on X: “Hillary Clinton was cold and elitist. Kamala Harris was down-to-earth and laughed too much. Is there always something wrong with women? There must be if a convicted, lying felon can beat them. In Finland we elected a woman president 24 years ago. #USAElection2024” / XAnother group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.
211 What Happened? 2.0: In Real Life Sometimes the Bad Guys Win
Does this belong in this chapter? What role did voter suppression play?
Carter, The Kochs and The Donald – Greg Palast
Jamelle Bouie does a great job on debate between Yglesias’ popularism and the idea the Democrats should be a genuine opposition party-place below in the Popularism section.
Biden does introspection
Joe Biden’s lonely battle to sell his vision of American democracy – The Washington Post
Classic consultant brain:
UPDATE: Put in Musk section
Chuck Johnson on a crusade against Musk
How Elon Musk’s Twitter Alt Account “Adrian Dittmann” Was Unmasked
What Nate Silver misses on “hypocrisy “on pardons-for me there’s no hypocrisy as I was always opposed to Biden’s promise not to pardon.
Don’t mistake Democratic partisan orthodoxy for a “coherent” philosophy
Nate also wrong about voter suppression
Kevin Mccarthy on Ukraine/Russia 37 minutes
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Democracy | C-SPAN.org
UPDATE: More on the failures of Merrick Garland
Put below under “all the worst people”
@whattheactualf.bsky.social: “This is it in a nut shell 🦋” — Bluesky
Link Thiel’s snide talk about the “ancien regime” to Silver and Cenk
According to Yglesias the Democrats are the extremists on gun control
UPDATE: Find a place for this below in terms of why Kamala lost UPDATE: did I already implant the Ukraine Zelensky quotes?
The fallacy of the DOGE Democrats
Place below in Genocide Joe commentary
Wednesday 11/6/2024
And in recent politics it seems they ALWAYS WIN. Certainly that’s the self evident lesson of Donald Trump’s political career. When you’re a star they let you do it.
This is the title of Hillary Clinton’s book back in 2017 that attempted-CF Chapter What Happened-to explain what happened in 2016-pretty apt title. In this chapter I’m going to try to explain-to myself as well as the readers-what just happened here in 2024 where evidently America just remarried it’s abusive husband. Yes like 2016 but much worse.
In some ways things seemed more hopeful as terrible as it was. This time the feeling is different-it’s hard to know at this moment where things will go from here. There will no doubt be many, many theories as to what just happened tonight-last night really. Many of them no doubt will focus the blame on Kamala Harris-she will be scorned as “bad candidate” by many pundits. Just like Hillary has been widely scorned as a “bad candidate.”
Of course, Kamala Harris’ defeat will be held not just against her but against her entire gender.
(3) Elie Mystal on X: “Dems are never nominating a woman again.” / X
The bad candidate narrative will be irresistible for many no doubt-it often seems like in this narrative a “bad candidate” essentially is the same thing as a female candidate-there’s the presumption that no woman could be a GOOD candidate for President. I’ll vote for a woman just not that woman.
UPDATE: Already you see clues that it’s going to be a “white guy winter” over at the DNC in choosing their next DNC Chairperson-Jaime Harrison was immediately forced out post election.
Centrist Dems seize opening at the DNC: ‘I don’t want to be the freak show party’ – POLITICO
End UPDATE
What is unquestionable is that the numbers in this election were terrible-now wether or not this is Kamala’s fault is another question. But, again, it’s inevitable that many will so presume-it’s Occam’s Razor: the easiest explanation is she was a bad candidate-the quite subtext being that maybe all women are bad candidates.
As to why this is worse than 2016 there are many reasons. One is that this time the country seemed to move to the Right almost uniformly. Trump did better in almost every state-nearly every single county-wether they were Red, Blue, or Purple.
Across the board Trump outperformed his 2020 numbers-or if you like Kamala underperformed Biden’s numbers. In 2020 Trump had also won Florida but by 3 points-this time it’s by 14. Trump had, of course, won Texas in 2020 but by 6 points. This time it’s also by 14. Similarly he won Iowa by 8 in 2020-this time was by: 14. OTOH Kamala won the Blue state of NY which marks the 10th straight time Dems have won NY but this time it was by only 12 points-in 2020 it was 23, she won the Blue state of NJ by under 5 points; similarly she won the Blue state of Illinois by just 5 points-while the Biden-Harris 2020 ticket won the state by 17-which was historically typical for that state-the Dem candidate had won the last three elections in IL by about 17 points-Obama in 2008 had won by 24. In 2022 there was bifurcation where the Dems mostly overperformed except for Florida and Long Island NY. What’s arresting this time is how uniform Trump overperformed.
UPDATE: This was early in the morning of Nov 6-Illinois has risen a bit closer to 10 points since-though that’s still close to a 10 point loss.
He may well-though it’s not certain have won the popular vote. Though it was NOT a “historical landslide” as many have been saying.
How Trump Won, Again – The New York Times
So many will look to blame Kamala AND her gender. Of course, when you lose there are 100 different decisions you can point to as decisive-as vulgar Hegelianism would put it, success is proof of truth, success has many fathers, defeat is an orphan.
Everyone will insist her defeat their particular narrative that was preconceived many years before the fateful day of November 5, 2024.
You might say there are two kinds of explanations of WTF happened?! Many hinge on a version of Kamala Harris was either a BAD CANDIDATE or she ran a BAD CAMPAIGN. It’s hard not to suspect that for many of the BAD CANDIDATE people there’s no such thing as a female candidate who is good.
The other kinds of explanations-which I certainly find more persuasive-is that what happened on Tuesday night was structural.
Nate Silver is not necessarily anyone’s favorite person these days-certainly not among liberals like me-but he did warn about the fundamental picture many times during the latter part of 2024-as he had rightly warned of Trump’s first victory.
I will admit that after the Seltzer poll on Saturday night I became a little high on my own supply-after all, IF Kamala were really up by 3 points in IOWA where else may she have been underestimated? After all, Trump won Iowa by 9 points in 2020 while losing Texas and Ohio by only 6 so… This led me to put out a forgettable tweet I’d like to have back.
VERY EARLY Wednesday morning before the race was officially called for Trump Josh Marshall wrote this:
If Harris loses, that is obviously a crushing result. There’s no way around that. It’s different from 2016 in that it’s not a shock. We all knew or should have known this was a very possible result. The polls and models were about as close to 50-50 as you can get. A number were literally 50-50. But there’s another dimension of the story, assuming Trump does win. And that’s this: everyone knows who Donald Trump is. He was already President once. We know what that was like. Paradoxically Kamala Harris and he both did a pretty good job reminding us who he was over the last month. So it’s not like 2016 when you could say people didn’t know what they were getting. We know who he is. If he wins, which now looks probable though not certain, that’s a very sobering reality.
I wrote yesterday that I thought Harris ran a near flawless campaign. I still think that. And that removes one excuse. If she had run a mess of a campaign that would be one thing. She didn’t. I think she ran about as good a campaign as possible. I’m sure some people will blame her. I don’t think that will be fair. But big picture it doesn’t matter. Trump is the exception. Nobody gets a second chance to run for President. So blame her or not, it doesn’t matter. She won’t be running again.
Status Check Just After Midnight – TPM – Talking Points Memo
A few thoughts. A throwaway thought is that it’s simply amazing how none of the rules of political gravity that govern others effects him. Indeed the fact that he was able to run after not only losing in 2020 but being the ultimate sore loser who still to this day hasn’t admitted he lost like it’s the most natural thing in the world speaks volumes. Yet Harris’s political career is clearly finished-as the rule of political physics Trump alone is exempt from is if you lose a Presidential eelction you’re a loser-not of one election but for all time-think of Jimmy Carter, Wlater Mondale, Mike Dukakis. These folks went onto be political punchlines
FN: True Jimmy carter went onto a second career for all the good works he’s done post Presidency-and to an extent his accomplishments at Camp David. Speaking of Carter while it’s wonderful he lived to sese his 100th birthday and vote for Kamala Harris, it’s pretty sad he lived to see Nov 5, 2024 in a sense.
EndFN
UPDATE: I’m actually now less sure her career is over-reportedly she’s considering either running again or running for CA Governor and when I heard this I realized that all things being equal I would vote for her again though I’d have to see who else is running and what the political environment is like at that point assuming we’ll have another election.
More importantly I completely agree with Marshall-focusing on campaign quality or mistakes is too easy-you can blame it on any particular decision. But it does seem to me what happened on November 5 was more systemic, more structural.
The Youtuber Vaush argues-based on Marxist theory-that the material circumstances for what happened was a long time coming. While personally I’m not a Marxist, I AM a big fan of Vaush-and Marxist theory can be helpful as a pedagogical tool-and I do think there’s likely a lot of truth in this.
So what did happen?
There are also some debates on which voters deserve the blame. Some are very eager to insist that Black voters get zero blame.
Seems to me there’s plenty of blame to go around. Sure 52% of White women voted for Trump thereby further enternching Dobbs. But as Mystal says, depending on which exit poll you look at either a very narrow majority of Latino men voted for Trump or voted for Harris-despite Trump’s fascist rally at MSG a few weeks ago with that comic who called Puerto Rico a “garbage island.”
It’s almost as if nothing matters.
This after Biden won the Hispanic vote by 23 points.
OTOH 20-25% of
Some dueling theories for What (the fuck) Happened
One thing that occurs to me is that there’s something reassuring in that premise that Kamala was a terrible candidate or ran a terrible candidate-as this is in principle easy to fix-just get a GOOD CANDIDATE next time. Then we don”t have to do too much introspection-“we” being the party elite. Maybe the country is still not ready for a woman… the party elite might reason.
It’s reassuing precisely because it’s totally facile and there’s no way to falsify it-wether someone is a good or bad candidate is, after all, totally subjective. Hillary Clinton too was allegedly a Bad Candidate-in a total conicidence she was also a woman. One piece of theater criticism of HRC was that she talked too much about the historical aspect of her candidacy. So Kamala Harris talked about electing a woman almost not at all. Yet she too was a bad candidate.
FN: Of course, Hillary herself hadn’t discussed the history of being the first woman in 2008 and she was criticied FOR THAT-in 2016 she spoke about the history to correct what many said was a mistake in 2008.
Seeing as we are in the same place in 2024 we were in 2016 only worse as Trump may have actually won the popular vote-it seems clear that yet again putting it all on the idiosyncrasies of one particular candidate being a bad candidate isn’t going to get us anywhere fast. At the end of the day any candidate WHO LOST can be called a BAD CANDIDATE-after all if they were GOOD they would have won-right? The conversation is entirely circular.
To make any progress on wtf happened?! a more structural and systemic analysis is necessary. Here is Jonathan Chait’s theory of the case-it’s one I suspect we’re going to see a lot of the next few years.
Americans Didn’t Embrace Trump, They Rejected the Biden-Harris Administration
Americans Didn’t Embrace Trump, They Rejected the Biden-Harris Administration
Immediate off the bat that’s reassuring-after all it’s not that the embraced Trump. Still-if true-the question that begs is what exactly is it about the Biden-Harris Administration was so bad?
That half this country could willingly restore Donald Trump to a position of power is a sickening thought. For most liberals, moderates, or people who closely follow news sources not controlled by the Republican Party, it is almost unfathomable.
,
The incomprehension often leads either to despair or denial. Because Trump is so abnormal, so grotesquely narcissistic and cruel, that his success seems to upend conventional political assumptions and render his triumph into a kind of black magic. Reality is more banal. The American public has not embraced Trump. The decisive bloc of voters always evinced deep misgivings about Trump’s character and rhetoric, even if they didn’t fully recall all his crimes and offenses (who could?) Trump didn’t win by making people love or even accept him. He won because the electorate rejected the Biden-Harris administration. It is important to clearly discern the sources of that rejection. The work of correction is hard, but not complicated.”
Part of the reason I suspect Chait’s theory is going to be heard about a lot in the next two years is because it’s not complicated-for many the less “complicated” that is the more facile a theory is the better. Whichever theory requires folks to rethink the fewest preconceptions.
,
The seeds of Harris’s failure were planted eight years ago, when the Democratic Party responded to Trump’s 2016 victory not by moving toward the center, as defeated parties often do, but by moving away from it. This decision was fueled by a series of reality-distorting blinders on the Democrats’ decision-making elite. During the first Trump era, public polls showed the president immediately and deeply unpopular, fueling the belief that Americans opposed him so overwhelmingly that Democrats did not need to make any ideological compromises to win. And that delusion was fueled by the pervasive influence of social media, especially Twitter, which fostered a delusional sense that the Democratic base had veered far to the left. Candidate after candidate bowed to demands of progressive groups to endorse unpopular stances favored by the left.
,
And so the Democratic primary in the 2020 cycle was a race to the left. Joe Biden won because he abstained from that rush to the left, keeping him closer to where the party’s voters had remained. Yet his win happened so quickly it could not dispel the notion that Democrats actually wanted radical transformative change, and Biden had too little organizational ballast or strong convictions of his own to defend the more mainstream vision he had used to win the nomination.”
TBH I don’t find this narrative terribly persuasive. Implicit is the idea that HRC ran to far to the left-but the trouble with this kind of explanations is until you reveal specifically on what issues was she too far to the Left it’s way to broad and vague a claim to make much of.
Later though Chait puts forward a specific issue Biden was allegedly too progressive on: inflation.
In office, Biden suffered a combination of bad judgment and worse luck. The Covid pandemic led to dislocations and a surge of inflation that has toppled the governing parties of every ideological stripe across multiple continents. Inflation generated so much resentment it caused a retroactive halo for Trump, who Americans began to remember more fondly than they ever had during his first term.
