Where do we go from here?

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Paine said:
Thanks for the detailed response. I agree that Faiz didn’t seem to convince Ezra. Their argument was very similar to many we’ve had and they came to the same point that we have.

I agree that Dems will have to change their tune on some cultural issues. It goes to what we’ve both talked about in terms of an economic focused message + faith based message.

Red state Dem governors (and even some Rep governors in red states) are good examples to look to when examining how to handle these culture issues.

Andy Beshear does it through his faith. He’s vetoed anti-trans legislation in Kentucky and makes it clear that trans people are humans deserving of the same rights as everyone else. From there you can pivot to talking about universal rights, including economic rights.

Something along the lines of “we are all God’s children” has been a premise of the liberal left for a long time.

I really appreciate you bringing the religious aspect into this because I think it has helped my thinking. Not in terms of being naïve about what evangelical religious people actually tend to vote on, because my family is full of them. But in terms of crystallizing a message that has worked for left movements in the United States multiple times: universalist messaging wrapped in semi-religious to outright religious language.
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I don't know much about Faiz. I've not seem him that much, probably because he's more of a behind the scenes guy.

Ezra Klein is super smart. That doesn't mean he's the best political strategist, but he shouldn't be ignored on any issue he weighs in on. He usually has things to contribute.

One of his points this year has been that liberals need to reclaim the mantle of building things. So many of the GOP attacks on "regulation" are bad faith, but Ezra says that over-regulation is indeed an issue when it comes to housing construction, that liberals have tried to incorporate so much stuff into housing policy that it's really hard to do anything. So many approvals and studies required. It's a very good point.

One problem with a lot of liberal policy these days is that it seeks to pile every concern into every issue. For instance (and this can be a longer conversation), the way we talk about the minimum wage. Minimum wages can never be anti-poverty programs. That's not how they work or what they do. They are supposed to basically give some protection to workers who have no leverage in bargaining and are thus pure price-takers. The minimum wage levels the battlefield, so to speak. But the right minimum wage is not a "living wage." It's the wage that would lead to the most welfare for the people who earn it. If that's not a "living wage" then we have to find other ways to address that. The "living wage" movement will just end up wiping people out at the lowest rung of the ladder. Well, it certainly could. If the minimum wage is too high, people will be unemployed.

This is especially true in housing policy, permitting, zoning and the like.
 
superrific said:
I don't know much about Faiz. I've not seem him that much, probably because he's more of a behind the scenes guy.

Ezra Klein is super smart. That doesn't mean he's the best political strategist, but he shouldn't be ignored on any issue he weighs in on. He usually has things to contribute.

One of his points this year has been that liberals need to reclaim the mantle of building things. So many of the GOP attacks on "regulation" are bad faith, but Ezra says that over-regulation is indeed an issue when it comes to housing construction, that liberals have tried to incorporate so much stuff into housing policy that it's really hard to do anything. So many approvals and studies required. It's a very good point.

One problem with a lot of liberal policy these days is that it seeks to pile every concern into every issue. For instance (and this can be a longer conversation), the way we talk about the minimum wage. Minimum wages can never be anti-poverty programs. That's not how they work or what they do. They are supposed to basically give some protection to workers who have no leverage in bargaining and are thus pure price-takers. The minimum wage levels the battlefield, so to speak. But the right minimum wage is not a "living wage." It's the wage that would lead to the most welfare for the people who earn it. If that's not a "living wage" then we have to find other ways to address that. The "living wage" movement will just end up wiping people out at the lowest rung of the ladder. Well, it certainly could. If the minimum wage is too high, people will be unemployed.

This is especially true in housing policy, permitting, zoning and the like.
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Interesting thoughts. Shakir is def more behind the scenes. He’s been in Democratic politics for a while now. Floated for DNC chair but apparently not interested. Believe he works for More Perfect Union now, which is doing some great work.

