You get at this with media coverage, but I think a lot of these discussions about messaging elide salience. The World's Greatest Message about something that's not inflation or abortion rights is going to have trouble getting through when the real world includes inflation and a right wing Supreme Court that invalidated Roe.
There's also a tactical and orientational divide here regarding how political actors see the base. Setting aside substance, a lot of the Race / Class Narrative approach, for instance, views base voters as messengers who co-produce opinion change along with elites. That seems more consistent w/ the social media + traditional media ecosystem we're living in. A position that polls as popular but that disappoints part of a vocal base, e.g. means testing student loan forgiveness, can produce a muddled message in social + earned media even if it narrowly over-performs in polling and paid media testing. To put it another way, how do you control for what real constituents think and say about a policy strategically? I don't think anyone in these disputes has a good track record of getting the people who disagree with them to pipe down in the name of message discipline or what have you.
Additionally, I think this issue is further confused since a lot of the commentators who write about strategy work for mainstream media outlets from a position of presumed objectivity, but that often precludes tactical discussions about what produces high salience media coverage of an issue. Wrote about this a bit more here, but exercising power and provoking the opposition tend to produce media coverage, which is very much upstream of messaging decisions, at least in my experience: https://www.aaronhuertas.com/messaging-is-not-the-same-as-generating-attention/
Agree with all of this, and I think it's underrated how much of the narrative behind popularism is a game of hot potato back-and-forth of Popularists complaining that Democrats are bad and the media covering it.
The role of the media here feels paramount, and as long as Larry Summers gets covered anytime he opens his mouth, we'll still struggle against that.
Hadn't thought about the interaction with the base, but this makes total sense too. Thank you for your thoughtful reply!
Mehdi Hasan also put this to Rep. Clyburn in an interview months ago. Basically, if you're using a media platform to say your party shouldn't stand for "defund" aren't you functionally associating your party with defund by bringing it front of mind? Hasan is a particularly astute interviewer, so one of those strange meta-moments in this discourse. https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1413287920992243713
I think you may be inaccurately eliding the difference between “moderate” democrats and “popularists.”
You’re right, moderates have been and are losing. But it’s because they ignore the most popular left policies. They are beholden to capital (either because of group affinity, corruption, or both) and kill everything people want from the left. Drug price negotiation, wealth taxes, white collar prosecutions, competently administered state benefits (e.g. the popularity of medicaid expansion v. the hell of the exchanges), etc.
Moderates then, having kept those options off the table, keep using half measures or symbolic radicalism on anything that won’t threaten capital (e.g. the leadership kneeling in support of black lives).
Altogether, I don’t see how this problem could be attributed to them skewing too closely to empirical measures of popular opinion. They may SAY that they are choosing “moderate” policies because people don’t like big liberal change, but that’s just a lazy subjective diagnosis of what went wrong in the 80s. In reality, their real problem is their class interests are straight jacketing them.
Thanks for starting this newsletter. My comment/question is not in response to this post, specifically, but the series of posts you’ve made so far in general.
First, a little context: I consider myself a pragmatic progressive, usually aligned with Elizabeth Warren (and sometimes Bernie Sanders) on policy but more inclined to Obama on style and tactical approach. I currently work closely with a moderate-left governor in a blue-purple state as a high level bureaucrat with direct line of sight into policymaking and communications strategy, and have previously served a moderate Republican governor in a different solidly blue state as both a bureaucrat and an appointee. I have some lived experience with these issues that I suspect differs from the author(s) here. I appreciate that you all seem to be writing in good faith and suspect that we probably share some of the same long term goals but disagree on how to get there.
Something not yet addressed in your, Simon Bazelon’s, or Matt Yglesias’s posts on the topic, are the questions of incrementalism and winning hearts and minds through actually governing.
What I mean by incrementalism is the apparent lack of appetite among most of the progressive left for strategic, incremental policy wins that build a durable foundation (not subject to electoral swings) for a more economically and socially just future. The current lack of interest in the Collins/Murkowski abortion bill is one example of this; another, from my state’s legislature, is the progressive state house caucus negotiating against their own party’s governor on public safety reform this year (the progressive criticism was that the governor’s proposal did not go far enough, but Republican votes would have been needed to pass anything) in a way that ensured nothing got done at all. That outcome is disappointing in and of itself, but it likely makes things worse in the short term for those living in neighborhoods affected by violence, and in the short-to-medium term makes it much less likely that moderate suburban Democrats — on whose re-election the slight Dem majority depends to get anything done — will win this fall.