,Inflation was by far the largest single source of Biden’s unpopularity. Its effects drove governing parties in other countries twenty or thirty points below water. It would have been difficult for any sitting president to defy the pattern of anti-incumbent rage.
As inflation was generated by supply chain international issues and effected many other countries what would Chait have him do? Chait thinks his big sin was being too Keynesian-of pushing for full employment too soon.
But Biden’s policies worsened his predicament. He ignored warnings of inflation, believing that the fastest return to full employment and rising wages would be rewarded by a grateful public. Biden was following a strategy designed by the “anti-neoliberal” movement, which believed a populist economic strategy provided the key to building a Democratic majority. A 2020 memo laying out this strategy by the Hewlett Foundation, which poured millions of dollars into an intellectual campaign to spread these beliefs, called for “a new consensus permitting governments more room to spend on efforts that boost aggregate demand without worrying about inflation quite so frantically.”
,
Many liberals (including me) were eager to believe they could produce rapid growth without the risk of inflation or that inflation would prove more tolerable than slow growth and high unemployment. This proved mistaken: people prefer to believe their wage gains are a credit to their own skill, and inflation is the government’s fault.”
So what should Biden have done-imposed austerity? What specific policies did Biden implement that sacrificed higher inflation for lower unemployment? If it was unemployment that was high and inflation low Trump and the GOP would have focused on unemployment. And what does Chait have to say about the Inflation Reduction Act-which helped bring down inflation.
The trouble with this particular narrative is the inconvenience that inflation is now down below 3%. As for gas prices they approached $5 dollars per gallon in the Summer of 2023. Thanks in no small part to Biden’s policies gas prices would moderate greatly-they have now been around $3 dollars per gallon for well over a year.
FN: Indeed, one particularly impressive and innovative policy of President Joe was his successfully gaming the commodity market in Saudi oil
find link
End FN
As for the idea that Biden sacrificed high inflation for lower unemployment there’s no evidence of that. Indeed there’s a decent argument that it’s the opposite-he was all too willing to do the austerity Chait thinks his failure to do led to the high inflation that caused his-and his successor’s-defeat.
(3) “The economy is fine” – by Stephen Semler – Polygraph
FN: I’ll have more to say about this premise of Semler’s below. I do think he hits on a crucial point on what may have been the big problem with Biden’s reelection campaign-before he was forced out-with idea that while the macroeconomy has done very well during the Biden years, the economic well being of many Americans has not.
Place this below.
But I do suspect this idea of Chait’s will be one widely recurring theme the next two years as the party struggles to figure out what went so wrong. Many are going to claim the Democrats went too far to the Left-a flawed premise and I don’t say this as a member of the Far Left-the frustrated Marxist Leninists a la Tankies who practice such fealty to Putin who also had a great night on Tuesday-but a Center Left liberal.
Indeed, Lanny Davis too sounds the idea that the Democrats have gone too far to the Left but his focus isn’t that they were too leftist on economic issues but on cultural/social issues.
Many centrist/establishment Democrats as well as centrist pundits are facilely hyper focusing. on inflation as the central cause of the Democrats’ defeat.
But another narrative claims the Dems lost because of their overly zealous embracing of The Woke. This narrative is favored by Lanny Davis who seems to think that the Dems lost because of the terribly salient issue of trans women in women’s sports.
Second is the word intolerance. Our side applies this word to Trump and his supporters even as our left base refuses to tolerate any deviation from their stance on an increasingly long list of sacred cows. I speak from painful experience. I am sympathetic, empathetic, to those who suffer from the feeling they have two genders – one hidden inside, the other marked by physical characteristics on the outside. As President Clinton would say, sincerely, I feel their pain.
“But I am also uncomfortable with the idea that males in transition to being females should be allowed to use restrooms for “girls” or “women” without any concern for the discomfort it might cause young girls or grown women. If we must be sensitive to the challenge of being transgender, why should trans people be insensitive to the discomfort of those who are not? And how did it become a litmus test in our political party to support biological males competing in female sports?”
“The idea that “boys in girls sports”-ie trans women in women’s sports is a big problem for the Democrats I expect to be another major recurring theme the next few years. This is kind of tough as I am a big fan of Lanny Davis’ book on the 2016 election-I quote from him copiouisly in Chapter No Probable Cause.”
But TBH here he drifts dangerously close to outright transphobia here-it’s one thing to debate trans women in women’s sports under the premise they have an unfair advantage-there is scant evidence they do in fact-but to refer to trans women as “biological males” is fairly problematic-and I’m really not a “woke scold” as such. For instance I to this day wonder if the dropping of the name “Redskins” was necessary-Commanders has no history or resonance behind it and I say it as a Giants fan. I mean does the fact that most Native Americans didn’t favor the change mean nothing?
But this narrative where Democrats are picking up the GOP talking points about boys playing on the high school girl’s soccer team seems to have been gaining traction-even before the terrible night of November 5-Ted Cruz’s opponent Collin Allred had made a point of publicly decrying trans women in women’s sports-he framed it as is usual that high school girls are under threat.
Suffice it to say I don’t find the idea that this is why Kamala lost compelling at all. The GOP had gone all in on this contrived moral panic to little avail-at the end of the day it was not an issue that interested many voters. But recently for some reason many Democrats have become interested in this very uninteresting phony issue just like in the last few years Democrats have embraced the GOP’s harsher immigration rhetoric-even if they remained committed to real immigration reform. But as Vaush noted in a recent episode-much more on Vaush below-if you’re a genuine committed xenophobe you’re voting for the GOP-exit polls showed something like 3% of voters who considered immigration a top issue voted for Kamala.
I don’t find either of these narratives compelling but I do suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot about these dubious narratives-Democrats lost because Biden didn’t go full austerity or they lost because they didn’t’ talk enough about “biological males playing girls’ sports.”
And like the idea that they lost because Harris ran a bad campaign is reassuring for some-as it’s a facile explanation that requires little introspection-they idea that they lost because the party failed to adequately repudiate wokeness or “boys in girls’ sports-or Biden didn’t impose enough austerity is also kind of reassuring as they are yet more facile explanations which doesn’t require too much introspection.
The Morning After: Lessons To Learn – and Not To Learn | RealClearPolitics
Seems to me it’s worse than this. Aaron Rupar argues voters didn’t simply vote against Biden-Harris but affirmatively FOR Donald Trump.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around how we got to this place. Donald Trump lost in 2020, incited a coup attempt, was convicted of 34 felonies, is an adjudicated rapist — and yet it appears he’s on the cusp of beating Kamala Harris, the VP of an administration that did a good job under extremely difficult circumstances. And Trump isn’t just poised to win the electoral college — for the first time in three tries he’s likely to win the popular vote too. From the standpoint of January 7, 2021, what’s happening right now is unfathomable.
Sitting in it – by Aaron Rupar – Public Notice
Yes the worst part of this is unlike 2016, a majority or near majority voted for Trump. He seemed to improve on his 2020 performance-and Kamala underperofmred Biden’s 2020 performance-not just in almost every state but almost every single district-in NYC-the hub of Blue State America, it’s because of NYC that Trump didn’t win in NY, Trump improved his performance in every single borough.
Clearly they liked SOMETHING. What DID they like is the crucial question. Would argue-trying to be a little optimistic-that not all of them LIKED this. The Trump Far Right base did. But when you talk about the many-quite honestly, low information voters who gave Trump his first majority-or at least near majority; the votes haven’t all been tallied yet-did al of them like THIS? I suspect not. Many of them either dismissed it-‘but he didn’t succeed so it turned out ok’ ingoring how close he came to succeeding-or maybe even didn’t know about it at all-yes, I’ve become convinced by now that those of us who are hyper engaged in politics greatly underestimate how many people know very little about what goes on in national politics-where if it doesn’t effect their own immediate, lives it doesn’t really exist.
As the YouTuber Vaush persuasively argues I suspect that many people who voted for Trump have never even heard a speech of his beyond the clips they may see on social media-or maybe Joe Rogan? What is hard to estimate is how much those intimate Trump’s spots on Rogan and Friends did to humanize him-‘They say he’s this Nazi who wants to end democracy but he’s just a regular dude he likes wrestling and will sit down and shoot the shit with you like he’s another guy.’
Back to Rupar:
That voters are choosing to put him back in power … whew — words fail. And unlike 2016, nobody can say they don’t know what they just signed up for. As we wrote many months ago, Trump didn’t try to hide his plans to abuse power and brutalize outgroups.
In the wake of a disaster of this sort, it’s natural to play the blame game. I’ve already seen people nitpicking the campaign Kamala Harris ran, opining on what President Biden should’ve done differently, sounding the alarm about the role Russian interference played, and so forth. These are all legitimate things to talk about. But I also think we need to process the reality that even if it still doesn’t have majority support, fascism is far from a political loser in this country. Deportation raids will almost certainly be unpopular in practice, but the idea of them isn’t. Misogyny and a skewed media environment were factors working against Harris, but ultimately a huge chunk of American voters simply are buying what Trump is selling.”
Exactly-that’s what’s so hard to understand-how is J6 by itself much less Dobbs, his theft of sensitive and classified documents as he finally walked out the door after he fomented the insurrection, his 91 criminal indictments, his 34 counts of criminal conviction in Manhattan, or that he’s an indicted rapist to boot-how does none of this disqualify him? J6 in particular is such a foundational breach of our rule of law and our system of democracy. Of course, Trump’s own SJC set aside the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and then the voters in their own way would follow suit.
What do these voters think they’re buying though? And does his assault on democracy not matter at all? Arguably no-there’s an argument that many voters DON’T care-not only do they not care that Trump seeks to subvert our democracy they welcome it.
Donald Trump reveals the ugly truth of today’s politics
My guess is different voters want different things. There is certainly a base of Trump support that welcomes the idea of Trump being their dictator. OTOH another subset of voters don’t believe he really intends to do it-the take him seriously not literally canard. What Tuesday night definitely convinced me of is that you can’t overestimate how low information many voters are-it’s not for nothing Trump declared “I love the poorly educated.”
But I think Vaush gets to the fundamental dynamic of the travesty of 2024-a year that’s been a disaster both personally for me-if I may speak personally for a moment-and socially and nationally-after all we elected a fascist. a fascist may have won the popular vote-this is one of the numerous reasons 2024 is much worse than 2016.
Vaush argues Kamala did NOT run a “bad campaign”-he argues she ran as good a campaign as could have been expected within parameters she was constrained by-she ran a good campaign and was a good candidate he argues.
FN: He also dismisses the idea that the decisive factor was Gaza which I certainly tend to agree with.-a big part of the problem is the Left thinks this is like the Iraq war or Vietnam but it’s not as those were US soldiers with boots on the ground dying thousands of miles away. Here we’ve simply been giving arms to our ally. If simply sending arms to an ally who arguably engages in genocide makes you a war criminal-most war leaders are war criminals-North Korea has been sending Russia a good amount of weapons; indeed who on the Left would agree that the Soviet Union were the war criminals during Vietnam-rather than the US government
Indeed it’s rather appalling for alleged pro Palestinian activists to be celebrating the election of a literal fascist.
I’m sure Trump who moved the embassy to Jerusalem-all conversations between him and Abbas ended after taking an action the Palestinians saw as a betrayal-and who recently revealed he’s been talking to Netanyahu almost every day is going to be great for Gaza. When he gets back into the Oval with David Friedman and Jared Kushner in tow-Kushner wants to turn it into beachfront property so there’s that, meanwhile per Barak Ravid it was Friedman who pushed hard to move the embassy at a time Trump was somewhat torn.
UPDATE:
FN: Link
Having said that, I do reluctantly have to agree with the leftist YouTube streamer Hasan-Kamala should have had a Palestinian address the DNC. I understand why she and her campaign were pretty cagey on this issue-on Israel-Palestine she was pretty boxed in, it seems as if they sort of viewed the whole issue as a kind of scab, picking it would only make it worse. Nevertheless I do think she could and should have given the Palestinian activists SOMETHING. She had given a few early signals that suggested she might have been better than Biden on the issue-she didn’t attend Bibi’s talk and apparently was pretty strong with him when they talked privately. But over the campaign she seemed less willing to give anything on the issue. Trump shrewdly exploited the issue by meeting with Palestinians in Dearborn the last week.
Despite his terrible record on Israel-Palestine from the standpoint of the Palestinians, despite moving the embassy when he was last President, despite his Muslim ban, despite revealing the almost daily conversations with Bibi during the campaign-Trump did at least meet with them
FN: I’m not assuming there WAS a quid pro quo between Trump and Netanyahu I’m also not assuming there was NOT.
IF Bibi announces the end of the offensive in Gaza on the first day that will be very good news but it will also beg the question wether this was another version of the agreement between the Reagan campaign and the Ayatolloah-Likud was also in on that see Chapter Iran Collusion-to delay the release of the hostages until literally the morning Reagan was inaugurated.
I just can’t help but think of Michael Deaver’s book.
In Chapter Democratic Part is a Girl I talked about the gendered nature of the parties. The idea that the Democratic party is the codependent Mommy party while the GOP is the abusive Daddy party is buttressed by how the division of labor between the parties is divided-Dems do all the work and the GOP gets all the credit.
I mean it couldn’t be more stark in Deaver’s Book:
When the coffee ended, the president and president-elect, as is the custom, drove up to Capitol Hill together. They were alone in the car, but Reagan later told me, Carter remained on the phone with his National Security staff nearly the entire time. When we got to the Capitol, Reagan pulled me aside. Instead of feeling slighted, he was deeply moved by Carter’s determination to see our people free. Reagan himself was becoming increasingly agitated that a handful of Iranian zealots could bring a sitting American president to his knees. He genuinely felt for Carter and understood entirely what was going through his mind.”
