Post-election thoughts

On Democrats' 58-item purity test, the right size of the tent, and more.

I am sad that Donald Trump won.

It does seem clear that he really won. I think 2016 was a bit of a fluke, more of a 30th percentile unlikely outcome coming true, driven by some contingencies and some very narrow margins in some swing states.

This election does not feel that way. It seems that Trump won pretty handily, including the popular vote. The list of “Obama/Biden won this county by X points, Trump won it by X+10” examples is honestly too long to go through.

This is not a fluke election. What it might be is an example where macro/global environmental factors are primary drivers here. Incumbents are being wiped out around the world and in some ways this is just a part of this trend. People hate inflation. There’s a general post-COVID malaise that has contributed to a sense that things are bad and a “change” election is needed. I will still be a pointy headed liberal and say that the economy in America is actually doing pretty well and it is still kind of a mystery that political scientists will have to solve why people didn’t feel that way.

Trump almost certainly is running behind someone like Nicki Haley, in that sense. The racism, authoritarianism, etc. are actually defects, not features. Under these incumbent headwinds, perhaps Haley could have pulled off a true landslide a la Reagan in 1984 with nearly 60% of the vote and essentially the entire electoral college. Likely not possible given the degree of polarization today, but I still think she would have done well.

I forget who said this, but it is still true: people who vote for Trump are not saying they love racism/authoritarianism/fill in the quality. But they are saying that those qualities are not a dealbreaker. But even more importantly: an increasing number of those people who feel that way are themselves victims of that racism.

That swing among racial and ethnic minorities reminds me in some ways of how Black people voted for Democrats back in the New Deal days because they felt like that party represented their interests even though many of them were obviously racist. And not Tema Okun “white supremacy culture” racist, like actual segregationists who explicitly thought black people were an inferior race.

The fact of this swing is depressing and hopefully will occasion some degree of wake up call among the highly educated and the left wing about the current state of public opinion. The party has moved very far left since Obama and it seems evident that it is paying a cost and not getting the anticipated benefits.

For one, racial minorities seem to continually be defecting to the Republican party, even as it maintains some of its racist and xenophobic rhetoric. Some of this is because POC as a category is an illusion. There’s no reason that a hypothetical Nicaraguan-Americans who live in Milwaukee are necessarily more likely to support a more permeable border than anyone else is.

I worry, though, that the self examination won’t happen. I just read a Facebook post from an old Marxist college professor. He’s equally fed up with the Democrats. But his view is that this election discredits centrism and that the problem is that the Democrats were a “close the border and abet Netanyahu party.” At the same time, he’s arguing for a 50-state strategy.

That just seems so off base it’s insane. I worry that in my left wing foundation world people will continue to just say: “we should keep running further to the left.” But that strategy seems completely and totally discredited to me. Even someone like Bernie Sanders, who’s an effective messenger of leftist stuff because he focuses on bread and butter economic issues and appropriately deflects cultural leftist stuff. In this election Harris ran ahead of Bernie in his own state of Vermont.

So what should Democrats do

It’s clear that the Democratic Party needs to have more of a clear identity about what they are for. And it needs to be a shorter list and less of a collection of identity appeals and negative polarization (“we need to stop Trump”). We can’t keep up a culture where you need to have the correct position and language on 58 different issues or you get in tons of trouble with the groups that are supposed to be your base.

I said this to a friend and he agreed in principle. But then I gave Joe Manchin as an example, mentioning how we treated Joe Manchin poorly even though he is the reason all these great Democratic priorities passed, just because he wants to export more LNG. And he interrupted me to say “no, but Joe Manchin is” a word that means “terrible person.”

But that’s the point! If the Democrats can’t even have a guy in the tent who runs 30+ percentage points above the party, wants to expand the welfare state, gives them a Senate seat that should be totally unwinnable, and helps them pass billions of dollars in climate funding and other priorities, then who is going to run in this 50 state strategy that people like my Marxist college professor (rightly) think we should have?

Part of the blame here rests with “The Groups,” the civil society/nonprofit/academic/pundit network of left wing operatives who help determine and police Democratic orthodoxy and platforms. I don’t fully understand the politics for why “The Groups” have so much influence here. After all, as Skocpol and others have documented, they are hollow groups. Organizations without members, foundation-funded and only accountable to big donors and foundations, not to regular people whose votes they can influence (and be influenced by).

Part of it is that Democratic leaders just want to avoid coalition infighting and unpleasant interactions. Who wants to be yelled at about how you don’t care about [fill in the group/cause]? I’ve been yelled at like that by activists, it wasn’t pleasant! And that was just a private one-on-one meeting. If I was a politician with more power and visibility it definitely wouldn’t feel good to have that happening all the time from 100 different groups, each with a public audience of thousands of people. Note that I say audience, not membership.

