I had to laugh. Right now the Democratic Party is run by its far Left 10-15%. They are typically scorched earth proponents if they don't get their way. I expect the Party to implode, and the more rational 85% or so to regroup and try to rebrand.
Their best hope, which is not all that unlikely, is for Trump to make some gigantic mistake from which there is no recovery. Right now they're out of ideas and out of leaders who might bring new ones.
You might look back in history and ask yourself, "When 'the people' are lost and don't now where to go, what sort of person leads them in a new direction, assuming such a person happens?" Then look at some well-known leaders and ask what unusual variabes they might have.
Well, Moses, Lincoln, Napolean, Ghandi, Hitler, Mao, and many more, seem to come from the periphery of 'the people' but are within enough to be able to identify with the people and offer them a new goal.
When the people aren't lost but need a leader to guide them to a known goal, you may get, if you're lucky, a Washington or a Churchill.
May I point out that, culturally, that describes Trump?
And may I ask what Democrat has those qualities?
Meanwhile the Democrats are organizing a circular firing squad. I tend to suspect that that's because for too many of them the only goal is power, but maybe that's just my anarchist leanings.
The last rightward shift in the Democratic Party was the "New Democrats" in the nineties. Bill Clinton famously repudiated extremists in his own party in the "Sister Souljah moment" and declared "the era of big government is over".
Clinton followed 12 years of Republican presidents. Reagan in particular was wildly popular. In 1984 he won 49 states. It was clear to Democrats that they needed to change. Nowadays, the situation is different. Even in 2024, Trump only won the popular vote by a small percentage. He remains personally unpopular.
I was a child during the Clinton presidency. Does anyone have a better idea than I do how Clinton won this ideological battle and pushed the Democratic party towards the center?
Clinton only won because Ross Perot split Bush's votes more than Clinton's. From memory I think Clinton had like 43% of the vote, and then Newt Gingrich's Contract With America put the Republicans in control of Congress for the first time in years, and maybe the only time they controlled both houses since before FDR.
In other words, Clinton didn't have a choice. He could be a complete lame duck and get nothing done, or he could try to advance his party at least a little by compromising and getting things done.
And there was some bad stuff going on. 1993 was the highest violent crime year in US history. 1994 had Joe Biden proposing an extremely tough anti-crime bill, which passed. The USSR had recently collapsed, meaning Communism was defeated - not the time to be passing socialist policies.
Clinton's move to the right probably saved his chances in 1996, which he again won a minority vote due to the split with Perot. In the modern era there's no president who had less of a mandate to enact his own agenda. But he also got to be David's centrist, which turned out to be very popular. The government seemed fairly well run, and we had a surplus for the first time in a long time. Even his sexual exploits didn't seem to ruin him, which I think does speak to the popularity of what he was doing otherwise.
Nowadays, left-wing Democrats usually use two arguments against centrist reform:
a. Centrist reform would be morally wrong
b. More left-wing reform would actually be more popular.
Immigration is an example of category a; left-wing Democrats often argue that detaining and deporting illegal immigrants would be wrong, regardless of its practical costs or benefits or of opinion polls. In category b, left-wing Democrats sometimes argue that working-class voters don't want lower taxes or deregulation; they want European-style social democracy.
Did left-wing Democrats make similar arguments against Bill Clinton's policies? Or was it broadly accepted that he had the right idea?
As I said, the fall of the USSR made left-wing stances far less popular. They had just lost the major ideological debate of the last 50-80 years, which is essentially the entire lives of the current population. They were barely holding on to scraps, so even though they would have made similar arguments, they had no power to enforce them even within their own party.
Capitalism was winning in the 80s, but it wasn't until the Soviet Union fell that we found out just how far behind they really were. For a time it seemed that every socialist or otherwise left wing position had been fully and forever repudiated.
“Did left-wing Democrats make similar arguments against Bill Clinton's policies? Or was it broadly accepted that he had the right idea?”
I agree with the rest of what you wrote. But all due respect, these are not the relevant questions.
Sure there were those on the left who made similar arguments back then. But their numbers were small and their popularity small.
Of course, we didn’t have social media back then. But there are many many other factors that are different between now and then. The lack of a left-wing that tried to push left was not one of them. The reality is that the center of the Democrat party was not nearly as left then as it has become since 2006.
The “viral” cartoon by Colin Wright in the link makes the main point better than any words I might type:
Thanks for that. I lived through it but had forgotten how Perot scrambled things. It's not reasonable to say Perot threw the elections to Clinton. In 1996, giving all Perot's votes to Bush would have left him 0.1% short of Clinton. In 1992, Bush would have won with just 1/3 of Perot's votes, but Bush had angered so many Republicans that there's no guarantee they would have held their nose and voted for Bush.
(What I most remember was Perot withdrawing because of threats against his family, then reentering, and thinking what a lousy commander in chief he would have been, but I probably voted Libertarian regardless.)
I think you're right about Perot, as much as I liked him at the time. As far as Bush? It's hard to say at this point, but I think a two-party race would have been bad for Clinton and good for Bush. Having a third option probably brought in some otherwise non-voters, but most people would have been in either of the main camps and I don't think a lot of Bush 88 or Reagan voters would have gone to Clinton - though I do agree some were mad or disappointed in him.
By 96 the game is truly different, and Dole was probably the least exciting candidate in my lifetime. I thought then and still think that the Republicans didn't expect to win in 96 so they let an aging veteran politician get his shot as a political give.
"In 1996, giving all Perot's votes to Bush would have left him 0.1% short of Clinton."
Of course, giving all of Perot's votes to Bush in 1996 would have made no difference at all anywhere - since Clinton was running against Bob Dole... ;-)
It was not that clear a difference. Clinton won by 6%. Perot took 18%. But Bush had angrified a lot of Republicans, and some of them would have vented their disgust by voting for Clinton, who was a fresh face, good speaker, and saying enough right things to justify turning their backs on that traitorous bureaucrat Bush. I think without Perot, it would have been a close race.
I think Piper's ideas are great but assumes that there is some way to bell the cat. It can't happen. There is no single entity as democratic party and whatever we thing the party is doing is a result of far too many independent actors acting in self interest. So idea that Newsom can't run for President is not really feasible.
I think for all political parties that enjoy power for some time one of their features is very constant. They create a Regulatory Industrial Complex that creates positive feedback loops that harm the party and the platform both. Only a catastrophic failure seems to then fix thing.
Most people agree that it would be nice to protect our forests, keep our water clean and let wildlife thrive. It is a reasonable political platform. But once the party that promotes it wins, they pour money into these initiatives which creates the "Climate Industrial Complex". Now suddenly you have government funded research programs, regulations and what not. Everyone aligns to these new incentives. This sort of complex than only grows and each passing day becomes more ridiculous. I can see this feminism, LGBTQ rights, vaccines debate etc.