LOL-I’m sure old Ronnie’s heart was breaking for Carter-as his campaign negotiated with these same Iranian zealots behind Carter’s back to win flip the election in Reagan’s favor.
Later, in the holding room, Reagan waved me over. “What is it, Governor?” I said, calling him by that title for the last time in my life. Based on the intelligence information he was provided, Reagan thought the release of the hostages was imminent. “If it happens, even during my Inaugural Address, I want you to tell me. Slip me a note. Interrupt me. Because if it happens, I want to bring Carter up to the platform. No country should embarrass and humiliate any president of the United States.” The opportunity never came. Twenty minutes after Reagan took the oath of office, word came to us that the hostages were in fact free. At the time, the new president was having a traditional lunch with the Senate leadership. I wrote out a quick note and made my way toward President Reagan.
“Without looking at the note, he instinctively knew what happened. He read it and let out a long, silent breath and smiled. America had a clean slate—and a new president. He knew that the Iranians did this to embarrass Carter. You would never hear Reagan boast that he had anything to do with the release of the hostages.”
He didn’t have to all his Republican hagiographers did it for him. But the question begs-how did Reagan know the release was imminent? So Carter did all the work, making himself sick for over a year, then within 20 minutes of Reagan’s inaguration they were released.
IF Bibi announces the end of the offensive in Gaza on the first day that will be very good news but it will also beg the question wether this was another version of the agreement between the Reagan campaign and the Ayatolloah-Likud was also in on that see Chapter Iran Collusion-to delay the release of the hostages until literally the morning Reagan was inaugurated.
No doubt this is what will happen with the economy-inflation has recently fallen below 3%-under the Biden WH US handled inflation better than anywhere lese in the developed world all the indicators of macro economy are pointing upwards now Trump gets in just in time to get full credit as we all know he’ll grab. Meanwhile all the positive benefits of Biden’s Chips Act and his Inflation Reduction Act will finally begin to make themselves felt in the next two years once again confirming the false narrative of many that Trump’s is awesome on the economy.
In retrospect I had a terrible sense of foreboding during 2024-which has turned out to be a terrible year on many levels-I think of 2024 as actually starting on October 7. While I’m not arguing October 7 was a false flag
UPDATE: Though the more I think about it I’m also not arguing that it was NOT
it clearly has greatly benefitted Netanyahu whose political standing was pretty precarious prior to it. As unpopular as he was, though, his numbers have improved-Israeli’s liberals missed their moment a la Benny Gantz in the immediate aftermath of Oct 7 just as US liberals missed it in 2021-2022 a la Biden, Merrick Garland et al. In many ways Netanyahu and Trump are the same guy-both were hanging from a cliff very recently-politically and legally-both need to be chief executive of their respective nations just to stay out of jail and both have been allowed to be entirely rehabilitated by their feckless political opponents and with a major assist from the media.
And while I’m not arguing Oct 7 was a false flag-I’m not aware of any evidence; then again Netanyahu has prevented any serious investigation-but it clearly saved Netanyahu’s career as well as keeping him out of prison-unlike we Americans-Israelis have no compunction about putting a former PM in prison.
But it’s kind of hard to dismiss Seth Abramson’s premise-linked to above-that there is a quid pro quo between Trump and Netanyahu-as there was in 2016-seeing as Trump has himself recently revealed he and Bibi speak almost every day. Gee I wonder what they have to talk about almost every day. Kind of hard to believe the little word Gaza hasn’t come up. So could there be a quid pro quo between Bibi and Trump like there was between the Reagan-Bush campaign and Iran in 1980? Again if they are released immediately after Trump’s inaugurated…
In his recent book War, Bob Woodward reveals that Trump and Putin spoke at least 7 times since he left Office. Pretty interesting Trump and his team have suggested repeatedly that Trump will end the Russia-Ukraine war BEFORE he gets into Office-he certainly is never shy to break the Hatch Act one more time.
UPDATE: It’s getting harder for me to reject the idea of Trump-Bibi Collusion out of hand
I mean cuo bono-who benefits.
UPDATE:
Mehdi Hasan on X: “Beyond parody.” / X
For more on Dearborn which voted for Trump and is already finding out:
Trump election win: They turned against Kamala Harris. They’re about to find out if it was worth it.
End FN
At the end of the day so many people seem to have very short memories, Tuesday night proved that if nothing else. It also didn’t hurt that the Inman Trump met with was clearly conservative. In an interview he had on Zeteo with Mehdi Hasan the Inman said a few things that suggested he was motivated by more than just Gaza-he made an aside that sounds like he’s also worried about trans issues in schools.
But Kamala could have done the same thing-find a Palestinian who’s sympathetic politically to her-indeed, the perfect choice would have been Ahmed linked to above who lost 31 members of his family in Gaza but has been just as critical of Hamas as he has of the IDF and had warned repeatedly of the fallacy of punishing the Democrats by electing Trump.
The left must stop apologizing for Hamas – The Forward
End FN
But she was greatly constrained by these parameters. He argues the recurring problem of the liberals who run the Democratic party is they don’t understand that institutionalism is done as a political force in US politics-we live, Vaush argues, in the age of populism. Liberalism itself he argues, is spent Still he goes on to argue it’s not that a liberal policy agenda can’t win just that the Democrats haven’t been running in the right way-they remain beholding to the institutionalist canard.
The problem is not liberalism per se but liberal institutionalism-it’s the Democrats inability to move past respectability politics.. Indeed, what’s striking is how popular the liberal Democrat policies are vs the Democratic politicians.
An Overlooked — and Increasingly Important — Clue to How People Vote – POLITICO
This gets to a another major cause of this terrible defeat-a terrible media environment totally flooded with Bannon’s shit. We’ll have more to say about how bad the media environment has become especially the last two years in terms of disinformation.
Vaush’s argument is very thought provoking as it reveals the big stumbling block we Democrats have struggled with since the Obama years. The public clearly likes are policy agenda whereas the GOP agenda is extremely unpopular. Yet we struggle to translate that into victories at the polls. The reason for this is the failure of Dems to speak in narrative form about their agenda. This is the missing piece. In a way it’s understandable-as Democratic policies are good and popular it’s not obvious why there is a need to frame them in a particular way-if policies are popular don’t they speak for themselves? In this era of populism and lack of trust in institutions-the answer is no. There are two big problems-one if the anti institutionalist mood of the public-Vaush persuasively argues this has been the mood post 2008-and then there’s the disinformation tsunami the GOP has launched in Right wing media and social media the last few years.
I’m not fully willing to embrace his premise that Bernie Would Have Won but I do agree with him that it all comes down to populism-that’s why Trump won-we’re now living in a populist age-he argues this has been true post 2008-like it or not I don’t but then I’m a liberal. Here is Bernie’s own statement on Twitter X after the debacle.
Now let me say this-Bernie’s theater criticism of the Democratic party has the convenience of at least being much more plausible and substantive than that of the two centrist takes I quoted from above-of Chait who claims Biden was too liberal economically and did nothing about inflation-what would Chait specifically have him do?-or of Lanny Davis that the Biden Harris Democratic party is too WOKE on “cultural issues.” Again the problem with these kinds of narratives is they entirely vague and superficial-they can never name one specific example of Biden/Harris being too far to the Left either economically or “culturally” whatever the hell these pundits even mean by culturally.
Bernie’s criticism is much more substantive-it is, has been, and remains true that the underlying problem is a 60% supermajority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Yet Harris’s policy agenda was much better for this working class than Trump”s-indeed, Trump’s policy agenda-to the extent he even had one-would be-will be?-very harmful to the struggling working class cum frustrated middle class.
FN: And Bernie’s criticism did veer off a little in taking potshots at “identity politics”-in what way has the Democratic party done too much “identity politics?” It reminds you of his notorious jibes in the past ‘It’s not enough to say I’m a woman vote for me.’ Who said that? This is why he fell far short in both 2016 and 2020-which is why I question Vaush’s assumption “Bernie would have won”-there were reasons he was never trusted by large parts of the Democratic base-remember Elizabeth Warren’s claim he suggested a female candidate couldn’t win?
UPDATE: You’ll have to excuse me LOL I’ve had a few weeks to digest this and there’s a LOT wrong with Bernie’s take-if anything he and Pelosi pretty much are saying the same thing-she’s criticized the Democrats for going to far Left “culturally” while Bernie says it’s “indentity politics”-these terms are basically synonymous for the same thing-the Dems lost because they nominated a Black woman. If anything Pelosi makes a fair point-it is pratically liable for Bernie to accuse the Dems of “abandoning the (White?) working class” when he himself admits Biden was the most progressive President since FDR-I disagree only slightly in that LBJ is in this conversation.
I DO agree with Vaush’s point about the importance of narrativization-the Dems I agree failed to talk about the econoy in the right way. Ironcially just recently Adam Schiff showed us the right way.
End FN
Sargent makes the crucial point that Kamala’s platform was overall very good for the working class though again per Vaush’s insight above, the really frustrating point may be that policy doesn’t matter. If that’s true then we shouldn’t be TOO quick to conclude this was why voters voted as they did-because PACE Chait low inflation is more important than full employment-as if the workers are to paraphrase Nixon “all Monetarists now.”
Vaush’s very important insight is that it’s not about policy it’s above vibes and Trump’s grievance politics are in line with voters not his, ahem, policy agenda-to the extent he has one. His “platform” as enunciated by himself was to deport 20 million illegal immigrants-even though there’s nowhere near 20 million illegal immigrants-a huge tariff that will in reality function as a huge sales tax on these very same working class voters, and a very dubious proposal that claims to cease taxing tips but may in reality be a stealth plan to defund Social Security.
FN: The picture that is already starting to come into focus just six days after that disastrous election is Trump may be literally looking substitute taxes with tariffs-on the campaign trail he actually namechecked William McKinley which makes sense as Trump wants to take back the way the government and economy works to the 1890s.
Trump Says He’d Replace Income Taxes With Tariffs: The Potential Economic Fallout
End FN
Indeed, regarding policy, Hillary Clinton’s platform she agreed to negotiating with Bernie at the 2016 convention was very favorable to the working class-as we saw in Chapter What Happened-if only she hadn’t backed away from her own idea of a Universal Basic Income, her economic agenda would be to the Left of Bernie’s . As important as healthcare is, the immediate problem for the struggling working class cum frustrated middle class-frustrated as many folks come from a middle class background but have been unable to sustain a middle class life for the last 23 years or so-is low wages, our low wage epidemic.
As for healthcare, Kamala actually made a truly radical progressive proposal for Medicare to start covering home healthcare costs. If I might speak personally for a moment, 2024 has been a terrible year both for us as a society-because of November 5, 2024-andn personally, this year Doordash deactivated me, meanwhile my father had a stroke. He was hospitalized for a few months and now he’s home and I’ve now learned what many elderly Americans and their children learn-even if you were fortunate to amass a good financial savings throughout your life, home healthcare costs may well bankrupt you-remember when Republicans used to talk about the Death Tax? The real death tax are these home healthcare costs that can easily cost $85,000 a year.
Yet the struggling working class failed to vote for this. What explains it? It seems to me there are two possible explanations: one is Vaush’s point that policy doesn’t matter it’s just about vibes. Ie even if this is a very beneficial progressive policy, Harris failed to talk about it in the right way.
But this brings me to another possibility: she didn’t talk about it enough, indeed barely at all. Perhaps she should have mentioned it prominently in every speech. And I do think there’s something to that. Indeed, the fact that Biden’s macroeconomic record is so impressive yet voters according to a widely held narrative-according to polls-were terribly dissatisfied with his economic performance once again keads you to kind of throw up your hands-apparently nothing matters. Certainly facts, much less an incumbent’s record, matter.
Indeed it’s not clear what does matter at this point
And note that Sherrod Brown was more in line with the leftist Bernie “anti Nafta” line and this didn’t spare him. So how do you explain this? How the voters threw out a President with a record of unsurpassed job growth, record economic performance for his opponent who himself was voted out as President four years earlier for record job losses? Who leads a party with an abysmal record of economic performance and job growth since the end of WW11?
FN:
The real paradox-beyond the fact that the economy performs so much better under Democrats-is that so many voters believe the opposite:
We have heard much about the puzzle that US economic performance under President Joe Biden has been much stronger than voters perceive it to be. But the current episode is just one instance of a bigger historical puzzle: the US economy has since World War II consistently done better under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents. This fact is even less widely known, including among Democratic voters, than the truth about Biden’s term. Indeed, some poll results suggest that more Americans believe the reverse, that Republican presidents are better stewards of the economy than Democrats.
In a sense, it is not exactly surprising that so few people know that economic performance has been consistently better under one party than the other. The proposition sounds implausible on the face of it, like the sort of blatantly partisan claim that is not even worth checking out. The puzzle is the fact itself: that it is completely true.”
See also:
End FN
Because facts, character, a candidate’s actual record in Office, don’t matter not even a little bit? It’s all vibes a la Vaush’s observation?
OTOH a less nihilistic argument is that while Biden’s macro record is excellent-record job growth, etc it’s arguable that he made a wrong turn early in his first year back in early 2021. While it’s true in any ways his economic record was excellent other parts were less impressive. One economic metric which has not been good during his term is disposable income.
