Polarization is the defining characteristic of the current political era. For most of the left, and a growing majority of the center, it’s understood that polarization has happened asymmetrically. The standard narrative is that this is driven by geographical sorting1.
However, for many, the galaxy-brain moment is the realization that this is shaped by the two parties’ coalitions - one both ideologically and demographically diverse, and another whose ideological diversity is… arguable… and whose demography may be showing some “green shoots” of growing diversity, but otherwise is pretty solidly dominated by Whites, with a pro-male gender imbalance, tending to be median-or-above income, and less likely to have college educations2.
Why start with this discussion? Because the left’s multi-layered diversity makes it difficult to agree on a solid political program, but the right’s structural advantage in America’s political system forces the left to assemble large majorities around singular issues in order to achieve any major items on its platform3. This was easier when the more factionalized and ideologically-mixed earlier incarnations of our two major parties allowed for more fluid coalitions to be assembled on any given issue, although the cost was that civil rights was never allowed on the table.
The Selfish Leftist
What all this means is that generally speaking, if you’re a leftist, Your Pet Issue Doesn’t Matter.
Yes, you.
No, I’m not talking about that other person in the background, I mean YOU.
Have you ever fantasized about moving to Europe, but you know you can’t hope to learn the local language? Have you ever salivated at universal health care, free college, strong unions, demilitarized police, and dozens of other social democratic policies? Have you ever cursed being born in such an incredibly privileged country that still manages to miss the mark so badly as our beloved America?
Well, I’ve got news for you. Europe has its shit put together so well because they had to rebuild their political systems from scratch after WWII. America simply was never forced to do this, and it shows. Our system is beyond outdated, beyond stagnant, and is actively failing now.
It’s simply impossible anymore for the American left to get its way on any given issue on anything resembling a reasonable timeline. And yet, to a far greater degree than the only other party in the country, the only thing keeping various leftists pulling the lever for the Democrats is their own rabid dedication to whatever idiosyncratic cause they’re most personally committed to. It’s not so much that any one component of this depressing state of affairs is all that unusual from a broader political science perspective… it’s that they’re happening at the same historical moment.
The Challenge Before Us
However, it’s humanly impossible to convince the entire left that Your Pet Issue Doesn’t Matter. It makes far more sense to attempt to use their personal dedication for our own ends - to build atop their conviction that Their Pet Issue Really Does Matter, a larger sense that they need to do something specific about it, something which fundamentally changes the American political system, in order to get their issues addressed. But first, we need to know what that something is, and that requires us to understand the current American political landscape.
Republicans control trifecta government (see above) in 22 states, and 7 more legislatures - important for using Electoral College controversies to trigger presidential tiebreakers in the House, a growingly attractive avenue of power for Republicans who’ve managed to occupy a wierd electoral niche never intended by the Founders.
They also control 27 of the 50 state delegations to the House of Representatives.
Don’t get me started on gerrymanders; however, it suffices to say that most-if-not-all Republican state legislatures are self-gerrymandered. That is, the gerrymander was instituted by the legislature itself, and the power to reverse it remains mostly with said legislature.Republicans have a 1.26% edge in the Electoral College.4
The national debate about the Electoral College suffers two major misconceptions: (1) that the small-state bonus is electorally significant, and (2) that the only reasonable alternative is a popular vote or even abolishing the College outright.
Towards the first, while the small-state bonus is indeed real, it’s basically wiped out by the fact that most states are dominated by one party or the other, and thus the EC only overrules the popular vote based on near-arbitrarily random combinatoric outcomes in the large swing states - Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, plus the 3-6 other states that become relevant any given cycle.
On the latter misconception, while the National Interstate Popular Vote Compact may be the closest alternative to enactment at the moment, it’s also of questionable constitutionality. And almost every other proposed reform to the EC involves eminently unrealistic attempts to abolish it by amendment.
Short of that idiocy, the “Repeal #17A” crowd5 thinks the best alternative would be to copy the Maine scheme and apportion Electors to House districts, with the Senatorial Electors designated to the statewide vote winner. Some liberals get fooled into thinking this would be an improvement on their objections to the current setup, but it would essentially just infect the Presidency with the gerrymandering problem that plagues the House, worsening the Democratic disadvantage in the process!6 Most other liberals want to either proportionalize EC delegations by state, abolish Winner-Take-All, or keep WTA but institute Ranked-Choice7.
Notably, all options short of a constitutional amendment would basically have to be enacted in the state legislatures, just like with gerrymandering.Republicans have a ~3% edge in the House8.
This is mostly due to gerrymandering exacerbating the natural disadvantage at which geographic clustering puts Democrats. It’s simply easier to gerrymander cities than it is to gerrymander rurals.