What democratic party now needs is to wait for Trump admin to totally destroy these complexes which have grown too much. USAID, Department of Education, Cozying up with EU regulators, FDA, FAA and other alphabet soups etc. is under assault by Trump admin.
This also destroys the funding and disproportionate representation some people get in Democratic Party platform. This would let a more enterprising an cunning democrat to come up with some new idea and galvanize the party.
First of all, you assume that politics is uni-dimensional on some measure of rightness and leftness. That doesn't seem to me to describe voter preferences. As a libertarian, are you to the right or the left of a person whose politics is focussed on enforcing Christian values?
Second, how do you propose to accomplish "Every part of every American city should pass the toddler test: you feel safe walking through it with two toddlers who will try to eat cigarette butts and needles if there are any around to be eaten. If you have to use the subway, the elevators work and fit the stroller." Without a proposed implementation mechanism, it's an unenforceable feel good promise. With a proposed implementation mechanism, it involves either a focus on municipal government (at the expense of effectively contesting federal races), or extreme centralization, putting whatever level of government you focus on very much in charge of municipal activity - at least as much centralization as France.
How is demanding increased funding for infrastructure, maintenance, and cleaning from every place called a city consistent with "Americans disagree, profoundly, on all kinds of things, for which we have the marvelous social technologies of freedom, federalism, and minding your own fucking business. No bullying Masterwork Cake Shop, no Presidential intervention on city congestion pricing, cut it out."
Third, this feels more like "things David Friedman wants" than things that are particularly centrist. OTOH, I don't know what would really be centrist in this country. But economic issues are conspicuous by their absence from your list, and that doesn't make much sense to me.
Piper's proposals are not all things I agree with, although they are better than what the Democrats offer currently. And I see them as objectives, not as things all of which have to be fully accomplished in order for the Democratic party to be what she wants.
She obviously doesn't like Newsom, but it struck me that he also wants to shift the party to the center, not because those are the policies he likes but because those are the policies that he thinks could get him elected president in 2028. I expect his view of center is less libertarian than hers and hers less libertarian than mine.
That chunk was a straight quote from her post on X. Kelsey has another post on why she is not a Republican, most of it having to do with recent things by Trump.
The Hotelling model is obviously a simplification. I don't fit it very well, but there still is enough hardwired tribalism so my gut reaction to hearing a European party described as "right" is positive not negative, even if the actual positions of the party have little correlation with mine.
Decades ago, libertarians proudly presented themselves as neither left nor right, but introducing a new dimension to a uni-dimensional scale. They favored freedom in all things, social as well as economic.
More recently, libertarians I encounter seem firmly allied with the Religious Reich, not to mention even more recently with Trump, Orban, and similar folks.
Meanwhile, my own issues are primarily economic, along with at least enough social freedom that I and people like me aren't targets for "conversion therapy", or even overall second class status.
The result is that I'm stuck allied with a left wing I don't much respect, figuring them for bought and paid for, and thus unwilling to do much that's meaningful, except on the social front.
I'd love to see the US Democrats find a mission other than "not Trump" and "favor a few minorities". But I'm not holding my breath that they'll manage it. And what hard wired tribalism I have tends to favor social democrats, rather than the left in general.
The Mises Caucus people, who currently control the LP, favor the right wing, but the LP doesn't seem to be doing very well under current management so that may change. I don't think libertarians more generally favor the right, still less the religious right.
> More recently, libertarians I encounter seem firmly allied with the Religious Reich, not to mention even more recently with Trump, Orban, and similar folks.
The problem with attempting to apply a "libertarian" approach directly to "religious" issues is that it ultimately backfires. You end up with children of broken homes and drug addicts which increases the amount of people on government support.
What do you consider a libertarian approach to religious issues and why do you think it "backfires"? A libertarian approach to marriage permits monogamous heterosexual sexually exclusive marriages as well as other forms. Is your claim that people will reject that form even though it is better for them?
> Is your claim that people will reject that form even though it is better for them?
That form is better for them and their children in the long term. However, some people aren't good at thinking about the long term. This is similar to how getting addicted to cocaine or becoming an alcoholic isn't good for one long term, but people do it anyway.
And what do you see as the better alternative? Make birth control and abortion illegal to force people into marriage in order to get sex? Ban divorce? I expect that with a smart watch and suitable software the rhythm method could be reliable enough to permit quite a lot of casual sex. Do you ban that too?
I'm wondering if DinoNerd has finally found someone to argue with who actually holds the views she attributes to generic Christians.
Obviously it would be much better to force females who hate into their god-given role as child rearers and child bearers. That way their children will be raised by mothers who hate and resent them, but have no means to abandon their marriages except by suicide, leaving happy children recalling their idyllic upbringing.
Come to think of it, there will be problems for these children with maternal drug addiction, before their god-fearing mothers get around to suicide, if those mothers have any source available for self medication.
Where did "females who hate" come into the argument? Do you mean "females who hate the female role in a traditional marriage?"
Both Christian doctrine and the law in most countries require consent of the parties for marriage. Who are you imagining arguing for forcing women to get married?
Right, the Holy Bible does say that all women want to belong to a male, serve him in all ways, but primarily spend their time raising children. Any woman who claims otherwise must be lying, since God's word is obviously more accurate than anything a person might report to be part of their personal experience.
In particular, there are no women who are other than eagerly monogamously heterosexual, or who find anything whatsoever more fulfilling than raising children.
That is, paradoxically, why the religious reich puts so much effort into demanding that women act according to their god given nature.
I share your concerns about Piper's proposal looking suspiciously like "appeal to libertarians". That said, I took the idea about toddler-safe cities to mean that Democrats should speak and act as if these are top priorities, rather than as if they are behind priorities defended by Democrats over the last ten years, such as reparations for specific minorities, or protecting the privilege of MtF transsexual athletes to compete as women. There's no official litmus test, but voters will have a pretty good nose for whether their local candidate supports safer cities for kids over compassion for the homeless.
> Second, how do you propose to accomplish "Every part of every American city should pass the toddler test: you feel safe walking through it with two toddlers who will try to eat cigarette butts and needles if there are any around to be eaten. If you have to use the subway, the elevators work and fit the stroller." Without a proposed implementation mechanism, it's an unenforceable feel good promise.
And actually solving this problem would involve cracking down on the kind of libertinism you seem to champion.
Suppose everyone agrees that the GOP has reorganized in a way that took a key faction away from Democrats. This suggests an underlying belief that parties are to be visualized as coalitions of factions, where any faction with significant voting power is on one side or the other, and any given individual is mostly in one faction - where that faction goes, that individual will go, and while that individual could change factions (e.g. civil rights advocate deciding her main concern is now foreign wars), change happens slowly and marginally - one can see signs of it at least a year in advance, and it's not the case that an entire faction's members suddenly decide they're all goldbugs or something.
