How does one admit that one suffers from “Main Character Syndrome” without indeed solipsistically making the whole exercise about oneself? Asking for a friend…
Liberals make a fatal error when they assume the CRT backlash is just another obvious lie/astroturfing. Look, thus stuff isn’t coming from nowhere, guys. Greater Appalachia has always been suspicious of education, especially as a tool of Northern indoctrination.
The name may be new, but the suspicion isn’t. Don’t let that fool you.
Democrats’ obsession with “care” is why they constantly lose on “the economy”. Just because 60% of some survey says their most important issue is “healthcare”, and healthcare indeed is a dangerously huge chunk of the economy, doesn’t mean that when people tell you they want you to improve “the economy”, that they’re actually saying “yeah, sure, just go ahead and spend several trillion on cost-disease socialism for care work”.
Look, care is not the same as economics. And it’s already really hard to convince people that macroeconomics truly aren’t zero-sum in the first place. The CTC program didn’t turn out to be the dead ringer we hoped it was, so it’s time to move on to something else, or we’re no better than the Republicans were in 2008.
The best move is to cut the cost-disease-socialism parts of the bill to the bare minimum tolerable for progressives, and replace them with whatever we need to resolve the current supply chain crisis. Because I can guarantee you, if the harbors are still backed up with boats by next November, the bloodbath will only get worse.
Relatedly, as I pointed out last week, probably the best thing we can do on healthcare is prescription drug negotiation for Medicare. It satisfies both the “do things that reduce the deficit” imperative, and the “do things that are extremely popular with swing voters” imperative.
So, I’m glad to hear that Congress is finally doing the not-insane thing of working towards a compromise there, where it looked like we wouldn’t have one just last week.
This is the dead ringer we need, guys. I hope we don’t blow it.
The Republicans are going to have an “entropy of victory” moment with their Supreme Court majority. It’s happened every single time the right has won one of its periodic generational campaigns to capture the court — after Dred Scott and Lochner, mainly.
That’s not to say it’ll happen nearly as quickly as the left wishes it would. But there will come a point where what seems like an impenetrable majority will have a crisis of faith, and 1-2 conservatives will change course in the face of a liberal popular majority.
Noah Smith is absolutely right that extremism in defense of antiracism has indeed become a vice, and not a virtue. But the real problem is that we are not leveraging effective strategies the way past crusaders have.
Civil Rights was won by baiting White supremacy into showing its ass on national TV. The moral debate over abolition was won when Harriet Beecher Stowe showed that the South was lying about idyllic plantations of well-cared-for slaves.
Police brutality was exposed by viral video. The gains we’ve won, have been on the moral strength of those videos. The rest of the movement… has mostly gotten in its own way with dumb slogans. Real momentum last summer basically stalled out because progressives couldn’t help getting ahead of themselves1.
As a progressive, I support the movement. I support its goals. I’m even open to most if not all of its most extreme proposals. But as a realist, I recognize that those proposals take time to process through society. They’re worthwhile eventual goals. There’s a lot of ballgame to play between here and there.
Advocating for change is something that’s really easy to get wrong and really hard to get right. It took generations for HBS and MLK to come along and “get it right”. I just wish that the advocates themselves understood this.
It was like an idiot boyfriend/husband who takes the question, “Does my ass look fat in these jeans?” as an invitation to critique not just his girlfriend/wife’s ass, but the rest of her physique, her performance in bed, her diet, her workout regimen, and her entire family’s genetics, all under the slogan “Decalorize That Ass” — but, of course, with the helpful clarification that he really just means she needs to replace about 70% of the red meat in her diet with fruits and vegetables, and actually if she does all that, she could afford for the overall size of her ass to be at least 10-20% bigger!
So, lest this come across like I’m obsessing about slogans alone, the deeper picture is indeed — as I’m told — that activists actually considered “Defund” to be a compromise from their true position. That speaks to the other aspects of what would otherwise seem like a bunch of exaggerations I’ve made to make a joke. Some activists really do want police and prison abolition. And while I’m okay with those as nice utopian ideals, the conservative estimate is that they’ll take at least a century to effectuate. Even fucking Sweden still has prisons, fer chrissakes.
The problem with the movement was, we let those people speak for it. Look, I get that in the wake of MLK’s death, the Civil Rights movement has been leery of singular leaders; and in the era of “All Your Faves Are Problematic”, pinning our hopes on just another figure whose social media and personal affairs will be endlessly scrutinized can often seem like setting ourselves up for failure. But the cost here was that without any semblance of centralized leadership, a bunch of activists appointed themselves leaders of BLM, naively made some really extreme pitches seem deceptively easy to achieve in front of audiences of community members who were primed to be receptive, and then used that platform to negotiate a “compromise” with the establishment (“Defund”) that, like any product of an internal committee process, was doomed to fail when subjected to public scrutiny.
I wonder how we can bait NIMBY’s on the upzoning issue.