Thought I'd do a political entry today, as it's been awhile since my last one. Talking politics isn't enjoyable for me these days, but part of what I want from this blog is for it to be a time capsule of my thoughts -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- and it will be glaringly incomplete if I don't occasionally write about politics. So, here we go.
I'm going to format this post by linking to things in the media I've recently consumed and then giving my thoughts on them.
Mitt Romney Announces He Won't Seek Reelection In 2024
Remember
when "binders full of women" was considered the most awful, sexist
thing a presidential candidate could say?* How much would you give to go
back to those days? Sorry, Mitt, for all the unkind things I said and wrote about you back in 2012. It was probably all true, but if I
knew how much worse it could get, I would've let it slide. I wouldn't
even have mentioned the fact that you ran expressly on repealing
Obamacare, even after implementing the same basic plan in Massachusetts
and calling it "a model for the nation" just a few years earlier. Such
commentary seems so petty now, when we are all wondering what happens if somebody is elected president while in the midst of multiple criminal trials.
*I
joke, but even at the time, despite not being a Romney fan, I thought
this was a silly thing for people to get exercised about.
It's funny, I was thinking about when I first got interested in politics, as an insufferable Nader-ite, back around the turn of the millennium, and the biggest problem with our political system, as I saw it, was that our two parties were too alike and too beholden to corporate interests. As Noam Chomsky put it: "In the US, there is basically one party -- the business party." But, oh, do I long for those days now. I'd take them in a heartbeat over our current shitshow. The business party sounds just fine to me.
It's gotten so bad that while listening to an interview with Chris Christie on NPR the other day, I started fantasizing about somehow skipping the election and just instating him as president. Can we do that? Is there a clause in the constitution that would allow us to agree as a country to just make him president? I mean, I don't really want him to be president. Of course I don't, but neither does his own party, so it's fair. Both sides go away unhappy. But since we would be guaranteed to not get another term of either Trump or Biden, both sides would also go away happy. It's an adequate compromise. If only...
Biden Is Losing Ground With Black and Latino Voters
The linked
article is actual somewhat "positive" for Biden, in that it is mainly
about how, although Biden has a slimmer lead over Trump in national
polls than he did in 2020, he seems to be maintaining the same edge in
battleground states.* But one thing that caught my eye is that Trump
seems to have gained support among nonwhite voters overall. I wish that this surprises me, but it doesn't. Part of this shift is probably just
the push-and-pull of coalition building. When you gain in one area, like
Biden did with suburban women in 2020, you might lose in a different
area, because, given real-world constraints, it's impossible
to keep everybody happy all the time. Also, it should be noted that
Biden still holds a significant -- although reportedly not as significant
as three years ago -- advantage over Trump among nonwhite voters.
*With the stated caveat that any analysis this far out has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Although, it did make me entertain the possibility of Biden losing the popular vote but winning the election. Wouldn't that be a doozy?
Still, it's a bit disconcerting for those of us dreading the prospect of another Trump term to see such data. And I suspect it's not so much that he's gaining nonwhite voters as it is that Biden, Democrats in general, are losing them. I further suspect the reason for this is something I've expressed concern over in the past: Democrats are becoming increasingly incapable of winning over anybody but highly-educated, affluent voters. They've already lost almost all the white voters who don't fit this criteria, and my worry is that now we're seeing that happen with nonwhite voters.
Why is this my worry?
A little bit of bad policy and a lot of bad messaging.
On policy, I think Dems mostly dropped the ball by not reopening things quickly enough after the Covid shutdowns, and this has had a disproportionately negative effect on working-class folks, who can't work from home, can't afford nannies and tutors, and don't have much savings to fall back on. I remember shortly after the 2020 election listening to a Latino woman in Florida speak about Ron Desantis, and she spent a solid two minutes blasting his awful, dehumanizing immigration stunts, and then at the end she said that she voted for him. When asked why, she replied that she owned a nail salon, and if the Democrat won she thought she'd go out of business.
Another policy position that might be bad -- kinda sneaky-bad -- with working-class voters is Biden's college debt relief decree. Before it was blocked by the Supreme Court, I was reading a thread about it online, and the non-college-educated commenters did not like it. Is this representative of a wider sentiment? I couldn't say, but it makes some sense: By definition, tuition debt relief only helps the highly educated, and if you're somebody who specifically chose to not incur debt, to not go to college, to possibly put yourself at a disadvantage in the job market, then, yeah, it's understandable that you'd be peeved about it. It would be hard not to feel like the chump in that circumstance.
School choice might be another one. Dems are mostly against it (teachers' unions don't like it), but I've heard working-class families sing its praises. Again, it's tough to say with certainty whether they speak for a larger contingent, but again it makes sense if they do: The traditional neighborhood system forces poor families in underperforming districts to attend their subpar local schools, while affluent families can move to districts with higher-achieving schools (which is exactly what we did). In practice, the neighborhood system is one of choice -- but only for people who can afford it.
