Last week's Pod Save America was right: Republicans wouldn’t be screaming like stuck pigs about culture war issues right now, if we didn’t have them on the ropes on the economy.
Not to be Panglossian about it, but I reiterate that I believe Biden is still on the right track. He’s following the best possible strategy to set the Democrats up for an historic midterm hold:
1. He’s not pushing forward with filibuster reform, but letting the situation play itself out.
2. He’s getting as much as he can done through reconciliation, in order to get the economy in the best shape possible with stimulatory spending and investments.
Not doing either, provokes a backlash. The Democratic base might not like it, but the electorally critical voter in America remains socially conservative and economically liberal (see the picture above). Biden’s path is the only way to prevent the typical midterm slide.Everyone forgot about Secret Congress once again, because it’s so secret1.
But it’s also emblematic of what works so well about the Double Secret Biden Midterm Strategy. He’s pushing the big things he knows he can get, and he’s not pushing the marginal things that would just get polarized if he endorsed them, like this drinking water infrastructure bill that passed last week. (“Why the hell is he passing this infrastructure bill if he’s already passing another one?!”)
This is why we should always keep in mind that the advocates and activists love to bitch about not getting attention on these polarizing issues2, but they also regularly sabotage themselves with said bitching. So as I said yesterday, it’s important to take them seriously, but not literally.Keeping Dave Honest: Secret Congress is also perhaps one of the few bits of counterevidence to my personal narrative about American political decline.
And it even applies to what we might call the Not-So-Secret-Congress docket! If you ignore the vote totals on the final bills, you’ll see lots of back-and-forth on controversial legislation like ARP, AJP, and AFP. Moderate Republicans negotiated behind the scenes with Democrats every step of the way on ARP; they just didn’t want to publicly vote on the final product. But they negotiated with every bit of knowledge that said final product would include at least some of their priorities.
What this also tells me is that even if the filibuster is abolished, we most likely won’t actually see a deluge of legislation rammed through. Both sides will just treat legislative battles like they do reconciliation: they’ll negotiate as much as they can, but then not vote for the outcome in order to tar it as “partisan” and “forcing [X] on the American people”. Keeping the theme of deluge, let’s call this the “trickle”.
This points to a suboptimal future, but perhaps less suboptimal than the Deluge Scenario. The conventional wisdom says that under the Deluge, we get a partisan death spiral as each side passes flurries of laws attempting to seize total power3. However, in the Trickle Scenario, we get more legislation overall; but as I just outlined, it’s not an explosion, and it mostly just features each side resorting to the same familiar tactics. The major threat of the Trickle isn’t so much an apocalyptic showdown (though that’s always a possibility), but that the partisan hyperbole and grandstanding that the filibuster currently gives us, continues to obscure the real legislating being done by Secret Congress, and thus the electorate keeps making the same poorly-informed decisions as it does under our filibuster-driven culture war.
At the end of the day, though, perhaps this whole scenario is less unworkable than we might expect. The big problem is getting Democrats, who are always slow on the uptake with gaming filibuster politics, to recognize that just because Republicans won’t vote for their own plans, doesn’t mean one can’t hash out a plan with them, pass it while they pretend to be upset about it, and have it be durable against backlash. If Obamacare taught us anything, it’s at least that this style of legislating, while not sexy or inspiring, insulates it from backlash to a degree. The kicker is just that Obamacare is best interpreted as an easily-demagogued one-shot backlash, not as an indicator that passing family policy on a party-line vote will provoke a whole new backlash.It probably went without saying, but the Discourse’s official position is “Stop Feeding The [Damned] Trolls”. You’ll never see stories on here about MTG or LB or Matt Gaetz, not because they’re not “consequential” in some journalistic sense, but because they’re not sane.
The typical retort is that “not feeding” is tantamount to “dangerously ignoring”, but that’s only true when it comes to children, not your political opponents. When they start to actually become dangerous, we’ll cover them, but only in the context of sane politics, not one that signal-boosts their shitty messages.I’ve said before that the best strategy for Never Trumpers to achieve real power, is to form their own caucus/party that gives Manchin and Sinema cover on a filibuster reform vote, lowering the threshold to a cool 54/55 votes so that the new party is clearly a kingmaker on all policy in the Senate.
What’s interesting to me today, is that the very fact they haven’t done so in Biden’s first 100 days is both a tribute to the power of human psychology to obscure optimal strategies4, and an indication that even the Never Trumpers don’t trust their own ability to control Senate Democrats5.
Which, to be fair to them, is indeed a gamble on whether voters would actually reward the kingmakers in the next election6. But I suspect that the same self-sense of patrician respectability that leads these guys to be Never Trumpers, is also why they believe so hard in what’s essentially a “domino theory” of electoral politics resulting in the downfall of their cushy elite power.
It’s a helpful reminder that today’s parties are not only ideologically polarized, but they’ve reached a level of ideological ferment that reconciles the various otherwise-disparate positions they hold. Remember this next time you wonder, “Why don’t [X people] do [Y thing that I think they should/wish they would do]?”“Where Are Those Death Panels, Anyways?”. Next time you see this take, let yourself have a nice little chuckle, and then remind yourself that it’s only half the story.
The other half is that the people who fell for the death panels have long since been indoctrinated past the point that this cute little retort of ours can penetrate. They are constantly distracted and redirected towards the latest outrage by a trillion-dollar propaganda machine. To the extent that any of them would ever take the retort seriously, their response would merely be, “But WE kept Obummer from doing it!”.