What About Wages? – People’s Policy Project
In early 2021 Biden very quickly chose to end expanded unemployment benefits. When he was pressed he said that Dem Governors were welcome to expand it if they chose-they of course also let it lapse-even the allegedly progressive Gavin Newsom. Indeed, regarding Kamala Harris, while no one remembers it, back in June, 2020 she’d called for $2,000 dollar monthly checks until the end of the Covid pandemic
UPDATE:
Ron Klain now leans into this same argument
IReturning to Semler’s piece I linked to above I find his argument that the real problem wasn’t simply inflation but that at the same time Biden cut back fiscally compelling. However I find Semler’s attempt to link fiscal austerity to supporting Ukraine against Russia’s aggression pretty dubious-as if Biden had only let Putin conquer Ukraine in 2 days everything would have worked out for the good. For one thing the fiscal tightening begun already in May 2021-in my view the first big mistake economically at least-his first mistake overall was not firing Wray see Chapter Biden’s First Mistake-was letting expanded unemployment lapse-if not only doing the $2000 $1400 check one month, indeed maybe the mistake was going for only $1,400-usual Biden fastidiousness in counting Trump’s $600 towards the $2,000. Also Semler’s premise that Biden completely bailed on a progressive economic agenda is belied by the work he did to get the Chips Act and the Inflation Reduction Act-which while these certainly weren’t perfect and could have been much better was probably the most you would get in the face of the willingness of Manchin-Sinema to torpedo their own party’s agenda.
Semley also ignores the inconvenient fact that Biden’s numbers actually tanked after the Aghanistan pullout never to recover. The irony is that this was something the Left had been beating the drum on for years yet Biden reaped no political benefit for it-quite the opposite. Trump and his GOP co-conspirators of course had no compunction in attacking Biden for doing Trump’s own withdrawal plan-he’d negotiated with the Taliban
UPDATE:
The economist Isabella M. Weber had been arguing since 2021 that the issue wasn’t simply about inflation, rather inflation exacerbated the economic pain workers were already feeling with the quick rollback of the fiscal stabliziers-the relief checks, expanded unemployment, and the Fed”s tightening of rates.
FN: In Woodward, Biden’s response to Powell’s interest rate hikes was the same as to when Netanyahu continued to escalate in Gaza against Biden’s wishes, or when Merrick Garland appointed David Weiss Special Counsel, or when Manchin continued to torpedo his agenda: privately cursing him out but refusing to say a negative word publicly-as that would violate the norms of respectability politics. Recently Powell was asked about what he will do if Trump threatens to fire him-why would Trump fire him? Powell tightened rates during Biden’s tenure, the day after Trump won he cut them.
UPDATE: She just did a very interesting long form interview arguing explicitly that “inflation didn’t have to doom Biden.”
And this brings us to a major moment in the campaign Kamala Harris arguably made a serious mistake:
One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump’s oligarchical allegiances. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, “We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends.”
While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.
Why Biden’s Team Thinks Harris Lost – The Atlantic
We can quibble about the source-obviously Biden’s team are hardly impartial observers-still this proposal against corporate gouging was a pretty good response to voters’ concerns about prices-true inflation has now largely moderated, but certain prices remain elevated-it still costs over $20 bucks just to get a sub and a sandwich at Subway and dropping it was a serious mistake.
UPDATE: So basically Mark Cuban became literally her corporate handler
Mark Cuban speaks out against piece of Harris’ tax plan while campaigning for her
In a spot at a campaign rally Cuban literally threatened to “campaign against her” if Kamala stuck by Biden’s tax proposal for a wealth tax.
Speaking of the Covid relief checks no one seems to recall that Harris had proposed continuing $2,000 monthly relief checks until the end of the epidemic.
Kamala Harris Supports $2,000 Monthly Stimulus Checks, Giving People Money – Business Insider
If she had endorsed this as the Presidential candidate suspect it would be a pretty different world today. While she did have a pretty good economic agenda she was concerned with countering the narrative that she was a “San Francisco liberal”-would things have been different if she’d embraced it? The irony of leftist criticism is her record is very progressive-in her four years in the Senate she was the fourth most progressive Senator.
FN: This FWIW has been my own premise post 2016-when I personally ran in the 2018 Democratic primary in NY 2nd district I ran on a platform of a Job Guarantee, Universal Basic Income, and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit. Today I would have added expanded unemployment benefits.
My guess though is Kamala would have been a very progressive President-provided they won back the Senate and also won the House, in this parallel universe where she won the Presidency, the Senate Dems would have ended the filibuster-led by new Senator Adam Schiff-we would have gotten very progressive, “populist” if you prefer economic policies. But her campaign strategy, ironically, was to understate her own progressive preferences and record.
Again, she DID, call for Medicare covering home healthcare costs, but arguably she didn’t talk about it nearly as much, much less in the right way as she could and should have.
Assuming that ANYTHING matters much less policy. And I think there’s a good argument that in a parallel universe where a parallel Kamala Harris ran a parallel campaign, she would have won a parallel election.
If this is true her big mistake was rather than-falsely-denying she is a San Fransico liberal, she should have embraced it. And this comes to what I have thought all along might be her big weakness-a tendency to dissemble during campaigns. I’ve suspected during the entire campaign that her weakness is an unwillingness to ever contradict the conventional narrative. Here’s an example that struck me on one of her series of October interviews-was it 60 minutes? Basically she was asked a question the media loved to ask during the campaign-what about the polls that showed voters trusted Trump more on the campaign?
UPDATE: Biden then she didn’t talk about THIS
Her response was basically to list all the things she’s trying to do in terms of good policy to reassure voters. Yet it seemed to me what she could have said was point out that recent polls actually showed her now breaking even with Trump on the economy. In the big scheme of things this doesn’t seem terribly important in retrospect. I agree with Sargent’s argument that anyone who argues she lost for this one reason-this one thing she said or didn’t say, this one campaign tactic she did or didn’t employ-is grossly oversimplifying
But the importance of it in my mind wasn’t substantive but tactical. Rather than questioning a particular media narrative, she implicitly accepted it and tailored her response to operating within it. And this has arguably always been her big weakness-in a candidate I personally really liked; she’d been my first choice in 2020, I’d first discovered her during the Senate Judiciary hearing in 2017 when she very effectively cross examined Jeff Session on his attempt to dissemble on his meetings with the Russians during the 2016 campaign.
Regarding the entire San Franscico liberal narrative, her conundrum of how to respond goes back to the 2020 campaign. During that campaign there was an anti police narrative during the Dem primary or at least so it was perceived. For that reason she tended to mute her own experience as a prosecutor and California DA, etc. Despite the fact that she’d written a pretty interesting screed back in 2009 for the progressive prosecutor-rather than “tough on crime” or “soft on crime” she called for being SMART on crime.
FN: link
I actually bought it during the 2024 campaign and it’s pretty interesting. But back in 2020 she or her campaign didn’t feel she could embrace her experience as a progressive prosecutor.
Because of the perceived ascendency of the Left she kind of got pushed into a bidding war on who could be the furthest Left on every possible policy issue. The issue that really seemed to sink her campaign was the single payer debates.
It seems to me-and she was so seemingly deliberately ambiguous it was tough to say for sure-that she did NOT support single payer but rather was in favor of the public option. Indeed, initially she had not called for SP but after the leftist backlash on Twitter she came out explicitly for Single Payer. This pleased no one-the Left still claimed she didn’t REALLY support it-while others criticized her for supporting it. Her proposals were ripped apart in the media, her numbers tanked and never recovered.
In retrospect that charge that she wasn’t playing it straight had a ring of truth in it-she didn’t support Single Payer-neither do I, like her I support the Public Option-but pandered in claiming she did. There are a few problems with this starting with her opponents can rightly say you can’t trust her on anything she says about policy as she just wants to say whatever she thinks everyone wants her to say. Where are her own core beliefs?
And in 2024, I think it’s fair to say-as a big fan and supporter of hers-she never adequately answered this question. In 2020 she’d tacked further to the Left than she really felt comfortable, in 2024 she went the other way and tacked further to the Center.
She didn’t talk in detail about her own beliefs on healthcare too much. She didn’t mention the public option. Again, she DID call for putting home healthcare costs on Medicare, which is an excellent idea, but she hardly centered or amplified it in her campaign.
Ironically then she may have lost because she was unwilling to show voters who she really was or what she believed even though they would have liked that person.
Regarding Vaush’s very important critique that the problem of the Dems is not about policy but vibes, I will argue that the big takeaway for Democrats is twofold: OTOH progressive economic policy is good. The Dem rejoinder is: WTF do you think we’ve been doing.-but the corrolary is in the way you say it, the way you frame and package it.
Vaush’s poinot is that this is a populist age-rather than an age of great trust in institutions-if you go back far enough you could argue that trust in usititions has been dimishing going all the way back to the Warren Report-but certainly the post Iraq post 2008 economic collapse error has been different-basically we’ve been in this populst anti institutionalist era since 2008.
This is why while Biden presided over a very progressive administration it didn’t matter-because of the importance of the way you frame and narrative it
Yes but this goes back to the huge gap between perception and reality in American politics today. To go back to the big picture for a moment, 2024 is much worse than 2016 for a number of reasons starting with the fact that unlike 2016, 2024 has a veneer of democratic legitimacy. What we have is democratic fascism-the people democratically voted for the candidate who ran on ending democracy. In some ways this is was unprecedented-while it’s true Hitler was elected he and his party won nowhere near a majority, they won like 30% but got into power through coalition was other parties.
Here what may be a majority of Americans voted against their material interests. Women voted for the man who ended abortion in many parts of the country-and will look to push through some version of an abortion ban as President-Latino men voted for the candidate who has pledged to do mass deportations, indeed promised to deport 20 million people.
Since very early on November 6 there have been debates on which voters deserve the blame. Some are very eager to insist that Black voters get zero blame.
While there’s some truth in how Latino dudes and White woman voted against their own interests-it’s very tough to imagine most of the tens of millions of Latinos who voted for Trump have at least a one undocumented immigrant in their family-it is rather stunning that an estimated 20-25% of Black men voted for Trump. I believe the exit polls show 86% of African Americans voted for Kamala-and that this is the same as 2020. Based on this some have declared “Black folks did their jobs.”
Here I can’t resist making an NFL football analogy. In 2002 John Gruden became coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Coming in, the Bucs had a been a pretty good team the previous few years-they’d been a playoff team but didn’t get beyond the early rounds. They had an excellent defense but they’re offense had been kind of tepid. When Gruden arrived there was a decent amount of carping by the defense about having to carry the offense. In a conversation with Tampa’s future Hall of Fame defensive end, Warren Sapp, Gruden challenged him and the defense. Sapp complained about the lack of offensive production, the lack of points, etc. Gruden’s response was what about you guys on the defense-how many points are you scoring?
Gruden was challenging the defense not to wait for the offense to score points-it should see it’s job as going beyond simply preventing the opposition from scoring-they should look to score points themselves. This would become the defense’s identiy in 2002-they forced record numbers of turnovers and points off of turnovers. In the Super Bowl in January 2003, they blew out the Raiders 48-21-and the defense had three interceptions for touchdowns.
That’s what an inspired coach like Gruden does-they never allow finger pointing but challenges each player on the team and on both sides of the ball to continually raise their standards and play above andn beyond.
So for African Americans I would note: even if they voted 86% for Harris just like they had for Biden-Harris 2020 why only 86%? Why not 94% like they voted for Obama? Even they relatively have became slightly less blue the last four election cycles. In fact in 2008 while 95% of African Americans voted for Obama it was down slightly to 93% in 2012-and Black men only voted for him with 87% of the vote.
Bositis-Election-2012-merged.pdf
That I believe was the first election you started seeing the Black male vote dip beneath 90%. Now in 2024 at least the prelminary exit polls seem to suggest as low a number as 75% of Black men may have voted for Kamala Harris.
Bottom line there is more than enough blame to go around. Personally I blame everyone-including the voters. As Mehdi Hasan says, why should they get a pass?
The Harris/Walz Autopsy | Mehdi Hasan | TMR
FN: See about 14 minutes in
End FN.
As for women OTOH it’s hard to argue that Scott Sumner’s theory is implausible.
I’m sticking with my earlier claim that female candidates are at a disadvantage in US presidential elections (but not in other elections.) Unfortunately, some voters (both male and female) see the presidency as a man’s job. Nonetheless, Biden also would have lost, probably by an even larger margin.
No doubt many would like to dispute his theory and you’d like to believe it’s wrong but it’s not obviously wrong.
And I say this as a male who actually has wanted to see a woman become President since 1992-the first election I was old enough to vote in. OTOH there is this huge cesspool on social media of the most toxic misogyny and what’s accurately bee called rape culture. OTOH as Sumner notes it’s not solely males who even now after Hillary 2008 and 2016 and Kamala 2024 see the presidency as a man’s job.
On yet another hand many are sickened by the vile taunts of nasty misogynists like Nick Fuentes-“your body my choice.”
‘Your body, my choice’: Attacks on women surge on social media following election
Fuentes went on to gloat that “there will never be a female President.” But there’s the rub: men do seem more determined to not have a woman POTUS than woman are to vote for one.
That was the hope of the Selzer poll-which turned out to be such a cruel mirage. Selzer’s poll was actually half right-she had men for Trump by +14 which is what the national exit polls show but she had women choosing Harris by 20 points but instead they chose her by only 10 points.
Indeed, at this point it’s hard not to think of Plato. The premise of his Republic was the idea that the people aren’t wise enough to entrust with the vote-as they will only vote against their own interests. Also thinking of Nietzsche who talked about the need to harm stupidity.
FN: The Gay Science
Stupidity needs to be harmed because stupidity is so harmful-what they don’t know can hurt you. Not only did all these White women, Latino and Black men, and all these working class people harm their own material interests they harmed ours-those of us who made a piont of actually being informed before we got in the voting booth.
The low propensity, low information Trump voters for some reason decided to only educate themselves about tariffs after the election.
