Is this why Dem’s Approval Rating Polls are so bad?

StrangePackage said:
Exactly. The status quo was not working. Pretty much all of the country felt that. MAGA is a tacit acknowledgment of that - but the changes they offer are shitty and will hurt many many more than they help.

Democrats can't expect to win by offering more of the same - they are extolling institutions that largely failed the people. They need some populism, and to stop fucking cowering about what right wing media will make of it - they'll call everything extremist socialism, even if it's a tepid compromise, so you might as well do the right goddamn thing anyways. Minnesota was the model - school lunches, legal weed, easy voting- but for some reason the centrists put Walz on the ticket and refused to let him cook.
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Absolutely. But I don’t think what Minnesota was doing was particularly leftist, even compared to whatever counted for the national Democratic platform. They just got it done.
 
The greatest lesson Dems need to learn from the last few months is that we must get shit done, no matter what it requires or what stands in our way. That’s what Trump and his minions have done. They don’t care about laws. They don’t care about polls. They don’t care about norms. They just do it anyway. Whenever and wherever Dems have power, we need to be doing the same thing.

I don’t care much who the candidate is in 2028. I just want his or her campaign slogan to be, “I’ll Get Shit Done for You.”
 
lawtig02 said:
The greatest lesson Dems need to learn from the last few months is that we must get shit done, no matter what it requires or what stands in our way. That’s what Trump and his minions have done. They don’t care about laws. They don’t care about polls. They don’t care about norms. They just do it anyway. Whenever and wherever Dems have power, we need to be doing the same thing.

I don’t care much who the candidate is in 2028. I just want his or her campaign slogan to be, “I’ll Get Shit Done for You.”
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The problem with this view is that it’s far, far tougher to build things than to destroy things. Pubs don’t build anything, they merely destroy things. Dems have a much greater challenge in what they’re trying to accomplish and will naturally be less successful in these attempts.
 
SnoopRob said:
The problem with this view is that it’s far, far tougher to build things than to destroy things. Pubs don’t build anything, they merely destroy things. Dems have a much greater challenge in what they’re trying to accomplish and will naturally be less successful in these attempts.
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No doubt. We’ll almost need a Marshall Plan approach if we still have a nation in 3.5 years. Whatever it takes to rebuild a functional nation, atop the devastation of MAGA’s blitzkrieg on America.
 
SnoopRob said:
The problem with this view is that it’s far, far tougher to build things than to destroy things. Pubs don’t build anything, they merely destroy things. Dems have a much greater challenge in what they’re trying to accomplish and will naturally be less successful in these attempts.
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Not to mention, it doesn’t take long to break government, as we’ve seen.

Building an effective EPA, NIH, CDC, Federal Reserve Board, Bureau of Labor and Statistics, SEC, FBI, DEA, ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, immigration courts, Veterans Administration, etc…….all that is BORING work and takes time.

Building an effective government is time-consuming, grinding, BORING work.
 
Zoo_View said:
Not to mention, it doesn’t take long to break government, as we’ve seen.

Building an effective EPA, NIH, CDC, Federal Reserve Board, Bureau of Labor and Statistics, SEC, FBI, DEA, ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, immigration courts, Veterans Administration, etc…….all that is BORING work and takes time.

Building an effective government is time-consuming, grinding, BORING work.
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Agree with all this. In 3.5 years, if we have a country, we’ll have given up at least 100 years of HARD work. But that doesn’t change the message, in my view. It’s going to be hard as hell to repair this. It’ll take time. But it has to start with the next president, and he/she will have to be willing to be as aggressive in rebuilding it as Trump and his supporters have been in tearing it down.
 
StrangePackage said:
Exactly. The status quo was not working. Pretty much all of the country felt that. MAGA is a tacit acknowledgment of that - but the changes they offer are shitty and will hurt many many more than they help.

Democrats can't expect to win by offering more of the same - they are extolling institutions that largely failed the people. They need some populism, and to stop fucking cowering about what right wing media will make of it - they'll call everything extremist socialism, even if it's a tepid compromise, so you might as well do the right goddamn thing anyways. Minnesota was the model - school lunches, legal weed, easy voting- but for some reason the centrists put Walz on the ticket and refused to let him cook.
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Was "the status quo" not working, or was that the narrative that Republicans pushed along with their Zen-orgasm-inducing culture wars?