Given that framework, the easiest, most be-like-water strategy I see for Democrats is to start by ruling out certain possibilities. The primary option to avoid: trying to turn the clock back to 2008. Whatever they lost, they're not likely to get back in exactly that form. That means blue collar people who went to Trump for blue collar reasons aren't going to about-face and head back to Democrats for those same reasons. People who hated Biden's response to COVID aren't going to flock back to Democrats if Democrats declare lockdowns and face masks are even lamer than Trump says they are and vaccines are even more dangerous than RFK Jr. has been arguing. (Indeed, this won't even be relevant if there isn't another pandemic for four years.) People who were fed up with the riots and hostile workplaces produced by wokism and DEI aren't going to even grudgingly decide the Democrats were right all along, let alone convert into fervent supporters.
Another strategy to avoid are changes on the persistent issues like abortion, gun control, EPA- and FDA-style regulation, macroeconomics, and so on. The battle lines on those have been drawn and reinforced and lined with wire and mines for decades, and more importantly, have settled roughly 50-50; I don't think Democrats can suddenly peel off voters by changing their stance on these issues faster than they'd lose voters for appearing to have let down their traditional side.
So what's left? Well, the Democrats might not get blue collars and Latinos and immigration reformers and vaccine mandate opponents that they lost. But they *might* get voters from around the back. Visually, imagine GOP/Dem as a sort of yin-yang; the movement that brought us Trump made a push around the wheel on one side. The Dems won't make much headway on that front. Instead, they push on the other side of the wheel, where Rep attention hasn't been as focused. In some cases, they get back the same individuals! It's just that the voter that went to the GOP for immigration reasons won't flip back to Dem for immigration reasons, but will flip for, say, environmental reasons or foreign policy reasons or something else.
This might require waiting for a crisis and being prepared to use it to make a point. For example, if Dems were to quietly fortify state emergency rescue efforts, only to have a major hurricane or quake or wildfire hit, and they keep their eye on the ball, they now look like the party of emergency preparedness. What was different? "We identified certain key services that could be better run locally, and coupled them with a network we funded to quickly shunt critical resources from neighboring localities to keep price gouging down." Crime wave? "We began an initiative at the state level to address gang warfare in a novel way, making it easier to disperse gangs before they form serious threats."
Some things don't have to wait for a crisis. "We conducted an overhaul of existing law at state levels to expedite the release of non-violent inmates and clear prison space for violent offenders, while comprehensively helping new releases to rehabilitate and re-enter civilian society." Health care? "We revisited the issue, and noticed that the one issue where the dollar did the most good was heart disease prevention. Two-pronged approach: research into new procedures for addressing heart issues, and prevention to make it easy for people to avoid heart disease in the first place."
The overall theme here is to change the game. Don't push back against the Republican success of the week or even initiative of the week; instead, find a new game. There are plenty. It's just that they require visiting territory that isn't getting much attention right now.
I wrote the above while "wearing my Democrat hat" - I pretended to be someone who was a lifelong Democrat, genuinely believed in its platform, but acknowledged its current unpopularity. I wanted to adjust its platform while avoiding betrayal of core constituencies, limiting it only to constituencies I believe to be so unpopular that insisting on them would effectively consign the party to permanent minority. Among those were COVID lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and DEI restrictions.
Most importantly, it occurs to me that as long as Democrats play opposition to GOP initiatives, Democrats will appear to have no initiative of their own. (Love him or hate him, Trump's motto appears to be "whatever else: do something".)
Piper's approach strikes me as much more aggressive against the party itself. It would appeal to my libertarian and even conservative side. We appear to agree on Title IX, and while I didn't bring it up, we agree on abolishing state-coordinated discrimination against businesses that don't fully agree with woke ideology, and penalizing the act of concealing the failing health of the party leader. The list doesn't end there. But the question to me is whether otherwise loyal Democrats would accept that list.
The D party isn't doomed or anything. Sure, their nuts make them look bad. So do their policies.
But say you are in a trade union. You need work, the D party gets you work, every election the secretary of the union lets the token R bore make a speech and annoy everyone a little, then the secretary calls on the young guy whose dad has been in the union thirty years. He makes a short speech from watching his dad all his life. The secretary closes saying, well, the D party isn't great but we need work and the D party gets us work. Most members listen, many remember to vote D.
Then there's all the D patronage hires. Racism is bad, sexism is bad, something should be done, making every big business hire D patronage is something. It's a majority of the country.
Why should the D party change? Kamala Harris was not a great candidate and she came within 2%.
I think part of the point of the current administration's attempt to cut things out of the budget is to reduce the amount of patronage spending. That aside, while they are in power a lot of patronage spending will be theirs.
Harris would have done a lot worse against any other Republican. Trump is incredibly divisive simply by not being a standard politician.
I'm hoping JD Vance can reposition himself as halfway normal and not a Trump clone by 2026 after the midterms, otherwise the Democrats will continue their woke streak simply for hating Vance as Trump-lite. Republicans will put Trump on a pedestal sooner or later, just as they did Reagan, and that will free up both parties to get over their TDS. Bush Senior was a terrible milquetoast followup to to Reagan. I'm hoping Vance won't be, so Republicans can get over Trump sooner.
“Harris would have done a lot worse against any other Republican.”
I thought the same thing prior to the election.
And I have no doubt that amongst the ~35% college educated portion of the country - people like you and me - you are correct.
But if you look at the November results you will see that in every single swing state with a Senate election, Trump outperformed the GOP Senate candidate and won by a greater margin. He won multiple states where the GOP Senate candidate lost. You could blame a couple of those on the candidates in question, but when it is across the board it becomes very difficult to argue that Trump was a net negative in this election.
So while we cannot know with absolute certainty, the actual votes cast in the election suggest that you are most likely wrong in this claim.
One possible strategy for Democrats in the next election is to adopt Trump’s effective question: “Are you better off today than you were two years ago?” This would resonate with voters if they feel their circumstances have worsened. Given my pessimism about AI-related job displacement increasingly affecting employment, many might answer, “no.” People who feel unhappy tend to support candidates promising improvement, something Trump employed with great success. If Democrats can either highlight real declines in employment, quality of life, or convincingly portray circumstances as worse, following this tack may enable them to take back some seats in Congress.
I like Piper's ideas and i definitely support moderate factions in the democratic party, but I'm skeptical of the overarching narrative of how elections get decided. I think they mostly come down to charisma of the candidates and how people feel about the economy/state of the country. Did shifts in how left or right the parties were decide the 2004, 2008, or 2012 elections? I think charisma and state of the economy fit much better, obama for example benefited from an economic crisis and was a once in a lifetime candidate while Kerry was not charismatic and did not enjoy a major crisis to take advantage of. Seems to me that any republican would have beat Harris or biden because people hate inflation and neither is as charismatic as trump is. A lot of politics seems to be waiting for the other side to drop the ball and seizing that opportunity.