(1) November 8, 2024 – by Heather Cox Richardson
FN: Kind of recalling Brexit where only after the fiasco did voters realize there was no magic $315 billion pounds at the NIH once you got out of the EU
End FN
It all kind of makes you think of 1988. Now let’s be clear I did NOT see this coming. My own personal narrative was that the Democrats would win-it was the same narrative with Biden and then after with Harris-and that national any polls that showed Trump actually leading were obvoiusly wrong as the GOP had only won the popular vote once since 1988 and then there were all the special election wins for the Democrats the last few years post Dobbs.
So even the last month which showed the poll tightening with Kamala’s lead dropping from just under 3 points to just under 1 point my assumption was that obviously the polling error would be in Kamala’s favor unlike the previous two Trump elections. After all if the average polling error is about 3 points it was much more likely Kamala wins by 4 than say Trump wins by 2 I reasoned quite wrongly as it turned out.
Still it’s important to overstate it either-this was NOT a landslide either in terms of the popular vote or the electoral college. Indeed the estimate for his popular vote margin has been shrinking as more of California is tabulated.
A 1.4 margin is only 70% of HRC’s popular vote margin 2016 and considerably less than say Obama’s 4 point margin in 2012; Obama got 332 EVs that year compared with the 312 Trump has. Indeed, Trump’s estimated 1.4 margin-and it could shrink further with CA still out-is considerably less even than George W. Bush’s 2004 margin the last time the Republican party candidate won the popular vote.
Beyond that there’s no reason in the world to proclaim there’s ANY mandate for Trump’s dystopian agenda. I do see some Democrats making this mistake.
Biden won a far bigger popular vote margin in 2020 and Trump STILL hasn’t conceded. Because we’re liberals not fascists we recognzie he won THIS election-though I will still go to my grave insisting his 2016 win was illegitimate so it STILL gets an asterisk-as W 2004 gets an asterisk as he stole 2000-but this doesn’t mean we grant him a “mandate” we have to fight his terrible misogynstic, racist, xenobogphic, plutocratic agenda with everything we have.
Indeed his margin was considerably smaller even than W’s 2004 popular vote win the only other time post 1988 the GOP has won the popular vote
Biz Leaders From Musk to Cuban React to Trump Winning the Election – Business Insider
I mean sure “Trump won fair and square” THIS TIME. But as he cheated the previous two elections-and was primed to cheat in this one there’s still a big asterisk on it. He certainly does NOT have any kind of “mandate.”
UPDATE: It’s also pretty rich to see Musk congratulating Trump-he also congratulates Musk which is quite right as Musk bought the election for Trump.
I mean quite arguably Cuban is why she lost with his terrible advice not to do a wealth tax or criticize corporate America-almost makes you wonder if it was deliberate sabotage. Even if it wasn’t even if Cuban wanted Harris to win his material interests are benefitting handsomely from Trump’s win-he’s yet another crypto bro.
No, Trump Did Not Win in a Landslide—Nor Did He Secure a Mandate
And speaking of 1988 at least I get to quote the late great liberal columnist, Michael Kinsley-democracy can goof.
It looks as if my candidate for President is going to lose this election. If so, he will be constrained to be graceful about it. Not laboring under any such constraint, I am free to say that the voters — or at least a majority of them — are idiots, betrayers of their country’s future, misperceivers of their own best interests, ignorant about the issues, gulled by slick lies. Unless, of course, there’s an upset. In that case, the voters have magnificently exercised their ingrained popular wisdom, vindicated the faith of the Founding Fathers, demonstrated the innate genius of democracy, etc., etc., etc. I knew it all along. Regarding my candidate for Senator, kindly reverse those two explosions of prejudice.”
“It’s widely considered a breach of democratic etiquette to question the collective wisdom of the electorate. To suggest that the voters are wrong, let alone to characterize their error in more melodramatic terms, opens you up to charges of elitism. The contention that people have been misled or manipulated, wrote one smug supporter of the probable winner shortly before the election, “reveals an extraordinary contempt for the political intelligence of the public.”
Essay: Democracy Can Goof | TIME
It’s actually pretty fascinating reading this 36 years later for how familiar this sounds:
The electorate’s decision is held to be self-validating. However knowledgeable or ignorant, focused or distracted, reflective or scatterbrained they may be individually, the voters collectively are always wise. Political pundits who have been concentrating for months on the shallowest and most mechanistic aspects of the election campaign — tactics, commercials, “likability” and so on — will switch gears on Election Day and begin interpreting the “message” of the election in the most grandiose philosophical terms. Reports of the candidates’ strategies for appealing to various groups or regions of the country will be replaced by theories about what an undifferentiated mass called “the people” was trying to say. These theories will often be of such exotic sophistication that no single one of the people, let alone all of the people, could possibly have thought of them before voting.
Indeed, what Kinsely seems to be denying is the very notion of a “mandate.”
Foremost among the theorizers will be supporters of the winner, who will reject any notion that their man’s victory might be due to their own vigorous exertions of the previous few months. It was, instead, they will argue, a fundamental and clearheaded rejection of the “values” represented by the loser. And the neutral political observers will agree: an election loss is supposed to force losers to reconsider not merely their political strategy but their fundamental beliefs.
Yet why should this be so? As a matter of logic, it makes no sense. Serious beliefs derive from serious reflection, over a long time. A serious thinker should always be open to counterarguments from those who disagree, but the mere fact of disagreement, however widespread, shouldn’t count for much.”
He argues that contrary to what many would argue his attitude is NOT an insult to voters-when it’s quite the opposite. In retrospect it’s almost jarring-I forget how great Kinsley’s style is. So I’ve quoted him at length:
The commentator who sneers that it shows “contempt for the political intelligence of the public” to suggest that the voters may have been duped is a highbrow intellectual who wouldn’t dream of reaching his own political judgments based on the information and level of argument offered to the voters by his candidate. (Or mine, for that matter.) Who is showing real contempt for the public? Those who question the infallible wisdom of the majority, or those who hold the voters to a lower intellectual standard than they hold themselves to? Who is more “elitist”?
I extend every voter who votes differently from me the courtesy of serious disagreement: I think you’re wrong. You may well have been misled or underinformed or intellectually lazy, or you may be highly informed and thoughtful but have a faulty analysis, or you may have acted out of narrow, unpatriotic self-interest, or you may just be a fool. But whatever the reason, you blew it. In my opinion. And I take democracy seriously enough that my own decision on how to vote was the result of a lengthy intellectual process that is not going to reverse itself overnight on Nov. 8 just because a majority of voters disagrees with me. Finally, although I am always open to dissuasion about my political beliefs, and more than open to suggestions on how to make those beliefs more salable to others, I have enough respect for the political intelligence of the public that I hope a majority may come to agree with me the next time around.
The theory of democracy is not that the voters are always right. Nothing about voting magically assures a wise result, and for a citizen to dissent from the majority’s choice in an election is no more elitist than for a Supreme Court Justice to dissent from his or her colleagues’ judgment in some case. The proper form of democratic piety was nicely expressed by Senator Warren Rudman during the Iran-contra hearings (explaining why the illegal secret funding of the contras offended him, although he favored contra aid himself). “The American people,” he said, “have the constitutional right to be wrong.” You can value and honor that right without cheering every exercise of it.
Kinsley’s lack of reverence for the “wisdom of the American people” is all the more audacious as Bush Sr won a real landslide: by almost 8 points in the popular vote, with 426 EVs-Dukakis had only 99-and 40 states.
1988 United States presidential election – Wikipedia
But regarding the voters’ “constitutional right to be wrong” the voters last Tuesday exercised this right to be wrong to the fullest, from the hind to the hindermost. It’s hard to imagine an electorate every being more wrong. As Kinsley put it whatever the reason the voters of 2024 voted as they did-they blew it. It’s pretty hard to imagine the tens of millions of voters who voted against their own interests had any kind of “lengthy intellectual process.”
It’s important to appreciate just the scale of what the voters did on November 5.
America Hires a Strongman
This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.”
Trump Asked for Power. Voters Said Yes. – The New York Times
Clearly this was much worse than 2016 starting with the fact he’s likely won the popular vote-the estimate is around 1.5% at this point. While that’s not a landslide either in the popular vote or EC this hasn’t stopped Trump and the GOP co-conspirators claiming it was-as well as many mainstream commentators and even among many Trump opponents. From there it’s easy to see they will claim Trump now has a huge mandate. On a factual basis this is absurd-W claimed a mandate after having a larger victory than Trump’s in 2004. W used this to claim that he had a mandate to end privatize Social Security-within 5 months in 2005 the “mandate” was over.
FN:
Indeed, with the news Trump has chosen Matt Gaetz-who was being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for among other things having sexual relations with a minor-to be his AG-Florida Democrat Jared Moskowitz’s response was shockingly bland:
Rep. Jared Moskowitz on Wednesday said that he believes Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney general, Rep. Matt Gaetz, would be the “most powerful attorney general in American history.”
“I mean, look, this is what the American people voted for, right?” the Florida Democrat said to CNN’s Brianna Keilar when asked about Trump’s shocking Truth Social announcement that he was tapping the far-right congressman from Moskowitz’s home state for AG.
Moskowitz’s hair is strikingly NOT on fire:
“[Trump] was not shy about what he wanted to do in this country,” Moskowitz continued.
“Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department,” Trump said in his social media post.
“In Matt Gaetz, he’s not only going to get someone who’s fierce loyal, but fiercely competent. Matt Gaetz knows exactly what to do with the attorney general’s office,” Moskowitz said. “He will turn that into being most powerful attorney general in American history.”
Shadi Hamid argued back in August that there’s evidence that elite Democrats do NOT REALLY think Trump’s an existential threat to democracy-and clearly Moskowitz doesn’t appear to. It’s certainly true that while the Democrats claimed Trump was such a threat during the election they often didn’t act like it.
If Democracy Is Dying, Why Are Democrats So Complacent?
Democrats are unwilling to match their language of urgency with a strategy even remotely proportional to it.”
If Democracy Is Dying, Why Are Democrats So Complacent? – The Atlantic
If many elite Dems don’t believe democracy is under threat that’s a fairly big betrayal to its voters as many of us do believe that.
Donald Trump Won & America Will Regret It – YouTube
Maybe run someone who does believe it next time and they’ll do better?
End FN
The reality is there are no mandates in politics certainly not Presidential politics. Nevertheless what makes the result even more terrible is Trump told us what he was going to do.
Donald Trump told Americans exactly what he planned to do.
He would use military force against his political opponents. He would fire thousands of career public servants. He would deport millions of immigrants in military-style roundups. He would crush the independence of the Department of Justice, use government to push public health conspiracies and abandon America’s allies abroad. He would turn the government into a tool of his own grievances, a way to punish his critics and richly reward his supporters. He would be a “dictator” — if only on Day 1.
FN: Speaking of the DOJ and public healthcare conspiraices just yesterday he nominated Gaetz at DOJ, along with TULSI GABBARD at DOJ and RFK Jr in charge of public health. When Mike Davis was in the running for AG he’d vowed to jail Tish James.
Possible Trump AG Mike Davis Threatens to Jail Letitia James in Profane Rant
Even though Trump chose Gaetz not hard to imagine him liking this idea.
And, when asked to give him the power to do all of that, the voters said yes.
This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.
After defeating Vice President Kamala Harris, who would have become the first female U.S. president, Mr. Trump will bring his own historic firsts into the White House: the only president convicted of dozens of crimes, accused of dozens more and twice impeached.
Unlike in 2016, when he scored a surprise electoral victory but lost the popular vote, Mr. Trump will go to Washington able to claim a broad mandate. Over his four years out of power, he rebuilt the Republican Party in his image, creating a movement that only seemed to strengthen with every recrimination. He will begin his second term bound by few political norms, after a campaign in which he seemed to defy every one.”
He’s bent on revenge and retribution AND his Supreme Court has given him absolute immunity.. Does nothing matter?
Alex Cole on X: “It’s unbelievable that this wasn’t the end for him. https://t.co/pC8CysKbiy” / X
Daniel Finklestein argues this demonstrates the “awful truth of politics” here in 2024 America. Note that he wrote this on the morning of November 5-BEFORE the voting started. This was on purpose-as he argued that historical tomes like Theodor H White’s “The Making of the President” had the fatal flaw where the authors-and the readers-knew how it turned out.
“And this was reflected in the narrative from the beginning. Those associated with the victorious campaign seemed like geniuses. The losers always appeared hapless fools. Yet this couldn’t possibly be right.”
“Indeed, it recalls what Hegel had said about SUCCESS, the Real is the rational, the rational is the Real-in retrospect the winners always look likThis is the reason I have an advantage over you. You are reading this, most of you, knowing at least something of the result of the presidential election. I am writing this before the votes have been counted. This allows me to avoid the error of the campaign books. My reflections are not biased by any knowledge, however incomplete, of the outcome.e geniuses, the losers like utter fools. ”
So I am able to write about Donald Trump without knowing whether the swing states are falling his way. And without that knowledge, it is already obvious that he has changed our understanding of politics profoundly. That his political career has been, however grim it may be to acknowledge it, a stunning success. And that, as a result, we have seen things about democracy we can never unsee. This will be the case whether he is heading for the White House or not.”
Of course, I’d much rather be “seeing it” with him NOT HEADING to the White House.
At a campaign stop in Iowa in 2016, Trump remarked: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Correctly, he added: “It’s, like, incredible.” When he said it, it seemed ridiculous. Even making the remark seemed politically incompetent. It doesn’t seem ridiculous now.”
It sure doesn’t. Now it sort of recalls the myth that Babe Ruth called that homerun against the Chicago Cubs in the 1932 World Series.
