After the humiliating and ridiculous loss in November, you’d think the Democrats would decide to shake things up and change a few of the top brass. You’d think wrong.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) lost the bid to be the leading Democrat on the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday, following reports that former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was actively plotting behind the scenes on behalf of her challenger, Rep. Gerry Connolly.
The 74-year-old Virginia Democrat ended up winning by a margin of 131 to 84 in a secret ballot vote taken by the entirety of the Democratic caucus.
In a report published by Punchbowl News last week, the outlet wrote that Pelosi was “actively working to tank” AOC’s bid and was “making calls” on behalf of Connolly.
Not only is Connolly old, but he was recently diagnosed with cancer. Pelosi just had hip replacement surgery.
Fresh off hip replacement surgery, Nancy Pelosi, 84, secured another victory. House Democrats on Tuesday afternoon decided that 74-year-old Gerry Connolly—who announced his throat cancer diagnosis in November—will serve as ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, besting 35-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a closed-door caucus vote. “Gerry’s a young 74, cancer notwithstanding,” said Virginia Democrat Don Beyer, a Connolly ally. Pelosi had opposed the 35-year-old’s run for the role, “approaching colleagues urging them to back Connolly over Ocasio-Cortez,” Axios reported last week.
Connolly will join fellow septuagenarians in top committee spots next year. Richard Neal, 75, will lead Democrats on Ways and Means while Frank Pallone, 73, will be the party’s top representative on Energy and Commerce. Eighty-six-year-old Maxine Waters will be the ranking member on the Financial Services Committee, and Rose DeLauro, 81, will helm the Democrats’ presence in Appropriations.
Jesus christ, this is insane. I can say that, because at 67 years old, I can recognize that my age is a limitation, and that I should be stepping back to let younger colleagues place their stamp on my institution. When I’m in my 70s and 80s, I should definitely not be the one shaping policy in my department — I’m already too remote from modern science in my field.
But the Democrats are wed to money and power, and they’re not going to shake it off.
In other democracies, the leadership of parties that have endured humiliating defeats like the one Democrats saw in November—or even just regular defeats—resign. That kicks off a process by which members determine a new, ideally more successful direction, represented by different people. But the Democratic Party isn’t really a “party” of the sort that exists in other democracies, with memberships and official constituencies, like unions, who have some say over how it’s governed. Members mostly make decisions based on their own interests rather than to drive some shared, democratically decided agenda forward.
That’s part of what’s so depressing about the Oversight Committee ordeal for the couple dozen journalists and political junkies who pay attention to that sort of thing. Pelosi and the old guard’s continued opposition to younger talent seems breathtakingly counterproductive in the face of the Democratic Party’s numerous challenges right now. Simultaneously, the House’s “resistance” to Trump and the GOP in the House will be led by people of all ages who don’t seem particularly interested in that project, despite having spent the entire election cycle warning that Trump’s Republican Party represents a second coming of fascism. If incoming House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries really believes that, then why is he advertising his willingness to work with the GOP? Why are so many other Democrats, for that matter, trying to make nice with Trump acolyte Elon Musk?
Capitalism and a gerontocracy — we are cursed. They’re going to lose the next election, and the next after that, aren’t they?
Yep. The Democratic party is a private club and the old guard membership is there to serve their own interests, not the people who vote for them. Their staunch refusal to embrace and campaign on popular progressive policies only worsened in the last election when the completely embraced Republicans and most of their agenda in order to appeal to some mythical right wing voters that would not line up behind Trump. Now they are lining up to kiss his fascist ass and ensure that a bad situation can only get worse.
Good luck!
QFT.
Yeah, that sums it up.
An inbred gerontocracy.
After an election defeat like the last one, they should be doing a review, an autopsy, and searching the imaginary souls of the Democratic party.
Why do the same old things over and over again, when they fail?
Strangely enough, at least their candidate for president, Kamala Harris, was relatively young for a national leader. She is 60.
I’ve always though the Democratic party lacks any real leadership. I don’t even know who the party head is.
.1. At this point, they should already be identifying candidates for the midterms.
Contest every race since the GOP is intellectually and morally bankrupt.
.2. They should have a farm system like Major League Baseball.
Which means identifying young people like AOC, or like Obama and Bill Clinton were, with intelligence and talent to eventually be national leaders and electable.
On the bright side, the GOP isn’t any better.
Their leader is a 78 year old with obvious age related cognitive problems.
You really think they’ll be more elections now? At least actual legitimate free~ish and fair~ish ones?
I doubt that. Given Trump and Musk and Murdoch and all that
jazzfascist ideology triumphing with unchecked power now.(Thanks Vicar, Beholder, Purity Disunity mob who didn’t turn out and vote for Kamala when it was your ONLY easy, democratic chance to actually stop what everyone should see is coming but clearly too many didn’t actually see coming because a majority – if slight – of Americans
arewere too collectively fooled by propaganda to do the obviously right things.)RIP USoA. Pity you didn’t choose more wisely. For all of us. Fuck yáll forever for being so fucking guillible, willffully deluded and badly informed and poor of rationality. You have totally screwed the restof us and yourselves. But hey, something something Biden not perfect, old, Kamnala, well, woman, not the unicorn farting rainbows you insisted upon,, Oh and Gaaaaaaaaaza.. as if that’s not also going to be made so much worse, so very, <very, very much worse becoz of you now.. Putin thanks you for your temporary, disposable usefulness and foolishness with scientific notation and a couple of baziliion figures in the superscript after that.
every day a new embarrassment
Of course the boot licking tankies are quite happy to lick Putin’s boots, cheer on his genocide in Ukraine and then Putin’s other genocides to come and celebrate the total destruction of their country and the world order until the metaphorical fucking leopard becomes a not so metaphorical actual thing that metaphorically -maybe even actually sarts eating THEIR fucking faces.
As everyone with a working brain already warned them. But too late now.
Yeah, not seeing much reason to show faith in the Democratic leadership. Guess it’s grass root work ahead of us.
The USSR developed into a gerontocracy too and collapsed when Gorbachev tried to revive it.
@ coffeepott : To whoem? Why? Care to elaborate and specify please?
@6. Recursive Rabbit : Mor eunderground than grassy roots. Deper and harder. So to speak.
No one in our organization has supported either corrupt political party (DNC RNC) in this country. We voted against tRUMP by holding our noses and voting for Harris. When we contribute we do so to specific individuals and organizations based on their honesty and decency. We support the Squad (AOC, Tlaib, Omar, et. al.) We do all we can to avoid any support of the corrupt abusive corporations and their ceos that run this country.