It is my opinion that the Democrat party has been infiltrated by the GOP. If the Democrat social media strategists are not Republicans, then they have to be the dumbest and unaware political cotrie ever created.
I wonder about how the radicalization effect of gerrymandering effects a position like the presidency that can't be gerrymandered, if at all. I could see the polarizing gerrymandering causing people to fervently oppose centrist candidates with nearly as much zeal as those diametrically opposite, in which case I think the dynamics would shift the presidency towards extreme positions as well despite gerrymandering not being able to directly affect it.
Colin Wright summed up in a single cartoon nearly 4 years ago better than anyone why the move DF talks about Piper advocating is nigh on impossible in the short-to-medium term.
“Kelsey Piper, a Vox journalist, a Democrat, a lady I have a high opinion of”
Her opinions might well be those of an average Democrat circa 1997, but they are clearly not the opinions of today’s Democrat Party.
By which I mean a majority of her party no longer agrees with almost any of them.
And a large majority of primary voters clearly disagrees with almost all of them. Whether the state is blue or red or even purple. With the possible exception of Maine, I’m struggling to think of any state that might be the exception to this “rule”.
The GOP today is simply a much bigger tent ideologically than is today’s Dem Party. Which of course doesn’t mean there still aren’t multiple ways it could screw up elections going forward.
Probably right about Kelsey Piper being out of touch, but I see both parties as being so tied up in Trump that no one actually knows what either party will stand for once he leaves the scene. He's too much of a wildcard to make any guesses what he will do, or how his haters will react. Woke works for Dems only because they hate Trump. Once they no longer have to accept woke as the price of avoiding Trump, woke will lose most of its voters. Other than that, the political landscape is a mystery until Trump is gone.
Agreed wholeheartedly on Trump as the wildcard, and because of that the political landscape is less predictable than ever before in our lifetimes.
But I disagree on the implicit claim that each party is close to an up for grabs blank slate after Trump is gone.
The ideological policy beliefs of the median Dem is *far* to the left of where it was in 2004.
A few specific topics notwithstanding (I think most of foreign policy), Trump has not massively changed the ideology of the GOP, and notwithstanding leftist media claims, the GOP and its median voter has not moved hugely to the right over the last 20 years, only marginally so.
And while I concede it is a *possibility*, I don’t think it probable at all that “woke will lose most of its voters.”
The GOP is now the protectionist party. Vance wants to make it the pro-union party and no longer identified with support of the free market. How much of that has happened I'm not sure, but pulling a lot of blue collar Democrats into the GOP has to have significantly changed it.
While I agree that the GOP is now less free trade than it used to be, claiming that it is "the protectionist party" and implying that the Dems are the party of free trade is false.
In the most charitable light, it is a gross oversimplification. The kind which I find that you are usually the one to shed light on, rather than the opposite.
Vance is surely more pro-private sector union than any modern GOP leader. Like you, I hope he doesn't succeed in, e.g., eliminating Right to Work Laws.
Of the 19 Blue states in the last election, only 1 (Virginia) has RTW laws, while 26 of the 31 Red states have such laws, including 5 of the 7 swing states. So any claim of having significantly changed the GOP already seems highly overblown to me.
A much more charitable explanation is that, given that the working class aligns with traditional GOP - and even *most* libertarian - values better than today's Dem Party, Vance - and surely Trump - is merely trying to be less openly anti-private sector unions than the GOP has been in the past, in order to build a bigger tent and reach out to the center.
I still think private sector unions vary between being moderately bad and godawfully bad things, but I confess that not only are they less bad - and immoral - than public sector unions, but I find them less bad than the current leftist elite consensus that believes in censorship, is anti-energy, anti-building, pro-authoritarian government and on most of free enterprise (other than international trade) is for crony capitalism and heavy regulation.
Where the average private sector union member is in fact overall more pro free enterprise than the elite leftist consensus is today.
The indisputable fact that private sector union folks are in aggregate wrong on issues of international free trade notwithstanding.
While not optimal public policy for we free market types, *exactly* to the point of this particular piece, for those of us who prefer liberty, the idea of throwing a couple of bones to private sector unions in order to help ensure that leftists not take federal power seems like a sensible course of action for a political party to take.
I agree that "the protectionist party" was an overstatement, but at the moment they are the more protectionist party. I was describing what Vance wanted, not what he yet had — you can read my earlier post for the evidence.
I'm in favor of freedom of contract so opposed to both right to work laws and laws banning "yellow dog" contracts, contracts in which the employee agrees not to join a union.
Ok, I must confess: Trump’s most recent tariff actions - in particular the new tariffs on steel and aluminum - are just indefensible.
It *may well* still end up being the case that you, and especially most others of his critics, have judged him too harshly here, confusing tactics and negotiating leverage with policy and strategy, but based on these most recent actions, I clearly was too charitable in my views.
And that’s independent of whatever Vance is and may do in the future.
We are in agreement on what Vance seems to want, and your posts and pointers were instrumental in educating me on this.
You did claim in the prior response that “pulling a lot of blue collar Democrats into the GOP has to have significantly changed it”, and that’s really our only area of meaningful dispute.
Remember that an even bigger component of the MAGA base is primarily non-union blue collar workers. I highly doubt those folks in the south would suddenly be ok with RTW laws being killed in their states.
Even a wildly successful GOP only gonna be able to get perhaps 60% of all private sector (non-SEIU at that) union employees, so the idea that their interests would come to dominate GOP policy is not likely.
So the idea that Vance will succeed on this axis within the GOP seems unlikely even if he becomes the next GOP nominee, and President. Even as I do concede that it’s plausible.
Note especially the differences in age answers on slide 56 - almost literally the definition of whether or not one is woke.
And when you look at it take note that this is ALL respondents, not just Dem ones, and therefore that the large numbers of young people who are woke are almost exclusively Democrats.
I had to laugh. Right now the Democratic Party is run by its far Left 10-15%. They are typically scorched earth proponents if they don't get their way. I expect the Party to implode, and the more rational 85% or so to regroup and try to rebrand.
Their best hope, which is not all that unlikely, is for Trump to make some gigantic mistake from which there is no recovery. Right now they're out of ideas and out of leaders who might bring new ones.
You might look back in history and ask yourself, "When 'the people' are lost and don't now where to go, what sort of person leads them in a new direction, assuming such a person happens?" Then look at some well-known leaders and ask what unusual variabes they might have.
Well, Moses, Lincoln, Napolean, Ghandi, Hitler, Mao, and many more, seem to come from the periphery of 'the people' but are within enough to be able to identify with the people and offer them a new goal.
