Political Mailbag
From My Tumblr Inbox
I have 50 asks in my Tumblr inbox, primarily on politics, so I thought that I’d take some time to go through them and post the answers here so that more people have access to them.
Q: I worry that voters hate Democratic partisans more than Democratic politicians and in the event the party aims for the social middle, those voters might outright leave the party, leading to a net loss of votes.
I mean, voters absolutely hate Democratic partisans more than Democratic politicians, but the beauty of the two-party system is that people to the left of the Democratic party don't have anywhere else to go, and converting a single Republican voter is worth +1 for Democrats and -1 for Republicans for a net +2, while a left-wing non-voter who would have otherwise voted for Democrats is -1 for Dems. Plus, Democrats going left might very well be -1 for Democrats and +1 for Republicans given that’s exactly what happened in 2024 due to immigration in particular.
Moreover, like I’ve said many times before, anybody that cares enough to whine about how Democrats are too right-wing will most likely ultimately suck it up and vote for the Democrat, especially in contentious races. The real problem Democrats have is with people who don’t pay attention to politics and don’t consume media, and pretty much nobody has a fix for that!
Q: Do you ever worry that we might see a more vindictive version of liberalism emerge? One that’s more openly elitist and dedicated to destroying the lives of conservatives and minority defectors.
Not outside of Bluesky.
Why do centrist Democrats fear the orgs so much? Are they just conflict averse?
It’s not even about being conflict averse. Even when Democrats tell the orgs (and staffers!) to pound sand, like they’re tried to with immigration and LGBT stuff in particular (plus Israel/Gaza but that’s a different sort of debacle), reps from the orgs run to the media and call Democrats racist and sexist and evil, and contrary to popular belief, all press is not good press!
Plus, when individual representatives/senators attempt to stand up to the orgs (see:Elissa Slotkin, Seth Moulton, etc.), they don’t get formal support from the party! Leadership just plugs their ears and goes “la la la la” and waits for the news cycle to die down and nothing ever changes, and the orgs get even more entrenched in the party apparatus.
The fundamental problem is that Democrats are really really bad at coalitional management. They literally can’t handle it when members of the Democratic coalition are in conflict with each other, whether it’s immigration activists vs. front line Democrats or Asian voters vs. education activists who claim they’re advocating for Black/Hispanic students (without asking Black and Hispanic parents what they want obviously) or Muslim vs. Jewish voters. Like, look at what happened with Israel/Gaza. Democrats tried to appease both sides of the conflict and given that both Jewish and Muslim voters went right, it clearly did not work!
And like, given that the ACLU fielded the 2019 survey which yielded the question that inspired the “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you” ad (arguably THE strongest ad of the 2024 cycle), it’s completely justified that centrist Democrats hate the orgs like these groups that are implicitly associated with the Democratic Party make it really difficult to win majorities in a country that’s centrist on a good day, and it’s only because Republicans are so incompetent that Democrats are able to somewhat break even.
Q: There is no Democratic version of Joe Rogan because her name was Wendy Williams and she doesn’t have a talk show anymore. At best, reality TV podcasts now fill that gap.
It’s actually Kristen Doute from the Vanderpump Rules extended universe
Q: I think Democrats have far more room to punish the Sista Souljah’s of the party than they believe they do, they’d just have to explicitly call their wants and desires stupid instead of redirecting to how they’re distractions from economic issues. Like even Slotkin’s focus on economic messaging doesn’t align with what voters are actually mad about which is Democrats letting activists run the asylum. The rampant conflict-aversion of the party’s elites is what damages it.
I mean yeah, if people care about X, you can't just tell them to care about Y because X isn't a real issue, they'll just feel gaslit.
Democrats also can't just "dog whistle" moderation, they have to actually take different stances, but if they take different stances, they'll get yelled at and most Democrats can't handle that.
This all boils down to "Culture Denialism", as Ruy Teixeira puts it.
A close cousin of changing the subject from cultural issues is simply ignoring them. Instead of changing any positions on these issues, the idea here is…just talk a lot about other stuff. […] Or perhaps the real problem is that Democrats haven’t communicated their wonderful positions adeptly and thoroughly enough. […] Then there is the dead-ender position. Cultural issues have no independent life or policy significance of their own but are simply re-expressions of the underlying racism, etc of Republicans and the voters who support them. Therefore, Democrats should run head-on at these retrograde views instead of compromising in any way on these issues.