But @3 StevoR is correct, we think that this country is circling the drain due to the above disgusting corrupt forces. Oh, I almost forgot, the xtian terrorists are allied with that destruction.
Welcome to the new Dark Ages.
The Democratic party is probly now history.
(Yay? Apart from y’know, all the carnage, human pain, deaths, implicatiions, consequences, that’s about to result.)
I’m pretty sure American Democracy – such as it already was – which wasn’t much – is definitely now hstory.
Ditto what was formerly the United States of America.
I wish I could say I was being hyperbolic here. I don’t think I am.
I wish you Americans hadn’t just fucked up the rest of our pale blue dot that we all live upon and share. But you have.
I don’t blame you for being upset, but this really is completely out of touch with what happened and is happening in the US.
It’s especially weird that you’re still posting strawmen about “unicorn farting rainbows” while refusing to direct any of your otherwise justified ire at the uniquely dysfunctional party apparatus in the US. Even on a post which explicitly calls out the wildly out of touch corruption which cost the Democrats the election (and, as you say, maybe the rest of us our democracy).
The election outcome absolutely did not turn on third party votes in battleground states. Or even turnout. It’s true Democratic turnout was down overall (which I take as a tacit indictment of the party’s offer to voters), but NOT in swing states, where democratic-aligned voters did their duty. In the end, there were simply too many voters in those states who desperately wanted a change, and (correctly, frankly) saw Trump as the only one offering any, however shambolic and wrong-headed that offer was.
(Besides Have any of those folks confirmed that they live in a state where it would really matter?
You do understand that many people live in states where a protest vote for a third party can be made with no material effect on the outcome. Many people in closer states may also “trade” votes with someone in one of those states, so that their protest can be registered without affecting the outcome.)
Vicar’s arrival to the thread in 3…2…1…
US Democratic party is one of the most pathetic opposition parties I have ever seen. Please Democrats, for the love of whatever you hold dear abandon the fucking stupid seniority rules. It’s stupid AF.
Stevo you’re drunk. Again. Sleep it off and don’t post until you’ve sobered up.
@12
You mean knuckle-dragging morons who don’t seem to recall how horrible things were the last time Trump was president?
Americans didn’t want “change.” They wanted a white man for president. That’s all.
@16: Yes. Misogyny was the key (again).
Incidentally, the election was very close, a fact that he-who-should-not-be-named has been rather desperately and fairly successfully trying to bury. Meanwhile, the nightmare we are living in shows no sign of improvement and everyone I know is dreading the second half of January. The best we can hope for is wide and deep cracks in the right-wing coalition, as I have argued here (some but not all of them will recognize Matthew 6:24):
https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/biopolitical-times/serving-two-masters-trump-teams-tensions-reproductive-politics
There is a good chance that Trump will disappoint and anger people to the point that the Democrats come out ahead in 2026 and a Democrat wins in 2028. This will be taken as a sign the system is working when in fact it’s slowly decaying. The Democrats won’t be aggressive enough about undoing the damage done by Trump and things will putter along.
The biggest hope at this point is that the latest generations are not going conservative as they get old. The super wealthy have sucked up so much and nothing is being transferred down. With no wealth to conserve and no private housing developments to live in the population isn’t shifting conservative as they get older. This may save the country despite the Democratic party, though they will take a lot of unjustified credit.
Unfortunately, m-m-m-m-my generation didn’t die before it got old enough to control either US party. And it’s now holding on to power when — at least politically — it should entirely be in hospice care: If you’re old enough to be on Social Security, you’re too old to be on the ballot. Because, if nothing else, elective office requires responding to and making longlasting decisions about change and unforeseen circumstances, and for physiological (not to mention cultural and psychological) reasons that ability starts going downhill rather rapidly after the mid-to-late 50s. (One might say since the mid-to-late 1950s, but that’s a slightly different issue.)
The real lesson that should be taken from the 2024 election — especially, but far from only, the Presidential “selection” — is that it’s darned near impossible to generate widespread enthusiasm when the choice is between the lesser of two evils. For one thing, it can be awfully hard to determine which one is truly the lesser (taken a look at any ballot in the city of Chicago in the last half-century? how about the presidential race in 2000, or for that matter all but two of the races in the last half century?); for another, that ballot is still choosing evil, and that becomes a “duty” instead of a “choice.”
tl;dr “Old and wise” all too often means “Decrepit and inflexible” — as the last three election cycles have more than adequately demonstrated.
I won’t say that’s not part of it, but it’s most certainly not “all”, or even such a decisive factor that the conclusion was foregone.
For one thing, you’re fooling yourself if you don’t understand that things are also pretty horrible for a lot of people under Biden. Not four years ago, right now. And actively getting worse. Many people were effectively rug pulled by the temporary Medicaid and EITC expansions, foreclosure bans, student loan pauses, etc. Having those things snatched away was (psychologically) even worse than just the usual slow march to doom: things got slightly better for a bit, making the reversion to the mean that much more traumatic. Not entirely Biden’s fault (figures like Synema, Manchin, Pelosi and Schumer deserve a big chunk of blame too), but it all happened under Biden’s watch, and I can’t say it was opposed all that vigorously. Ditto losing access to abortion (which voters clearly did not see Harris as actually offering a solution to).
Look, I’m not claiming all voters are geniuses here. Obviously anyone voting for Trump and expecting things to get better is a fool with the memory capacity of a brine shrimp. But simply wishing for a different, wiser, electorate isn’t how you win elections. People are people, and at the end of the day if you actually want to try to win an election, you’ve got to meet people where they are.
The Harris campaign simply didn’t do that. She tied herself way too tightly to Biden’s sinking ship, and aggressively declined to offer anything new or concrete to pull people in. That left her with only the same abstract, tired, half-hearted appeal of, “you have to vote for us because at least we’re not fascists.” And that was pretty predictably just not anywhere close to any wavelength that millions of people actually struggling were tuned in to. Throwing in, “Hey look over here, we’re BFFs with Liz Cheney” was certainly not anywhere near enough to make up for that mismatch, and likely just self-undermining.