I tend to agree with Klein re: housing. NIMBYism needs to be purged from the party. The larger point about building things is well taken and part of the issue with the Democratic brand. Biden did a bit of this but industrial policy has been missing for so long that it wasn’t felt soon enough.

Again, the messaging has to be simple and match the policy. People, no matter how politically sophisticated, understand fixing and building infrastructure.
 
Paine said:
jacobin.com

Democratic Elites Embraced the Identity Politics They Decry

After eight years of using shallow “identity politics” as a cudgel against the Left, Democratic pundits and elected officials are now blaming leftists themselves for the fact that such politics took over the party.
jacobin.com jacobin.com

Really good read regarding the identity politics piece of this.
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It would be more effective if it wasn't primarily concerned with relitigating 2016. I mean, it's a broadside against the Democratic Party over a decade, all in a few paragraphs. That is never going to work, so we get passages like this:

"The reality is, the kind of divisive “identity politics” that Jentleson, Slotkin, and others in this crowd are complaining about was embraced by the centrist wing of the party as a strategy to halt Sanders and the movement behind him. Many of the same figures who embraced this approach in 2016 and 2020 now claim it sunk the Democrats in 2024."

That is not the reality, and it's almost laughable that it's being posed as such. The idea that the Democrats embraced what is being here called identity politics (you and I know that everything is identity politics) in order to beat Bernie Sanders is unreal. The Democrats have been embracing this politics for decades. Why did Clinton need a Sister Souljah moment? Identity politics. It was an attempt to disassociate himself from Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, which as the name implies, was heavily into minority identity politics. In fact, one could argue that it was little else but that. And Jesse was a major player in Dem politics back then.

The Dems did not need a conspiracy to defeat Bernie, and this soft "stop the steal" stuff that still persists is really fucking annoying. To this author, I would say: make your point. Quit with the nonsense theories about Dems inventing ways to defeat Bernie even if it meant we would lose the general. That's bullshit. It always has been bullshit. If you want to take a Bernie-style message to the people, argue that point. Stop playing victim.
 
Paine said:
Interesting thoughts. Shakir is def more behind the scenes. He’s been in Democratic politics for a while now. Floated for DNC chair but apparently not interested. Believe he works for More Perfect Union now, which is doing some great work.

I tend to agree with Klein re: housing. NIMBYism needs to be purged from the party. The larger point about building things is well taken and part of the issue with the Democratic brand. Biden did a bit of this but industrial policy has been missing for so long that it wasn’t felt soon enough.

Again, the messaging has to be simple and match the policy. People, no matter how politically sophisticated, understand fixing and building infrastructure.
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One thing I would have liked to see more of was the fantastic response to the collapsed interstate in Philly. They got right on it and fixed it in record time. That would have been a way to show the Biden administration actually doing things, whereas Trump talks and talks about infrastructure but doesn't do shit because he doesn't know how.

Now maybe that would have been more of an emphasis if Shapiro had been on the ticket, or maybe it's just too small-bore to move the needle much. I don't know. I'm not good at that level of detail when it comes to messaging. It sure seems to me, though, that a good answer to "Haitians are eating pets" would be "No, what they do -- along with all Americans -- is fix our roads and collapsed bridges. The roads and bridges Trump promised to fix in his first term but it was always just a con."

In fairness to everyone involved in this discussion, it's hard to know what works because we've never quite faced this. The GOP has been institutionally dishonest for a long time, but Trump obviously rachets up the mendacity to new levels. Nobody has ever run a presidential campaign based completely on lies, with little effort to hide that it's all fabrication. I would have thought there would be a limit to the Trump bullshit that Americans would swallow. A very high limit, but a limit, right? Like, when Trump says that migrants are running towns in the Midwest, people who live in the Midwest know that's just bullshit. When the mayor and governor had to come out and say, no they are lying about Springfield, that would cost them, right? It did not.

Trump has proven that a strategy of 100%, 24/7 lying actually works. How do you run against that without becoming the same damn thing? That's the question.
 
