As always you’ve got a lot going on my friend. One point that I think is solid and has the potential to be a great silver lining from all this,
“Dobbs is now both a challenge and an opportunity for Democrats to refocus on seizing state legislatures, which was always fundamentally the real path to power in American politics”.
Dude the democrats have been so focused on national politics the they’ve lost their way locally. Part of this is using resources where they can do the most good. State houses have been so gerrymandered that Missouri democrats only represent about 30% of general assembly seats, despite the fact that 42% of Missourians votes for Biden. The democrats need to start playing for keeps. Get off the high horses and fight.
One more point real quick, this can be traced back to the filibuster. I know the topic has been beat to death but between failed attempts to codify ROE and Supreme Court picks, you take out the filibuster and this ruling doesn’t happen.
One of the most consistent things I've kept hearing over the years from rural areas is that they feel like Democrats just abandoned them. Like, PHYSICALLY just packed up and stopped coming around about 20 years ago.
I get that it's difficult and resource-intensive to run candidates in every downballot race, but the effect of NOT doing that has been that large swathes of the country feel like there just isn't any opposition to the Republicans. Almost every Democrat I know is bitching about rural abortion access today, but who the fuck is actually even showing up in those places to carry the standard into battle? It's in no small part emblematic of the performative-but-detached empathy that the party's educated class can't seem to cure itself of. They love to make themselves feel good by insisting that "EvErYoNe In ThIs CoUnTrY dEsErVeS tHiS vItAl cIvIl RiGhT", but -- don't even ask them to do something REALLY hard like *LIVING there*, just give them something easy like "Instead of pointlessly donating to stupid viral races we won't win (like McGrath in KY's futile attempt to unseat Cocaine Mitch), let's donate to a party organization that makes sure we field candidates in every downballot race in the country, even when we know we're going to lose" -- and all you'll get are blank fucking dead-eyed Zoomer stares.
RE the filibuster, I agree: it's no coincidence that Roe co-occurred with the rise of filibuster abuse. Neither necessarily caused the other. But Roe came at the tail end of an era where judicial activism had indeed picked up, but still coexisted with meaningful legislative progress on big, controversial issues. Despite being premature (to the climate of public opinion) and an overreach (it veered too hard towards one side of the issue, and on a weak legal theory at that), by becoming a banner for abortion-rights maximalism, Roe managed to endure, and in doing so proved to both parties that they didn't always need to rely on legislation to achieve final victories.
Civil Rights provides a contrast here: For MLK and the rest of the CRM, Brown and the other landmark decisions were incremental victories to help lay the groundwork to build public support for a Civil Rights Act that would be the *actual* victory. And although portions of the CRA have since been gutted, almost all of the act's civil protections still stand, and -- outside of a couple cranky libertarians and the Actual Racists/Fascists factions -- even the most rabid White-ly Grievanced MAGA Boat Parade-rs support its general provisions.
The filibuster became a way for both parties to take certain issues off the table and/or shunt them off to the judicial field. If you can just argue well enough in court, you can win a more complete victory than you ever could have gotten by passing a compromise bill through the Senate, and whenever the other side whines, you get to just tell them, "It's The Law Of The Land. Settled Law!". No hard work of building majorities. You just need to keep enough Senators to defend your turf.
(Hot Take: If the Senate map keeps getting worse due to geographical shifts, to the point that the Republican advantage gets anywhere near the filibuster's 60-vote threshold, I think that's when Democrats finally resolve that they'll abolish it the next time they just barely scratch 50+VP votes together.)
I'm *slightly* skeptical of a direct claim that the filibuster prevented any legislation before the Republicans' first attempts in the 1990s, because Democrats held the House until 1994. But it's certainly true that in the abstract, Democrats had declared direct abortion regulation by Congress off-limits post-Roe, in no small part owing to this mindset born of the nexus you identified between the filibuster and judicial supremacy/activism.
So dems lost rural places due to scarcity of electoral resources, but the gop didn’t suffer as dramatic a situation. Most urban areas are nogo zones for the gop, the real battles are the democratic primary. That being said you have seen a similar realization on the GoP side because they have the dems beat on geography. As long as gerrymandering continues to be a thing, it’s a practically impossible for dems to gain the upper hand in state legislatures.
As long as that’s that case then the house will continue to be unrepresentative. All this is to say, I’m legitimately concerned about representation and the lack thereof at all levels of government. I’m surprised that Biden and co don’t push more for Puerto Rican, DC and other territory statehood. Both politically and legally it doesn’t make sense for these places to not have representation.