I simply don’t buy that there was nothing to be done, though. It’s just that what was necessary would have taken tools the DNC pollster and advisor class simply don’t possess. Indeed, I think you can clearly see another possibility in the poll trends. Harris came out strong when Biden dropped out. Plenty of people were evidently not turned off by her race or her gender. Instead, they were genuinely excited for someone (somewhat) younger, likely hopeful that would be attendant with new ideas and approaches. She got even stronger following the Walz pick, the convention, and a good debate performance.
And then you can almost spot the exact moment that Harris and the campaign start to listen to the whispers from the Tony West and Geoff Garin types and rein it all back. They stop talking about the sweaty weirdos. They drop even their half-hearted talk about progressive policies, like going after corporate price gouging. They basically pivot hard away from anything remotely new or populist or genuine, and fall back on publicly fellating the walking corpse of neoconservatism instead. The voters caught on quick. Numbers plummet all the way through October. By November, it was just yet another choice between one flim flam act promising more of the same shit and another flim flam act promising at least a different flavor of shit. It’s no wonder quite a few voters picked the latter. Depressing and reprehensible, sure. But comprehensible — and absolutely preventable.
(PS: I don’t believe this, but if it were really true that the only thing that could have prevented the catastrophe of fascism and the end of US democracy was to run a white dude, isn’t that maybe what the party should have done?)
Interesting essay here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/a-disease-of-affluence/
“Like many cynical maxims that are not even true, it is kept aloft on a cloud of smaller, equally persistent, falsehoods. There is a trope that most Americans work ‘paycheck-to-paycheck’. They don’t. The median American has savings. Politicians on both the left and right love the rhetoric of Americans working multiple jobs to get by. In reality, less than 5% of the labour force does so (and that includes upper-class professionals like a lawyer who does consulting on the side).
Nor is it what voters themselves say: The average American thinks democrats are far too liberal. They see the party as to their left on both economic and social issues. Only 6% said they thought Harris was not liberal enough. This is not an electorate crying out for socialism, turning away from Democrats because they haven’t seized the means of production.”
Good God, I was hoping Pelosi would go quietly into the California sunset. No, here she is dominating the party from her hospital bed in Europe. She needs to stop meddling, see last election, and let the morphosis of the party happen. The Dems need to promote the younger more intelligent ones in their midst.
PS, I do appreciate what Pelosi has done in the past, but she needs to let go now.
And yet the election hinged on just 1% to 2% of the electorate, in a handful of swing states — far less than 1% of the total population.
Talking about a “median” Trump voter, Democrat, or American, is a pretty damned vapid analysis. Elections are quite notoriously won and lost at the margins. (That’s a glaring enough error that I have to wonder if obfuscation wasn’t the point.)
Hilariously wrong. “Most” is not and has never been the trope. The trope is that some (even many) Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. And in a country claiming to be the greatest and most prosperous in the world, even one is too many.
Those 84 who voted for AOC should consider making a new party. Gut the democrats. Start over.
I know your electoral system makes actual democracy hard and 3rd parties even harder but what’s to lose at this point?
Ahem. https://www.foxnews.com/video/6336288493112
“61% of Americans reportedly living paycheck-to-paycheck”
Aired September 01, 2023 by Fox Friends
If the DS collapsed we have a lot of time before the next election to replace them.
I know, it’s unlikely. But the Ds will likely not fight without becoming uncomfortable from criticism at the very least. By all means negotiate with the Rs and Is and cooperate to do the functional/structural stuff, but start getting at least as socially hostile as the Rs. Be mean, be insulting, let your disposition show you mean it.
And at least part of this is a side effect of the locked-in two-party system, which in turn is locked in harder in the U.S. than it is in other countries like Canada because of the explicitly Presidential system where the President is directly elected separate from every other position and takes up most of the air in the room.
Here in Canada we still have non-mandatory first-past-the-post voting like the U.S., and yet we have five parties with seats in Parliament. (One of them only has one or two seats, and one of them is regional so only gets seats in one part of the country and can’t ever become the ruling party, but the other three are all fully national parties with significant fractions of seats in parliament.) There are a few significant distinctions between Canada and the U.S. that I think contribute to this:
– No Electoral College (though in some ways the Prime Minister gets selected based on the result of riding elections, it’s not entirely different, just there are hundreds of ridings rather than 50 states)
– No Primaries (party leader is voted on only by the members of that party, who usually has to do some explicit coalition-building within the party to get enough votes)
– Riding boundaries are drawn by civil servants, not politicians, so there’s no real gerrymandering
– The Prime Minister is just the leader of whichever party controls Parliament; despite being the face of the party, the Prime Minister isn’t directly on the ballot (though a lot of people annoyingly treat the election otherwise).
We also have a good bit of recent history of party splits and changes just within my lifetime. Fundamentally I suspect that a lot of the issue in the U.S. Democratic Party is that there’s this feeling that they don’t have to change because it’s essentially impossible for a new party to form anyway, so who else are people going to vote for? This means nobody can actually break off from their left flank. Until that lock-in problem gets fixed, I’m not sure how long-lasting any other changes could be.
I don’t want soft people concerned about social comfort advocating for me or representing me at this point in history.
Last I heard, there was a thing called primaries where voters could pick who represented them within a party….
I guess y’all just decided that it wasn’t worth voting for someone other than these? Maybe someone should offer a better alternative?
The democratic party represents the people that chose them.
The trouble with democracy is that the voters get who they vote for.
Not sure which side you’re arguing here. I’m sure whether “paycheck-to-paycheck” fraction is literally a majority or not will vary from study to study depending, in part, on how exactly the term is defined. It doesn’t change the fixed points that A) it’s too many, and B) the author of that essay gets this very badly wrong one way or another.
Remember, the real “trope” he’s trying to rebut there is the conclusion that electorally significant numbers of Americans live — or at least feel like they live — on an economically fragile knife edge. Arguing that some of them could technically survive as much as a whole month or two (that’s the median savings amount) hardly does the job. (Nor does his other main line of support — lecturing Americans about perspective by saying that even low-ish American income levels would be high by the standards of, e.g., a Caribbean economy. I hope I don’t need to explain to you why that’s not how anything works.)
Yes to all that. I’d add that another easy to underestimate factor is that there is (mostly) no possibility for a split government in a parliamentary system. That means that the government might actually be able to try to solve problems in a coherent fashion once in a while. And afterward, it’s much easier for voters to correlate policy outcomes with the party responsible. American voters are stuck scratching their heads about whether it’s more appropriate to blame the President, the House or the Senate for the lack of any legislative progress at any given moment — and that’s the well-informed ones.