But part of it is cultural. Why exactly is it so unpleasant to say “no” to one of The Groups’ priorities? Or to flat out disagree with one of their stances? The fact that the Democratic party is now the party of neurotics likely doesn’t help. Anxious folks don’t want to be told “everyone hates you,” they’d love to nip that one in the bud if possible. Speaking from experience..

We as Democrats and progressives are trained to hate people for their one point of departure and to ferret out what that one area of disagreement might be. Do you support individual gun ownership with only modest restrictions? Spurned. Do you live in South Dakota and want to re-legalize abortion, but not to the maximalist extent that abortion activists want? No money for you from national donors. If you want a specific example, look at this profile of Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a rare Democrat winning (again, luckily!) in a red district and all of the stuff that she agrees with Democrats about and how controversial she still is.

Why do we have this problem?

To some degree that’s the negative consequence of a good thing: solidarity politics. It’s good to have solidarity between causes and oppressed groups, instead of having everyone just stay in the most narrow lane possible. That sort of collaboration is part of how big wins get over the finish line, including recent statewide abortion and economic justice wins.

But the downside is this “you must agree to these 58 interest group priorities to be a Democrat” style Invisible Charter that develops. And the fact that all of them are treated as somehow equally essential, regardless of their popularity, where you’re running, or the absolute number of people that are impacted.

I feel this pressure, too, and I’m far to the left of the average American! I articulate certain criticisms or areas I disagree with the Democrats about and my urban, highly educated cohort says “wow are you a Republican?” My friend moved from LA to Missouri and stopped being a prison abolitionist and her friends joked that she’s in her “MAGA era.” It’s a joke, but it reveals some of the dynamics here.

I think we should raise taxes on rich people, have a more robust social safety net (including expanded healthcare, unemployment benefits, etc.), invest more in public education and public health and other public goods that promote general welfare, regulate companies to stop them from polluting the earth, incentivize more adoption of green energy and invest tons in R&D to help develop new technologies to combat climate change, and the list goes on..

If having all those views still makes some of my labor organizer friends call me “conservative,” then I’m not really sure who belongs in the Democratic Party besides Marxist professors and feckless Twitter activists who never say or do anything wrong because they never actually do anything.

Matt Yglesias had the idea of narrowing views to fit on one postcard for “Common Sense Democrats.” His list:

This is largely sloganeering. It also skews more towards social issues, which I think reflects Yglesias’s analysis of where Democrats are losing voters.

I think my version of this would be more policy-focused and less value-focused and might center more on America’s social safety net and taxing rich people. Of course, this is just me saying that the Democrats should do everything that I already like. What needs to happen is that people need to duke it out about whatever those 5-10 items are, and I’m more than happy to suck it up and vote for the Democrats even if they don’t pick the same 5-10 items that I do as long as there’s a base level of value and policy overlap there.

Blue state governance

The last piece of the puzzle here for me is something that Ezra Klein has been sounding the alarm bells on for awhile and Josh Barro wrote most eloquently about post-election. Democrats are not doing a great job in the states and cities where they are in power and it’s not a coincidence that there were big swings towards Trump in places like Manhattan. Here’s Barro laying out a litany (emphasis added):

I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them, because it costs four times as much per mile to build a subway line here as it does in France, and because union rules force the agency to overstaff itself, inflating operating costs. Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system — the other day, I was on an M34 bus where one shouted repeatedly at another passenger that he was a “faggot” — and even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it, and I can’t entirely blame them since our government lacks the legal authority to keep these people either in jail or in treatment. The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets. A judge recently said the city can’t even padlock the illegal cannabis stores that have popped up all over the place — that’s apparently unconstitutional, and so years into what was supposed to be the wokest legal cannabis regime in the country, our government still can’t figure out how to make sure people who sell weed have a license to do so, even though they’ve done that with regard to alcohol forever. Ever since the COVID shutdowns, Democrats here have stopped talking very much about the importance of investing in public education, but the schools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under state court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything — and it’s really expensive to travel here, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council literally made it illegal to build new hotels. And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population — we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy.

Here’s a few non-New York examples of my own:

• It cost $1.7M to build one toilet in a park in San Francisco.

• Texas is lapping California and other blue states in solar energy buildout. Hint: it’s not because they care more about the climate.

• As of almost a week after Election Day, California is still unable to count its ballots.

I pick these examples for a reason. Some of the things that people crab at Democrats about are actual value-laden questions or difficult empirical issues. What is the optimal balance of harm reduction and criminalization for drug policy and how much has fentanyl changed the picture? What are the most effective ways to reduce crime? How do you balance short and long term strategies to reduce homelessness in a durable way while treating people humanely and preserving public space?