None of these methods actually work in practice, and the only way to address cultural disconnects with the electorate is to meet them where they're at, and persuasion is often a long and arduous process. Plus, as Jeremiah Johnson writes, Democrats took the wrong lessons from the fight for gay marriage.
Left-leaning activists also struggle with cost. Gay marriage legitimately had no real costs, but that’s a rarity. Most policies have real trade-offs and difficult cost/benefit calculations to think about. A program might benefit one region but harm another. A new spending program must be paid for eventually with taxes. But progressives today shy away from having hard discussions about costs or trade-offs. Instead, activists usually deny that tradeoffs exist and live in a fantasy where everything can be easily done, there are no negative consequences, and nobody has to pay for it. But that’s just not true. If you end fossil fuel drilling, gas and energy prices will go up. If you stop prosecuting retail theft, petty crime and disorder will increase. Most policies come with a complex set of gains and losses, benefits and harms, and ignoring that leads to bad policy and politics.
If you want people to give stuff up, whether it's material or anything of cultural value, you have to make it worth their while, and that's not easy to do!
saw you say on twitter (i'm a fan, hope it's not creepy lol) that you don't care much about hypocrisy but inconsistency drives you nuts. how are you differentiating between the two, i kind of conflate them in my mind but i'm interested in your take
Lol it’s not creepy, I’m not hiding my identity.
When I think about hypocrisy, I think about how liberals get really mad when conservatives talk about being pro-life but are also pro death penalty and often don’t care about the welfare of immigrant children, and call them raging hypocrites, but while I find that mentality morally wrong, the hypocrisy of it doesn’t bother me because I can logically understand that they see the unborn as both living beings and innocent while death row prisoners and illegal immigrants are inherently guilty. This is really dark but from their POV, immigrant children would never have been put in cages at the border if their parents hadn’t been trying to come into the United States illegally, and I understand that mentality even though I find it a morally reprehensible.
Conversely, when I think about inconsistency, I think about how a lot of Democrats support killing the filibuster but only when they’re in power. After Republicans took the Senate, a reporter went and asked all 47 Democratic senators, including Ruben Gallego who literally won his seat by running on killing the filibuster which his predecessor Kyrsten Sinema refused to do, 0/47 responded to her. I find that inconsistent and deeply annoying. If you support killing the filibuster, and I think I do because I’d rather the American people get what they’re voting for, you have to support it even when Republicans are in power! But obviously, Democrats want the ability to block BAD Republican bills, which of course is why the filibuster exists in the first place but it takes more effort to pass legislation than to block it, which is why Democrats want the filibuster gone in the first place.
You do realize you’re asking fundamentally neurotic and conflict laden people (online activists) to develop the social skills people around them have been wanting them to do for years at this point? If anything, moderates need to be more forceful in calling out bullshit and escalating conflict until the miscreants shut up. Go below the belt, attack their personal lives and character. Maybe that’ll work.
The problem is that this problem is not just with online activists who constantly are threatening to vote third party, it’s party animals like Ken Martin, the current DNC chair, who ran the Minnesota DFL, and Jaime Harrison, the former DNC chair, who was beefing with Nate Silver in the fallout from the 2024 Biden vs. Trump debate.
In other words, the neurosis problem that you correctly diagnose is endemic to the entire party apparatus, which fundamentally doesn’t understand how and when to put their foot down, and subsequently ends up looking hella pathetic on the national stage. The people that work in the mainstream media outside of Fox News are all liberals! They all voted for Biden and Harris even if they don’t disclose it publicly (I would know given I sort of moved in those circles in DC), and they cover liberals much more extensively and critically than they do conservatives.
Matt Yglesias wrote about coalition management recently and it’s worth reading.
The problem is that the progressive left (the Bernie cohort, which isn’t even class focused like Bernie Sanders allegedly was1 given they also think borders are inherently fascist) has a lot of media allies and pushes back bigly when moderates even try to fight back, and the moderates don’t have the same media connections. Like I said, I know or at least know of these media connections and they are not my biggest fans for a number of reasons, including that they think I’m too mercenary and not emotional enough.
Whom do you think could be potential nominees for the first female Republican president?
Joni Ernst or Katie Britt, maybe Nikki Haley. It could have been Elise Stefanik but she done fucked that up lol.
Bernie was attacking Barack Obama on deportations from the left in 2015 so no, he wasn’t actually moderate on immigration by the time he ran for president, contrary to what his stans claim
Great answers to these questions! If I could add one more: of the potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates, who do you think would be the strongest in the general election that year? Just disregard the Dem primary entirely for this question. :)