On messaging, I think left-coded institutions, not even necessarily Democratic politicians themselves, but universities, advocacy groups, and certain media and online spaces, increasingly speak in a way that only resonates with highly educated, affluent liberals -- nobody else seems to like it or understand it. The epitome of this is Latinx, which I hear from time to time on places like NPR, despite the fact that it polls terribly among the people to which it's referring, and Hispanic Democrats like Ruben Gallego constantly plea with progressives to stop using it.
And there are myriad other vocabulary examples like this. Many institutions put out their own equity language guides filled with them. Personally, I can't think of a better way to alienate people who might otherwise be open to your cause. Implying that pretty much all of society speaks the wrong way, and that everybody should adopt your more evolved vocabulary, is just about the worst way to win influence with people I can think of. The way we speak is very personal, and we can be very defensive of it. It's just terrible, terrible politics to tell people from on-high that they speak incorrectly.
Getting back to the article linked at the top of this section, they had a conversation about it on Political Gabfest, and Emily Bazelon said she found it surprising that Trump had gained ground with nonwhite voters, because he does so many racist things. I think this provides another example of what I mean about highly-educated, affluent liberals speaking in a way that other people don't really get. To the type of people who work on (and listen to) Slate podcasts, the term racism is used by default to refer to systemic racism. By this definition, a racist is somebody who contributes to -- or perhaps just doesn't actively oppose -- social systems that produce disparate outcomes between racial groups. So, you can be a racist without holding any animus toward nonwhite people. This has so become the working meaning of racism among this circle (my circle) that we use it this way without even really thinking about it.
But I don't think this is the case for most people outside the Slate-podcast demographic. To them, the term racism refers to interpersonal racism. So, racists are people who actively discriminate against or disparage other people based on their skin color -- bosses who pass over people of color for promotions, sports fans who chant racial slurs at the opposing team, people who hang out on Neo-Nazi websites.
By the former definition, Trump does and says a lot of racist things; by the latter definition, it's not so cut-and-dried. For his many faults, he doesn't disparage people explicitly because of their skin color, and he's so all-over-the-place-all-the-time with his rhetoric that people can take from it almost anything they wish. (For example, tweeting “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” immediately followed by "Honor the memory of George Floyd!") He is very consistently anti-immigration and "tough on crime," but such positions seem to not be as disliked by nonwhite voters as I once thought -- perhaps because they're the ones who feel the most threatened, job-wise, by immigrants, and the ones most likely to live in neighborhoods in which violent crime is a big problem. (And I'm not making any value claims here; I'm just calling it as I see it.)
I think a lot of nonwhite people -- not a majority, but not a tiny sliver either -- see Trump working with Ice Cube and supporting Herschel Walker and receiving endorsements from Jim Brown and Geraldo Rivera and ostentatiously praising Black people ("Look at my African-American over here!") and tweeting how much he loves Mexican people while eating a taco salad, and they don't hate it. It kinda works, and a big part of why it works is that the messaging from the other side doesn't speak to such people anymore at all. Plus, liberals can also be very cringe on race, including the man at the top of the ticket.
I could be completely wrong about everything I wrote above. The only thing I believe with certainty when it comes to political analysis is that nobody can say anything with certainty. It doesn't mean it's all useless; it just means if you're trying to honestly assess things, you should always keep an open about changing your prior beliefs. One thing that I'm trying very hard not to do in this entry is commit the "the smart things to do politically are the things I like" fallacy. In a vacuum, I don't have super strong feelings on a lot of the issues I discuss above. The main thing I want politically at this moment is for Democrats to win elections -- or more specifically for Trump-supporting Republicans to lose elections (which, given the current state of affairs, is pretty much the same thing). So, for the most part, what I consider good policy and good messaging are what achieves this end. That is to say, I'm a pragmatist.
And this brings me to the linked article above entitled "The Two Kinds of Progressives: Moralists vs. Pragmatists" by Matthew Yglesias. I found it quite interesting, in no small part because, as an avowed pragmatist, I often experience the tension described in the article first-hand. In the past decade or so, I've really come to embrace the idea that politics (life, really) is a series of imperfect compromises. Nothing we do is totally right or totally wrong. Pretty much everything we do hurts some people, at least a little bit, and helps other people, at least a little bit. So, being a good person boils down to negotiating a never-ending stream of impossible decisions in a way that best serves society overall.
Now, "best" obviously is a super vague, subjective term that can mean a million different things to a million different people. But I don't think that that's what's at the heart of the moralist-pragmatist divide. It's not the "best" part that's so divisive; it's the "negotiating" part. Moralists believe there are things that are simply not to be negotiated. They have a collection of moral certitudes that we pragmatists lack, and these certitudes form the basis of their political positions. If you want to summarize things with a pithy pseudo-cliché: For the moralist, the heart informs the head; for the pragmatist, the head informs the heart. And sometimes those inverted ways of thinking can come into conflict, even when the end goal is basically the same.
Anyway, I could probably write a couple thousand more words on this topic, but this entry is already quite long, and I want to hit one more thing. Actually, I'm going to post this now and save my next topic for its own standalone entry.
Until next time...
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