The big idea to fix this is having Congress mandate the states use bipartisan or “independent”9 redistricting commissions, and failing that, a unilateral state-by-state effort to institute it. But even if this passes federally, what’s to keep heavily-gerrymandered states from weakening the process? Federal courts can’t be relied on to police every single violation, and SCOTUS can’t be trusted not to overturn the law by inventing new states’ rights out of thin air.
Furthermore, like a national popular vote, this only entrenches the two-party system. CIZST isn’t alone in telling us that the particularly American incarnation thereof is really really bad. “Bipartisanship” always sounds nigh-utopian to a population traumatized by the rancor of the two parties, but relying on bipartisan commissions to save us is like a judge selected by two abusive parents going through a bitter divorce begging them to “keep the child’s best interests in mind”.
Multi-member districts using Single Transferable Vote - the multi-member version of Ranked-Choice - would go a long way towards actually solving gerrymandering, but this would have to approved by the Senate.
It’s clear that the House can’t be fixed without (1) abolishing the filibuster, (2) restoring balance to the federal judiciary through the Senate, and (3) controlling the state legislatures.
Hmmm, I wonder if anyone’s picking up on a pattern here…Republicans have a 6-7% edge in the Senate10.
This one surprisingly doesn’t go through the state legislatures. Article V requires unanimous consent of the states to reform Senate representation, so just about the only way to fix it is… the collapse of the Republic. Even putting on our rosiest-colored sunglasses, the states have simply never unanimously consented on a single major controversy. Even the decision to declare war after Pearl Harbor had a dissenting vote, and while that wasn’t an amendment, it speaks to the difficulty of getting unanimous consent on issues of critical national importance.
Now, adding DC, PR, and the island territories would go a long way towards changing the math, but only if they pass the filibuster. That’s only a 6-seat swing, in what’s already the most extreme scenario imaginable. And yet, there’s an even more extreme scenario - some Harvard Law professors figured a while back out that you could theoretically gerrymander the Senate by breaking up America’s cities into a hundred or so “states”, so as to permanently sideline rural areas.
Anyways, even the most realistic of these fairy tales for fixing the Senate involves (1) abolishing the filibuster, and (2) making it easier to elect Democrats in the states, which would require… yep, recapturing the state legislatures!
Dumb Alternatives
Look, the obvious answer is to (1) abolish the filibuster, and (2) seize the state legislatures in order to enact whatever reforms would make leftist causes easier to pass.
But while the former is probably a political inevitability, the latter is incredibly difficult! The political indicators are… not going in the direction that suggests recapturing state legislatures will be easy. And this is precisely why you hear so much talk from the left about other nonsense ideas that seem easier or more straightforward, but won’t make a difference in reality, or may even worsen the problem. To wit:
Term limits are… pardon my French, but abominably fucking stupid.
The politics of reducing or constraining congressional salaries and benefits (“put them all on Medicaid, pay them minimum wage, and see how the lazy bums like it!”) have utterly backfired and fallen mainly on their staffs, which has made them more reliant on lobbyists.
As a result of similar efforts at the state level, many state legislators essentially do it as a part-time job or barely that, which may be the wet dream of many morons out there, but is simply no rational basis for a modern republic to employ its lawmakers.Lobbyists are already registered, morons. Quit suggesting it.
Closing campaign disclosure loopholes and abolishing PACs are good in their own right, but they’re also not going to fix the system that produced those problems in the first place.
It’s like trying to stop the flow of the Mississippi at St. Louis to fix a flood: yeah, man, it’s a lotta water flowing by, and you wanna stop it from flooding your land, but there is so much hydrodynamic power pushing that flow from so far upstream, you’re just creating all new problems for yourself instead of stopping the water.Voter suppression is real, but mostly ineffective.
Voter nullification (IE the Republican plot to have gerrymandered state legislatures designate Electoral College delegations) however is a serious threat, but if anything it’s just more proof that the endless idiotic demands for distractions like term limits and “getting the money out of politics” are in fact distractions.
All of the various lighter reforms that people are constantly suggesting in good faith are likewise genuinely very amazing, but also too small bore to save Democrats from the systemic disadvantage they face: pre-election media blackouts, mandatory voting, automatic registration, early and absentee voting, expanding polling places, etc.
Getting From Here To There
Knowing what the left needs to be convinced of isn’t the end of the problem. There remains the issue of actually going out there and convincing them. Matt Yglesias recently had a good piece on what we can actually do to achieve policy outcomes, but even he somewhat misses the key here. After all, he’s preaching to his own choir, and probably not really getting his message out to the leftists he specifically addressed.
