Weekly Roundup 8/13/21
Real Fridays-The-13th Are Always Anticlimactic To What I Was Brought Up To Fear
Hey folks! Just starting up another week here. Let’s dive in…
Is Obama the Left’s Reagan? I was pondering the similarities. Both men are simultaneously considered the gold standards of political achievement for their parties (Reagan’s near-total Electoral College victory, Obama riding in on the 60-Senator majority), held up as modern-day saints of their movements, while also having large parts of their program and strategy rejected by the base as not merely antithetical to the party ideology, but heretical and even sometimes cast as traitorous. Saint Ron is now seen as having “capitulated” on immigration, and backlash to his amnesty is the motivating force behind the failure of every grand immigration compromise - Republican or Democrat - since. Saint Barry got himself hoodwinked by Cocaine Mitch into compromising away an historic majority, and also betrayed the Black community by triangulating respectability politics with police brutality.
I’d say that at first glance, the major difference is that internal dissent from Obama both came earlier and was more widespread. While Reagan’s tax compromises were genuine political crises for him, the right has been more than happy to paper these over and canonize him as having presided over a constant string of victories. For two and a half decades after his presidency, Republicans fought a “king of the hill” struggle to claim the mantle of spiritual heir to Reagan. The “third term” of Bush 41 was never in question within their party. The left, by contrast, didn’t even wait for Obama to leave office before mounting a vigorous and nearly-successful rebuttal to his legacy. An Obama-ite (Biden) may have in a sense won a third term after a brief interruption caused by some very idiosyncratic reasons, but the debate within the party is far from over.
Perhaps some of this is also due to the nature of the two parties’ coalitions. Republicans are much better at papering over their differences. Liberals are more diverse and more habituated to fighting tooth-and-nail for priority in intraparty struggles. At any rate, we’ll need a few more decades before we can properly judge Obama’s intraparty legacy.RE Ezra Klein’s Friday podcast: Contra Drum, I think it's more accurate to say that [mainly White, but also non-White] progressives didn't actually "go hard left", they reacted to the shattering of their illusion of progress since the 60's.
What I hang it on is this: If you go and talk to any progressive today - not just a Bernie Sanders, but a Liz Warren, or someone else who's pretty level-headed - and fly Drum's take past them, they'll look at you like you're *nuts*. Part of that is always going to be regular old partisan self-regard. But there's a kernel of truth in there, that progressives don't really feel like they've gone all that far to the left, they're just "holding America to its stated values".Most progressives had a sense that there had been real progress. Republican politicians observed liberal speech codes - because, as I think Ezra’s podcast really helps illuminate, they hadn't fully transformed into a party of identity yet - and competed in elections democratically, and overall it seemed like the march of progress was going on.
But the reaction to and stonewalling of Obama shattered that illusion. And all of a sudden, progressives realized that the underlying reality wasn't as pretty as they'd thought it was. So they readjusted their agenda and started pushing for the same vision they thought they'd already won in the 60's. The thing is, to a centrist, this looks "hard left", because the changes progressives are now demanding seem pretty radical, just like MLK did in the 60’s. But to a progressive, what they're asking for actually feels regressive - we're relitigating a consensus we thought we already had, at the cost of new 21st-century issues like climate change.
Anyways, that's my take on how to reconcile Drum's perspective with that of progressives. It's not that any one is right or wrong, it's that they're all describing different views of the same thing.
Also RE Ezra Klein: He mentions something in there about the policy space being full of potential positive sum ideas, but that the identity space is often zero-sum. Geez, I wonder what this statement sounds like?
Finally, his guest Mason kept mentioning That Certain Faction. It’s nice to hear echoes among different intellectuals of the same thing, but I also wish we elite leftists would be a little more honest with ourselves and just call out the Southern White Power Complex for what it is. Then again, Hanlon’s Razor suggests we give ourselves a break!Thursday’s Pod Save America: “Running against the Fox caricature of Democrats” may definitely be a perennial weakness of the GOP, but I think we should also honestly ask ourselves where it’s succeeded.
And I think the immediate answer is “Appalachian-influenced America”. As the Scots-Irish get further and further away from their formative Borderlands primordial habitat, they’ve found it less and less easy to keep straddling the fence and playing both sides of the Great American Cultural Divide they’re enmeshed in. The Southern White Power Complex has always been more willing to indulge Appalachian America’s worst instincts and tell them The Big Lies instead of the dozens of little white lies the North has preferred. Which means that as the Appalachian mindset has spread and influenced the rest of rural America, the Southern White Power Complex’s favorite propaganda arm (Fox, duh) has followed along with it.
A more modern-focused answer might focus more on the dirty little secret of today’s state politics, which is that despite seemingly deep benches, both parties have trouble recruiting candidates to contest every single seat in the country, especially in safe districts. This is why every 4 years, party officials talk a big game about the “50-state strategy” (IE contesting every seat and state in the country) in presidentials, but whether either party actually attempts it (and how successful it is) is far more dependent on long-term trends than anything else. Thus, most candidates in down-ballot races are pretty much on their own unless they can attract national attention, which is extremely difficult. And since these candidates draw mostly from the general population, they also share the general population’s distribution of inborn expertise at running one’s own PR shop - which is to say, not much. Against this whole backdrop, then, the Fox Caricature gives Republicans an edge in downballot races, because it helps them tie inexperienced, no-name Democrats with weak-if-any communications capacity to the most extreme elements of the national party.The current make-believe “inflation crisis” is a great example of how traditional inflation politics are never good for doves. We need a way to sell the wonks’ preferred policy of moderate inflation to The Unenlightened which is at least as effective as the constant demagoguery with which the hawks bombard them.
