own bubble!