In my view, this means that these progressive electeds as well as the activist groups they work closely with (and who too often provide the staffing for these electeds) are doing too much virtue-signaling and too little governing. Your comments on winning hearts and minds through organizing in an earlier post frustrated me, because I’d agreed with much of what you’d written to that point, but a pretty straightforward way to win hearts and minds to the cause is to govern and show results. How is producing wins and results not the best way forward?
I can only think of two explanations for this approach: (1) that progressive elites are too deeply invested in calling out systemic rot and racism and corporate capture of government (which in many cases all happen to be true) and have thus decided that even trying to govern isn’t worth it in such an environment; and/or (2) it’s a legacy of leftist thought of yesteryear, in which nothing short of a revolution that gets us all the way to utopia in one leap is the only way. I find the first depressingly self-defeating, and the second wildly unrealistic and likely dependent on violence.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on this phenomenon.
Also, YOLO can’t be a sound basis for an entire campaign strategy. To the extent that “try new ideas” is valid, that’s exactly what the popularists are arguing for. The problem is that the hard left keeps taking that imperative as an excuse to keep proposing more and more extreme versions of the pet issues that non-college white men despise, and that’s not actually YOLOing in the direction you’re arguing it does.
To the extent that the left, or even moderates, can propose ideas that have a snowball’s chance of winning NCWMs, as you are demanding, well that’s exactly what Matt and the other popularists are asking for TOO.
The idea that our leaders “lack charisma” smacks of Green Lantern Theory. You go to war with the army you’ve got, not the one you wish you had.
Also, it’s strawmanning to argue against a putative “popularist trifecta”, because popularism is primarily an *electoral* theory. The point is to run on a limited list of popular ideas in order to get an incontrovertible electoral majority, and then you enact those ideas in order to build the intraparty unity and voter trust to allow you to enact the LESS popular things you care about.
You get at this with media coverage, but I think a lot of these discussions about messaging elide salience. The World's Greatest Message about something that's not inflation or abortion rights is going to have trouble getting through when the real world includes inflation and a right wing Supreme Court that invalidated Roe.
There's also a tactical and orientational divide here regarding how political actors see the base. Setting aside substance, a lot of the Race / Class Narrative approach, for instance, views base voters as messengers who co-produce opinion change along with elites. That seems more consistent w/ the social media + traditional media ecosystem we're living in. A position that polls as popular but that disappoints part of a vocal base, e.g. means testing student loan forgiveness, can produce a muddled message in social + earned media even if it narrowly over-performs in polling and paid media testing. To put it another way, how do you control for what real constituents think and say about a policy strategically? I don't think anyone in these disputes has a good track record of getting the people who disagree with them to pipe down in the name of message discipline or what have you.
Additionally, I think this issue is further confused since a lot of the commentators who write about strategy work for mainstream media outlets from a position of presumed objectivity, but that often precludes tactical discussions about what produces high salience media coverage of an issue. Wrote about this a bit more here, but exercising power and provoking the opposition tend to produce media coverage, which is very much upstream of messaging decisions, at least in my experience: https://www.aaronhuertas.com/messaging-is-not-the-same-as-generating-attention/
Agree with all of this, and I think it's underrated how much of the narrative behind popularism is a game of hot potato back-and-forth of Popularists complaining that Democrats are bad and the media covering it.
The role of the media here feels paramount, and as long as Larry Summers gets covered anytime he opens his mouth, we'll still struggle against that.
Hadn't thought about the interaction with the base, but this makes total sense too. Thank you for your thoughtful reply!
Jake Grumbach had a funny post about that: https://twitter.com/JakeMGrumbach/status/1462895734286524419
Mehdi Hasan also put this to Rep. Clyburn in an interview months ago. Basically, if you're using a media platform to say your party shouldn't stand for "defund" aren't you functionally associating your party with defund by bringing it front of mind? Hasan is a particularly astute interviewer, so one of those strange meta-moments in this discourse. https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1413287920992243713
I think you may be inaccurately eliding the difference between “moderate” democrats and “popularists.”