You’re right about the relationship between the judiciary and legislation. Judiciary starts the move towards rights, the legislation should complete it. Why wasn’t that done with abortion, marriage equality, etc.?
The Dems didn't lose rural places due to resources, they had already been lost for a long time at that point. Dems mostly owned rural areas up until the Southern Strategy, which is actually kind of a misnomer because it was more intended to make Dixiecrat politics attractive to the *rest* of the country, not merely make the South more Republican.
What happened isn't that the Dems peaced out while Reps moved in; it's that most of the existing Dems decided they wanted to become Reps. The rural power structure wasn't replaced, it just changed the sign on the window. The remaining Dems who didn't flip -- core liberals and progressives -- eventually woke up to a new reality where they were now the "out" party, and peaced out for the cities where their politics were still tolerated and could make a difference.
And as the GOP went off the deep end in the 'teens, there *was* some rural appetite for an alternative, but the Dems hadn't been contesting those seats for at least a decade or two at that point.
I think the first step is just showing up. Contest every seat. And make sure we get the quality control right: We want candidates who are progressive enough to stand out as a real alternative, but also plugged in to their communities enough to not stake out dumb/extreme positions. We shouldn't expect to just start winning right off the bat, either -- it's going to take a good solid decade of "you win some, you lose some" before we have a chance of flipping state legislatures. But THAT's the goal. And hopefully it'll be right in time for the 2030 redistricting.
Biden et al see PR/DC as extreme moves that will prompt a backlash. IMO they're only half right: the GOP establishment would be infuriated, some rural areas will see it as a direct assault, and the few remaining conservative intellectuals will call foul; but normie voters would probably see at least PR as "fair" -- DC is a little riskier.
But I think the Dem establishment is mostly just holding their fire because of some sort of private threat McConnell's made. They'd love to do it if the popular/intellectual backlash was all they had to face. But even from the minority, especially this bare minority, McConnell can make their lives hell.
RE the judiciary->legislation. Marriage equality just genuinely saw a quick shift in public opinion. Same as it did for interracial marriage - the reliance issue is just too large, no one wants to open those two cans of worms, and overturning it is unpopular anyways. Before 2021, we *were* in an era of "backfilling" legislation to accommodate broadly popular marriage equality and sweep away a handful of old annoying laws, just like was done for interracial marriage. But since 2021, the GOP realized it could fuel backlash and division by making trans rights the new enemy, and marriage equality/LGB rights have kind of suffered some splash damage. I think Dems also just genuinely overreached and mistook enthusiasm for marriage equality as enthusiasm for gender politics that normies would perceive as more extreme.
IMO, normie politics will ultimately prevail and repair this damage. The GOP has had to come pretty far to the middle on LGB rights in order to make their attacks on trans rights palatable to normies. Even if Dems never moderate on trans rights, they'll still be able to force Republicans to the middle on LGB - there'll never be a true mandate to roll back marriage equality. And it stands to be seen whether the coming battles on abortion drown out the battle on trans rights anyways.
By contrast, none of this was done for abortion because of Roe. Roe prevented these state-level battles, dumb as they seem, and thus the normie public was never given test cases to settle on a compromise, and neither party was forced to moderate its extreme positions by those battles. Instead, their extreme positions fermented.
So, now I want to cry. You have talked about needing more than two political parties and doing away with FPTP voting. [I agree!] But, then you expound on the inability of the Democratic Party to form coalitions. That noise you hear in the background is me, screaming incoherently. While I am not a Democrat, I still lean that way while yearning for something better.
Does the upper echelon of the Democratic Party exist in an echo chamber? I know that it isn't the entirety of the Democratic Party, because Stacy Abrams exists. Where are the pragmatists with vision? I will even skip demanding the people that can play Go really well and settle for someone that is reasonably good at checkers to set the course for the party.
I think that the disengagement of young people (not all, but way too many) may well be rooted in the lack of local political engagement. If they aren't seeing anything promising locally, why should they look any further? When they look around, they don't see what their parents and grandparents saw. They see less ability to advance, less money and more disdain for them from the older generation. I know this is not true across the board, but too much of the board looks like that.
Well, there it is: my return rant that went off at an angle from yours. Thanks for taking the time to write.
