Dave's Daily Dose 1/13/2022
"Whatever The Long-Form Opposite Of Live-Tweeting Is, Done For The Bulwark" Edition
Leading off, Monday’s Bulwark missed their own point. They got really worked up about how the Chicago teachers’ union dumbly said that Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s “return to school” push was rooted in “racism, sexism, and misogyny” — and to be fair, the episode really was emblematic of just how absurdly and unnecessarily inaccessible the Professional Left makes its rhetoric — but Charlie just leaves it at the Michael Bay level of, “Gee whiz, I can’t believe they do such stupid things!”.1
I suspect the root cause Charlie misses here is that the Professional Left never seems to understand that they aren’t actually preaching to their own choir. For one, barely anyone but themselves are their choir, and for another, the right has an entire propaganda machine whose oldest and most-practiced specialty is foregrounding every dumb thing a leftist in America ever says.
Each of which are their own, very serious problems. But maybe convincing the Professional Left of this basic fact is where we should start first, rather than just jumping to browbeat them for their dumb rhetoric.Also, look, I’m not exactly raring to hop into the “vaxxed and done” crowd, but the Bulwark’s got a damned point: Reopening schools is one of the few things that may help Democrats keep enough of its recent converts in the suburbs onside and hold the House in November.
In fact, it’s arguably far more important than passing BBB or voting rights, and possibly could at least diminish the growing backlash over inflation.That said, I think Charlie overestimates the negatives of noncitizen voting in NYC. Yes, it’s fuel for the very propaganda machine I just mentioned above. But I think there’s a reasonable discussion to have here about the electoral trade-off vs. the long-term advancement of the voting rights frontier. It’s not a slam-dunk.
I’d love to be able to have that discussion, but we sadly don’t have any polling data that’s remotely good enough to tell us what this trade-off looks like. Most professional campaign managers probably don’t! So I don’t actually know if we can safely ignore the Cletuses2 who’d be triggered by it, but were never persuadable anyways, or if we can make up ground with the suburban Karens who are sympathetic to us on other issues3.
Also, this one’s ultimately not an exclusive failure of tunnel-visioned activists. NYC already has RCV, and this is the sort of policy that RCV-run polities dominated by liberals enact. Sure, it’s also the sort of policy typically championed by tunnel-visioned activists, but pundits like Charlie are probably just not that used to seeing functioning political systems like NYC’s, where good-old-fashioned horse-trading leads to more frequent victories on otherwise niche issues that actually have considerable support. In other words, just because it’s a 30/70 issue nationally, doesn’t mean it can’t be a 60/40 or 55/45 issue in NYC, and while we’re used to those sorts of issues getting killed by the filibuster in the Senate, a more sane political system lets those policies get enacted.
The moral is, this should be a reminder that we need a more sane political system in the rest of the country. Not a panic alert about how bad this may or may not make us look to swing voters.Yesterday’s Bulwark had a funny moment where Tim Alberta alllllllmost reasons his way to CIZST, but the poor worm just barely missed the hook.
If anything, poor Tim is just an example of how deeply the zero-sum mindset he criticized is rooted in our world. When your political world is only zero-sum, it’s hard to think outside of zero-sum terms.
Which is somewhat understandable for a relative newcomer like Charlie. Having defected from the right much longer ago myself (14 years now!) is a nice window into how both sides of this conversation think, actually.
Cleti?
Abortion. Duh, it’s abortion. But also, being completely turned off by the GOP’s embrace of vulgar populism.