When the people aren't lost but need a leader to guide them to a known goal, you may get, if you're lucky, a Washington or a Churchill.
May I point out that, culturally, that describes Trump?
And may I ask what Democrat has those qualities?
Meanwhile the Democrats are organizing a circular firing squad. I tend to suspect that that's because for too many of them the only goal is power, but maybe that's just my anarchist leanings.
“Meanwhile the Democrats are organizing a circular firing squad.”
I agree with almost all of your points except this one at the end.
Other than James Carville, there are precious few Dem leaders even now who are actually punching left.
The last rightward shift in the Democratic Party was the "New Democrats" in the nineties. Bill Clinton famously repudiated extremists in his own party in the "Sister Souljah moment" and declared "the era of big government is over".
Clinton followed 12 years of Republican presidents. Reagan in particular was wildly popular. In 1984 he won 49 states. It was clear to Democrats that they needed to change. Nowadays, the situation is different. Even in 2024, Trump only won the popular vote by a small percentage. He remains personally unpopular.
I was a child during the Clinton presidency. Does anyone have a better idea than I do how Clinton won this ideological battle and pushed the Democratic party towards the center?
Clinton only won because Ross Perot split Bush's votes more than Clinton's. From memory I think Clinton had like 43% of the vote, and then Newt Gingrich's Contract With America put the Republicans in control of Congress for the first time in years, and maybe the only time they controlled both houses since before FDR.
In other words, Clinton didn't have a choice. He could be a complete lame duck and get nothing done, or he could try to advance his party at least a little by compromising and getting things done.
And there was some bad stuff going on. 1993 was the highest violent crime year in US history. 1994 had Joe Biden proposing an extremely tough anti-crime bill, which passed. The USSR had recently collapsed, meaning Communism was defeated - not the time to be passing socialist policies.
Clinton's move to the right probably saved his chances in 1996, which he again won a minority vote due to the split with Perot. In the modern era there's no president who had less of a mandate to enact his own agenda. But he also got to be David's centrist, which turned out to be very popular. The government seemed fairly well run, and we had a surplus for the first time in a long time. Even his sexual exploits didn't seem to ruin him, which I think does speak to the popularity of what he was doing otherwise.
Nowadays, left-wing Democrats usually use two arguments against centrist reform:
a. Centrist reform would be morally wrong
b. More left-wing reform would actually be more popular.
Immigration is an example of category a; left-wing Democrats often argue that detaining and deporting illegal immigrants would be wrong, regardless of its practical costs or benefits or of opinion polls. In category b, left-wing Democrats sometimes argue that working-class voters don't want lower taxes or deregulation; they want European-style social democracy.
Did left-wing Democrats make similar arguments against Bill Clinton's policies? Or was it broadly accepted that he had the right idea?
As I said, the fall of the USSR made left-wing stances far less popular. They had just lost the major ideological debate of the last 50-80 years, which is essentially the entire lives of the current population. They were barely holding on to scraps, so even though they would have made similar arguments, they had no power to enforce them even within their own party.
Capitalism was winning in the 80s, but it wasn't until the Soviet Union fell that we found out just how far behind they really were. For a time it seemed that every socialist or otherwise left wing position had been fully and forever repudiated.
“Did left-wing Democrats make similar arguments against Bill Clinton's policies? Or was it broadly accepted that he had the right idea?”
I agree with the rest of what you wrote. But all due respect, these are not the relevant questions.
Sure there were those on the left who made similar arguments back then. But their numbers were small and their popularity small.
Of course, we didn’t have social media back then. But there are many many other factors that are different between now and then. The lack of a left-wing that tried to push left was not one of them. The reality is that the center of the Democrat party was not nearly as left then as it has become since 2006.
The “viral” cartoon by Colin Wright in the link makes the main point better than any words I might type:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144
Thanks for that. I lived through it but had forgotten how Perot scrambled things. It's not reasonable to say Perot threw the elections to Clinton. In 1996, giving all Perot's votes to Bush would have left him 0.1% short of Clinton. In 1992, Bush would have won with just 1/3 of Perot's votes, but Bush had angered so many Republicans that there's no guarantee they would have held their nose and voted for Bush.
(What I most remember was Perot withdrawing because of threats against his family, then reentering, and thinking what a lousy commander in chief he would have been, but I probably voted Libertarian regardless.)
I think you're right about Perot, as much as I liked him at the time. As far as Bush? It's hard to say at this point, but I think a two-party race would have been bad for Clinton and good for Bush. Having a third option probably brought in some otherwise non-voters, but most people would have been in either of the main camps and I don't think a lot of Bush 88 or Reagan voters would have gone to Clinton - though I do agree some were mad or disappointed in him.
By 96 the game is truly different, and Dole was probably the least exciting candidate in my lifetime. I thought then and still think that the Republicans didn't expect to win in 96 so they let an aging veteran politician get his shot as a political give.
"In 1996, giving all Perot's votes to Bush would have left him 0.1% short of Clinton."
Of course, giving all of Perot's votes to Bush in 1996 would have made no difference at all anywhere - since Clinton was running against Bob Dole... ;-)
Perot clearly made a difference for Clinton in ‘92.
I agree with you that he didn’t make the difference in ‘96.
It was not that clear a difference. Clinton won by 6%. Perot took 18%. But Bush had angrified a lot of Republicans, and some of them would have vented their disgust by voting for Clinton, who was a fresh face, good speaker, and saying enough right things to justify turning their backs on that traitorous bureaucrat Bush. I think without Perot, it would have been a close race.
I think Piper's ideas are great but assumes that there is some way to bell the cat. It can't happen. There is no single entity as democratic party and whatever we thing the party is doing is a result of far too many independent actors acting in self interest. So idea that Newsom can't run for President is not really feasible.
I think for all political parties that enjoy power for some time one of their features is very constant. They create a Regulatory Industrial Complex that creates positive feedback loops that harm the party and the platform both. Only a catastrophic failure seems to then fix thing.
Most people agree that it would be nice to protect our forests, keep our water clean and let wildlife thrive. It is a reasonable political platform. But once the party that promotes it wins, they pour money into these initiatives which creates the "Climate Industrial Complex". Now suddenly you have government funded research programs, regulations and what not. Everyone aligns to these new incentives. This sort of complex than only grows and each passing day becomes more ridiculous. I can see this feminism, LGBTQ rights, vaccines debate etc.
What democratic party now needs is to wait for Trump admin to totally destroy these complexes which have grown too much. USAID, Department of Education, Cozying up with EU regulators, FDA, FAA and other alphabet soups etc. is under assault by Trump admin.
This also destroys the funding and disproportionate representation some people get in Democratic Party platform. This would let a more enterprising an cunning democrat to come up with some new idea and galvanize the party.