What should Biden and Democrats have done differently, given the flaming pile of shit that they inherited? They handled inflation better than other advanced democracies, the economy, jobs, and wages were growing faster than it did under trump and faster than most OECD countries, and any failures to do more to help were certainly hamstrung by Republicans.

1. People were pissed about inflation.
2. The US led by Democrats fared better than most others.
I would put it in the category of the majority of voters didn't have a good understanding of the issue. That has several causes.

1. Low information voters
2. Poor Democratic messaging
3. Relentless right-wing scapegoating
4.
 
BillOfRights said:
Was "the status quo" not working, or was that the narrative that Republicans pushed along with their Zen-orgasm-inducing culture wars?

What should Biden and Democrats have done differently, given the flaming pile of shit that they inherited? They handled inflation better than other advanced democracies, the economy, jobs, and wages were growing faster than it did under trump and faster than most OECD countries, and any failures to do more to help were certainly hamstrung by Republicans.

1. People were pissed about inflation.
2. The US led by Democrats fared better than most others.
I would put it in the category of the majority of voters didn't have a good understanding of the issue. That has several causes.

1. Low information voters
2. Poor Democratic messaging
3. Relentless right-wing scapegoating
4.
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Agree. No excuses going forward though. The Pubs have removed all rules. When we get power back, and we will, we can’t be constrained by the rules they’ve eliminated.

I see this in terms of the Social Contract. We had one. It was roughly defined by the constitution. MAGA has voided it. We have no social contract right now. Dems should always attempt to recreate one, hopefully an even better one, but in this moment, there’s nothing that constrains the ability of the party in power to do what it wills — Pubs for the benefit of the elite, or Dems for the benefit of the marginalized.
 
lawtig02 said:
I would much prefer something fairly left, especially to fix what MAGA is destroying, but seeing as how US politics usually lags about 8-10 years behind European politics, can you identify a leftist movement that has succeeded over a substantial period of time in non-Scandinavian Europe? Seems to me a lurch to the left is just a recipe for a pendulum that swings wildly back and forth from one election to the next.
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I do think bringing up leftism is moving the goalposts a little bit; all I said was that centrism was a failing ideology. That said, Cuba and China would probably count based on one's definition of leftism; Sheinbaum in Mexico just succeeded AMLO. That said, it would be a good start, as you've alluded to, if the Dems would just commit to legitimate liberalism, in the Minnesota or Liz Warren molds.
 
akillesheel said:
I do think bringing up leftism is moving the goalposts a little bit; all I said was that centrism was a failing ideology. That said, Cuba and China would probably count based on one's definition of leftism; Sheinbaum in Mexico just succeeded AMLO. That said, it would be a good start, as you've alluded to, if the Dems would just commit to legitimate liberalism, in the Minnesota or Liz Warren molds.
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Well, we did just nominate the governor of Minnesota as VP.

The difference is that Walz and Minnesota Dems pulled no punches in getting shit done, even with a very thin majority. That HAS to happen nationally.
 
Batt Boy said:
outstanding take by Brooks
www.nytimes.com

Opinion | Why I Am Not a Liberal

I don’t think the left grasps reality in all its fullness.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Too bad Batt Boy won't see any criticism of this piece. He has said he has me on super ignore because I once accurately described his position and he didn't like it. Anyway:

1. This is a very misleading headline. One of the most misleading headlines I've seen in a long time. I know that editors usually write the headlines, but one wonders what David Brooks thinks about it. One also wonders whether David Brooks' columns have been lagging in ratings, and so they are trying to attract controversy aka attention.

2. The reason it's so misleading is that he aligns himself with Kelsey Piper. She's literally the hero of his little story. Kelsey Piper is a committed liberal. If you read the exchange between Piper and the villain of the story, you might confuse it with some of the discussions between Paine and me. Except the roles are reversed. The young enthusiast (Piper) talks like me; the grizzled vet (I think that's what Bruenig is) talks like Paine. Anyway, "Piper is asking right questions; Bruenig is not" is a quintessentially liberal position.