Yep. This is a huge factor. The party has been heavily relying on pure residual party identification since at least Clinton in the 90s, probably much longer. But that can’t and won’t last forever — the Trump era is putting a lot of stress on that coalition, and so far the Democratic leadership has still failed to realize that anything has changed.
The Republicans actually had a significant internal readjustment following the mostly successful tea party insurgency in the 2010s. For better or worse, the current Republican leadership is significantly more in touch with their base than it used to be, or then the Democratic leadership is with theirs.
Eventually, I think something is going to have to give, and a similar realignment will need to take place on the D side. The questions are when, will it be in time to effectively resist Trump (signs point to no…), and will there still be a Democratic party afterward.
The trouble with American democracy is that both of those things are often not quite true.
@#3, StevoR:
Right, right, it can’t possibly be the Democratic Party’s own fault, it has to be those stupid, stupid voters, who wouldn’t support the center-right. After all, the Democratic message of (checks notes) harsher border security, more deportations than Trump, more military funding, more police funding (when their base wanted to defund the police in 2020!)*, no significant improvements to healthcare, and of course more genocide, all things which are historically very popular with the left and the Democratic base. And if you think all of that is actively against your best interests — as it, you know, actually is — it’s your responsibility to vote for it anyway, because the divine purpose of the voting public is to keep a useless and unresponsive political class with no sense of responsibility in power forever.
*Incidentally: Biden’s expansion of funding to both the military and to local police — again, contrary to what a majority of the Democratic base wanted — is absolutely going to make Trump’s victory much, much worse for everybody than it would have been if Biden had simply not done that and then lost. Biden didn’t just fail to make things better, he was actively making things worse all along, exactly as I predicted in 2020 if you’ll go check the comments sections on this site back then. If you supported him at any time, you are every bit as much of a fool as the people who support Trump, just for that reason alone, let alone all the rest.
The Electoral College means that your complaint is totally invalid. There’s not a single state where Harris would have won if third-party voters (of whom I was one) had supported her. Not even if she had gotten the Libertarians to vote for her in addition to the left-leaning candidates. And yet when Biden stepped aside and the public pretty much only thought of her as a brown-skinned woman, she was ahead in the polls — it was only when she kept doubling down on Biden’s policies (the ones which the public was refusing to vote for, which is why he had to stop aside!) over and over again, losing a little support every time, that she ruined her own chances. Your ridiculous, imbecilic party blew it completely. We on the left have warned you and them over and over again for decades now and yet you’re still trying to blame the critics instead of the people who kept throwing away the future, over and over again. You are why the party keeps losing, because they know there’s a core of people like you who will blindly support them no matter what they do, and it’s enough to keep them employed. If you were willing to discard the center-right, they’d be gone. But you aren’t, so they keep running center-right candidates who think the Democrats can win by appealing to suburban white people and nobody else, which doesn’t work and never really has.
@#21, John Morales
When polls are made of policy positions without mentioning parties or ideologies, the average American turns out to be far to the left of the Democratic Party. A majority support single-payer healthcare, a strong majority support cutting military spending and increasing taxes on the rich (and, incidentally, think the rich are much less rich than they actually are), a majority support taking action on climate change. They’ve been trained to hate the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party assists in that by sitting on their hands every time they get into office and parroting Republican rhetoric. They’re afraid to even be seen to be taking action — when Democrats held the Senate under Reid, Republicans could simply request a Democratic-sponsored bill not be floored (with the threat of a filibuster) and it wouldn’t be, but Democrats were not permitted such requests against Republican-sponsored bills. Schumer has been basically the same. The system went past “courtesy” and into “deliberate self-sabotage” decades ago, and you’re still happy to support it. But it’s very obvious that being seen to be taking action is what wins elections. Bernie Sanders has an astonishing failure rate (usually due to Democrats refusing to support common-sense things like, oh, not supporting a genocide that a majority of the country does not want to continue) but because he’s constantly out pushing for things in a highly visible way he keeps winning elections without even being a member of a major party. Tlaib won by a strong majority in an area Harris lost, because she was seen to be working for the things her constituency wanted, while Harris refused to even half-heartedly draw a line in the sand because she wanted to back Biden so much.
If Obama had actually prosecuted the Too-Big-To-Fail banks and Wall Street traders, the Republicans would have basically been destroyed completely in 2010. If the ACA had had a public option, there wouldn’t be any rhetorical openings to criticize (but, of course, Obama promised the private insurance companies that that would not be permitted before Congress began negotiating, and called individual members of Congress to make them stop talking about it). If the Democrats had, as they promised to do two elections in a row (2006 and 2008), ended the war in Iraq ahead of Bush’s original 2011 timetable and prosecuted the GWB administration for starting the war, they would have had full turnout of the base in 2010 and held Congress. If they hadn’t expanded Trump’s immigration policies (we’ve been building Trump’s border wall all through Biden’s administration! Biden has deported more people than Trump did, just as Obama did in any 4 years of his presidency!) they would have still had support of immigrants. (All that being said: it’s very clear from their voluntary policy positions that both Obama and Biden were much further to the right than they ever appeared in their public rhetoric. It’s not a case of “we decided not to do these things”, it’s “we always wanted to do approximately what we did, in fact, do, and the results — including Republican victories — are things we desired.”)
Screw the Democrats. They haven’t been worth backing since at least 1992. And that change was a deliberate move, by the people who are still controlling the party, and they’re going to continue doing it until the same imbeciles who are defending them above give up and let them get kicked out.
“There is a trope” is what written, and “the real “trope” he’s trying to rebut there” is what you wrote, trying to rebut that.
A trope, not the trope.
That’s a problem with media bubbles, no?
You don’t even know it’s a trope, if it’s outside yours.
—
Vicar, that was a pullquote from the piece. There’s an entire thesis there.
Meh the dems are gonna keep playing the tired old game they have played and more and more people are just gonna keep dropping out. I know my household and that of my parents has basically stopped voting, and we were all lifelong democrats. Their failure to do anything substansive to defend Sarah McBride killed even my mom’s interest in them.
It’s hard to buy the “lesser evil” argument when they go out of their way be as evil as possible every time while still technically being lesser.
Also I love John’s article telling us to ignore our lying eyes. As if I canr fucking see myself and everyone I know being poorer and more desperate than we were 30 years ago. Yeah sure keep singing that tune “You can’t be mad about your life being bad! Our specifically tortured and twisted data shows your life has never been better!” Keep singing that old saw I am sure people will hear that tune, ignore their lying eyes, and come dancing back any day now.