Lots of thoughts here.
First of all, you assume that politics is uni-dimensional on some measure of rightness and leftness. That doesn't seem to me to describe voter preferences. As a libertarian, are you to the right or the left of a person whose politics is focussed on enforcing Christian values?
Second, how do you propose to accomplish "Every part of every American city should pass the toddler test: you feel safe walking through it with two toddlers who will try to eat cigarette butts and needles if there are any around to be eaten. If you have to use the subway, the elevators work and fit the stroller." Without a proposed implementation mechanism, it's an unenforceable feel good promise. With a proposed implementation mechanism, it involves either a focus on municipal government (at the expense of effectively contesting federal races), or extreme centralization, putting whatever level of government you focus on very much in charge of municipal activity - at least as much centralization as France.
How is demanding increased funding for infrastructure, maintenance, and cleaning from every place called a city consistent with "Americans disagree, profoundly, on all kinds of things, for which we have the marvelous social technologies of freedom, federalism, and minding your own fucking business. No bullying Masterwork Cake Shop, no Presidential intervention on city congestion pricing, cut it out."
Third, this feels more like "things David Friedman wants" than things that are particularly centrist. OTOH, I don't know what would really be centrist in this country. But economic issues are conspicuous by their absence from your list, and that doesn't make much sense to me.
Piper's proposals are not all things I agree with, although they are better than what the Democrats offer currently. And I see them as objectives, not as things all of which have to be fully accomplished in order for the Democratic party to be what she wants.
She obviously doesn't like Newsom, but it struck me that he also wants to shift the party to the center, not because those are the policies he likes but because those are the policies that he thinks could get him elected president in 2028. I expect his view of center is less libertarian than hers and hers less libertarian than mine.
Ah - I misread your post as being ideas you approve of, some of which were also being suggested by Piper, rather than the other way round.
That chunk was a straight quote from her post on X. Kelsey has another post on why she is not a Republican, most of it having to do with recent things by Trump.
https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1892755071806620119
The Hotelling model is obviously a simplification. I don't fit it very well, but there still is enough hardwired tribalism so my gut reaction to hearing a European party described as "right" is positive not negative, even if the actual positions of the party have little correlation with mine.
Decades ago, libertarians proudly presented themselves as neither left nor right, but introducing a new dimension to a uni-dimensional scale. They favored freedom in all things, social as well as economic.
More recently, libertarians I encounter seem firmly allied with the Religious Reich, not to mention even more recently with Trump, Orban, and similar folks.
Meanwhile, my own issues are primarily economic, along with at least enough social freedom that I and people like me aren't targets for "conversion therapy", or even overall second class status.
The result is that I'm stuck allied with a left wing I don't much respect, figuring them for bought and paid for, and thus unwilling to do much that's meaningful, except on the social front.
I'd love to see the US Democrats find a mission other than "not Trump" and "favor a few minorities". But I'm not holding my breath that they'll manage it. And what hard wired tribalism I have tends to favor social democrats, rather than the left in general.
The Mises Caucus people, who currently control the LP, favor the right wing, but the LP doesn't seem to be doing very well under current management so that may change. I don't think libertarians more generally favor the right, still less the religious right.
> More recently, libertarians I encounter seem firmly allied with the Religious Reich, not to mention even more recently with Trump, Orban, and similar folks.
The problem with attempting to apply a "libertarian" approach directly to "religious" issues is that it ultimately backfires. You end up with children of broken homes and drug addicts which increases the amount of people on government support.
What do you consider a libertarian approach to religious issues and why do you think it "backfires"? A libertarian approach to marriage permits monogamous heterosexual sexually exclusive marriages as well as other forms. Is your claim that people will reject that form even though it is better for them?
> Is your claim that people will reject that form even though it is better for them?
That form is better for them and their children in the long term. However, some people aren't good at thinking about the long term. This is similar to how getting addicted to cocaine or becoming an alcoholic isn't good for one long term, but people do it anyway.
And what do you see as the better alternative? Make birth control and abortion illegal to force people into marriage in order to get sex? Ban divorce? I expect that with a smart watch and suitable software the rhythm method could be reliable enough to permit quite a lot of casual sex. Do you ban that too?
I'm wondering if DinoNerd has finally found someone to argue with who actually holds the views she attributes to generic Christians.
Obviously it would be much better to force females who hate into their god-given role as child rearers and child bearers. That way their children will be raised by mothers who hate and resent them, but have no means to abandon their marriages except by suicide, leaving happy children recalling their idyllic upbringing.
Come to think of it, there will be problems for these children with maternal drug addiction, before their god-fearing mothers get around to suicide, if those mothers have any source available for self medication.
Praise Jesus!
Where did "females who hate" come into the argument? Do you mean "females who hate the female role in a traditional marriage?"
Both Christian doctrine and the law in most countries require consent of the parties for marriage. Who are you imagining arguing for forcing women to get married?
Yeah, that was a typo, probably for something like "women who hate both child rearing and the activities needed to become pregnant".
Or maybe just "females who hate it into their god-given role ...", though that's a bit ungrammatical.
Except even basic familiarity with the statistics shows that your scenarios are total BS.
Right, the Holy Bible does say that all women want to belong to a male, serve him in all ways, but primarily spend their time raising children. Any woman who claims otherwise must be lying, since God's word is obviously more accurate than anything a person might report to be part of their personal experience.
In particular, there are no women who are other than eagerly monogamously heterosexual, or who find anything whatsoever more fulfilling than raising children.
That is, paradoxically, why the religious reich puts so much effort into demanding that women act according to their god given nature.
I share your concerns about Piper's proposal looking suspiciously like "appeal to libertarians". That said, I took the idea about toddler-safe cities to mean that Democrats should speak and act as if these are top priorities, rather than as if they are behind priorities defended by Democrats over the last ten years, such as reparations for specific minorities, or protecting the privilege of MtF transsexual athletes to compete as women. There's no official litmus test, but voters will have a pretty good nose for whether their local candidate supports safer cities for kids over compassion for the homeless.
> Second, how do you propose to accomplish "Every part of every American city should pass the toddler test: you feel safe walking through it with two toddlers who will try to eat cigarette butts and needles if there are any around to be eaten. If you have to use the subway, the elevators work and fit the stroller." Without a proposed implementation mechanism, it's an unenforceable feel good promise.
And actually solving this problem would involve cracking down on the kind of libertinism you seem to champion.
I hadn't seen Piper's essay when I came up with one of my own, that I posted to ACX:
Think of this as the next political era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_eras_of_the_United_States
Suppose everyone agrees that the GOP has reorganized in a way that took a key faction away from Democrats. This suggests an underlying belief that parties are to be visualized as coalitions of factions, where any faction with significant voting power is on one side or the other, and any given individual is mostly in one faction - where that faction goes, that individual will go, and while that individual could change factions (e.g. civil rights advocate deciding her main concern is now foreign wars), change happens slowly and marginally - one can see signs of it at least a year in advance, and it's not the case that an entire faction's members suddenly decide they're all goldbugs or something.