The idea that the Democrats can run as economic populists anymore into the future is so out of touch with reality. It 100% is a losing strategy going forward because all the GOP has to do is demagogue that to oblivion.

The socialism campaign worked when Millennials (the largest voting block in America now) were younger. As a Millennial, I can tell you quite clearly we are not economically ideological. To the extent Millennials were ideological it was on social issues, which is why Obama did so well at the time he did. However, once their self-interests kicked in, that's when Sanders campaign worked. Same goes for Trump in this past election, I know a lot of people around my age who swung from Biden to Trump because they aren't Democrats, they aren't ideological, they dont want a revolution, they really just want a normal life where they can make a living and life isn't overly expensive. Dont let the elite Millennials trick you here, they aren't representative of the majority of the generation.

We're actually quite a pragmatic generation all in all, at least my cohort of slightly older Millennial. Which is why pragmatic politics appealing to Millennials, who are now in a completely different stage of life than when Bernie Sanders emerged, needs to be considered going forward. There are perhaps economic messages that work for Millennials now which wouldn't have previously, but also need to consider that what sells to the educated Millennials will not with the non-college educated Millennials, so the messaging has to be more unified around things that benefit the entire generation. Promising to cancel college debt for instance backfires, unless its combined with a policy that's also helping the non-college educated ones too. Same goes for the childcare tax credit, that only helps the people who are remotely stable enough to even consider having children, for many people there's a logjam of other problems they are up against before a childcare tax credit would be a worthy policy for them to vote on.

Democrats really screwed the pooch on housing, that would have been the issue but we'll see where housing prices stand in the years to come. I'd like to see Democrats go after Airbnb nationally, as well as people parking their money in our finite supply of property around the country. The amount of foreign money sitting in domestic real estate is a major factor for why housing is more expensive, yet Democrats just talk about building more housing, which is NOT the solution. We have plenty of housing, and we can easily drive down housing prices by running on policies that will make it far more expensive for private equity and foreign entities to control OUR housing supply. Democrats need to run at the problem, not maintain the problem for the benefit of the donor class who simply try to come up with these half-ass solutions. The GOP certainly isn't going to take this issue on either so its really low picking fruit.
 
Paine said:
I have no idea what this person is talking about. I’m pretty sure millennials voted for Harris in higher numbers than any other generation.
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Perhaps I got that wrong, thought I saw a swing towards Trump with Millennials. Nonetheless, I have anecdotal cases where people I know were so fed up with Biden they either didnt vote or voted Trump, but they weren't Democrats (nor were Republicans). But could just be anecdotal rather than a trend.
 
AlbionAmerican said:
Perhaps I got that wrong, thought I saw a swing towards Trump with Millennials. Nonetheless, I have anecdotal cases where people I know were so fed up with Biden they either didnt vote or voted Trump, but they weren't Democrats (nor were Republicans). But could just be anecdotal rather than a trend.
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You claimed “pragmatism” alongside “normal life” and voting for ttump.
 
AlbionAmerican said:
Perhaps I got that wrong, thought I saw a swing towards Trump with Millennials. Nonetheless, I have anecdotal cases where people I know were so fed up with Biden they either didnt vote or voted Trump, but they weren't Democrats (nor were Republicans). But could just be anecdotal rather than a trend.
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I think a lot of millennials and my folks (Gen Z) aren’t registered as D or R and don’t feel tied to either party. Makes them more likely to swing in unpredictable ways from cycle to cycle, especially during times of economic distress.

There is a lot being prewritten. I don’t think these gains for Republicans among young(er) voters will be particularly durable if the economic situation in the U.S. doesn’t improve considerably. Our period of political history is not conducive to incumbent parties staying in power. Mostly due to there being systemic issues that can’t be/wont be addressed by Democratic or Republican administrations.
 