So let’s look at some historical examples of the left getting sold on a particular theory of political change. (Trigger Warning: This is depressing!)
Marxism. Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto as a call to action in the revolutions of 1848… which were promptly put down. Marxism didn’t really recover for another 30 years. That time was spent in the rhetorical wilderness of Russia, where leftist proponents tried various foolhardy schemes to sell the population on communism.
Eventually, they gave up, and having been forced to sit in their echo chamber for much too long, embraced full-on revolutionary vanguardist insurgency. In other words, they convinced themselves that Russia would only adopt communism if a small vanguard of intellectual elites managed to topple the tsarist regime through bloody violence and disruption first.
After another 40 years of fumbling around with different strategies to accomplish this, they finally succeeded. This was mostly characterized by endless internecine infighting among the elite vanguard, and several failed attempts to hijack popular revolutions that they themselves had had little hand in starting.Abolitionism & Radical Republicanism. Cooler heads tried to tell the left to calm its jets, but they were absolutely right that this was one of the great moral crusades of human history, and couldn’t just be ignored.
However, there weren’t many of them, so after several decades of backward progress driven by moderates compromising with an intransigent South, the left grew impatient, cheered on its own stochastic anti-slavery violence (Nat Turner), and the right used that to propagandize their populace into a civil war.
The left’s side lucked into winning the war, but then they mistook being in the catbird seat of the winning side for five years, as having a winning majority nationally. Moderates refused to back their ambitious plans for politically reconstructing the South from the ground up.Clintonism & Bernie-ism. Leftism was on the ropes nationally, so they really had no choice but to accept a centrist moderate they hated. They weren’t happy about it, but they lost the debate in the primary, and he won it in two consecutive generals.
Bernie-ism is best understood as a relitigation of Clintonism. Thirty years of social progress have left Clintonite positions looking pretty bad in hindsight, so the left is now trying to capitalize on that. They haven’t really learned anything, other than not to trust the new crop of moderates giving them the same advice.The American Revolution. Despite the picture of unity we learn as schoolchildren, pre-revolutionary America was about evenly split into thirds on the question of independence - a third were Loyalists, a third Patriots, and a third undecided. Everyone was basically terrified of the Patriots for courting treason; the British were being remarkably lenient with all this open dissent considering what other empires typically did at the time.
The British gifted the left-leaning Patriots a series of easy PR victories in dumb massacres and insulting laws passed by Parliament, and it was off to war - the left didn’t even bother convincing the Loyalists, they just kind of seized on public outrage among the undecided, to declare independence and hope they could just keep the momentum going. The war languished on - through Washington’s brilliance at leading a perpetually rearguard force - until the Patriots amassed enough victories, actual and strategic, to bring in a ringer (France). This then convinced a reluctant South to help finish the job.
Upon victory, the South went back to being recalcitrant, and the left had to fight a hard public campaign to convince them otherwise.The Civil Rights Era. Martin Luther King orchestrated one of the most masterful nonviolent political advocacy campaigns in world history. He’s mostly famous for the content of his civil rights achievements, but that sadly overshadows just how disciplined, effective, and talented he was, and how unusual this is among politicians in general, let alone leftists.
Most modern leftist hagiographies emphasize King’s leftist shift in the second half of his public career. I think that’s incomplete; namely, that his work was incomplete. King was an ambitious man who set an ambitious target of both racially and economically remaking America: finally solving the problem of the Race Class Narrative. While vilified at the outset, the momentum he built was so strong that even years after his death, Nixon was moments away from signing a Universal Basic Income into law.
King is the one shining example of a leftist using both tactics and strategy to build a compelling-enough moral case to overwhelm the fundamentals that drove his contemporary moderate allies to chastise him.
It may be fair to point out that King benefited from the leftist momentum FDR built, but I’d argue that FDR was “merely” competent in riding a wave of backlash to a failed right, and then lucky to preside during and not screw up an apocalyptic war; King, by contrast, kept that wave going for a good decade and a half after it would otherwise have ended, given the growing divisions in the Democratic Party and the clear rise of the right in the GOP.
I think what we see here is that… the left ignores most pundits, listens to itself, and follows the incentives ahead of it. Go figure! Also, talents like Dr. King aren’t once-in-a-generation, they’re more like once-every-few-centuries, so you can’t really count on those.
Anyways, what’s interesting is that the left isn’t prey to the same populist incentives as the right is. The right falls for Fox News. The left reads another book. But, crucially, they only read books that they think they’ll agree with ahead of time! So while center-leftists like Yglesias may at least have the book part down, the left isn’t reading them - not the Kendian left, nor the far more numerous Kendi-hating left.