CanadianSteve @ 29:
The primaries are no better than the general; to get onto the primary ballot, a candidate must either have approval as “acceptable” from the local party leaders, or have reallyREALLY big outside backing — and in either instance, we’re back to choosing from candidates prescreened not by the “actual voters” but by powerbrokers (who are almost exclusively old white guys). In most states that have fully partisan elections, the party gets to withhold the candidate’s label if it doesn’t like him; look up the history of the Harold Washington Party in Illinois (and the laws and practices have barely changed in the last half-century).
So yes, do vote in primaries — I always do. Just don’t expect much more of a real choice than one gets in the general election.
(And note: the pronouns in the preceding were selected on purpose to reflect what my generation — the Boomers — actually expects.)
Vicar @31:
It would have been nearly impossible for Obama to “prosecute” wrongdoers in the banking scandal. Leave aside statute of limitations problems by mid-to-late 2009, which would have been considerable and blocked prosecution for otherwise-criminal acts taking place more than three years previously (and the Comptroller of the Currency’s report stated that most of the critical missteps, which would probably have included these, took place in late 2005 to mid-2006). More directly, it would have been darned near impossible to meet the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard along with proof to the same level of criminal intent to obtain a conviction. Rightly or wrongly (mostly but not entirely wrongly), that’s just how it is with white-collar crime. Worse, if it was civil lawsuits… they’d still be going today (look up US v. IBM, or US v. Microsoft, to get an idea; US v. Apple — the ebooks matter — proceeded to trial “only” three years after filing because most of the defendants conceded liability).
“He shoulda prosecuted teh baaaaad bankers” is a red herring at best.
The democrats appear to have learned that they can lean on “we’re not as bad as Trump” when, in fact, the voters who voted Trump out the first time wanted change. Granted, that change was: getting rid of Trump. But I’m sure I’m not the only person who cringed when they put Biden in because it was his turn, and he did a good job of implying that he wouldn’t run again, did, and cratered everything. Of course, Harris wasn’t brave enough (or didn’t care) to distance herself from Biden’s ruthless support for Israel. Instead of running for change and swamp-draining, Harris listened to the consultants and started touring with Cheney’s nepo-baby. WTF.
I’m not going to vote republican, ever, but the democrats have got to start running some progressive left-leaning candidates, and stop doing the Clinton strategy of tacking toward the center and attacking republicans as far right (true!)
I used to say “let’s crush the republicans, then reform the democrats” but that’s obviously not possible. The whole system’s got to burn itself to the ground – the two party system’s control on politics is too locked-in.
Malcolm X was right, in his prescient speech (“the ballot or the bullet”) when he pointed out that the black community only sees a democrat when there’s an election coming up. His observation was that the hispanic and black communities need to identify themselves as a vote bloc that can collectively decide any election, then let the offers pour in. A lot of this nonsense would be resolved if we had an actual opposition coalition, or dominant party, rather than these rock-solid blocks of racial gerrymanders.
Oh, well. Shoulda had SEAL team 6 shoot Manchin and Sinema, before it was too late.
Une trope, deux tropes, red trope, blue trope. Rope a trope. Trop de tropes! Whatever weird word games you think are in play don’t fundamentally change the substance of the issue. Try again.
I dunno about Vicar, but I read the whole piece. It’s all just as bad, and boring, as your “pullquote”. The author even eventually gets around to admitting that — surprise — significant numbers of Americans do suffer from real economic hardship and fragility. It’s just that can’t possibly have anything to do with voting behavior, because that’s only the comforting “poverty narrative”*.
His answer? Voters these days are just ever so beastly. They simply don’t know what’s good for them. Especially without the civilizing influence of liberalism to hold back their beastliness.
I’m not sure you could ask for a more vivid illustration of how liberal politics is constitutionally incapable of resisting fascism. It’s really a masterclass in elite panic (or at least something elite panic adjacent).
-—————
* His conveniently reductive — and thus easily dismissed — strawman version of which is simply “poor people vote for Trump”. As opposed to something more nuanced involving, say, middle class (or even upper middle) voters also getting terminally fed up with a system that increasingly manages to fuck over just about everyone (or their loved ones) in one way or another, with the only exceptions being an increasingly narrow slice of tech billionaires, health insurance execs, hedge fund managers, property developers and the like.
“Une trope, deux tropes, red trope, blue trope. Rope a trope. Trop de tropes! Whatever weird word games you think are in play don’t fundamentally change the substance of the issue. Try again.”
For you, one more, jack.
Not that you’re a genuine interlocutor, when it comes to me, but hey. No worries.
So. Concept at hand is the definite article vs indefinite article.
Not the same.
Akin to the universal vs. existential distinction.
—
Basically, you railed about “the” instead of an “a”, and you were not aware it’s a thing.
(Wanna check other rightish-wing media? It is indeed a trope, though it’s not your trope)
“I dunno about Vicar, but I read the whole piece. It’s all just as bad, and boring, as your “pullquote”.”
Only a really clueless person would imagine I am endorsing that in any sense.
It’s what’s called a reality check.
It is really a thing.
(Outside your bubble, but still a thing)
I quote:
“Finally, the narrative (hereafter called the ‘poverty narrative’) often assumes an outdated (and decidedly masculine) vision of a frustrated proletariat of laid off coal miners, quite at odds with the reality of life for most working Americans in the 21st century. The 23-year-old barista serving you coffee at Starbucks, who lives with roommates in a small apartment, who doesn’t have job security, or the ability to pursue her goals in life—she most likely did not vote for Trump. The electorate has undergone class realignment, but exit polls still show the lowest income Americans preferred Harris.”
You most certainly did not read the article, if that’s what you imagine it says.
I have heard similar things. It’s certainly the official line from Holder et al. I think I credit the technical issues like statute of limitations and a lack of specific laws to charge under more than any difficulty meeting the burden of proof — there were a plethora of whistle-blowers with pretty solid evidence available. But the investigations also didn’t really get started until 2012, which exacerbated the statute of limitations problems.
IMO, this doesn’t really absolve the Justice Department though. It’s entirely possible that all the prosecutions would have failed in one way or another. But they still should have tried. The instinct for prosecutors is to not bring a case they aren’t sure they can win, but that was the wrong instinct here. It’s probably the wrong instinct in almost all white collar cases.