Babe Ruth’s called shot – Wikipedia
While it’s not REALLY TRUE as we discussed above that he won a “landslide” or has a “mandate” what the voters did in November 5 is give him their own version of what the Republican Supreme Court gave him on July 1-Absolute Immunity; after the George W. Bush cum Donald Trump Court gave Trump legal absolute immunity, the voters gave him political AI. Indeed, there is one narrative that the only reason Trump lost 2020 was Covid. In other words nothing he did hurt him-accept for the gross mismanagement of a pandemic that led to the death of 1 million Americans.
If this is true it tells you a lot about US voters-only when Trump did something that did major damage to their own private lives were there ANY repercussions. Even so, in retrospect what really happened with Covid has been memoryholed-just as while George W. Bush and the GOP were in power the eight years leading up to the Great Recession, Obama and the Democrats got the blame for it.
But there’s another part of this cycle, which is that Americans simply have no idea who to credit for anything or how to determine the apportionment of credit. Obama was associated with the Great Recession because it happened on his watch, even though he didn’t cause it and he saved America from much of its potential destruction.
Joe Biden is now said to have experienced the global post-pandemic backlash because he was in office for a large swath of the pandemic, despite the fact that he took the nation under his care from essentially being ranked last globally in pandemic response under Trump to being ranked first in post-pandemic recovery. Now American voters are primed to add insult to injury, pretending that the 2025 economy—which will start out robust—is a Trump economy rather than a Biden economy, even as such voters had no reaction to the pre-election revelation that Elon Musk plans to destroy Biden’s economy, devastating the lives of tens of millions, in order to fire regulators who have pestered his companies (rightly so) for a litany of civil, possibly even criminal offenses.
(1) Proof of Consequences, Vol. 1: Where America Goes Now
Back to Daniel Finklestein:
There are some conventional explanations, of course. Ruy Teixeira was correct in Monday’s Times to talk of the way that progressive ideology has damaged the political prospects of the left. Persisting with Joe Biden in the last couple of years didn’t help, either. And within the Republican Party, the economic libertarian approach of Ronald Reagan began to lose support of less well-off social conservatives and nationalists.
Not to digress but I disagree about “progressive ideology” as I already discussed above, though it’s striking how widely held this erroneous idea is in the Dem leadership class at this point. The early returns suggest they are learning exactly the wrong lessons-indeed as we saw above, “even Bernie Sanders” has a problematic take-that the party “abandoned working class voters for identity politics”-again what does that mean other than the party should not nominate women or candidates of color in the future?
However Finklestein’s larger point is compelling:
Yet this still can’t fully explain how, in an American political system that ate up and spat out candidates with fairly minor foibles, Trump was able to persist to arrive at today, let alone tomorrow.”
Exactly. Indeed, this was part of why I had such a hard time taking the moral panic over Biden’s age seriously-it seemed to me that even if Biden were legally dead on election day that would seem like a minor foible next to Trump’s rap sheet. And-indeed-even Nate Silver who basically led the Dump Biden movement admitted that personally no matter how bad Biden’s “cognitive decline” were he’d vote for him over Trump-as he found J6 so disqualifying.
FN: Link
His argument was the the polls showed pretty uniformly that low proposenity, low information voters didn’t see it that way. We ill have a lot more to say about these low propensity, low information voters below.
Is an 86-year-old Biden being president as ridiculous and untenable as an 82-year-old Trump being president? (Trump just turned 78 so would be 82 by the end of his second term.) For me, the answer is still no. In fact, although this is an increasingly unpopular view, I think Biden’s had a pretty good first term. And if I lived in a swing state2, I’d still vote for Biden — if for no other reason than because I think January 6 is so disqualifying to outweigh everything else.
But an 86-year-old president would be disqualifying under any other circumstance. And I can’t really blame any voter for thinking otherwise. In a political environment full of misinformation and distrust, that Biden is 81 and seeking to be president until he’s 86 is something rare: an unassailable, objective fact. If I were a single parent supporting three kids on a minimum-wage job, who barely had time to follow the news, could you really fault me for thinking the one thing I know is that this guy is too fucking old to be president?
Joe Biden should drop out – by Nate Silver
Maybe he can’t. For me it makes me feel like I can’t really blame Plato for writing The Republic. More on Plato and his The Republic below. For now back to Finklestein:
Here are the three things I think this tells us, none of them very encouraging and all of them relevant to Britain. They are, as I say, things Trump has made us see that we cannot unsee.
First, people simply don’t care about political scandals anywhere near as much as journalists and other politicians do. Minor scandals are hardly noticed at all, with the protagonists completely unknown. Major scandals may entertain but they often don’t outrage because people (wrongly) think that all politicians are pretty much the same.
In 2016, Trump did not seem to many potential voters in any way a less suitable president than Hillary Clinton. And this was not because they thought him a saint. It was that they thought her at least as much a sinner. They also thought her a hypocrite because Trump, at least, didn’t pretend. Hypocrisy is why partygate mattered, while Boris Johnson’s sex life did not.”
See I partially disagree. In 2016 the reason voters thought Clinton at least as much a sinner was over the faux scandal of Emailgate. As we’ve argued quite fulsomely in this book the Emailgate scandal was much ado about nothing-indeed, arguably the investigation should never have been opened in the first place as it lacked predication-Chapter No Probable Cause.
The fact that “partygate” mattered but Boris Johnson’s more serious crimes didn’t underscores that often it’s the small bore, minor “scandals” that matter. Often it seems that ONLY minor scandals outrage whereas major ones are discounted-there’s also a sense of what Chris Matthews said about dogs-dogs only understand other dogs. Major scandals are in a sense too massive for many people to even understand. But they get things like petty sins, petty graft, seeking a small advantage, etc.
OTOH it’s important to understand the very different standards of the two parties I discussed in early chapters in this book-the Clinton standards were always much more stringent than the Trump standards. I think the heart of it is in chapter is the Democratic Party a Girl: girls misbehave much less often than boys do but when they do they are punished three times more than when boys do even though boys misbehave much more often. Substitue “Democrats” for girls and “Republicans” for boys and you begin to see the political economy of American politics.
It’s not for nothing that we still haven’t elected a female President-while we have elected a Black man. Though true Obama’s election has led to the rise of explicit White nationalism.
So Seth Abramson’s frustration is completely understandable but:
Did Biden not lie enough? Not incite violence enough? Not assess the fuckability of his own daughters enough? Was his hair too real? His skin too skin-colored? His tie an appropriate length? How exactly does nonpartisan historians ranking Biden as the 14th-best POTUS ever encourage us to go with what Joe Rogan says of him, instead?
the very idea of this as a thought experiment gives us the answer: if Biden did even one of these things he’d be run out of politics by night fall because of the radically different standards between the parties which mirrors the differences between the genders in US society.
If it’s different when a woman does it it’s also different when a Democrat does it. And minor foibles are punished much greater than true, audacious acts of crime, of rape, of betraying the nation with foreign powers a la Putin_=-Netanyahu, etc.
FN: I’ve only gotten more obsessed over what exactly Trump and Bibi were talking about in what Trump said was their almost daily conversations.
Back to Friedman:
Second, Trump shows how we reason. We start with what we want to think — what it suits our interests to think — and we fit our explanation of events round it. So people who support Trump saw his criminal convictions as evidence that he and they were right and that the liberal establishment had rigged the system against them. Social media intensifies this tendency to motivated reasoning.
But it is the third lesson of Trump’s rise, and persistence, that is the most worrying. Far from his contempt for democracy — his active subversion of it in January 2021, his open flirtation with dictatorship before and since — being politically ruinous, it actually attracts many voters.”
Certainly many in the GOP base desire Trump to be an authoritarian.
An alarming number of people don’t care at all about liberal democratic norms as long as things are all right for them. And they rather think “strongman” rule might be a better idea than rule by a load of squabbling politicians. They like that Trump is (as he is thought to be) a successful and ruthless businessman. They like that he belittles others. They think he is doing that on their behalf.
This attitude is not only an American one. In Britain, Trump hasn’t much of a market — for now. But in 2022, Onward, the think tank of which I am chairman, found that support for “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament/elections” was at 46 per cent. And among voters between the age of 18 and 34, support for rule by the military was at 44 per cent.”
Speaking of Britain-fun fact I’m actually a dual citizen who was born in Britain-they had their own Donald Trump in 2016 called Brexit. What’s amazing about Britain today is everyone now admits Brexit was a terrible mistake but there’s no political will to undo it. In the first few years post Brexit the narrative was that anyone who even suggested a do over is arrogant anti democratic elitist. True Brexit had won with just 52% of the vote but to even suggest that some folks didn’t quite understand what they were voting for were terribly “condescending.” Which logically makes no sense-in 1975 the British had voted to join the EU with over 67% of the vote. If you can never suggest anyone could possibly be ill informed or regret a vote then wasn’t 2016 also condescending-second guessing the votes of 67% of the public?
In any case even now that the Tories were finally thrown out, Britain is hardly out of the woods yet in terms of a fascist threat with the huge anti immigration riots that broke out post the election of the first Labour Prime Minister in 15 years.
With all this international know nothing support for Right wing populism and fascism in the First World it’s hard not to sympathize in retrospect with-PLATO and his The Republic. After all, the central premise of The Republic is that democracy doesn’t’ work as the people can’t be trusted not to vote against their own material interests-I’m paraphrasing. So better to have an enlightened Philosopher King rule.
And after 9 years of Trump there’s scant evidence Plato was wrong. These voters not only voted against their own interests but against yours and mine.
What’s the other hand to this terribly dispiriting argument? If there is ANY case for optimism it’s that it’s perhaps less these voters are stupid at least in many cases but rather that they’re just totally misinformed.
One number in the exit polls that is very interesting is comparing informed vs uninformed voters more on this in a moment. A post November 5 article by Jamelle Bouie set the table:
“What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them?”
The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”
What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid and possible cuts to Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?
Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?”
I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.
Opinion | What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them? – The New York Times
And that’s the one point of hope-there were some as Daniel Finklestein argues-who welcome fascism and know exactly what they voted for. Certainly Elon Musk in prediting as Seth Abramson documented above a deep recession that will be necessary for the “structural reforms” he and Trump want to impose on the economy. Certainly the many knuckle dragging racists and misogynists in the Republican party.
But the many low propensity swing voters-the women, Latinos, and Black men who voted for Trump-didn’t know what they were voting for. And this brings us back to the polls: back in October Reuters did some interesting polls:
What has emerged pretty clearly is that if that voters that were well informed on the issues of immigration, crime, and abortion voted for Kamala Harris, those who didn’t voted Trump as Heather Cox Richardson pointed out yesterday
Politics Chat: November 12, 2024
As Marcy Wheeler argues there were basically two elections on November 5.
want to elaborate on something I said on Nicole Sandler’s show on Friday. There were really two elections last Tuesday.
In one, politics worked.
In the other, propaganda worked far better. Trump didn’t even hide that he was running on propaganda. JD Vance said it plainly during his debate: their campaign wasn’t willing to participate in any venue that would fact check. They did not contest this election on true claims about policy. Indeed, hours after Trump’s win became clear, one after another influencer announced that, yes, Donald Trump really does plan on implementing Project 2025, even though he falsely disavowed it as a core tenet of his campaign over and over.
Trump won with about the same number of votes he got in 2020. Trump will get millions more votes than he did in 2020 (though possibly not more than Biden did in 2020.) [Thanks to Nate Silver for the correction.] But they were different votes: more Hispanics, fewer white people. He will win the popular vote, too, but it’s not yet clear by how much.
Two Elections: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check” – emptywheel
UPDATE: Swing state vs non competitive state breakdown
Marcy published this on 11/10, here a week later it’s clear Trump will win about 3 million more votes than 2020 though 4 million less than Biden 2020 while Harris will win about 6 million fewer votes than Biden had in 2020.
It’s now clear as of 11/18 Trump will likely win the popular vote but he will still end up with less than 50% and his popular vote is modest.
Still what is rather arresting is that Trump gained support vs 2020 in almost every state, almost every district across the country. Part of what was so shocking-beyond him winning the popular vote at all-was that many of the states he gained the most were blue states.
Indeed, at a first glance what strikes you is that this is much more about the Dems numbers sinking than Trump’s soaring-this was not a Trump wave despite his gains across 49 of 50 states. He picked up about 3 million votes while Harris-Walz lost 6 million votes from 2020.
But that’s just it when you look at the final tally for 2024 the big story at least at first glance isn’t that Trump’s support spiked but that Democratic support tanked-again she lost 6 million votes from 2020 while he gained just half of that. If the Dems retain most of 2020, Trump’s modest increase-at least compared with what Harris lost-wouldn’t have mattered.
As to what explains this it’s hard to argue with the idea that her campaign ignored the base.
Kamala Harris was convinced to abandon her progressive ideas. So Democrats didn’t vote for her
Harris sought centrist Republican votes, experts tell John Bowden, at the expense of the Obama coalition. But Republican women didn’t end up turning out for her — and neither did a large part of the Democratic base
Harris was convinced not to run a progressive campaign. So Democrats stayed home | The Independent
As advised by Tony West and Mark Cuban-after her brother in law West “advised” her not to criticize corporate America, Cuban became her kind of corporate chaperone cum handler.
To be clear I think the freakout from the Left over Liz Cheney was much ado about nothing-they acted as if she was campaigning with Dick Cheney and that Kamala had agreed to a quid pro quo where in exchange for an endorsement and Liz Cheney’s willingness to campaign with her Kamala had vowed to invade Iraq again. To the contrary this was not about the post 9/11 era much of the leftists are perpetually stuck in but 1/6. After all, liberals like me had lambasted the GOPers for years-who said they were #NeverTrump yet refused to vote for the Democrat as the only alternative. If Kamala had publicly done what? refused the endorsement or to campaign with her that would make us look pretty hypocrtical. After all Liz Cheney had torpedoed her entire career to fight back against Trump’s attack on our democracy. And the 1/6 Commision owed a lot to her-had it not been for her you probably wouldnt have seen so many Republicans from Trump’s WH testify.”
