Democrats are terribly unpopular now. Some of the criticism people level at them seem irrational to me, while others seem just. Thanks to triangualtion, I feel like there's no choice but to vote Democratic. No matter what problems I have with them, they're vastly better than the Republicans.
But most people don't agree with me. Lots of people like the Democrats in an unconflicted way, and lots of people feel that their problems are so bad that staying home or voting for Trump was justified. There is deep hatred of centrist Dems on both the right and the left. Dems tend to believe that the people who don't like them are either stupid and misiunformed or bigots. That attitude makes lots of people hate them even more.
It seems to me that two things are true. First, Democrats are the main vehicle we have that has any chance of defeating or even constraining Trump, and there is no time to tear the party down and rebuild it. And second, there are serious problems with the Democrats that would, in normal times, provide good reasons for people not to support them.
It also seems to me, after reading what I've been able to about why people voted for Trump, that legitimate flaws in the Democratic party played a significant role in the second loss to Trump. Voters reacted badly to bad things in the party, while tuning out vastly worse things in Trump.
I don't know what this means. Should we call out the Democrats on the things we don't like about them? Should we shut up and stay in line? Should people like me try to argue, honestly, there are terrible problems with both parties, but right now the Republicans are far worse?
Technocracy seems like a good thing, and in general, I'm a supporter of technocratic policies. I want to let medical experts manage public health. But there's a problem.
When an expert talks to someone like me about their subject, they have to dumb it down. It's hard to take complex subjects like the economy and present them in a format that works on social media. In a democracy, it's easy for experts to think of the electorate as children with power, children you have to speak to simply, in the right way, so they'll use their power in the right way. Dems do this all the time. Sometimes it can veer off into dishonesty.
Last month, there was a fight among Democratic supporters over whether it made sense to shutdown the government. Professional strategists believed it would be disastrous to take on blame for that. Other experts believed that if the government were shutdown it would give Trump the power to pick and choose what to fund, and so a shutdown would help Trump and DOGE gut the goverment. But the base wanted Dems to fight.
I'm not an expert political strategist, and I don't know who was right. I heard Carville explain the insider position in terms of the Cook Partisan Voting Index, and what he said made a lot of sense. At the same time, I really wanted them to fight. I still want them to fight. I don't know the answer.
Under Schumer's leadership, Dems decided to vote for cloture but against the CR, ensuring that it would pass. Schumer talked about fighting. They figured out who should vote for cloture and who should vote against it, probably based on Cook PVI numbers.
It was dishonest, and it was based on the idea that people don't know or care what cloture is.
Technocratic experts were afraid that the general public didn't need masks, not because it was true but because there weren't enough to go around. The basic position was right, medical workers needed them more than anyone else. Dems told us Biden was OK, because they knew Trump would be worse, not because Biden was actually OK.
In Gaza, Biden clearly made the decision and not to impose any real constraints on them. But he didn't level with the public about that. A lot of people agreed with the real policy, whatever I think of it. But he lied to the public about what he was doing.
The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell does a focus group podcast, where she plays recordings of voters explaining what they think. I know the recordings selected will probably inevitably show some sort of bias. But I've heard recording after recording of voters saying, "I don't trust Democrats." Trump has lied about many things, he continues to lie constantly. But his policies have been very much in line with what he said he'd do.
A lot of people think that Dems have to begin to fight. That might be true, or it might not be. I'm not a political strategist. But for me, personally, I think they have to learn how to be more honest, and how to stop talking down to people.
Published: 2025-04-21
Tagged: blog
Much of the world seems to be made up of systems in which the pieces fit together in complex ways which are usually not well understood. That's how ecosystems work, it's how climate works, and it's how our economy works.
It's possible to reason about small subsets of these systems effectively without understanding the larger dynamic, so long as the system as a whole is stable. Someone might have a great deal of insight into a particular industry, like tech, construction, or finance, and they might have great success. But if the economic environment in which they've been able to achieve that success changes in substantial ways, that might come to an end.
That's fairly abstract, so an example might be helpful. For a long time the US economy has been growing, and the fruits of that growth have been fairly broadly distributed to many (but not all) Americans via the stock market. As a consequence, for decades it's been possible to make good money by buying index funds and holding on to them. You don't have to know about how specific companies actually work, how to read a balance sheet, or any of that sort of thing. And you don't have to worry about whether a major brokerage firm is honest. Since the market has been going up for a long time, you can adopt the simple stratgegy of not selling into a bear market. As long as you can afford to hold your shares of the index fund until things get better, you'll be OK.
But none of that is part of the natural order of things. It's mostly come from systems that were built. In particular, it comes from the America's legal and regulatory systems and from the American led international order we've built since WW2.