What Brooks really means is that he's not a progressive. And indeed, when you read the article, you find that's who he is talking about. He describes the progressive world view that is basically Paine's -- historical materialism is the assumed backdrop for all analysis, and thus they don't ask questions about culture, etc.

3. Brooks' column does not accurately represent Bruenig at all. Basically, the argument between Piper and Bruenig (by the way, in case it wasn't clear, I read the underlying pieces, as I always like to go to the primary sources) is about this: should anti-poverty cash transfers ALSO try to accomplish other goals, like health or child development or decreased crime? Piper says no. The reason is familiar: limited resources. And so she favors policies that try to do many things at once. Anti-poverty programs should do more than modestly improve the immediate welfare of the recipients.

Her position is more politically realistic in our environment. There's a reason why the UBI folks have been touting all the other benefits that come from UBI -- namely, that American just don't like to give cash transfers to people to help them. It's unearned. It's unmerited. It rewards laziness. We've heard it all before. Bruenig says, "well, no matter what policy we pursue, at the end of the day the retiree is still retired; the paralyzed person still can't hold a job" and there was another example of two that I'm not remembering off the top of my head. He might be right, but of course in politics we won't be able to think about social security (which is deemed to be different than cash transfers) or the paralyzed nurse; we will get horror stories of welfare queens.

I have no strong feelings about UBI at the moment, given that I'm not sure whether it works. But part of that is a question of what it means to work. Bruenig says, "why isn't fighting poverty enough? Why isn't it enough to improve the consumptive welfare of the poor?" Why does humanitarian social policy also to be an investment. So I'm not sure what we want UBI to do; and I'm also not sure it works toward whatever goals we set. It is definitely something that we need to be talking about, urgently. There is a possible future in which robots and AI displace a lot of workers, both blue and white collar, and if we don't prepare, we are going to get wiped out with despair and anger.

4. If you read the debate between Piper and Bruenig, there's an obvious underlying subtext: it's effective altruism. Piper is a committed effective altruist. And effective altruists studiously, even religiously, want reams of hard data as to which programs are "effective" and then divert resources in that direction. There is much to be said in favor of effective altruism, but there are some weaknesses. For instance, effective altruists tie themselves in knots trying to figure out who we are being altruists toward -- is it just people living today, or is it all people from now until 2125? Should animals count, and how much? What about artificial intelligences? And once you start looking very far out in the future, you can justify any policy. The framework of data analysis breaks down.

The sociological weakness of effective altruism is that the movement is very much about rich people wandering into policy discussions they know little about, and throwing around money to shape the policy debate according to their views. I am quite certain this infuriates the old guard who have been fighting for justice for 30 years. Again, go back to Paine and me (and others, but to keep the story short I will reduce the cast of characters), imagine we were having our debates, and then I just bought the board and decided that all discussions had to be data-driven or else they weren't worthy of our time.

Old-timers in the policy community have long contended that effective altruism was nothing but a scam, a bunch of code words to justify rich people coopting liberal public policy to their own ends. Well, it turns out that the most prominent effective altruist -- Sam Bankman Fried -- was in fact nothing but a fraudster. And in an interview with Kelsey Piper, he was asked whether his support of effective altruism was just PR bullshit, and he said, "probably."

You can imagine how that went over in the policy community. Anyway, Bruenig talks to Piper like she's a janie-come-lately, wandering around the world cherry-picking studies to support her views without having any of the curiosity she brags about. I think that's unfair toward Piper, but it's also true that I don't live in a community that has been much affected by effective altruism.

5. So is Brooks' column an outstanding take? If it was really meant to explain why he isn't a liberal, it's pathetic and mendacious. If he was really explaining why he isn't a progressive, it asks interesting questions. I do not think it reports accurately on the discussion he's describing, and he is loading the deck in one direction by ignoring several of Bruenig's points. But at least it does shine a light on some intellectual debates going on. I just wish it did so more honestly.