I also don’t think there’s anything wrong in principle with campaigning for gettable Republican votes. I have also thought, however, for years that Democrats at least in the campaign consultant class are far too married to the idea that its about persuasion rather than turnout. Certainly both have their role in a campaign but the Democrats tend to focus almost entirely on persuasion while largely neglecting turnout. Comparatively the GOP doesnt make this mistake-to say the least-quite the opposite. Indeed one thing that GOP and Democratic campaigns have in common is they both look to maximize Republican votes…
Precisely because the GOP’s messaging tends to be so centered on red meat to the base for a long time I had assumed they’re ability to add on voters who aren’t far out there on the Right was limited but 2024 has disproved that.
How did they manage to pick up so many votes among non traditional GOP voters? We’re going to talk about this below when we return to Marcy Wheeler’s post.
It did seem like particularly after the convention she pretty much focused almost solely on GOP or GOP leaning votes.
J. Miles Coleman, executive editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, explains that the so-called “#NeverTrump” Republicans of 2016 are now either “standard Republicans or #Resist Libs”.
“You did have some of the suburbs around Milwaukee shift a little to Harris compared to…last time,” he noted. “[But] fundamentally, you know, it’s Trump’s party now… You probably have a lot of Democrats now saying, ‘We maybe, kind of should have focused more on turning out our base.’”
You can argue how many of these traditional Republican voters who didn’t like Trump were out there-a number a lot of folks have looked at is that Trump ultimately received 94% of Republican voters. Again I don’t have a problem in principle with trying to pick up gettable GOP or GOP leaning independents but she did seem to focus almost exclusively on as the campaign progressed.
FN: Per Tony West and Mark Cuban
And this I believe goes to the way the Democratic consultant class has long looked at campaigns where they focus almost exclusively on persuasion vs turnout. Their thought process is you’re base is going to vote for you no matter what so why waste time speaking to THEM? Again this is the opposite of how the GOP looks at it-they focus like a laser beam on the base-and this time at least-were able to bring a long a decent amount of low propensity voters not traditionally Republican.
Tillery, a professor at Northwestern whose 2040 Strategy Group projected in late October that Harris was in striking distance of turning out the requisite percentage of Democratic-leaning Black men to actually win, told The Independent that Harris’s campaign never made the sustained investment in turning out the Democratic base — rather than swing voters — which it needed to overcome Trump’s consolidated dominance of the GOP.
“The craziest thing is that the Democrats just — I don’t know if it’s overconfidence, [but] they just didn’t message to those groups,” Tillery said.
That’s just it-beyond the idea of anti Trump Republicans-again the questoin remains how many of them in 2024 hadn’t already left the GOP-the Dems always focus on independents and swing voters rather than the base implicitly assuming the base will vote for them no matter what they do. But clearly the GOPers don’t see it this way-they know while their base will vote Republican the question is not just percentage but volume and that some of their base are low propensity voters who have to be motivated. Indeed, even now post election-more than ever actually-you see the Dem consultant narrative is that Kamala Harris was too “woke” when nothing is further from the truth. Indeed, the more I think about what Bernie has said post election-quoted above-he and Pelosi really don’t disagree as much as it seems. She thinks the Kamala campaign was too leftist on cultural issues-despite all evidence to the contrary-while Bernie thinks the Democrats “abandoned the working class” in favor of “identity politics”-what does that mean other than the Dems should stop nominating women and candidates of color?
FN: Speaking of identity politics:
End FN
“In an age of digital ads, where you can message to those groups and the white swing voters that you really prize won’t even see those messages because they’re all on, like, YouTube?” he continued. “Yeah, just crazy to me that they didn’t do that.”
Exactly you don’t even have to decide between white swing voters and low propensity urban Black voters-you can target both.
Trump’s biggest successes in the 2024 cycle were his gains among younger men of all races, but mainly white and Hispanic men. He also made slight inroads with Republican voters, further diminishing the already-tiny share of registered Republicans who voted Democratic in 2020. That’s a statistic which is notable for how un-notable it is — in any other year, expected, but not after a sustained months-long effort by the Harris campaign to target white Republican women, moderate and conservative alike.”
Regarding Trump’s success with young men in terms of how he did it let’s go back to Marcy Wheeler-regarding the two elections on November 5.
Harris lost. But she lost differently in contested states and uncontested states. In uncontested states, the country moved upwards of 6% towards Trump. In contested states, Harris halved that movement by 3%. That is, where she followed the old rules of campaigning, persuasion, and GOTV, it worked, some, to counter the larger propaganda wave.”
And this is the kernel of hope for the future-assuming there will be real electoins in the future-rather than the kind of elections they have in Russia.
FN: And no, I don’t say this hyperbolically-as Vaush has acknowledged the #ResistanceLiberals have been proven right again and again and those of us most “hyperbolic” about Trump’s threat in say 2018 were proven right when Trump refused to concede in 2020. Remember when Trump told that Christian audience they just had to vote one time then he’d take care of it… It’s never proven very smart to play the “take him seriously not literally” game.
End FN
Meanwhile, a lot of people only voted for Trump. That’s why Democratic Senators are on pace to win four swing states that Trump won.
And Democrats had resilience down ballot in other places, too. A number of democrats in districts Trump won by double digits kept their seats. In several states, less conservative judges were kept. In Montana, the legislature moved left. In addition to most of the abortion referenda, right wingers lost referenda on school vouchers in ruby red states.”
Speaking of abortion… I’d say this was THE issue that was the biggest disappointment November 5. I will admit I totally missed what happened I never saw this coming. And as I touched on above, I totally drank the coolaid in the Seltzer poll that showed her winning in Iowa with a 20 point margin among female voters. Again what’s interesting is Selter was half right-she had men up 14 in Iowa and Trump would win men by 14 nationally. But women voted for Harris by only 10 points.
Indeed I will cop to having come into election day very confident-way too confident-she was going to win. Heck I never believed the polls that showed Biden behind either. I’d totally bought into the Hopium. The main reason for this was Dobbs. After the Dems overperformance in 2022 I’d figured that no matter what no way would women voters allow Trump to win again. And this is what most Dem elites had also assumed. Like Doug Emhoff had argued, I felt like the election would come down to Dobbs and democracy. How after January 6 and the overturning of Roe would Trump ever win again?
And this brings us to an even more fundamental conundrum of the 2024 election. Because Americans agree with Democrats-a strong supermajority support Roe. This is what makes it so frustrating. Because what we saw in November 5 is what could be called the Roe-Trump voters-they voted for abortion measures down the ballot but at the top of the ticket they voted for Trump. This happened in many states. Consider for instance Florida-the abortion measure won with 57% of the vote but Kamala Harris got only 43% of the vote. I have used the phrase voters who voted against their material interests more than once in this chapter-so far. What could be more stark than this? You want to protect a woman’s right to choose so you vote for Donald Trump? What explains this?! Greg Sargent:
Millions of female voters, millions of voters in general who strongly support abortion rights refused to blame the loss of them on the man most responsible for them being overturned. Indeed, there are now all those videos where people said things like Trump didn’t end abortion rights he just sent them back to the states-this was the same argument made by the anti abolitionists or those who opposed ending segregation. There were folks going so far as to say Roe was overturned during Biden’s term-so it’s Biden’s fault!
And this brings us down to a funamental fault line in this election. For the MAGA base it wasn’t despite al lthe terrible things Trump has done but because of it. But for these kind of low propsensity, low information, swing voters it’s not that they were ok with what Trump has done they genuinely don’t know what he has done or vowed to do. Which seems to those of us who regularly follow political news incredible yet it’s true. Many voted for Trump not because Dobbs is ok but they don’t know it was he who overturned it and has now pledged to instal some kind of national ban.
So what explains this disconnect? Why did the Harris campaign have such a hard time correctly pointing out to these voters that Trump is responsible for overturning Roe and that he will seek a national ban-through executive power? It turns out THE major divide in this election was more than anything between those who are informed and those were uninformed or misinformed.
The dichotomy is support for Trump decreases as news consumption increases. Like Trump did very well on election day with voters who consume NO news. Once again he wasn’t kidding when he said he loves the poorly educated.
Basically the more informed voters were the more likely they were to vote Democrat the less informed Trump. An Ipsos poll in October telegraphed where this was going:
But if informed voters preferred Kamala uninformed voters Trump, the big variable that separated informed vs uninformed voters was where they got their news from. Back to EmptyWheel:
Democrats are already at each others’ throat over whether politics could have worked better — who is to blame. Some idiots are arguing that Democrats lost because they’re too “woke,” as if they don’t know that “wokeness” was a propaganda creation the entire time, propaganda created by men waging cultural war on behalf of aggrieved men. We can come back to the two issues — Harris’ silence on Gaza and her cultivation of Republicans — that might plausibly have led Democrats to stay home.”
Only wish it was SOME-in reality it’s most at least among the Dem leadership class.
FN: One small kernel for hope was pointed out by Jen Psaki-in many ways the Dem elite reaction to November 5, 2024 is very similar to the Dem response to W’s win in 2004. As noted above, I’ve been thinking a lot about 2004 lately, after all it was the last time the GOP had won the popular vote until this year-though again, W’s win was actually considerably larger though even it wasn’t all that large-and W won the PV in 2004 after having lost it in 2000-and after winning the EV under dubious circumstances a la Bush-v Gore; similarly Trump won the EC with a minority of the popular vote and also dubious circumstances a la the Comey Letter. Despite this W-Trump appointed 5 of the 6 GOP Supreme Court Justices.Ag
As Psaki pointed out though, after W’s 2004 win the Dems freaked out over all the GOP’s winning anti gay marriage referendums. At that point the Dems decided the country couldn’t trust them because of gay marriage-though the candidate, John Kerry, hadn’t run on gay marriage. Similarly in 2024 the new “cultural extremism” was trans issues-the completely phony moral panic over trans women playing women’s sports.
Again, Kamala’s relative better performance in the swing states gives some grounds for hope-it’s not literally true that “nothing matters”-where Kamala did campaign she was able to close the gap in a very tough environment for the Democrats.
But given the larger dynamic of the race — that politics worked where it was done, but propaganda worked far better — Democrats would be far better to use the two months they’ve got to inventory their tools (one of which is that down ballot resilience), breathe, and think about how to counter the propaganda, because Trump will be in a position to keep doing what he just did unless Democrats find a way to counter the propaganda
One perspicacious observation late on November 5/early November 6 was that the Dems have mastered all the fundamentals of normal campaigning-but normal campaigning doesn’t have the return it used to. While her campainging in the swing states worked but not nearly as good as propaganda. This gets back to the fundamental divide between informed voters-who preferred Kamala-and uninformed voters who prferred Trump-where they get their news FROM. Once you begin to understand that a large number of voters preferred Kamala’s policies yet voted for Trump as they either didn’t know or refused to believe they were her policies it’s truly maddening.
“I’m not the only one making that observation. Michael Tomasky noted that Trump won on inaccurate perceptions about the economy. Amanda Marcotte wrote about this dissonance at Salon, pointing to a bunch of studies showing that people who get information from non-news sites prefer Harris’ policies but nevertheless voted for Trump.”
The problem wasn’t Democratic policy or messaging. It’s ignorance. As Heather “Digby” Parton wrote at Salon Wednesday, people backed Trump’s “aesthetics and attitudes” but knew nothing about his policies. Before the election, Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou at the Washington Post polled voters about policies without revealing which candidate proposed them. Harris’ were far more popular — even Trump voters generally liked her ideas more, as long as they knew they weren’t hers.
When voters have factual information about the candidates, they prefer Democrats. Polls from earlier this year show that people who consume news from journalistic outlets — newspapers, network news programs, and news websites — overwhelmingly planned to vote for the Democratic candidate. Newspaper readers clocked in at 70% Democratic support, and network news viewers were 55% Democratic. News website readers were only less so because the survey didn’t distinguish between legitimate sites like Salon and bunk outlets like Breitbart, but still: merely being a person who reads stuff makes you more liberal. In states where heavy ad spending helped educate voters a little more on Harris’ plans, she lost less ground than in places where that money wasn’t spent.
The problem is most people simply do not absorb quality information. Instead, increasing numbers of Americans have a media diet that is mostly a bunch of lies, conspiracy theories, irrelevant diatribes and other such bunkum that right-wing propagandists use to deceive people. A study released by Pew Research in September showed people were exponentially more likely to get “news” from social media detritus than legitimate news outlets. And those results almost certainly downplay the ratio of nonsense-to-real news, since most people taking the poll won’t want to admit that they mostly scroll TikTok all day and haven’t read an actual article in eons. Looking at newspaper sales and news site traffic, we can see that the consumption of reality-based news is plummeting.
So this comes down to a fundamental disconnect on November 5. Voters supported Kamala’s actual positions even as they didn’t vote for her-and this has been a long running problem for the Dems. This was a frustration I was having even during the Obama years. Voters will repudiate Democrats while supporting their policies. OTOH voters imputed lots of positions to Kamala she didn’t have-lots of scare stuff on immigration and LGBT.
As to what accounts for this-it all came down to where voters got their news from. Those who were informed voted for Harris. But informed voters mostly got their news from newspapers or legacy media-that’s on its way out of course. The uninformed voters who voted for Trump-or third party or stayed home-again, as we saw above the difference between 2024 and 2020 was the Dem ticket lost 6 million votes-whereas Trump gained 3 million. Of these 6 million voters it would be interesting to see what percentage of them had a media diet of right leaning social media.