By attacking things like the rule of law, fair elections, and especially our alliances and the system of global trade, Trump and his MAGA movement are dismantling the foundations of our success and power in a way that looks systematic from the outside. I am not claiming that it is systematic. I don't know why they're doing it or why so many people support them. I'm just pointing out that if someone wanted to destroy the foundational sources of American power and propserity from the inside, they could hardly do a better job than Trump is doing.
At the same time, almost no one is trying to look at the big picture, at how the pieces fit together, how American prosperity actually works.
I don't know a single person who thinks that the American led international order benefits them. Leftists identify the very real problems with the system and the immense suffering the system causes in some contexts, but they tend to talk as if the benefits of the system accrue to about a dozen billionaires. No one seems to think that the benefits might accrue in their own 401k accounts, that their own wages might be higher thanks to the international system, that the company they work for might have a leg up because of the American led international system.
On the right, people tend to think that so many of the top businesses in the world are American because we're smarter and we work harder, because we're awesome at business in the same way that Michael Jordan and Kobe were awesome at basketball. Oligarchs think they did it all themselves.
There isn't any political constituency for the old order. We all benefit from it, no one understands it or how it works, and everyone's relationship to it is based mainly on grievances. So it's coming down, faster and harder than anyone thought possible.
The damage Trump is doing is largely irreversible. The whole system was big and complicated, built over the past 80 years, with roots that go deeper into America's past. American power was projected largely through economic means, which depended in large part on the good will of our allies, which has been lost and will not be regained.
Published: 2025-04-11
Tagged: blog
J.M. Berger wrote a book called Extremism for the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. Here's a quote:
Extremism refers to the belief that an in-group's success or survival can never be separated from the need for hostile action against an out-group. The hostile action must be part of the in-group's definition of success. Hostile acts can range from verbal attacks and diminishment to discriminatory behavior, violence, and even genocide. This is obviously a very wide spectrum of activity, which will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters.
Sound familiar?
There are a lot of horrible things happening now. Our government is being systematically torn apart. Our alliances are being violated in ways that will make it difficult or impossible for us to restore trust, Our research universities, until now the greatest in the world, are under attack, and are suffering very real damage. Their ability to pull the most talented students from around the world, which again has contributed so much to our prosperity, is being destroyed.
I could go on. Many things are happening. I could talk about medical research, public health, the betrayal of our national interests to enemies and adversaries, or the Proud Boys, political street brawlers in the tradition of the 20th century's fascist colored shirt movements.
But the thing that scares me the most is the demonization of migrants, the orchestrated campaign of hate and lies that's being mounted against them. It's the out-group that convinces me that what we're seeing now isn't mere authoritarianism, that it's something worse.
The things we are doing to migrants now, and even to tourists, are evil. The day will come, sooner than we think, when we will be ashamed of them.
Adam Serwer wrote an article for The Atlantic called The Cruelty Is the Point. More recently, during a podcast Ben Wittes said something along the lines of, it's not just the cruelty, it's the performance of cruelty. I'm sorry I can't give an accurate quote. But it's not enough to send migrants to be tortured in El Salvadore, it's necessary to produce images of it. Kristi Noem has to have her photo taken, standing in front of the cages in the prison.
There are lots of moving pieces here. We've got the out-group, which serves several functions. It defines the movement, establishes its purpose. It also defines the in-group. In order to belong to the in-group you have to be on board with the war on the out-group. If you're not, you're an enemy of the people.
The in-group is organized as a kind of hierarchical personality cult, with the leader at the top, and various sub-alterns below, the movement's patriots. Membership in the in-group requires loyalty to the leader, not to the constitution or the country, because the leader is the only one who is able to win the war against the out-group. And that war is existential. The other day Elon said the Wisconsin Supreme Court race "might decide the future of America and Western Civilization".
And there's the transformation of political events into aesthetic experiences, the rallies, the photos of the prisoners, the experience of seeing ICE trucks parked outside of your kid's school. There wasn't any analog to that in the old days when they passed something like a farm subsidy bill.
I don't think fascism is an ideology, or a set of coherent beliefs. That's why it has so many contradictions, the populism and the tax cuts for billionaries. For society as a whole, it's a process, a collapse or transformation that happens to a polity. The resulting system isn't stable, it doesn't endure, but it commits terrible crimes, with many victims, and destroys the society in which it occurs. The severity of these things varies, with Germany being an outlier. I don't expect our fascism to be as bad as Germany's, or even close. But it will still be terrible, for both our victims, and eventually for us.
I think that for an individuals who gets swept up into the movement, it's an experience that provides meaning, the feeling of belonging and connection. And that's where I think the aestheticization of the things that are happening comes in.
I'm frightened because I believe we have abandonned small-l liberalism, and have begun to walk down a path that many nations have gone down before us, and which has never ended well for anyone. The path has been studied and described, and the things that are happening to us now fit the descriptions.
Published: 2025-04-02
Tagged: blog