If they’d prosecuted a series of high profile cases, the worst that would have happened is that they lost. In that case the take away could have been that the country needs stronger laws to hold bankers (and other white collar criminals) accountable. Instead, they didn’t even try, and the only takeaway we got is that corrupt Democrats are protecting Wall Street. What they did was bad for justice, and worse for the politics.
You do get you are insinuating all bankers are white collar criminals, right, jack?
And you do get everyone gets that, no?
(Jaws seems to me to be somewhat versed in the legal milieu)
Spare us. The referent (which is the actual concept at hand) was perfectly clear.
Consider: “I saw a cat through the window. The cat had a bird in its mouth.” Believe it or not, human people who speak English would understand that to be the same feline in both sentences, even though the article changes. It’s not magically two different cats named “a cat” and “the cat”.
Good thing I only said it was your pullquote. Which it is.
(However, as a point of interest, calling something “interesting” is indeed an endorsement of a sort, although the one that leaves one’s level of agreement ambiguous. Someone more secure in their opinions might stick their neck out and actually say whether they agreed with something or not.)
I’m not surprised by this piece, if that’s your understanding. On the contrary: I’ve seen it all before. I simply manage to stay aware of what’s going on in reality by giving the most time to people who are least remotely in contact with it.
But you do you.
Thanks. That is indeed precisely the paragraph I was referring to when I spoke of his overly reductive “poverty narrative” strawman.
It doesn’t look like the party or much of the base has any interest in facing this dilemma the Democratic party has put themselves in. Either the federal gov’t is lost, or the party was lying and fearmongering for cash and votes. Whether they believed it, how much they care about it, it’s not worth speculating about what exactly is in their heads. Either way looks bad for them. Maybe they’ll find some other way, some excuse to get out of it. But as of now I’m kind of done with the national party. Maybe there are state and local levels of it that are still of use or can be saved.
I’m certainly glad they have you out there to protect them from such libels. I’m sure they appreciate it.
It’s the whole, not the constituents.
The referent was part of an argument, and your claiming it was “the” trope when it very much was talking about “a” trope matters. Not to you, ostensibly, but reality cares not about spin.
My understanding is, and I quote myself, ““There is a trope” is what written, and “the real “trope” he’s trying to rebut there” is what you wrote, trying to rebut that.”
You (and I quote) literally wrote:
Though you unilaterally assert that what he is trying to rebut is not what he thinks he is rebutting, it may be… maybe, just maybe! possible that he actually knows what he is supposedly rebutting.
(You’re quite sure he’s doing a rebuttal, rather than putting forth a thesis? Different things, you know)
It’s not a strawman, however many times you say it.
Here: https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/more-americans-living-paycheck-paycheck-than-5-years-ago-bank-america-data-shows
Instant hit, many many more.
It’s a narrative on one side of the very polarised USAnian spectrum, and you can say it ain’t real, but it actually, demonstrably, evidently is.
I think you may have gotten yourself very badly lost. Would you care to paraphrase what you think the phrase “poverty narrative” refers to in the article?
“The median American has savings?” How much savings? Enough to make a difference if “the median American” gets a pay cut, a layoff or an unexpected medical expense their insurance (if any) doesn’t cover?
Nor is it what voters themselves say: The average American thinks democrats are far too liberal.
A major reason for that perception is that we’ve been letting far-right liars and propagandists define what “liberal” is, with virtually zero significant pushback.
Democrats keep saying “When we fight, we win.” The problem is, too many Democrats — including all Democratic presidents since Carter — simply chose not to fight. Hell, both Obama and Biden have been effectively conceding defeat since their respective Inauguration Days.
(“The article” there being Mr. Buckle’s essay, not the Fox Business piece.)
[don’t believe me?]
Here: ‘Recruit working-class candidates who reflect the pain and the understanding of people who live paycheck-to-paycheck’
“BY FAIZ SHAKIR
Faiz Shakir is an adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders and the founder of More Perfect Union.
The Democratic Party must have as its first and foremost goal rebuilding its connection to America’s working class. People of all backgrounds who hold a job, make under $100,000 and don’t have a college degree are increasingly leaving the party. To get them back, which I think is possible, requires a few important reforms: [blah]”
Not a strawman.
[oops, forgot citation. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/07/10-democratic-thinkers-on-what-the-party-needs-right-now-00187993 ]
And yet, you’ve just illustrated the strawman. Or are you under the impression that “people making under 100,000” are in poverty, or synonymous with the “lowest income” group referred to in Mr. Buckle’s exit polls?
Here is my take on the election and why the Democrats lost.
This is a repost from yesterday.
We are all in a state of shock and despair over how the election went.
The anti-humans won and are in control.
Things aren’t going well in the USA for the average person. The agenda of the MAGAts is to wreck the USA and make things worse.
I decided I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time trying to understand it.
It’s like trying to read the mind of a malaria protozoan or flatworm liver fluke.
Why bother?
Nevertheless, in passing I’ve made a low effort attempt.
Our standard of living per hour worked has gone down a lot in the last two decades.
The main expense of a family is housing and house prices are at an all time high in terms of affordability.
The second big expense is cars.
Also at an all time high in terms of affordability.
College. Same thing.
Private secondary school Same thing.
Medical care. Same thing.
We also have expenses that didn’t even exist 30 years ago.
Everyone needs a cell phone and internet access.
Job stability is also nonexistent.
Jobs come and go and employees are all fungible and expendable.
Our average lifespans are going down, a sign of a distressed society.
Follow the money.
Life is hard for the average person and getting worse, not better.
People want change, they just don’t realize or care that things can change and get even more dismal, not better.
Some data.
You are fun, jack.
That’s the narrative. The working-class.
The plebs. The average joes. The family people, struggling.
Nothing to do with my impression; everything to do with the thesis at hand.
When you wrote , you exposed your misapprehension.
He’s saying it’s a narrative, and it evidently is not a “straw[wo]man” version, given I can keep adducing examples about as long as your quota of comments to me lasts.
Also, I use “straw dummy” for a reason. I’ve done it for a couple of decades now.
(Also, I’ve been known to refer to someone about their straw erection, but I think they didn’t get the joke. the which itself which amused me greatly)
I can’t access the paywalled exit polls linked in the Liberal Currents piece, but NBC’s exit polls show every household income cohort below 100K leaning Trump, with the solitary exception of the <30Ks. The other poll may have had slightly different buckets, but something like that group is presumably the one referred to by Buckle’s “lowest income” group.
