I really like this blog/newsletter so far. I have one request/suggestion, I’d love to see you refine your critiques further on popularists. As others have pointed out a to a degree, many of your critiques of them so far have actually been arguments with which many of them agree. I’d love to get a better sense of what the actual points of contention are, since everyone seems to agree that winning elections is important and that movement building is important. So is the disagreement about when to focus on each activity or what those terms mean or something else.
Thanks! There’s just about nothing more important to our cointe’s medium term prospects than a vibrant, successful Democratic Party.
I think the issue is that there's three distinct but overlapping points that the Matt Yglesias types (I include myself) make:
1) Politicians in an election need to win +50% support in the here and now. There's little time for persuasion during a campaign, you need to win with the electorate you have. The electorate that we have is mostly made up of people whose political views are more moderate, messy, & poorly-defined than the passionate partisans on either side. This doesn't just mean "do whatever working class white men want". Black women vote Democratic by bigger margins than anyone else, but even these voters aren't a bunch of DSA progressives & leftists. *All* demographics are mostly made up of people who aren't passionate ideologues.
2) Pundits, activists, think tanks, etc. should persuade people of what is true and right, *especially* if those positions are currently unpopular. But many of them have a bad habit of saying things that appeal to people who already agree with them, at the expense of persuading people who disagree. A lot of online sociopolitical discourse is people in the left-most 5% of the population accusing the people in the left-most 20% of the population of being "right-wing". That's not how persuasion or movement-building works. (I'm conflating "pundits and activists" with "online sociopolitical discourse" here. Maybe I shouldn't?)
3) There are many cases where progressives are wrong on the merits, where the things they say just aren't true and right to begin with. Or maybe I'm the one whose wrong on the merits! This is normal disagreement, and should be resolved by arguing back and forth in good faith.
These ideas have some overlap. All of them are some form of "Progressives are a niche group. They should listen to moderates". But they're fully independent claims. A politician will fail if they can't get +50% support. Activists will fail if they're only preaching to the choir. And of course we should figure out what ideas are true and right on the merits.
>Pundits, activists, think tanks, etc. should persuade people of what is true and right, *especially* if those positions are currently unpopular.
My counterpoint would be: as the rest of your paragraph (2) implies, they mostly *don't* focus on persuading people that true-and-good (but unpopular) things are true and good. They focus on broadcasting that one or two headline policies are good and "progressive" (note the absence of "true", because not all those headline policies are based on claims that are true-as-given, even when they're good anyway), and that everything opposed to their present political orientation is "right-wing". Which then, of course, implies that the "right-most" 80% of the population on any given issue are the outgroup and are very bad, without actually mounting any argument for why they should change their minds or setting up any terms for possible compromise.
This is how you get progressive Democrats (who would be unelectable in certain parts of the country) accusing other progressive Democrats (who would be unelectable in certain parts of the country) of being reactionaries, conservatives, or otherwise right-wing. I've heard this called "the politics of position" (this policy is *ours*, and if you don't like it you're one of *them*) as against "the politics of reason" (this policy is good and its premises are true).
I'll just say that progressives aren't the only ones who fall for the "preaching to the choir" trap, every team does it. It's just that progressives are the ones who want to make the biggest changes to society, so they ought to be extra-focused on figuring out how to make their positions persuasive to people who don't share their entire worldview.
I'm going to write a more detailed response to this post at some point. But first, I just want to take a moment and say that you wrote, "Some have even argued that preserving the status quo should be the explicit goal of the Democratic Party," with a link to my piece on democratic backsliding. This is not what I wrote in my piece, and it is also not what I believe.
What I do believe is that the explicit goal of the Democratic party should be to maximize the welfare of the poor and disadvantaged. That may require strategic adjustments in the face of backsliding risks (which themselves increase the risk of long tail catastrophes, like war). But preserving the status quo is not something I have ever had any intrinsic interest in: and as someone who supported Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary, I find it very strange to be identified as such in your writing.
The main thing that comes to my mind on this is thinking about Great Britain, which like most countries in the west, moved considerably to the right in the 80's and early 90's.
The British Labour party refused to bend with the political winds (and instead moved so far to the left that it led the rise of a splinter centrist party that doomed them despite Thatcher's unpopularity), and the result of that was that Thatcher ended up with total control of Britain for 22 years, and in that time did incalculable damage to Britain's industrial base and welfare state.
22 years of losses completely discredited the progressive faction of the center left for a generation, making it so that when Labour did come to power, they ended up with much more right wing leadership than could have been imagined in the 80's.