AlbionAmerican said:
Perhaps I got that wrong, thought I saw a swing towards Trump with Millennials. Nonetheless, I have anecdotal cases where people I know were so fed up with Biden they either didnt vote or voted Trump, but they weren't Democrats (nor were Republicans). But could just be anecdotal rather than a trend.
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Trump did get a big swing in his millennial vote percentage over his last time around. Harris won them by 4 points but Biden won them by 19% points. Harris's most successful generation was generation Z which she won by 11% points But she lost ground there too. Biden won them by 20 points.
 
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HeelingAg said:
You claimed “pragmatism” alongside “normal life” and voting for ttump.
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They aren't looking at it big picture, they're buying what is being sold because they think it benefits them. I dont mean pragmatic in that its good for the country, I mean its pragmatic in how politics impacts their life, its fundamentally non-ideological from the point of view of economics. Whether it does or doesn't is the point, their intention isn't ideological, its far more self-interest dictating their choice. That's what I've seen constantly from Millennials who voted for Sanders, to Biden in some sense, to Trump this time around.
 
Paine said:
I think a lot of millennials and my folks (Gen Z) aren’t registered as D or R and don’t feel tied to either party. Makes them more likely to swing in unpredictable ways from cycle to cycle, especially during times of economic distress.

There is a lot being prewritten. I don’t think these gains for Republicans among young(er) voters will be particularly durable if the economic situation in the U.S. doesn’t improve considerably. Our period of political history is not conducive to incumbent parties staying in power. Mostly due to there being systemic issues that can’t be/wont be addressed by Democratic or Republican administrations.
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100% right
 
I find it entertaining that my generation is sandwiched between generations that have seemingly always needed/wanted policies tailored to them. We have watched Boomers dominate the world and build it exactly to their liking. Now we have to morph to fit the needs of millennial and Gen Z.

Wanna know what nobody has ever once asked in politics? What do the Gen X folks think?
 
wmheel1287 said:
I find it entertaining that my generation is sandwiched between generations that have seemingly always needed/wanted policies tailored to them. We have watched Boomers dominate the world and build it exactly to their liking. Now we have to morph to fit the needs of millennial and Gen Z.

Wanna know what nobody has ever once asked in politics? What do the Gen X folks think?
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Well that's because in the era of appealing to the masses in politics, GenX really doesn't matter.

In an alternative future where politics isn't trying to appeal to the masses, GenX would probably control the conversation. Millennials are very likely going to end up being highly indifferent to politics in the future as their problems subside in the years to come.

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AlbionAmerican said:
Well that's because in the era of appealing to the masses in politics, GenX really doesn't matter.

In an alternative future where politics isn't trying to appeal to the masses, GenX would probably control the conversation. Millennials are very likely going to end up being highly indifferent to politics in the future as their problems subside in the years to come.

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So when did this "era of appealing to the masses in politics" begin?

Because I've been an adult Gen X member for nearly 30 years and there's never been an appeal to our generation.

There's definitely been an expectation that we shoulder the load of financially taking care of generations before and after us, but never much care toward our thoughts.

Maybe that's why we are just kinda "over it" politically at this point and other folks don't understand the cynicism.
 
wmheel1287 said:
So when did this "era of appealing to the masses in politics" begin?

Because I've been an adult Gen X member for nearly 30 years and there's never been an appeal to our generation.

There's definitely been an expectation that we shoulder the load of financially taking care of generations before and after us, but never much care toward our thoughts.

Maybe that's why we are just kinda "over it" politically at this point and other folks don't understand the cynicism.
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To a large part, you have to show a willingness to be a part of the process to benefit from it. I don't think that's best but politicians have always catered to those who support them. Staying home and not participating because no one cares ensures that no one is going to put much effort into reaching out. It's about ROI. They're are going to concentrate on those who will help them get reelected. Maybe not the best for Americans but it 's about the best that we can do. The only way to have a voice and make the sort of changes you want is to get your hands dirty. Calling for a plague on both your hoses gets you doubly ignored.
 
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