Given that framework, the easiest, most be-like-water strategy I see for Democrats is to start by ruling out certain possibilities. The primary option to avoid: trying to turn the clock back to 2008. Whatever they lost, they're not likely to get back in exactly that form. That means blue collar people who went to Trump for blue collar reasons aren't going to about-face and head back to Democrats for those same reasons. People who hated Biden's response to COVID aren't going to flock back to Democrats if Democrats declare lockdowns and face masks are even lamer than Trump says they are and vaccines are even more dangerous than RFK Jr. has been arguing. (Indeed, this won't even be relevant if there isn't another pandemic for four years.) People who were fed up with the riots and hostile workplaces produced by wokism and DEI aren't going to even grudgingly decide the Democrats were right all along, let alone convert into fervent supporters.
Another strategy to avoid are changes on the persistent issues like abortion, gun control, EPA- and FDA-style regulation, macroeconomics, and so on. The battle lines on those have been drawn and reinforced and lined with wire and mines for decades, and more importantly, have settled roughly 50-50; I don't think Democrats can suddenly peel off voters by changing their stance on these issues faster than they'd lose voters for appearing to have let down their traditional side.
So what's left? Well, the Democrats might not get blue collars and Latinos and immigration reformers and vaccine mandate opponents that they lost. But they *might* get voters from around the back. Visually, imagine GOP/Dem as a sort of yin-yang; the movement that brought us Trump made a push around the wheel on one side. The Dems won't make much headway on that front. Instead, they push on the other side of the wheel, where Rep attention hasn't been as focused. In some cases, they get back the same individuals! It's just that the voter that went to the GOP for immigration reasons won't flip back to Dem for immigration reasons, but will flip for, say, environmental reasons or foreign policy reasons or something else.
This might require waiting for a crisis and being prepared to use it to make a point. For example, if Dems were to quietly fortify state emergency rescue efforts, only to have a major hurricane or quake or wildfire hit, and they keep their eye on the ball, they now look like the party of emergency preparedness. What was different? "We identified certain key services that could be better run locally, and coupled them with a network we funded to quickly shunt critical resources from neighboring localities to keep price gouging down." Crime wave? "We began an initiative at the state level to address gang warfare in a novel way, making it easier to disperse gangs before they form serious threats."
Some things don't have to wait for a crisis. "We conducted an overhaul of existing law at state levels to expedite the release of non-violent inmates and clear prison space for violent offenders, while comprehensively helping new releases to rehabilitate and re-enter civilian society." Health care? "We revisited the issue, and noticed that the one issue where the dollar did the most good was heart disease prevention. Two-pronged approach: research into new procedures for addressing heart issues, and prevention to make it easy for people to avoid heart disease in the first place."
The overall theme here is to change the game. Don't push back against the Republican success of the week or even initiative of the week; instead, find a new game. There are plenty. It's just that they require visiting territory that isn't getting much attention right now.
I wrote the above while "wearing my Democrat hat" - I pretended to be someone who was a lifelong Democrat, genuinely believed in its platform, but acknowledged its current unpopularity. I wanted to adjust its platform while avoiding betrayal of core constituencies, limiting it only to constituencies I believe to be so unpopular that insisting on them would effectively consign the party to permanent minority. Among those were COVID lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and DEI restrictions.
Most importantly, it occurs to me that as long as Democrats play opposition to GOP initiatives, Democrats will appear to have no initiative of their own. (Love him or hate him, Trump's motto appears to be "whatever else: do something".)
Piper's approach strikes me as much more aggressive against the party itself. It would appeal to my libertarian and even conservative side. We appear to agree on Title IX, and while I didn't bring it up, we agree on abolishing state-coordinated discrimination against businesses that don't fully agree with woke ideology, and penalizing the act of concealing the failing health of the party leader. The list doesn't end there. But the question to me is whether otherwise loyal Democrats would accept that list.
The D party isn't doomed or anything. Sure, their nuts make them look bad. So do their policies.
But say you are in a trade union. You need work, the D party gets you work, every election the secretary of the union lets the token R bore make a speech and annoy everyone a little, then the secretary calls on the young guy whose dad has been in the union thirty years. He makes a short speech from watching his dad all his life. The secretary closes saying, well, the D party isn't great but we need work and the D party gets us work. Most members listen, many remember to vote D.
Then there's all the D patronage hires. Racism is bad, sexism is bad, something should be done, making every big business hire D patronage is something. It's a majority of the country.
Why should the D party change? Kamala Harris was not a great candidate and she came within 2%.
I think part of the point of the current administration's attempt to cut things out of the budget is to reduce the amount of patronage spending. That aside, while they are in power a lot of patronage spending will be theirs.
Harris would have done a lot worse against any other Republican. Trump is incredibly divisive simply by not being a standard politician.
I'm hoping JD Vance can reposition himself as halfway normal and not a Trump clone by 2026 after the midterms, otherwise the Democrats will continue their woke streak simply for hating Vance as Trump-lite. Republicans will put Trump on a pedestal sooner or later, just as they did Reagan, and that will free up both parties to get over their TDS. Bush Senior was a terrible milquetoast followup to to Reagan. I'm hoping Vance won't be, so Republicans can get over Trump sooner.
“Harris would have done a lot worse against any other Republican.”
I thought the same thing prior to the election.
And I have no doubt that amongst the ~35% college educated portion of the country - people like you and me - you are correct.
But if you look at the November results you will see that in every single swing state with a Senate election, Trump outperformed the GOP Senate candidate and won by a greater margin. He won multiple states where the GOP Senate candidate lost. You could blame a couple of those on the candidates in question, but when it is across the board it becomes very difficult to argue that Trump was a net negative in this election.
So while we cannot know with absolute certainty, the actual votes cast in the election suggest that you are most likely wrong in this claim.
One possible strategy for Democrats in the next election is to adopt Trump’s effective question: “Are you better off today than you were two years ago?” This would resonate with voters if they feel their circumstances have worsened. Given my pessimism about AI-related job displacement increasingly affecting employment, many might answer, “no.” People who feel unhappy tend to support candidates promising improvement, something Trump employed with great success. If Democrats can either highlight real declines in employment, quality of life, or convincingly portray circumstances as worse, following this tack may enable them to take back some seats in Congress.