We were lucky enough that for all the damage Reagan did, he never had a governing trifecta. Something that was personally very sobering to me was going back and watching old news coverage of the 1994 election - the media environment and public mood was *unimaginably* right wing. You can never know counterfactuals, but it's easy to imagine a world where we had a Foot instead of a Clinton, leaving us with a Thatcher instead of a Clinton. And in that world, we might have ended up with future Democratic presidents who were much more right wing than Obama ended up being.
As a political activists, we're often enthusiastic about gambling the possibility of a much worse future for the hope of a better one. Given the humanitarian stakes of this moment - the specter of the total dismantlement of the welfare state and the potential end of liberal democracy as we know it, maybe we should have more loss aversion?
This doesn’t feel like it’s engaging with the main point of the article. The authors aren’t calling for Democratic leadership to stake out socialist positions on every issue, they’re saying the party needs to focus on engaging the movements that have the power to organize people to overcome the various biases of the electorate. That’s a distinctly different strategy from constant poll calibration but also doesn’t mean calling for an immediate end to the use of fossil fuels. I think this is emblematic of some people’s issue with your prescriptions, which is they work top down and take public sentiment as largely static, instead of a bottom up approach that has historically been the most consistently successful way of passing left-wing policy.
Perot wasn't right wing, exactly -- more precisely, he wasn't a right wing political figure. He was, in people's minds, a breath of fresh air, a simple, plain-speaking, honest, pragmatic break from the dishonest self-interested partisan politicians of both parties, and a man who respected them and shared their frustration at a system that refused to address their simple, crucial issues and needs. Let's just get rid of all that political garbage and sleaze and nonsense and elect someone who truly cares about America and isn't in it for himself, was the sincere, politics-weary, hope. That exact appeal to that broadly felt yearning (mainly, though *far* from exclusively, among white working-class voters) was a very large driver of Trump's support. And of Bernie's.
I think there is some merit to something Yglesias was fond of saying before "popularism" had a name and he embraced it, and that's the notion that Democrats should do popular stuff loudly and unpopular stuff more quietly. I think that falls into the "generic political best practices" bucket, but it's fair enough.
There's an often unstated divide in these discussions between paid + earned media. Something like a Race / Class Narrative approach on the progressive side of things views the Democratic base as both audience and messenger, assuming there will be a harder-to-measure socialized aspect of how people communicate with each other about politics. As a practitioner, I tend toward that view, but it's also something worth explicating and getting specific about.
I think that approach has gotten stronger, in part, because of disruptions to the mainstream media, but it's held back by a lack of investment in progressive-aligned media infrastructure, which funders may see as too disruptive to *their* preferred way of doing politics. There are also tactical ways that generating attention and provoking the opposition into arguing in your frame have changed as the MSM has gotten disrupted by social media, which also suggest a more democratized approach with supporters-as-messengers: https://www.aaronhuertas.com/messaging-is-not-the-same-as-generating-attention/
Further, another field where the party could make some interesting movement-aligned investments like you allude to here would be public engagement and democratic deliberation about policy, with an understanding that traditional town halls and other engagement processes favor people with free time. The Gov Lab does some interesting work in this field: https://thegovlab.org/. And historically, deliberative polling + consultation with voters has led to some positive developments such as the rise of wind power in Texas: https://www.nationalcivicleague.org/ncr-article/deliberative-plling-and-the-rise-of-wind-power-in-texas/.
At a practical level, campaigns can support mutual aid projects, unionization and other local democratic activity. AOC, for instance, has a how-to-form-a-union track for her constituents and a ton of Democratic members of Congress flipped their offices into mutual aid mode in response to COVID. The new wave of House Democrats in 2018 won in a much more online, engagement-focused environment, so they have a more aggressive approach on these fronts across an otherwise big tent ideological spectrum.
Finally, the point about labor is pretty obvious, IMO, and well-researched. Unions do a ton of political education and long-term goals should be aligned toward greater union density for human well-being reasons, with better electoral outcomes happily downstream of that. Interestingly, leaders across the tent are more than happy to stand on strike lines with workers, too, though of course there's some geographic variation there based on how strong unions are in a given constituency for starters.
Anyway, wanted to chime in here since there does seem to be a lack of practical focus in these debates re: what we should actually do to put competing strategies into practice (beyond the things we can actually measure well).