And there’s a lesson there: that response is internally consistent! It may not be historically accurate, but it’s a plausible narrative: (1) “Democrats were going to do death panels”, (2) “The Tea Party got public opinion against death panels”, (3) “Therefore, the Democrats abandoned death panels”.
This is why the Discourse spends so much time talking about narrative. It’s a powerful thing, because most narratives are internally consistent, which is what makes them so difficult to break through.I noticed a dynamic by which liberals fail to understand the culture war.
For most of us, we’re not activists. We’re not fighting the culture war. So it’s mind-boggling to us how much the right sees us through that prism. I mean, who’s pushing this shit, amirite? I’m certainly not going around “cancelling” people.
But what we’re missing is that the culture war is being driven by Fox7. Fox doesn’t just fight its own battles, they invent battles with us by cherry-picking tales about dumb shit our activists do, and painting us with the same brush. Now, we also do that to their activists to a large extent, but we haven’t made it an art form like they have.
I don’t know where I read this, but it was several years ago, and it was a great point that went like this: “We tend to assume that our opponents are like us”. And the truth is, they often aren’t!
Democrats intuit that people who take culture war issues seriously but aren’t actually bigots are just a vocal minority of Republicans, and therefore most Republicans must be motivated by more sinister things like bigotry, because how else could they buy something so patently false, hook-line-and-sinker?
Republicans likewise assume that Democrats have the same sort of movement-wide coordination and hierarchy as theirselves, and that we’re all following the same marching orders from a centralized media…
… which any Democrat could tell you couldn’t be further from the truth, and in fact is one of the most vexing facts of life in our coalition!
At any rate, the point is, per today’s top graphic, the best thing we can do is stop fighting the culture war, and start fighting the economic war. It doesn’t mean we have to abandon the race-class narrative, it just means we follow the most important lessons of said narrative by deploying it judiciously and properly optimizing messages to the according intersectionalities of the race/class groups we want to speak to at any given moment.RE: “Coupon Government”. Childcare and housing demonstrate to us that deregulation can only help if our baseline is a supply shortage. Otherwise, deregulation just hurts people. But the nice thing is, regulation can be reimposed once supply is met.
What the last century of social movements and their backlashes can tell us, though, is that regardless of which way we’re arguing - for more, or less regulation - we need to plan ahead for the overcorrection. Otherwise, like with the NIMBY backlash to eras of top-down building projects, we end up with entrenched politics like NIMBY now has.Does lead actually explain Trump and the Boomers? Lead was phased in just before they were born, and only phased out in the decade after the Boomer Era ended. Not to oversimplify things, but it could explain a lot about the arc of their political history.
I think we can now declare with some confidence that asymmetric polarization and electoral bias has indeed led to a fundamental deviation of the GOP from the traditional strategies. Historically, persuasion is what wins elections, and base turnout doesn’t. But with right-wing propaganda preaching to and epistemologically isolating a compiled assortment of right-skewed electorates, base turnout reliably works for them at literally every level but the presidency, and even there it’s tolerably reliable for them in overruling the popular vote.
My fear here is that if America doesn’t move to RCV quickly enough and the filibuster crisis is “resolved enough” by the of-late expanded reconciliation process, then we settle into a limbo where Republicans reset the playing field every decade with gerrymandering, and Democrats never get their fabled demographic victory.
On the other hand, Texas will probably flip long before that nightmare ever happens, mooting the fear altogether.
But honestly, and this is kind of selfish too, I’m already 35 and don’t want to spend the remaining 2-4 decades of my politically cogent life suffering under this insanity, only to witness it changing at the tail end.Is Iran becoming an “anocracy” like Imperial Japan? I think it’s a promising frame through which to analyze them, and it explains a lot of why different parties, in the US and globally, see different things in them.
Right now, the worst thing business leaders can do right now is freak out about their sunk costs in real estate. Get over it, guys, and take advantage of the golden goose of real-estate-savings that life has handed you.
If I were in upper management, I’d be desperately searching right now for the best way to optimize a hybrid work-from-home/in-office workforce, and definitely not trying to single-mindedly recoup lost investments that were planned pre-pandemic.
Finally, I need more Substacks to follow - it’s embarrassing to keep referencing Yglesias and Smith. Anyone got ideas? Thanks!
As my adorable, 12-going-on-22 sister would say, “duhhhh”.
For instance, how many Flint takes have we listened to over the past several years? And how far did it actually get the advocates, until they stopped bitching and started playing Secret Congress: The Game (tm)?
BTW, it should be noted that per Mettler’s Four Threats theory, even partisan spirals aren’t guaranteed to result in collapse; rather, the main problem is that today we’re in a unique alignment of all four of the threats she describes.
IE they’re not willing to sacrifice their commitment to ideological positions like low taxes and low spending, which the last few months have already proven to be on their way out regardless of how much Mitt Romney dislikes that macrotrend.
I mean, it also is just an indicator of just how consolidated the two-party system is. But the two things I outline here are the major contributors to why that consolidation hasn’t been meaningfully challenged.
Americans aren’t used to dealing with kingmaker parties, so this is highly unpredictable.
And its ilk - Breitbart, RCP, Drudge, Newsmax, OANN, etc.
I somehow kept my liberal head about me, despite the fact that, as a 69-year-old, I must have done at least some lining of my brainpan with lead.
I guess I just got lucky?
Nice. But you lost me on the 3 letter acronyms. On a less busy day I take time to look them up:). Subscribed!