Conveniently, that’s also the cohort most likely to be heavily biased toward, e.g., young people and students. By contrast, the 30K-100K cohort — where a lot of working class and union households would actually fall, and presumably the people Shakir is mostly referring to — has Trump up 6 points.
IOTW, Buckle is not only building strawmen, but also cherry picking the numbers to burn them up.
Again, it’s a narrative, not a reality-claim, jack. There’s a difference.
You most definitely don’t actually get the gist of the article, focused as you are on the whether the claims he analyses are veridical.
Whatever, pointless going on. Clearly, you are trying to argue against me somehow, not about the claims at hand, or the relevance of other narratives that affect the great unswashed.
I mean, I could not possibly be any more direct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faiz_Shakirhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faiz_Shakir
Got bona fides:
“Faiz Shakir (/fæz ʃəˈkɪər/;[1] born October 16, 1979) is an American Democratic political advisor. He serves as senior advisor to Bernie Sanders and executive director of the nonprofit media organization More Perfect Union.[2] Previously, he was campaign manager for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, an aide to Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, an editor-in-chief of the ThinkProgress blog, and political director of the American Civil Liberties Union.”
[sorry for the accidental double-tap]
@ 52
In other words, pander to the lowest common denominator, the illiterate, the racist the anti-LGBTQ, the fucking religious…
Again, I think you’re a little bit lost.
The narrative espoused by Saunders, Shakir, et al. is about the working class. Not necessarily just the poor or impoverished. It’s people making, say, 75K, with full time jobs, maybe even union ones. They’re struggling, depending on where they live, and probably one unexpected medical bill away from disaster, but mostly not actually in poverty. They’re working class. Which is different.
Buckle’s strawman is to recast that to be purely about poverty. He literally titles it the “poverty narrative”, instead of, say, the “working class narrative”. And then he decides that his re-interpreted narrative can be rejected by cherry picking the absolute bottom income cohort, the one least representative of the people Sanders et al. are really talking about, containing perhaps some truly impoverished working class families, but also significant numbers of students and retirees in a very different economic position and political orientation.
Righto, jack. You don’t find it interesting. No worries.
(That’s why you don’t get what regular people think and respond to that — it doesn’t have to be right, it just has to resonate)
“Not necessarily just the poor or impoverished. It’s people making, say, 75K, with full time jobs, maybe even union ones. They’re struggling, depending on where they live, and probably one unexpected medical bill away from disaster, but mostly not actually in poverty. They’re working class.”
The article:
“This is bad morality: Someone being poor, or annoyed with the excesses of social justice, does not justify them becoming a fascist. It’s also a poor understanding of the world. Most Trump supporters are not poor (in a global sense, most are very affluent).”
and
“The median US household income is $80,000. By most estimates, the median Trump voter’s is somewhat higher. This would be considered upper-middle class in most of Europe and upper-class in most of the world. ”
and
“But don’t those countries have more security in the form of better welfare states? To a degree, but it’s not the security to live at an American standard of living. The UK jobseekers’ allowance (unemployment insurance) is £70-90 a week (or $89-114). That’s it. A little under £5,000 a year. Most Americans I’ve mentioned this to find that preposterously low, but that’s only because they’re viewing it in the context of American wages.”
and so forth.
That’s the very thesis! That you mob ain’t particularly poor, by the standards of actual poverty.
(Talking about straw erections, yours is particularly bristly, jack)
Oh PZ, you optimist. Do you really think there will be another election?
Yes. I noticed. Although I wouldn’t say it’s the thesis. (It’s really just another leg supporting the overall thesis of the piece, which, as I said before, is that it’s all someone else’s fault, American voters are just soft, and will turn into beasts without the benevolent guidance of mother liberalism.)
Anyway, whatever you want to call it, the international income part of the argument is both meaningless and wrong.
Meaningless because of course most real people don’t judge their well-being by comparison to someone 4000 miles away.
They might judge in comparison to their friends and neighbors. But more relevantly to an election, they will judge by comparison to how they were doing last year. Or by whether they can afford child care. Or buy a house (like their parents could). Or by whether or not there is the constant hovering threat that going to the doctor and getting diagnosed with a bad heart valve or something might lead to an inevitable spiral of debt and bankruptcy.
I mentioned upthread that I hoped you wouldn’t need me to explain this, and that’s exactly why. This “Americans aren’t so poorly off compared to [other place X]” part is really an incandescently stupid argument which I assumed even you would be able to spot.
Imagine actually saying the equivalent of, “Mean old Bernie Sanders says that working class families are leaving the Democratic coalition because our party doesn’t ever credibly support policies which would address their economic struggles. But that can’t possibly be true — the voters he’s talking about have living standards which are literally thousands of times better than the average working class Greek peasant in the 11th century Byzantine Empire. Don’t those dumb-dumb working class voters know that by comparison, they’re actually super rich! If anything, they should be grateful to us!”
Ugh. How did he ever think that was convincing? I will bet you anything you want that not a single swing voter in this last election stopped and said to themselves, “Gosh, things are kind of shit for my family. I’m worried about day care, rent increases, my health insurance deductible keeps going up. I’m never going to be able to afford a house or afford to pay for college for the kids. It’s just getting worse and worse and nobody is talking about it. But you know what? I guess I am still better off than a UK unemployment dole taker or a Liberian shoe-shine girl. Maybe Biden is doing a good job after all.”
Which brings me to:
Wrong because he’s not even doing the standard of living comparison right.
His “shock” number is that someone on the UK unemployment dole only gets about £5K/year. That’s it. The sum total of his UK vs US standard of living analysis, is to say “£5K/year” and then compare that number to the salary of an employed person in the US making a living wage*. Which is…do I even need to say anything?
Of course, £90 a week is shockingly low. It’s certainly inadequate in either country (even as a temporary support). But, comparing like for like, it’s less inadequate in the UK. You get health care there. Also significantly lower costs for rent, food, transportation, and education. If and when our friend does get back on his feet and find a job, he’s going to make at least the UK minimum wage of about $15/hour — potentially twice what a minimum wage worker can be making in the US, and the very number Toby unfavorably compared our friend’s unemployment benefits to before. Weird, right?
This and more is the kind of stuff you’d have to account for to actually compare the standard of living and degree of economic security between the two countries.
(A comparison where the UK generally comes across more or less OK, mostly because of that health care.