I really like this blog/newsletter so far. I have one request/suggestion, I’d love to see you refine your critiques further on popularists. As others have pointed out a to a degree, many of your critiques of them so far have actually been arguments with which many of them agree. I’d love to get a better sense of what the actual points of contention are, since everyone seems to agree that winning elections is important and that movement building is important. So is the disagreement about when to focus on each activity or what those terms mean or something else.
Thanks! There’s just about nothing more important to our cointe’s medium term prospects than a vibrant, successful Democratic Party.
I think the issue is that there's three distinct but overlapping points that the Matt Yglesias types (I include myself) make:
1) Politicians in an election need to win +50% support in the here and now. There's little time for persuasion during a campaign, you need to win with the electorate you have. The electorate that we have is mostly made up of people whose political views are more moderate, messy, & poorly-defined than the passionate partisans on either side. This doesn't just mean "do whatever working class white men want". Black women vote Democratic by bigger margins than anyone else, but even these voters aren't a bunch of DSA progressives & leftists. *All* demographics are mostly made up of people who aren't passionate ideologues.
2) Pundits, activists, think tanks, etc. should persuade people of what is true and right, *especially* if those positions are currently unpopular. But many of them have a bad habit of saying things that appeal to people who already agree with them, at the expense of persuading people who disagree. A lot of online sociopolitical discourse is people in the left-most 5% of the population accusing the people in the left-most 20% of the population of being "right-wing". That's not how persuasion or movement-building works. (I'm conflating "pundits and activists" with "online sociopolitical discourse" here. Maybe I shouldn't?)
3) There are many cases where progressives are wrong on the merits, where the things they say just aren't true and right to begin with. Or maybe I'm the one whose wrong on the merits! This is normal disagreement, and should be resolved by arguing back and forth in good faith.
These ideas have some overlap. All of them are some form of "Progressives are a niche group. They should listen to moderates". But they're fully independent claims. A politician will fail if they can't get +50% support. Activists will fail if they're only preaching to the choir. And of course we should figure out what ideas are true and right on the merits.
>Pundits, activists, think tanks, etc. should persuade people of what is true and right, *especially* if those positions are currently unpopular.
My counterpoint would be: as the rest of your paragraph (2) implies, they mostly *don't* focus on persuading people that true-and-good (but unpopular) things are true and good. They focus on broadcasting that one or two headline policies are good and "progressive" (note the absence of "true", because not all those headline policies are based on claims that are true-as-given, even when they're good anyway), and that everything opposed to their present political orientation is "right-wing". Which then, of course, implies that the "right-most" 80% of the population on any given issue are the outgroup and are very bad, without actually mounting any argument for why they should change their minds or setting up any terms for possible compromise.
This is how you get progressive Democrats (who would be unelectable in certain parts of the country) accusing other progressive Democrats (who would be unelectable in certain parts of the country) of being reactionaries, conservatives, or otherwise right-wing. I've heard this called "the politics of position" (this policy is *ours*, and if you don't like it you're one of *them*) as against "the politics of reason" (this policy is good and its premises are true).
I'll just say that progressives aren't the only ones who fall for the "preaching to the choir" trap, every team does it. It's just that progressives are the ones who want to make the biggest changes to society, so they ought to be extra-focused on figuring out how to make their positions persuasive to people who don't share their entire worldview.
I'm going to write a more detailed response to this post at some point. But first, I just want to take a moment and say that you wrote, "Some have even argued that preserving the status quo should be the explicit goal of the Democratic Party," with a link to my piece on democratic backsliding. This is not what I wrote in my piece, and it is also not what I believe.
What I do believe is that the explicit goal of the Democratic party should be to maximize the welfare of the poor and disadvantaged. That may require strategic adjustments in the face of backsliding risks (which themselves increase the risk of long tail catastrophes, like war). But preserving the status quo is not something I have ever had any intrinsic interest in: and as someone who supported Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary, I find it very strange to be identified as such in your writing.
I wrote a more detailed response on my Substack, curious on your thoughts: https://outoftheordinary.substack.com/p/a-response-to-some-recent-criticism/comments?s=w
The main thing that comes to my mind on this is thinking about Great Britain, which like most countries in the west, moved considerably to the right in the 80's and early 90's.
The British Labour party refused to bend with the political winds (and instead moved so far to the left that it led the rise of a splinter centrist party that doomed them despite Thatcher's unpopularity), and the result of that was that Thatcher ended up with total control of Britain for 22 years, and in that time did incalculable damage to Britain's industrial base and welfare state.
22 years of losses completely discredited the progressive faction of the center left for a generation, making it so that when Labour did come to power, they ended up with much more right wing leadership than could have been imagined in the 80's.