1. I *definitely* agree that the disengagement of young people, and nonvoters more generally, in large part stems from dissatisfaction with the 2-party system. America has never had extremely high turnout, certainly never as high as places like Australia, but we've also had significant disenfranchisement over the centuries, which makes it hard to separate historic trends from
But in the broader context, I think that our uniquely zero-sum system is fundamentally disenfranchising to losers generally, and third parties specifically. If we evolved towards more positive-sum elections, I'd be downright floored if we didn't eventually see improvements to turnout.
I see all those other aspects - hope for the future, hope for change - as downstream of resolving the current political crisis. There's no universal law of progress that says things will just naturally get better for the younger generations all on their own, or that voters ten years from now will magically select the right policies to make things better just because "the future will always be better!". Maybe some of these problems will get solved with the political crisis as it stands, and maybe that will prove to be enough to restart the virtuous cycle. That happens *all the time* in history by pure accident. But that's not something we should be banking on. The less zero-sum of a system we can get out of the crisis, the more of those sticky problems we'll be able to solve.
2. I don't know if I'd necessarily call it an echo chamber - I plead agnosticism on that point. But in terms of broad causality... the pragmatists are always there. They're just not always as gifted as we'd like. Biden's a pragmatist; Obama and Clinton were, too. Abrams exhibits aspects of pragmatism. Even Tim Ryan, bless his heart, manages to achieve the platonic ideal of a Meathead Who Gets It. It's just not the only quality that makes a successful politician.
I think it's really easy to point fingers at scapegoats for why the party chose this path - on Roe specifically, and on the failing strategies of the entire Sixth Party System generally. Feminists and a pro-choice movement who demanded absolutism -- there's unmistakable traces of white female privilege/Karen-ism in them thar hills -- and relentlessly purged swing-state pro-life Dems; or maybe whoever it was that gave up on contesting rural areas; or maybe the many knock-on effects of the earlier and seemingly unrelated mistake to push AA over contesting persistent de-facto housing segregation. I mean, just take your pick of any mistake a Democrat's made in the past 50 years, right?
It's seductive.
Which is why I'm cautious of it. The 50-year history of both parties is an incredibly complex story. But what I *do* know is that, as I said, at pretty much every turn, the Democratic Party - from its thought leaders, to the base, to the elected leaders - chose to shun and purge pro-lifers. Moderates like Joe Biden either saw the writing on the wall or were outright coerced to rebrand themselves as pro-choice. At pivotal moments that pro-life Dems could have kept the party competitive in reddening states, the party rejected them.
I mean, just imagine an alternative history where Democrats were able to retain a strong majority of Catholics (instead of the 50/50 split they've held since Roe) on the strength of the progressive platform's large overlap with Catholic social justice theology and a policy of tolerance: "You can run as a pro-life Democrat, even call for Roe to be overturned, as long as you at least endorse the rape-incest-life-of-mother exceptions." The entire demographic makeup of the political system would be dramatically different! The Southern Strategy would still have gone on to export the Southern political-cultural complex to the rest of rural America, but Democrats would still be competitive in any mid-sized state with a strong Catholic population: Missouri, Louisiana, MN, WV, WI, MI, OH, PA, FL. We'd probably even have a decent shot at Utah, given Mormons' own odd tradition of social justice.
I guess my own point was really just that things didn't have to look this way, and we should keep that in mind VERY carefully going forward. A mad dash to reinstate Roe via court-packing or a filibuster-doomed abortion rights bill is going to signal to voters that Democrats mean to continue with more of the same scorched-earth tactics - in fact, this is sadly what I suspect will actually happen as of right now just judging from my social media lurking.
On the other hand, if we regroup, lick our wounds, and start running a 50-state strategy to win modest abortion rights - IE whatever the most popular compromise is in each state - then it's both (1) the best chance of ever getting those rights back, and (2) a big winner that sets us up in the long term with the fundamentals for a coalition that dominates the rest of the Seventh Party System. I'm not even a pro-choicer and I *still* can tell that's a winning strategy for them to get the most maximally pro-choice outcome.
Oh, I understand there is no promise that the future will be better. But, I have watched the middle class erode in the US and see how it disheartens younger people.
My first thought on needing more pragmatists may have been incorrect. (Though the handful you mention is/was not enough.) After reading your reply a thought stirred. Perhaps we just need more younger people with a little more give in their thinking. Maybe it isn't pragmatists, but less hidebound people, that we need. Thank you.