You’re right, moderates have been and are losing. But it’s because they ignore the most popular left policies. They are beholden to capital (either because of group affinity, corruption, or both) and kill everything people want from the left. Drug price negotiation, wealth taxes, white collar prosecutions, competently administered state benefits (e.g. the popularity of medicaid expansion v. the hell of the exchanges), etc.
Moderates then, having kept those options off the table, keep using half measures or symbolic radicalism on anything that won’t threaten capital (e.g. the leadership kneeling in support of black lives).
Altogether, I don’t see how this problem could be attributed to them skewing too closely to empirical measures of popular opinion. They may SAY that they are choosing “moderate” policies because people don’t like big liberal change, but that’s just a lazy subjective diagnosis of what went wrong in the 80s. In reality, their real problem is their class interests are straight jacketing them.
Thanks for starting this newsletter. My comment/question is not in response to this post, specifically, but the series of posts you’ve made so far in general.
First, a little context: I consider myself a pragmatic progressive, usually aligned with Elizabeth Warren (and sometimes Bernie Sanders) on policy but more inclined to Obama on style and tactical approach. I currently work closely with a moderate-left governor in a blue-purple state as a high level bureaucrat with direct line of sight into policymaking and communications strategy, and have previously served a moderate Republican governor in a different solidly blue state as both a bureaucrat and an appointee. I have some lived experience with these issues that I suspect differs from the author(s) here. I appreciate that you all seem to be writing in good faith and suspect that we probably share some of the same long term goals but disagree on how to get there.
Something not yet addressed in your, Simon Bazelon’s, or Matt Yglesias’s posts on the topic, are the questions of incrementalism and winning hearts and minds through actually governing.
What I mean by incrementalism is the apparent lack of appetite among most of the progressive left for strategic, incremental policy wins that build a durable foundation (not subject to electoral swings) for a more economically and socially just future. The current lack of interest in the Collins/Murkowski abortion bill is one example of this; another, from my state’s legislature, is the progressive state house caucus negotiating against their own party’s governor on public safety reform this year (the progressive criticism was that the governor’s proposal did not go far enough, but Republican votes would have been needed to pass anything) in a way that ensured nothing got done at all. That outcome is disappointing in and of itself, but it likely makes things worse in the short term for those living in neighborhoods affected by violence, and in the short-to-medium term makes it much less likely that moderate suburban Democrats — on whose re-election the slight Dem majority depends to get anything done — will win this fall.
In my view, this means that these progressive electeds as well as the activist groups they work closely with (and who too often provide the staffing for these electeds) are doing too much virtue-signaling and too little governing. Your comments on winning hearts and minds through organizing in an earlier post frustrated me, because I’d agreed with much of what you’d written to that point, but a pretty straightforward way to win hearts and minds to the cause is to govern and show results. How is producing wins and results not the best way forward?
I can only think of two explanations for this approach: (1) that progressive elites are too deeply invested in calling out systemic rot and racism and corporate capture of government (which in many cases all happen to be true) and have thus decided that even trying to govern isn’t worth it in such an environment; and/or (2) it’s a legacy of leftist thought of yesteryear, in which nothing short of a revolution that gets us all the way to utopia in one leap is the only way. I find the first depressingly self-defeating, and the second wildly unrealistic and likely dependent on violence.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on this phenomenon.
Also, YOLO can’t be a sound basis for an entire campaign strategy. To the extent that “try new ideas” is valid, that’s exactly what the popularists are arguing for. The problem is that the hard left keeps taking that imperative as an excuse to keep proposing more and more extreme versions of the pet issues that non-college white men despise, and that’s not actually YOLOing in the direction you’re arguing it does.
To the extent that the left, or even moderates, can propose ideas that have a snowball’s chance of winning NCWMs, as you are demanding, well that’s exactly what Matt and the other popularists are asking for TOO.
The idea that our leaders “lack charisma” smacks of Green Lantern Theory. You go to war with the army you’ve got, not the one you wish you had.
Also, it’s strawmanning to argue against a putative “popularist trifecta”, because popularism is primarily an *electoral* theory. The point is to run on a limited list of popular ideas in order to get an incontrovertible electoral majority, and then you enact those ideas in order to build the intraparty unity and voter trust to allow you to enact the LESS popular things you care about.