… But that’s the UK. Which is, let’s be frank, pretty fucked these days. Certainly at least runner up for the polity most turbo self-owned by Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal economic dismemberment, and now traumatically self-inseminating itself with Brexit nonsense on top of that. A comparison between the US and another wealthy country like France or Germany (or even, say, Finland) is probably more apropos, but that comparison is typically just going to go even more poorly for the US, with more generous benefits than the UK, and often even lower costs of living. (Rent in all three countries is ~50% lower than in the US.)
-—–
* Ok, fine, also a leading factoid about UK doctor salaries — who of course do make a relatively modest living more congruent to their status as professional public servants, rather than collecting astronomical self-employed medical tycoon rents like US doctors do.
“Yes. I noticed. Although I wouldn’t say it’s the thesis. (It’s really just another leg supporting the overall thesis of the piece, which, as I said before, is that it’s all someone else’s fault, American voters are just soft, and will turn into beasts without the benevolent guidance of mother liberalism.)”
Huh.
“A Disease of Affluence
Trump’s supporters are not motivated by economic anxiety, but by its opposite.”
That’s what the author was trying to sum up.
(Basically, that the electorate bears some responsibility for the outcome, rather than only just the Democratic party)
@30 jack lecou
Considering the current sitation in Germany, this reads really funny.
@15. Silentbob : “Stevo you’re drunk. Again. Sleep it off and don’t post until you’ve sobered up.”
Well, that sure addressed all the actual points I made there. Not. (Does that really need a sarc tag?)
If you have a valid issue with what I’m saying point it out and explain why. If you don’t well, your life is yours, mine is mine, Got no issue with you if you let me be.
@31. The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) :
Correct. Oh wait you were being sarcastic?
It is the fault of those who given a choice between fascist and NOT-Fascist, Democracy or not dictatorship, hateful dementing bigot or rational woman of colour as POTUS, chose fascis, dictatorship and the old demented bigot. Just as YOU have done given those two – & ONLY two choices as POTUS
Given the choice between Kamala Harris & Donald Trump you chose Trump.
That was YOUR decison, that is who you are, that says fucking EVERYTHING we all need to know about you here.
I will never forgive you for that nor in my view should anyone else.
Far as I am concerned anyone who could have voted against Donald Trump and didn’t turn outv to vote for Kamala Harris and what she represents is guilty of a Crime aginst Humanity, our planet and our collective future and should NEVER be allowed live that down or forget it.
Yes, it is that serious and consequential. No that ain’t hyperbole,.
Humanity had this one chance.
Voters in the USoA blew it. Saying “damn you all!” is vastly insufficient because whether they realised it or not, thats’ what they done and then some. To every human individual on this Earth.
Thanks for creating this hellscape we are about to endure. may you die last & suffer worst. You deserve that. Thae citiemsof your horrific choice do NOT,.
^ Victims
You chose and shaped the future we are about to enter.
So very many others didn’t and did NOT get a say in it.
Although I don’t live in New York, I have donated to AOC’s campaigns in the past so I get emails from her. This is the content of an email I received yesterday from her campaign. The donation request is in a separate block after the end of this content. There’s a block before this content about a survey she posted recently. I’m confident she’s no saint…hell, I don’t even want saints running things…just a competent people with an interest in bettering the lives of all of us. I would vote for her, if I had the opportunity
Jack @43:
The real problem is that an investigation by criminal prosecutors/investigators when there is (predictably) no realistic possibility of a constitutionally/statutorily successful prosecution…
…is precisely what Our Once and Future Dear Leader is calling for with his revenge threats against, to name an example that anyone who passed either the US citizenship exam or a college-level US history course covering Reconstruction should have screamed within seconds, Liz Cheney in light of the Speech or Debate Clause. Or anyone who understands the simple acronym “HUAC,” or has a shred of common decency remaining, or lived through the redefinition of “liberal” by theocrats (into a quasicriminal offense of being un-American and jeopardizing the morality of our children) when they lost the ability to just say “commie,” or knows any actual facts about governments throughout Southwest Asia.
The Department of Justice is ill-suited for dealing with wholesale-level problems. You absolutely do not want people with a prosecutorial mindset (and that specifically includes the FBI — it’s one of the reasons that everything about 9/11 “investigations” and “prevention” went so far off the rails) directing economic policy, or how individuals behave within it. Hammer, meet nut and bolt, mortise and tenon, and glue.
I am appalled every time I see those desiring widespread vengeance against The Enemy try to turn something that is really a disagreement about morality (the whole concept of “enlightened self-interest” is from a work on moral philosophy, by a moral philosopher, intended to persuade the ultrarich of the time to deploy their assets and take actions beyond greed) into a criminal prosecution. Let alone direct use of force. Understanding the limits on criminal prosecution is the first step toward avoiding a police state.
Isn’t that exactly what I said? Again: This election is not the fault of Dem liberals, instead, the problem is voters are soft (entitled affluenza cases), and turn into MAGA beasts without the guidance of his brand of liberal values.
That’s the thesis. In order to support that thesis, he needs to build out a number of legs for the argument: that 1) voters are not economically anxious after all, 2) they’re actually affluent, 3) the Democratic party didn’t do anything wrong, and then 4) instead, voters have moral failings (because they lack the liberal convictions he thinks they need).
But all those supporting arguments fail, some harder than others.
FWIW, I do actually partially agree on 4): he calls out Americans as an excessively “commercial individualist” people. Which is right. Americans have become extremely divided, atomised and alienated, and lost important communitarian values as a result.
What he gets wrong is failing to understand that that is the result of a fundamentally liberal indoctrination project. The excesses of individualism and competition and selfishness we suffer from today are all built on a foundation of liberal values. Not the flavor of the liberal values he wants, of course, but it turns out that the only thing separating social liberalism from it’s more brutish cousins is that little piece he calls “liberal conception of public good”, and it turns out that lever can come loose pretty easily if it starts to rub up too hard against other parts of the assemblage.
He also says that the core instinct of MAGA is the desire to have someone beneath you. Which is a good call out, and partially right. But what he gets wrong is to assume that all Trump voters are necessarily MAGA, or that these impulses are intrinsic personal characteristics rather than the product of a series of stimuli. Offering concrete alternatives (not just moral tut tutting) is important precisely because it can divert people from those worst impulses and redirect some of those who might otherwise go down a MAGA pipeline.
That’s really what it comes back to: like so many others, he’s got no plan. You can scold voters all day long, and some of them really are truly reprehensible, for sure. But unless you’ve got a plan to work with what you’ve got, all that scolding is going to do is lose more elections. (If there are any.)