So, in conclusion, after having written practically an entire book chapter here myself - and still not having a comprehensive solution - I think we can safely say that Ygelsias and I need the left to start reading us. Which means, in large part, biting our tongues, and speaking their language.
One popular but egregiously wrong-headed strain further suggests that this is somehow shaped by archetypical “brain plans” - compromising itself by attempting to map results onto existing political divides. This logical fallacy is known as “begging the question”: assuming one’s conclusion, and working backward to figure out how to frame the question such that the answer is said conclusion.
I want to be clear: This research is really bad, fundamentally flawed, essentially irredeemable. If you’ve heard of the “replication crisis”, well, it’s part of that. And for the record, said crisis really only affects this particular nexus of psychology/sociology/neurology/poli-sci. It doesn’t call into question particle physics, and only the more moronic of the soft scientists have even tried to pretend that it does.
This is really important. Another abominably dumb narrative on the left is that lower-class Whites are the foundational traitors to the pluralistic class struggle. While Trump’s coalition contains plenty of this class’s members, its true core are less-educated but economically middle-class Whites.
Sidebar: While it’s definitely bad that the filibuster forces Congress into a toxic style of omnibus legislation, because it cripples our ability to iterate on policy, I don’t think I’ve ever dwelt on the fact that this interacts with the left’s diverse unruliness in a unique manner. The left is incentivized to tie dozens of unrelated issues to whatever the current focal issue is. This end-run around the filibuster is how we ended up with Biden’s reconciliation bills having such a comically bloated scope.
I prefer this metric because it’s closer to our notions of what a “systemic disadvantage” is. The metric’s based on a Monte Carlo simulation: every state is randomized based on polling and historical data, and you run the simulation a large number of times to account for a reasonable variety. You then plot the average of simulated electoral outcomes (House seats, Senate seats, electoral votes) against the average national two-party vote share. Because our zero-sum system means the equilibrium outcome ought to hover around a 50/50 partisan split, the corresponding deviation from a strictly proportional 50/50 vote share necessary to achieve it, is the best quantification of the systemic advantage or disadvantage each party faces.
By contrast, I really dislike the predominant “median” or “tipping point” analyses that you’ll most often see. These basically calculate the difference between any given race’s two-party vote, and the national popular vote for that chamber. They then sort the districts/states from most-R to most-D, and spit out the number for the median or “tipping point” district or state.
In my view, this is kind of working backwards from arbitrary individual outcomes, and not telling us anything useful about the broader outcome space. After all, before the election, any old state could end up being the tipping point. At the level of the entire political system, which is where this discussion is happening, we don’t care about which state is the tipping point, we just care about quantifying the ongoing disadvantage one party faces. Admittedly, the value of that indicator inherently changes over time, and tracks outcomes, but backward-looking statistics can only tell us which direction it’s been heading, not where we’re going now.
Also, my preferred metric is a lot closer to how prediction models actually work.
Mostly arch-conservatives and “classical liberals” for whom the passage of the 17th Amendment is a cursed shibboleth of the moment when they think the federal government tragically departed from the Constitution as they arbitrarily think it to have originally been understood. Causally, many things they actually blame 17A for came before it, but don’t remind them of that or they’ll go all Sovereign Citizen on you.
Then again, perhaps with such an actually-skewed system forcing Democrats to campaign in the gerrymandered districts, their political incentives would dramatically change. Right now, Dems just bitch about the EC being biased against them, without doing much besides campaign extra-super-duper-hard in the swing states, because it’s pointless to assault rural Republican stronghold states.
Bizarrely, Maine also does this on top of its apportionment scheme. However, 2020 was its first year of this, and all races were won on the first vote, so ranking did not come into play.
This uses a slightly different method based on seats-won vs. votes-won. It’s all I could find, but at least less objectionable than tipping-point.
“Independently” selected by… partisan legislatures and executives. Just like our judiciaries. Yep. Totally gonna work.
This uses the tipping-point method I don’t like, but again it’s the only one I could find.
Out of all of this thoughtful and thought-provoking writing, I am going to home in on something that drives me a bit crazy. The idea of some people that we MUST interpret the Constitution as it was regarded on the day it was signed into being. This, in spite of the wrangling over it and the deals hammered out, interprets the Founding Fathers as being of one mind and we can't deviate. This, in spite of the fact that those very same men built in a way to CHANGE it. People accept the 2nd Amendment, and consider it sacrosanct, but the 17th Amendment is too much, in their minds, and shouldn't exist. Well, they are nuts because it came into being under the system that was setup to start with; they drive me nuts.
The rant is done, I'm going back to mumbling over my coffee. Thanks.