As always you’ve got a lot going on my friend. One point that I think is solid and has the potential to be a great silver lining from all this,
“Dobbs is now both a challenge and an opportunity for Democrats to refocus on seizing state legislatures, which was always fundamentally the real path to power in American politics”.
Dude the democrats have been so focused on national politics the they’ve lost their way locally. Part of this is using resources where they can do the most good. State houses have been so gerrymandered that Missouri democrats only represent about 30% of general assembly seats, despite the fact that 42% of Missourians votes for Biden. The democrats need to start playing for keeps. Get off the high horses and fight.
One more point real quick, this can be traced back to the filibuster. I know the topic has been beat to death but between failed attempts to codify ROE and Supreme Court picks, you take out the filibuster and this ruling doesn’t happen.
One of the most consistent things I've kept hearing over the years from rural areas is that they feel like Democrats just abandoned them. Like, PHYSICALLY just packed up and stopped coming around about 20 years ago.
I get that it's difficult and resource-intensive to run candidates in every downballot race, but the effect of NOT doing that has been that large swathes of the country feel like there just isn't any opposition to the Republicans. Almost every Democrat I know is bitching about rural abortion access today, but who the fuck is actually even showing up in those places to carry the standard into battle? It's in no small part emblematic of the performative-but-detached empathy that the party's educated class can't seem to cure itself of. They love to make themselves feel good by insisting that "EvErYoNe In ThIs CoUnTrY dEsErVeS tHiS vItAl cIvIl RiGhT", but -- don't even ask them to do something REALLY hard like *LIVING there*, just give them something easy like "Instead of pointlessly donating to stupid viral races we won't win (like McGrath in KY's futile attempt to unseat Cocaine Mitch), let's donate to a party organization that makes sure we field candidates in every downballot race in the country, even when we know we're going to lose" -- and all you'll get are blank fucking dead-eyed Zoomer stares.
RE the filibuster, I agree: it's no coincidence that Roe co-occurred with the rise of filibuster abuse. Neither necessarily caused the other. But Roe came at the tail end of an era where judicial activism had indeed picked up, but still coexisted with meaningful legislative progress on big, controversial issues. Despite being premature (to the climate of public opinion) and an overreach (it veered too hard towards one side of the issue, and on a weak legal theory at that), by becoming a banner for abortion-rights maximalism, Roe managed to endure, and in doing so proved to both parties that they didn't always need to rely on legislation to achieve final victories.
Civil Rights provides a contrast here: For MLK and the rest of the CRM, Brown and the other landmark decisions were incremental victories to help lay the groundwork to build public support for a Civil Rights Act that would be the *actual* victory. And although portions of the CRA have since been gutted, almost all of the act's civil protections still stand, and -- outside of a couple cranky libertarians and the Actual Racists/Fascists factions -- even the most rabid White-ly Grievanced MAGA Boat Parade-rs support its general provisions.
The filibuster became a way for both parties to take certain issues off the table and/or shunt them off to the judicial field. If you can just argue well enough in court, you can win a more complete victory than you ever could have gotten by passing a compromise bill through the Senate, and whenever the other side whines, you get to just tell them, "It's The Law Of The Land. Settled Law!". No hard work of building majorities. You just need to keep enough Senators to defend your turf.
(Hot Take: If the Senate map keeps getting worse due to geographical shifts, to the point that the Republican advantage gets anywhere near the filibuster's 60-vote threshold, I think that's when Democrats finally resolve that they'll abolish it the next time they just barely scratch 50+VP votes together.)
I'm *slightly* skeptical of a direct claim that the filibuster prevented any legislation before the Republicans' first attempts in the 1990s, because Democrats held the House until 1994. But it's certainly true that in the abstract, Democrats had declared direct abortion regulation by Congress off-limits post-Roe, in no small part owing to this mindset born of the nexus you identified between the filibuster and judicial supremacy/activism.
So dems lost rural places due to scarcity of electoral resources, but the gop didn’t suffer as dramatic a situation. Most urban areas are nogo zones for the gop, the real battles are the democratic primary. That being said you have seen a similar realization on the GoP side because they have the dems beat on geography. As long as gerrymandering continues to be a thing, it’s a practically impossible for dems to gain the upper hand in state legislatures.
As long as that’s that case then the house will continue to be unrepresentative. All this is to say, I’m legitimately concerned about representation and the lack thereof at all levels of government. I’m surprised that Biden and co don’t push more for Puerto Rican, DC and other territory statehood. Both politically and legally it doesn’t make sense for these places to not have representation.