Context Is Dictator: From Revolutions podcast, Josef Stalin is basically what you’d get if you Saw Gerrera instead of Mon Mothma ended up as the leader of the Rebel Alliance.
Just a friendly reminder to MASH THAT LIKE BUTTON, FOOLS! It’s like, right there. Come on. You know you want to.
Pod Save America Monday: I think Lovett was right: McConnell accepted the BIF because he had to. Infrastructure simply got to Secret Congress levels of support because it’s been percolating through Secret Congress for too long not to. Both parties ended up putting infrastructure on their post-Obama platforms because it seemed like such an easy win, and they sold their members on it so well that a bipartisan bill simply couldn’t be stopped by administrations changing over.
A lot of people love to dunk on how fallen our society has become, that we’ve locked our elderly away in nursing homes for the past few generations instead of living with them at home. But just imagine how bad COVID would have been if we hadn’t!
Also, this may be an underappreciated factor in why some other countries were either far more willing to accept restrictions, or simply Didn’t Give A Fuck: either (A) they were rich and comfortable enough to want to save babushka and pop-pop, who were right in front of them angrily eyeing their decision, or (B) having so many generations packed into the same household gives you an appreciation that life always ends, and there’s not much you can do about it.From The Comments: I really do try not to make a habit of wishing for the death of my political opponents, but I've been feeling for a while now that if Trump dies before 2024 of his own bad health, Western civilization will be dodging a bullet the likes of which we haven't seen since Attila the Hun conveniently died in 453 before he could finish finishing off what was left of Rome.
Soaking The Rich. Liberals love to point to how insanely popular taxing the rich is. But the problem is, when they do this, they almost always ignore one of their own favorite narratives: The Race-Class Narrative.
CIZST makes it plain that the rich will always have an incentive to divide the lower classes as a defense mechanism against the left’s depredations. So if you’re going to soak the rich, you can’t just bank on its popularity, you have to actually defend your cultural flank. The rich will hit back on guns, abortion, “BLM/Antifa”, COVID, and whatever other White Identity Politics they can play.
And this cultural flank is a HUGE liability for Biden going forward, since his pay-for for the $2.9T reconciliation infrastructure deal is “soak the rich”.ACX Thursday: It makes me wonder… what does the next phase of this “turning of the wheel” (see the graphic in section 2) look like? How do we get there? I don’t generally like embracing completely mechanistic views of politics like this, but let’s sanewash it a bit, for fun.
We at the Discourse insist that the seeds of each change are sown in history. So, what does history tell us? Well, the core conceit is that the right and left would essentially swap parties once again. Playing on existing themes, we see the seeds of this in (1) the growing anti-feminist Men-of-Color contingent in the GOP, (2) Trumpism’s populist elements, (3) adoption of Ranked-Choice Voting in Democratic-majority areas, and (4) assorted right-leaning elements of the Democratic party - moderate/centrist technocrats, the growing tech/finance elites, Never-Trumpers, older Black voters, and rural swing districts. We also always see historically that youth tend to lead as the vanguard of long-term party ideological movement.
The story of the next several decades would go something like this: As the GOP abandons actual fiscal conservatism to court Trumpist populism, intellectual elites in the Democratic party resume the historical strain of American conservative intellectual Brahminism. GOP Men of Color and Bernie-disaffected Roganites1 introduce an even more extreme brand of left-leaning populism. Ranked-Choice allows the Democrats to maintain a tenuous supermajority through the long-predicted demographic shift of Whites to a plurality status, but as the moderate wing of the party grows larger and larger (Biden having been the harbinger of a string of future moderate victories), the increasingly farther-left wings of elite academics grow ever more frustrated with the party’s direction and start seeing themselves more as DSA and Greens than Democrats. Trumpism, meanwhile, through its exposure to voices of color becomes less overtly racist, and embraces an inclusively nationalist, but nevertheless xenophobic, formulation of its populist ideology. As the Democrats slowly achieve their national agenda - building a European-style social welfare state - and having lost touch with their pipeline of ideas from the grassroots left, they transition into a conservative mode of protecting their accomplishments, cementing their place as the right-wing party with the backing of now-oldster tech and finance elites. The Trumpist GOP, on the other hand, are at first disturbed by finding themselves on the same sides of legislative fights as the Greens and DSAs, but eventually cobble together a distemperous leftist coalition with them under the Republican brand: “GOP as your Two or Three!” (referring to Ranked-Choice ballots).
So, to summarize… a Democratic Right mostly concerned with protecting the status quo of tech and financial elites, unified by its control of cultural and educational levers just like the old 20th-century elites were, and a Republican Left that is hopeful for radical change to bring down the system.
Anyways, that’s just one way to make it all make sense.
Cheers, and have a good week y’all!
Fans of Joe Rogan.
A couple of things occurred to me about Democrats, since you were talking about Obama. The first is that sometimes Democrats take “killing the messenger” to extremes. Like, they “kill” their own messenger before he even gets out with the message. The other thing is that, with all the intraparty brawling, they often are not united in confronting those they oppose. Until Trump, the Republicans were pretty good at putting up a solid front. (Now, with Trump banished, I am not sure it is solid, there appear to be cracks.) It might actually be a bit scary if the entirety of the Democratic Party all started using the same drummer and march cadence.