And note: I say that even though Brooks is articulating a position closer to my own. Like, if I had to choose between the Piper/empirical approach and the Paine/ideological approach, I would go with Piper. But it's still important to represent the other side of a debate accurately. And so let me do that right now: I'm using Paine as a foil here for the sake of exposition; I should not imply that he generally fights against empirical evidence. He was conversant in data driven social science. His approach had an ideological basis, according to him, and on top of that he used empirical analysis. One can question (as I did) whether that is a combination that can cohere, given the tension between ideology and science, but I don't want to make him out, even in retrospect, as some sort of lunatic ideologue.
 
Ali Velshi had Stuart Stephens and Jen Rubin on today, two firmly anti-Trump neocons. The topic was essentially that the Democrats need to hit back on Trump harder and don't be afraid to go after his base for being anti-American.

The basic gist was, they can't sit back and wait to return to normalcy and good government. There was that with Biden and it didn't matter. You can't bribe your way to Trump base's heart either. Factory jobs increased under Biden, red states benefited from Infrastructure and other programs more than blue states under Biden etc etc and it didn't matter.

They argued that Trump and his base are fundamentally un-American and there are a lot more people out there that feel disgust for them than the MAGA hordes, but they need someone to organize and lead them and the Democrats are largely not doing that. You can't be afraid of calling Trump out on the harm he is doing, you certainly can't wait for people to realize it on their own, and you have to be willing to say to the Trump base "we hear you are angry, but what you want doesn't work in America."
 
superrific said:
If you read the exchange between Piper and the villain of the story, you might confuse it with some of the discussions between Paine and me.
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Speaking of @Paine, where has our boy gotten off to? I miss the kid, he brought a lot of value to the board IMO...
 
Batt Boy said:
outstanding take by Brooks
www.nytimes.com

Opinion | Why I Am Not a Liberal

I don’t think the left grasps reality in all its fullness.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
Click to expand...
Maybe it's outstanding, but I'd like to know specifically what he means by "traditional values and practices that enable people to rise" before giving him too much credit. And Democrats have been discussing cultural values like expanded rights for women and gays and other minority groups for generations now, which he never mentions. And those Populist cultural ideals he talks about - "respect, values, national identity" and so on - have repeatedly been shown to be hypocritical and worse when used by Trumpers on way too many occasions. It's hard to respect people who are going to deny vaccines to others and are wrecking our medical research because they hate "experts", or who want to impose the 10 Commandments and Trump Bibles into classrooms and school curricula and fire liberal teachers. I do get what he's saying, but I think his claim that liberals have been focused almost exclusively on economic issues and welfare programs at the expense of everything else is pretty flawed, imo. And given what's been happening on the right over the past quarter-century it's a very weak defense of basically being a bosider and making the same old argument that liberals are just as bad as conservatives, and in our current political climate that's a very, very hard case to make.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
Maybe it's outstanding, but I'd like to know specifically what he means by "traditional values and practices that enable people to rise" before giving him too much credit.
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I think he kinda mentions them, in passing...

"Rising out of poverty also requires the nonmaterial qualities we now call human capital, such as skills, diligence, honesty, good health and reliability."

I don't think he's wrong abut these qualities being a positive and helping lead to folks thriving, but it's also a bit disingenuous to focus on them unless one can figure out a way to grow these qualities in some sort of organized and quantifiable way.
 
SnoopRob said:
I think he kinda mentions them, in passing...

"Rising out of poverty also requires the nonmaterial qualities we now call human capital, such as skills, diligence, honesty, good health and reliability."

I don't think he's wrong abut these qualities being a positive and helping lead to folks thriving, but it's also a bit disingenuous to focus on them unless one can figure out a way to grow these qualities in some sort of organized and quantifiable way.
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Maybe that's what he meant, but it would have been nice if he was more specific in his later comment. And as you said those are all rather vague goals and to pretend that Democrats aren't interested in those qualities and Republicans are is utterly absurd, if that's what he was getting at. Certainly honesty and reliability have not been GOP hallmarks, and they're now tearing down the ability of poor people to achieve the good health he praises. Brooks can have some good points sometimes, but he also seems to go out of his way to justify maintaining his "a pox on both your houses" attitude, even when it requires some disingenuous arguments.
 
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