I like Piper's ideas and i definitely support moderate factions in the democratic party, but I'm skeptical of the overarching narrative of how elections get decided. I think they mostly come down to charisma of the candidates and how people feel about the economy/state of the country. Did shifts in how left or right the parties were decide the 2004, 2008, or 2012 elections? I think charisma and state of the economy fit much better, obama for example benefited from an economic crisis and was a once in a lifetime candidate while Kerry was not charismatic and did not enjoy a major crisis to take advantage of. Seems to me that any republican would have beat Harris or biden because people hate inflation and neither is as charismatic as trump is. A lot of politics seems to be waiting for the other side to drop the ball and seizing that opportunity.
It is my opinion that the Democrat party has been infiltrated by the GOP. If the Democrat social media strategists are not Republicans, then they have to be the dumbest and unaware political cotrie ever created.
https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/has-the-dnc-been-infiltrated-by-the
I wonder about how the radicalization effect of gerrymandering effects a position like the presidency that can't be gerrymandered, if at all. I could see the polarizing gerrymandering causing people to fervently oppose centrist candidates with nearly as much zeal as those diametrically opposite, in which case I think the dynamics would shift the presidency towards extreme positions as well despite gerrymandering not being able to directly affect it.
Colin Wright summed up in a single cartoon nearly 4 years ago better than anyone why the move DF talks about Piper advocating is nigh on impossible in the short-to-medium term.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144
And the idea behind the cartoon is EVEN MORE true now than it was in the summer of 2021.
“Kelsey Piper, a Vox journalist, a Democrat, a lady I have a high opinion of”
Her opinions might well be those of an average Democrat circa 1997, but they are clearly not the opinions of today’s Democrat Party.
By which I mean a majority of her party no longer agrees with almost any of them.
And a large majority of primary voters clearly disagrees with almost all of them. Whether the state is blue or red or even purple. With the possible exception of Maine, I’m struggling to think of any state that might be the exception to this “rule”.
The GOP today is simply a much bigger tent ideologically than is today’s Dem Party. Which of course doesn’t mean there still aren’t multiple ways it could screw up elections going forward.
Probably right about Kelsey Piper being out of touch, but I see both parties as being so tied up in Trump that no one actually knows what either party will stand for once he leaves the scene. He's too much of a wildcard to make any guesses what he will do, or how his haters will react. Woke works for Dems only because they hate Trump. Once they no longer have to accept woke as the price of avoiding Trump, woke will lose most of its voters. Other than that, the political landscape is a mystery until Trump is gone.
It would be nice if the Democrats responded to Trump by becoming the pro-free trade party, but I think not likely.
Agreed wholeheartedly on Trump as the wildcard, and because of that the political landscape is less predictable than ever before in our lifetimes.
But I disagree on the implicit claim that each party is close to an up for grabs blank slate after Trump is gone.
The ideological policy beliefs of the median Dem is *far* to the left of where it was in 2004.
A few specific topics notwithstanding (I think most of foreign policy), Trump has not massively changed the ideology of the GOP, and notwithstanding leftist media claims, the GOP and its median voter has not moved hugely to the right over the last 20 years, only marginally so.
And while I concede it is a *possibility*, I don’t think it probable at all that “woke will lose most of its voters.”
The GOP is now the protectionist party. Vance wants to make it the pro-union party and no longer identified with support of the free market. How much of that has happened I'm not sure, but pulling a lot of blue collar Democrats into the GOP has to have significantly changed it.
While I agree that the GOP is now less free trade than it used to be, claiming that it is "the protectionist party" and implying that the Dems are the party of free trade is false.
In the most charitable light, it is a gross oversimplification. The kind which I find that you are usually the one to shed light on, rather than the opposite.
Vance is surely more pro-private sector union than any modern GOP leader. Like you, I hope he doesn't succeed in, e.g., eliminating Right to Work Laws.
Of the 19 Blue states in the last election, only 1 (Virginia) has RTW laws, while 26 of the 31 Red states have such laws, including 5 of the 7 swing states. So any claim of having significantly changed the GOP already seems highly overblown to me.
A much more charitable explanation is that, given that the working class aligns with traditional GOP - and even *most* libertarian - values better than today's Dem Party, Vance - and surely Trump - is merely trying to be less openly anti-private sector unions than the GOP has been in the past, in order to build a bigger tent and reach out to the center.
I still think private sector unions vary between being moderately bad and godawfully bad things, but I confess that not only are they less bad - and immoral - than public sector unions, but I find them less bad than the current leftist elite consensus that believes in censorship, is anti-energy, anti-building, pro-authoritarian government and on most of free enterprise (other than international trade) is for crony capitalism and heavy regulation.
Where the average private sector union member is in fact overall more pro free enterprise than the elite leftist consensus is today.
The indisputable fact that private sector union folks are in aggregate wrong on issues of international free trade notwithstanding.
While not optimal public policy for we free market types, *exactly* to the point of this particular piece, for those of us who prefer liberty, the idea of throwing a couple of bones to private sector unions in order to help ensure that leftists not take federal power seems like a sensible course of action for a political party to take.
I agree that "the protectionist party" was an overstatement, but at the moment they are the more protectionist party. I was describing what Vance wanted, not what he yet had — you can read my earlier post for the evidence.
I'm in favor of freedom of contract so opposed to both right to work laws and laws banning "yellow dog" contracts, contracts in which the employee agrees not to join a union.
Ok, I must confess: Trump’s most recent tariff actions - in particular the new tariffs on steel and aluminum - are just indefensible.
It *may well* still end up being the case that you, and especially most others of his critics, have judged him too harshly here, confusing tactics and negotiating leverage with policy and strategy, but based on these most recent actions, I clearly was too charitable in my views.
And that’s independent of whatever Vance is and may do in the future.
Thx.
We are in agreement on what Vance seems to want, and your posts and pointers were instrumental in educating me on this.
You did claim in the prior response that “pulling a lot of blue collar Democrats into the GOP has to have significantly changed it”, and that’s really our only area of meaningful dispute.
Remember that an even bigger component of the MAGA base is primarily non-union blue collar workers. I highly doubt those folks in the south would suddenly be ok with RTW laws being killed in their states.
Even a wildly successful GOP only gonna be able to get perhaps 60% of all private sector (non-SEIU at that) union employees, so the idea that their interests would come to dominate GOP policy is not likely.
So the idea that Vance will succeed on this axis within the GOP seems unlikely even if he becomes the next GOP nominee, and President. Even as I do concede that it’s plausible.
Most Dems only vote for woke because it is part of the only political package available to vote against Trump.
Respectfully, while I agree that your claim is mostly true for older Dems, some older Dems are fine supporting woke, as as majorities of younger Dems.
See Harvard-Harris polling from the fall of 2023 for more on this.
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP_Dec23_KeyResults.pdf
Note especially the differences in age answers on slide 56 - almost literally the definition of whether or not one is woke.
And when you look at it take note that this is ALL respondents, not just Dem ones, and therefore that the large numbers of young people who are woke are almost exclusively Democrats.