Most of the issues that Barro, Klein, and I raise are not that. These are things that the people and the party want to do! People who lived near that park wanted a toilet. The Democratic party prioritized climate policy over many other issues in the Biden administration and got tons of money to advance solar energy buildout. Every single state in the country should want to be able to count ballots quickly and effectively.

In short, Democrats need to do better where they are in power. Make people jealous! Make them say, “man, whatever Gretchen Whitmer is doing in Michigan is working, we need more of that in the federal government.”

Where the rubber meets the road

In my centrist pundit Twitter world I’ve seen a lot of scapegoating of trans rights or the use of words like Latinx called out as particularly unpopular and/or perceived out of touch issues. I do think there’s something there but it also kind of misses the point. It’s okay to pick unpopular fights. Sometimes you want politicians to lead, not follow.

Or sometimes you need to spend down political capital, sacrificing short term popularity to pass big bills like the Affordable Care Act that improve people’s lives. That’s what politics is all about and sometimes it even pays off in terms of popularity later.

What I don’t know is how you unwind some of these dynamics. Solidarity is important. And back to that idea that there are 58 different positions you need to agree with on the Invisible Charter to be allowed to be a Democrat, you don’t solve that problem by just throwing three or four of those issues out and “only” having 54 issues.

I posed a hypothetical to a friend who runs a union-like workers advocacy organization in the Midwest. Let’s say it’s 2030. A durably Republican state has its first Democrat running for Senate with a real chance. But, like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, he has to buck Democratic party consensus on some issues. Pick your deeply held issue: “trans people deserve rights but they make me uncomfortable,” “we should keep building coal power plants while we also add more solar panels,” 

What will he do? I’m honestly not sure how the progressive ecosystem is set up to handle those issues if they started coming up more often. He says that since he’s got an actual organization with working class members (similar to a union) that he’d just ask the workers what they want. But note how Trumpian rank-and-file union membership is, despite all that Democrats did for unions in the past four years.

Nevertheless, it’s a real answer to my hypothetical. So one way you solve it is by building organizations with real membership, which (1) keeps you anchored in working class realities and (2) puts actual power and votes behind the pressure you exert on the party.

But not everyone is going to do that. You can also resolve some of this problem by having what Matt Yglesias calls a more chill general orientation and identity as a party. A narrower set of core issues. More toleration of intra-party disagreement. More willingness to punch left and not let right wing media define the Democratic Party by the craziest activists that Democrats are too sheepish to fully disavow.

Trade offs and red herrings

Before I close I do want to name some of the trade offs here. Having too big of a tent can fail, and Trump may soon serve as a great example. He’s carved out strategic ambiguity on too many questions from foreign policy to abortion. Doves and hawks both think Trump will advance their interests, as do pro-choice Barstool Sports bros and anti-abortion evangelicals. There’s a reason he did not end his first term popular. The big tent electoral coalition will likely create problems when governing.

Overall, as many others have said, this is an inflection point. I’m not sure what issues will win the day as the Democrats search for a new identity. No one really knows how Trump will govern.

I’ve also had another nagging thought, not fully formed. I’m seeing so many use this election to talk about big abstractions: voters being fed up with “neoliberalism” or looking to change America’s role in the world. Look at this recent piece from former Obama staffer Ben Rhodes as an example. Or some of what Nikole Hannah Jones or Tressie McMillan Cottom have been spouting off about this as a white supremacy election, sometimes calling for more identity politics.

Each of these people has their own pet theory or model to explain this and they all have their own empirical challenges. Biden just governed far to the left on economic policy and already broke the neoliberal consensus in favor of more industrial policy, but we’re bemoaning how the Democrats have forgotten the working man. Record numbers of Hispanic and Black votes certainly pose challenges for racially-centered narratives.  And was Miami-Dade County, which went for Trump, really hollowed out by neoliberalism in the way that Rhodes describes?

I can’t escape the thought that maybe we’re all wrong. Forget policy and political party identity, the fall and rise of political regimes. Maybe it’s really all about style: voters sick of polished politicians and craving Trump’s “disinhibition.” Maybe slick politicians are just so thoroughly discredited due to the intense visibility and level of information that the Internet provides and it’s still essentially the same story that Martin Gurri told in Revolt of the Public.

Maybe the Democrats will run Mark Cuban or Alec Baldwin as politically incorrect outsiders who nonetheless adhere to 54 of the same 58 Invisible Charter ideas and win and this will all look histrionic.

[Note: I have been informed that my original number of Democratic Invisible Charter items (88) is a Hitler thing, so I’ve edited it. I am, in fact, Jewish and not a fan of Hitler.]