You’re right about the relationship between the judiciary and legislation. Judiciary starts the move towards rights, the legislation should complete it. Why wasn’t that done with abortion, marriage equality, etc.?
The Dems didn't lose rural places due to resources, they had already been lost for a long time at that point. Dems mostly owned rural areas up until the Southern Strategy, which is actually kind of a misnomer because it was more intended to make Dixiecrat politics attractive to the *rest* of the country, not merely make the South more Republican.
What happened isn't that the Dems peaced out while Reps moved in; it's that most of the existing Dems decided they wanted to become Reps. The rural power structure wasn't replaced, it just changed the sign on the window. The remaining Dems who didn't flip -- core liberals and progressives -- eventually woke up to a new reality where they were now the "out" party, and peaced out for the cities where their politics were still tolerated and could make a difference.
And as the GOP went off the deep end in the 'teens, there *was* some rural appetite for an alternative, but the Dems hadn't been contesting those seats for at least a decade or two at that point.
I think the first step is just showing up. Contest every seat. And make sure we get the quality control right: We want candidates who are progressive enough to stand out as a real alternative, but also plugged in to their communities enough to not stake out dumb/extreme positions. We shouldn't expect to just start winning right off the bat, either -- it's going to take a good solid decade of "you win some, you lose some" before we have a chance of flipping state legislatures. But THAT's the goal. And hopefully it'll be right in time for the 2030 redistricting.
Biden et al see PR/DC as extreme moves that will prompt a backlash. IMO they're only half right: the GOP establishment would be infuriated, some rural areas will see it as a direct assault, and the few remaining conservative intellectuals will call foul; but normie voters would probably see at least PR as "fair" -- DC is a little riskier.
But I think the Dem establishment is mostly just holding their fire because of some sort of private threat McConnell's made. They'd love to do it if the popular/intellectual backlash was all they had to face. But even from the minority, especially this bare minority, McConnell can make their lives hell.
RE the judiciary->legislation. Marriage equality just genuinely saw a quick shift in public opinion. Same as it did for interracial marriage - the reliance issue is just too large, no one wants to open those two cans of worms, and overturning it is unpopular anyways. Before 2021, we *were* in an era of "backfilling" legislation to accommodate broadly popular marriage equality and sweep away a handful of old annoying laws, just like was done for interracial marriage. But since 2021, the GOP realized it could fuel backlash and division by making trans rights the new enemy, and marriage equality/LGB rights have kind of suffered some splash damage. I think Dems also just genuinely overreached and mistook enthusiasm for marriage equality as enthusiasm for gender politics that normies would perceive as more extreme.
IMO, normie politics will ultimately prevail and repair this damage. The GOP has had to come pretty far to the middle on LGB rights in order to make their attacks on trans rights palatable to normies. Even if Dems never moderate on trans rights, they'll still be able to force Republicans to the middle on LGB - there'll never be a true mandate to roll back marriage equality. And it stands to be seen whether the coming battles on abortion drown out the battle on trans rights anyways.
By contrast, none of this was done for abortion because of Roe. Roe prevented these state-level battles, dumb as they seem, and thus the normie public was never given test cases to settle on a compromise, and neither party was forced to moderate its extreme positions by those battles. Instead, their extreme positions fermented.
So, now I want to cry. You have talked about needing more than two political parties and doing away with FPTP voting. [I agree!] But, then you expound on the inability of the Democratic Party to form coalitions. That noise you hear in the background is me, screaming incoherently. While I am not a Democrat, I still lean that way while yearning for something better.
Does the upper echelon of the Democratic Party exist in an echo chamber? I know that it isn't the entirety of the Democratic Party, because Stacy Abrams exists. Where are the pragmatists with vision? I will even skip demanding the people that can play Go really well and settle for someone that is reasonably good at checkers to set the course for the party.
I think that the disengagement of young people (not all, but way too many) may well be rooted in the lack of local political engagement. If they aren't seeing anything promising locally, why should they look any further? When they look around, they don't see what their parents and grandparents saw. They see less ability to advance, less money and more disdain for them from the older generation. I know this is not true across the board, but too much of the board looks like that.
Well, there it is: my return rant that went off at an angle from yours. Thanks for taking the time to write.