We were lucky enough that for all the damage Reagan did, he never had a governing trifecta. Something that was personally very sobering to me was going back and watching old news coverage of the 1994 election - the media environment and public mood was *unimaginably* right wing. You can never know counterfactuals, but it's easy to imagine a world where we had a Foot instead of a Clinton, leaving us with a Thatcher instead of a Clinton. And in that world, we might have ended up with future Democratic presidents who were much more right wing than Obama ended up being.
As a political activists, we're often enthusiastic about gambling the possibility of a much worse future for the hope of a better one. Given the humanitarian stakes of this moment - the specter of the total dismantlement of the welfare state and the potential end of liberal democracy as we know it, maybe we should have more loss aversion?
This doesn’t feel like it’s engaging with the main point of the article. The authors aren’t calling for Democratic leadership to stake out socialist positions on every issue, they’re saying the party needs to focus on engaging the movements that have the power to organize people to overcome the various biases of the electorate. That’s a distinctly different strategy from constant poll calibration but also doesn’t mean calling for an immediate end to the use of fossil fuels. I think this is emblematic of some people’s issue with your prescriptions, which is they work top down and take public sentiment as largely static, instead of a bottom up approach that has historically been the most consistently successful way of passing left-wing policy.
Also lol it was 17 years of Tories. Shouldn’t write things at midnight.
Just one other data point to show how right wing the early 90’s were - In June of 1992, Perot was tied with Clinton *among Democratic primary voters*.
Perot wasn't right wing, exactly -- more precisely, he wasn't a right wing political figure. He was, in people's minds, a breath of fresh air, a simple, plain-speaking, honest, pragmatic break from the dishonest self-interested partisan politicians of both parties, and a man who respected them and shared their frustration at a system that refused to address their simple, crucial issues and needs. Let's just get rid of all that political garbage and sleaze and nonsense and elect someone who truly cares about America and isn't in it for himself, was the sincere, politics-weary, hope. That exact appeal to that broadly felt yearning (mainly, though *far* from exclusively, among white working-class voters) was a very large driver of Trump's support. And of Bernie's.
I think there is some merit to something Yglesias was fond of saying before "popularism" had a name and he embraced it, and that's the notion that Democrats should do popular stuff loudly and unpopular stuff more quietly. I think that falls into the "generic political best practices" bucket, but it's fair enough.
There's an often unstated divide in these discussions between paid + earned media. Something like a Race / Class Narrative approach on the progressive side of things views the Democratic base as both audience and messenger, assuming there will be a harder-to-measure socialized aspect of how people communicate with each other about politics. As a practitioner, I tend toward that view, but it's also something worth explicating and getting specific about.
I think that approach has gotten stronger, in part, because of disruptions to the mainstream media, but it's held back by a lack of investment in progressive-aligned media infrastructure, which funders may see as too disruptive to *their* preferred way of doing politics. There are also tactical ways that generating attention and provoking the opposition into arguing in your frame have changed as the MSM has gotten disrupted by social media, which also suggest a more democratized approach with supporters-as-messengers: https://www.aaronhuertas.com/messaging-is-not-the-same-as-generating-attention/
Further, another field where the party could make some interesting movement-aligned investments like you allude to here would be public engagement and democratic deliberation about policy, with an understanding that traditional town halls and other engagement processes favor people with free time. The Gov Lab does some interesting work in this field: https://thegovlab.org/. And historically, deliberative polling + consultation with voters has led to some positive developments such as the rise of wind power in Texas: https://www.nationalcivicleague.org/ncr-article/deliberative-plling-and-the-rise-of-wind-power-in-texas/.
At a practical level, campaigns can support mutual aid projects, unionization and other local democratic activity. AOC, for instance, has a how-to-form-a-union track for her constituents and a ton of Democratic members of Congress flipped their offices into mutual aid mode in response to COVID. The new wave of House Democrats in 2018 won in a much more online, engagement-focused environment, so they have a more aggressive approach on these fronts across an otherwise big tent ideological spectrum.
Finally, the point about labor is pretty obvious, IMO, and well-researched. Unions do a ton of political education and long-term goals should be aligned toward greater union density for human well-being reasons, with better electoral outcomes happily downstream of that. Interestingly, leaders across the tent are more than happy to stand on strike lines with workers, too, though of course there's some geographic variation there based on how strong unions are in a given constituency for starters.
Anyway, wanted to chime in here since there does seem to be a lack of practical focus in these debates re: what we should actually do to put competing strategies into practice (beyond the things we can actually measure well).