On Asymmetrical Partisanship: It occurred to me that one aspect of the current party asymmetry is that Democrats are more ideologically “fermented”, while Republicans are more “flexible”.
What I mean is, the left has spent several decades now working its existing ideologies to their logical conclusions. And in fact, they’ve arrived at a pretty inflexible point. The right, on the other hand, doesn’t really care about its ideology. It just wants power, and that search for power is taking them in some pretty extreme directions.
You can see this in the shifting party coalitions: Never-Trumpers are the most ideologically committed conservatives, and they’re finding a home with likewise ideologically committed liberals. Anti-vaxxers, on the other hand, were always ideologically ignorant morons, and they had no problem jumping to the other end of the spectrum when the moment of polarization came.1
Anyways, this is why it’s important not to conflate extremism with inflexibility, which is often done in our political pop culture. What many voters saw as “moderation” from Trump was actually just him being really flexible about which direction he was going to be really extreme in. And what many see as extremism from progressives is actually just inflexibility and ferment in a cultural ideology that most of America ostensibly agrees with (“racism is bad”).Over the break, I finished a lot of books, including “Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States”.
To its detriment, it’s not merely myopically focused on climate change, but entirely framed within an alarmist approach. Which is sad, because the book is really good on the political mechanics of policy change.
For instance, Stokes has this amazing concept she calls the “Fog of Enactment”: like the fog of war, it’s an epistemological shroud that allows some actors to score what the conventional wisdom often clocks as surprising victories. This probably plays a huge role in larger phenomena we’ve noted here, like Matt Yglesias’ Secret Congress!
But she fails to connect it to the larger context. Which is okay; not everything has to be everything to everyone. And it’s why we exist here at the Discourse: tying together all these disparate threads to weave a rich fucking2 tapestry of the world we live in.Stokes also brought up the fact that Arizona has a utilities commission that often is thought of as a “fourth branch” of its government. This is something I hope to revisit from a CIZST perspective, eventually!
Notes on last Thursday’s Bulwark: I credit Adam Kinzinger as one of the less pundit-brain-addled politicians out there, but occasionally he still offers up Conventional Wisdom Gems like, “The insurrection is not going to age well”.
I mean, come on guys, let’s be realistic with ourselves. If history is any indication, The Big Lie will end up as Lost Cause, Redux.What I really wanted to talk about up at the top, but only makes sense after the rest of these items, is that Kinzinger/Charlie also brought up Yglesias’ theory of the GOP’s “unhinged moderation”.3
Too much is made of this. I mean, okay, Trump was seen as a “moderate”, but so what? Wake me up when Trump endorses Medicare For All.
The very fact that you and I both immediately know that that’ll never fucking happen, tells us all we need to know4 here. The GOP’s “moderation” isn’t a new trend. It’s closer to the utterly classic “run to the center” strategy than anything else. The GOP never moderated, they just reprioritized which issues they found it acceptable to run to the center on. With social politics paying better dividends in the age of the fully-metastasized right-wing propagandasphere5, it’s no wonder they chucked fiscal conservatism overboard. Republican politicians can read Fox News ratings just as clearly as Fox can, after all.
Now, I won’t pretend that the Trump-era GOP legislative record is necessarily reflective of their actual agenda. But taken together, we see pretty clearly the classic race-class-narrative dynamic at play: (1) they used token executive actions to toss some red meat to the base on issues they knew couldn’t otherwise6 pass the filibuster; (2) they passed some long-overdue bipartisan reforms like criminal justice because they knew they could, and that Democrats would happily let them; and (3) they used their one big reconciliation bill to pass the tax cut their elites actually cared about.
That’s not really moderation, it’s opportunism.One theory I do have is that Trump’s next move of unhinged moderation may end up being a “pivot to pro-vax”.
Vaccines will matter less and less as we get away from 2020 and closer to 2024. Which means that when the early/kabuki stage of the 2024 GOP primary starts on November 9 this year, the damage to Democrats will have already been done, and Trump can stick DeSantis on the wrong end of “Last Year’s Issue”, while cosplaying as a moderate to those dumb enough to believe him anymore. The rest of the party will follow suit despite the whiplash, as Trump hammers Biden on inflation or some other issue.
The point is, this is one of those sorts of twists the Conventional Wisdom may be missing out on right now.In our lifetimes, the nationalist right has always warned us about the danger of the left’s international plot to install communism. Going back further, they were concerned about things like the dangers of “papery” — that is, Catholics having mixed loyalties to country and pope.
And yet, today, these same bastards are forging an international alliance with rightist ethnic-nationalism Christianism.
The call is coming from inside the house. I try not to play in the daily tit-for-tat game, but this should convince you more than anything else to never trust these guys and their nationalist fearmongering about international plots.
I wonder what other blocs will sort along this wedge.
It felt awkward using such flowery language, so I had to break it up with something bluer.
Just look at the date line on that one. Fuck, man, talk about “not aging well”.
There’s gotta be a less clunky way to say this.
“Peak Asymmetric Partisan Propaganda”, maybe? Then, getting slammed on Fox News could be called a PAPP Smear! *ba-dum-TISS!*
IE through reconciliation.
> What I mean is, the left has spent several decades now working its existing ideologies to their logical conclusions. And in fact, they’ve arrived at a pretty inflexible point. The right, on the other hand, doesn’t really care about its ideology. It just wants power, and that search for power is taking them in some pretty extreme directions.
I'll be chewing over this one for a while. Some initial thoughts:
* While many right-wing pols are in it for the power, it does seem that there is a new breed who actually believe the BS;
* I can't believe that the average right-winger voter *only* cares about power--understanding what he really wants (and how he can be fooled) seems essential;
* The logical conclusions on the Left can often seem like a willing embrace of reductio ab absurdum, and as only a limited part of the populace is capable of such mental gymnastics, I wonder how the fundamentals of the ideology might evolve.