1. I *definitely* agree that the disengagement of young people, and nonvoters more generally, in large part stems from dissatisfaction with the 2-party system. America has never had extremely high turnout, certainly never as high as places like Australia, but we've also had significant disenfranchisement over the centuries, which makes it hard to separate historic trends from
But in the broader context, I think that our uniquely zero-sum system is fundamentally disenfranchising to losers generally, and third parties specifically. If we evolved towards more positive-sum elections, I'd be downright floored if we didn't eventually see improvements to turnout.
I see all those other aspects - hope for the future, hope for change - as downstream of resolving the current political crisis. There's no universal law of progress that says things will just naturally get better for the younger generations all on their own, or that voters ten years from now will magically select the right policies to make things better just because "the future will always be better!". Maybe some of these problems will get solved with the political crisis as it stands, and maybe that will prove to be enough to restart the virtuous cycle. That happens *all the time* in history by pure accident. But that's not something we should be banking on. The less zero-sum of a system we can get out of the crisis, the more of those sticky problems we'll be able to solve.
2. I don't know if I'd necessarily call it an echo chamber - I plead agnosticism on that point. But in terms of broad causality... the pragmatists are always there. They're just not always as gifted as we'd like. Biden's a pragmatist; Obama and Clinton were, too. Abrams exhibits aspects of pragmatism. Even Tim Ryan, bless his heart, manages to achieve the platonic ideal of a Meathead Who Gets It. It's just not the only quality that makes a successful politician.
I think it's really easy to point fingers at scapegoats for why the party chose this path - on Roe specifically, and on the failing strategies of the entire Sixth Party System generally. Feminists and a pro-choice movement who demanded absolutism -- there's unmistakable traces of white female privilege/Karen-ism in them thar hills -- and relentlessly purged swing-state pro-life Dems; or maybe whoever it was that gave up on contesting rural areas; or maybe the many knock-on effects of the earlier and seemingly unrelated mistake to push AA over contesting persistent de-facto housing segregation. I mean, just take your pick of any mistake a Democrat's made in the past 50 years, right?
It's seductive.
Which is why I'm cautious of it. The 50-year history of both parties is an incredibly complex story. But what I *do* know is that, as I said, at pretty much every turn, the Democratic Party - from its thought leaders, to the base, to the elected leaders - chose to shun and purge pro-lifers. Moderates like Joe Biden either saw the writing on the wall or were outright coerced to rebrand themselves as pro-choice. At pivotal moments that pro-life Dems could have kept the party competitive in reddening states, the party rejected them.
I mean, just imagine an alternative history where Democrats were able to retain a strong majority of Catholics (instead of the 50/50 split they've held since Roe) on the strength of the progressive platform's large overlap with Catholic social justice theology and a policy of tolerance: "You can run as a pro-life Democrat, even call for Roe to be overturned, as long as you at least endorse the rape-incest-life-of-mother exceptions." The entire demographic makeup of the political system would be dramatically different! The Southern Strategy would still have gone on to export the Southern political-cultural complex to the rest of rural America, but Democrats would still be competitive in any mid-sized state with a strong Catholic population: Missouri, Louisiana, MN, WV, WI, MI, OH, PA, FL. We'd probably even have a decent shot at Utah, given Mormons' own odd tradition of social justice.
I guess my own point was really just that things didn't have to look this way, and we should keep that in mind VERY carefully going forward. A mad dash to reinstate Roe via court-packing or a filibuster-doomed abortion rights bill is going to signal to voters that Democrats mean to continue with more of the same scorched-earth tactics - in fact, this is sadly what I suspect will actually happen as of right now just judging from my social media lurking.
On the other hand, if we regroup, lick our wounds, and start running a 50-state strategy to win modest abortion rights - IE whatever the most popular compromise is in each state - then it's both (1) the best chance of ever getting those rights back, and (2) a big winner that sets us up in the long term with the fundamentals for a coalition that dominates the rest of the Seventh Party System. I'm not even a pro-choicer and I *still* can tell that's a winning strategy for them to get the most maximally pro-choice outcome.
Oh, I understand there is no promise that the future will be better. But, I have watched the middle class erode in the US and see how it disheartens younger people.
My first thought on needing more pragmatists may have been incorrect. (Though the handful you mention is/was not enough.) After reading your reply a thought stirred. Perhaps we just need more younger people with a little more give in their thinking. Maybe it isn't pragmatists, but less hidebound people, that we need. Thank you.
Agreed. Cheers!