So what can be done? Plenty it seems to me. One idea you’ve heard a lot about in the last few weeks is that we need a liberal Joe Rogan. Whether or not there is such a thing it’s important for liberals and progressives much less Democratic party leaders understand the new media landscape-that has really accelerated the last two years. Again this has been the paradox for the Democrats since the Obama years-a supermajority of voters support our policies but we are getting far from a supermajority of votes. When you think of “shellackings” like 2010, 2014, and a terrible defeats like 2016 and 2024-voters have empowered the Republican party while in large numbers not supporting their policies.
What the GOP has done is become very skilled at turning out low propensity, low information voters the last few years-voters who don’t support their policies. But again as Vaush argues it’s not about policies it’s about vibes. Certainly among low information voters. If as Vaush argues the US has been a populist country-arguably starting in 2010 with the Tea Party wave-it’s also true that we’re now living in a post truth America-remember the Tea Party refrain? Take your government hands off my Medicare?
Help Slate track the “Medicare isn’t government” meme.
FN: Regarding the idea of post truth America there’s a great book by David Pakman due to be published early next year
End FN
This was the first truly populist election. On the level of facts it was absurd-these voters empowered the Paul Ryan Republican party-Ryan’s own personal magnum opus was a plan to privatize Medicare. This btw is the problem with Populism-truth doesn’t matter to it wether on the Right OR the Left.
So what the GOP achieved in 2024 was a long time coming. Indeed in Chapter The Unreported Background we looked at Roger Stone’s triumphalist book about Trump’s 2016 victory-a big part of it was him taking a victory lap that 2016 was the first election where the legacy media was unable to maintain its role as arbiter of truth. This is very important-the GOP has been in a long run holy war against the truth-as, again, votes hate their policies. So the only way they can win is if voters don’t KNOW what their policies are.
In this vein I came across some very interesting work by Matthew Sheffield on the paradox of how the Republican party’s very unpopular policies don’t hurt them with voters. Sheffield himself interestingly is a former GOP operative. But he provides some fascinating insights into the difference between the two parties-and how the GOP is able to overcome the unpopularity of its own positions.
He actually wrote a post in answer to this question:
Matthew Sheffield on X: “Here’s my answer to the question https://t.co/SY9UYt3Zc5” / X
“Why Trump won: Democrats have a coalition, Republicans have an ecosystem.”
“Americans preferred the vice president’s policies, but her campaign messaging was overwhelmed by a titanic far-right ecosystem that Democratic elites refused to counteract.”
Why Trump won: Democrats have a coalition, Republicans have an ecosystem
Understanding and appreciating his distinction between a coalition and ecosystem is an important key.
This essay is the ninth in a series called “How This Happened,” examining larger trends in recent American political history and how they manifest in today’s politics. Please subscribe to receive future installments.
It’s not official, but it’s obvious by now that Donald Trump is going to return to the White House next January. It’s easy to blame the voters when your candidate loses, and I can understand the impulse. But the entire point of democracy is that the people have the right to vote for whomever they wish. Ultimately, if citizens make the wrong choice, the responsibility rests upon the leaders of the losing party.”
LOL I’m kind of two minds on this I admit-I blame them both, the Dem consultant class but also the voters. I mean if you don’t have either the time or inclination to educate yourself sufficiently just don’t vote-as it is these voters not only voted against their own material interests but mine and yours.
FN:
Like on Gaza I blame Biden for being such a cuck to Israel and Bibi-even while Biden privately cursed Netanyahu and seemed to understand what he was doing-and Kamala for not even having an American Paiestinian speak at the convention. But I also blame the pro Palestinian folks for making such a self evidently terrible choice. Again democracy can goof. You have the right to vote against your material interests but that doesn’t make you a genius.
These Genocide Joe people continue to live in a dream world-I mean this is NOT satire it’s actually real.
Back to Sheffield:
From a tactical perspective, Kamala Harris ran a great campaign. She won the single debate that Trump had with her. The Democratic grassroots was historically enthusiastic about voting. The crew behind @KamalaHQ was incredible. She raised a record amount of money for a presidential candidate. Her campaign had an incredible ground game operation. But it wasn’t enough because tactics are not strategy.”
This is such a key point. Indeed the tactics-strategy dichotomy is crucial and resonates with me particularly as I’m a chess player. Not a GM by any stretch-LOL-though I have gotten my rapid up to a high of 1431 after starting out as a beginner at 750. But what I can attest in my own development and progress is that a key moment for improving my game was when I discovered the importance of developing a good opening repotoire .
I credit one chess player more than anyone for heping me learn about openings-Gotham Chess! Before I started watching him I was sort of stuck in about a 1075 range-I’d tried and failed a few times over the past year and a half to rise over 1300 but had topped out at 1298 and spent most of the time in the high 1000s or low 1100s. After I started watching him in like June 2022 within a few months I’d finally crossed 1300 for the first time and by April 2023 had crossed 1400 for the first time
There are some debates in the chess world on the importance of a chess opening but I can say for myself learning about opening theory was a crucial moment for my development. I realized that trying to win a chess game without any opening strategy is like trying to win an NFL football game without watching game film of your upcoming opponent.
And chess is in many ways a very good analogy for many kinds of contests and competition. To win wether you’re talking about a chess game, a football game. a war or a Presidential election you’re flying blind with no larger strategy. Tactics by itself only takes you so far. But as Sheffield says it’s how the Democratic elites and consultants approach Presidential campaigns.
Despite their fantastic tactical abilities, the Democratic Party’s top leaders have been outmatched and outclassed strategically for over 40 years by their Republican counterparts. Most Americans completely disagree with the Christian supremacist movement that dominates the Republican party. Only 29 percent of the public, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, have viewpoints that could be described as “Christian nationalist,” but this small minority just convinced tens of millions of other people to vote for their hand-picked candidate and his down-ticket allies. MAGA did not win the election for Trump, it was people outside of it.
As the returns started looking grimmer last night, I feared that the election was going to be decided by the people who didn’t like the candidates. Now that we have the final exit poll data, it looks like that is exactly what happened.
He documents how-yet again-the double haters went for Trump. Iterestingly those who LIKED both Harris and Trump went for Trump-which demonstrates a truism: once you consider Trump at least thinkable there’s a good chance you vote Trump as the reason not to vote for him as he’s unthinkable. Sorry-I can’t get by the idea that he still hasn’t accepted the 2020 election-how is that NOT disqualifying?
Throughout his political career, Trump has always bet on getting people to vote for him who didn’t like him based on what political scientists call “negative partisanship,” people basing their vote on opposing an undesired candidate instead of supporting a favored one.”
To be sure, this is by definition the GOP playbook going back to the demonization of the Clintons in the 1990s-which is STILL be felt today. In 2016 it was Hillary’s emails, 2024 Biden was old etc. Because no matter how much you believe that Biden has faced cognitive decline how does that make J6 more acceptable much less Dobbs in addition to the fact that the Project 2025 advocates not just ending ACA but cutting Social Security and Medicare?
Again regarding all the lies the voters believed about immigration, the economy, and abortion-like that Trump isn’t responsbile for Dobbs and isn’t planning a national abortion ban it all comes down to the GOP’s willingness to lie on top of the very large GOP big lie machine
Trump’s victory was built on blatant lying, but it could not have worked without the far-right media machine that Republicans have been building for decades but which has mushroomed in size since the once-and-future president came onto the political scene in 2015.:”
Ok now the Democratic party’s coalition vs the GOP’s ecosphere. Which party sound to you to have the side of the bargain?
When you compare and contrast the Republican and Democratic parties, it’s crystal-clear that Republicans have created a sleek and modernized ecosystem, while Democrats oversee a tottering coalition based on outdated assumptions about how politics works.
Democrats have great tactics, but their strategy is obsolete. This is why Kamala Harris lost.
In internet age, media platforms matter far more than policy platforms.”
Compared with the GOP’s modernized ecosystem the Dems tottering coalition has no cohesion. This is a central problem with a coalition-everyone is out for what they can get for themselves and their particular coalition but nobody cares about the Democratic party as such.
I hate to say it, but I’ve been afraid this would happen for a long time. This essay is part of a larger series called “How This Happened” which I started in March when I began to realize that Democrats seemed to have learned very little from their 2016 loss to Trump, and that the party’s 2020 victory was primarily due to dissatisfaction with Trump’s pandemic oversight rather than a mandate for Joe Biden.
As both candidates headed toward the Election Day finish line, Kamala Harris’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon made a notable shift in tactics, moving away from the highly successful “Republicans are weird” attack toward campaigning as often as possible with conservative ex-Republicans like former House members Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.”
Again, I do think there’s been a little oversatement about Liz Cheney-the Left has acted as if Kamala Harris had agreed to invade Iraq in exchange for her endorsement. She didn’t campaign THAT much with her they had a few events late in October. I do think, however, that it was a mistake to move off Republicans are weird. Liz Cheney has been atacked by the Left to the extent of cheering when Trump taled about her getting shot by a firing squad.
FN: I GUESS the premise here is that this is revenge for her father’s lies getting us into Iraq? The Left came across as sexist as the Right here as if she IS her father. If you take it as revenge for Iraq by the same token should Trump be hit by a drone-seeing as he launched a record number of drone attacks?
But I do take the larger point-I do think it was a mistake that many of the things Kamala did earlier in the campaign-back in the halcyon days of August-during her Brat Summer-were dropped down the stretch.
One major disadvanate for the Dems is because they are a mutli ideological coalition-unlike the GOP whose various groups shut up and sing.
It was not always this way, however. Historically speaking, American political parties were multi-ideological coalitions. Liberal Republicans were commonplace and conservative Democrats were as well. All of that changed once anti-New Deal reactionaries began flooding into the Republican Party in support of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy.
Working in lockstep, far-right activists targeted ideological opponents in primaries, canceled journalistic and academic critics, and scaled up a media infrastructure from shoestring newsletters into a multi-billion-dollar behemoth that totally dominates YouTube, the preferred news and entertainment source of Generation Z. They also have come to totally dominate the podcast space, as I reported last month.
Through their efforts, reactionary Republicans managed to change the nature of who was in the party. It became an ideological vehicle similar to how political parties are outside of the United States, with a core of voters who agreed on its general direction.
Inside the Democratic Party, however, nothing like this has ever taken place. It remains a legacy coalition of disparate groups with wildly different objectives that often have little understanding or sympathy for each other, a stark contrast to the “fusionism,” the shared sense of purpose that early American reactionaries developed to link their unrelated struggles of fighting communism, secularism, and business regulations.”
As Sheffield discusses there’s a lot an ecosystem can offer that a coalition can’t match. Any Republican party Presidential candidate starts the football game with a big advantage.
As the head of a modernized, ideological party, Donald Trump’s general election campaign automatically started at the 30 yard-line. With a gigantic, and self-funding media apparatus keeping grassroots Republicans onside, he was able to focus almost all of his attention and campaign money on identifying and mobilizing “unlikely voters” who agreed with Republicans but were not strongly interested in voting.
The Trump campaign’s bet that it could motivate reluctant voters to show up was incredibly risky. It went completely against the conventional wisdom, as articulated in 2021 by Matthew Yglesias, that parties should focus on winning swing voters rather than bringing in new ones.”
I have to say intuitively I’ve never been a fan of the almost sole focus on swing voters-as articulated by Yglesias here that the Democratic consultant class swears by.
Again it’s turnout vs persuasion-and the Dems err almost entirely on the side of persuasion. Large partisan ecosystems have some big advantages over the Dems squabbling coalition-where each part of the coalition cares only about its own issues-not the party per se.
Powered by deep investments in social media activism, microtargeted ads, relentless evangelical missionizing, and Trump and running-mate J.D. Vance making scores of appearances on any podcast that would have them, the campaign’s wager paid off. Trump improved his share among Hispanic men by 33 percent and among Hispanic women by 15 percent.”
FN: One big lesson it seems to me is the Democrats have to learn to do more podcasts-especially with legacy media imploding. Wether they WILL learn it is anybody’s guess seeing as they seemed to learn so little from the first Trump Administration.
Social media platforms are filled with angry Harris supporters claiming that these reluctant Latino Trump supporters will soon change their tune once he inevitably betrays their interests in office. As much as I would like for that to be true, however, I don’t think it will be because large partisan ecosystems are great for both attracting and maintaining relationships with reluctant voter.”
Again the key is negative partisanship.
“Through advocacy media, they educate party voters to maintain negative partisanship, meaning that people who dislike the leaders will still be inclined to vote for the party. Advocacy media also helps co-partisans interpret negative information in a more favorable light”
Once again this is an excellent post which I recommend very highly-most of all to the Democratic party insiders as they’re who really needs to understand this. As illuminating as his article is, Sheffield leaves it here-I’d be interested his thoughts on how the Democrats could get away from this antiquated coalition system.
UPDATE: He linked to thisartcile on his Substack
Who is allowed to practice identity politics?
One thing I’m convinced of more than ever is that attacking “identify politics” OR trans people is NOT the answer. In doing so Democrats only shit where they eat-early evidence however shows that this is where theater criticism of Kamala’s campaign from both the Left and the Center seems to most reside in. The endless inveighing against “woke” has the inconvenience of once again kicking their own base in the teeth.
So these are things those of us in Blue America-much less the Democratic leadership class-needs to figure out-some kind of response to the GOP partisan ecosphere.
As I suggested above the one small glimmer of hope is that Kamala did better in the swing states-so normal campaigning was able to close the gap though to close it all the way the needed to have a presence on social media and the podcasts.
At this point I want to revisit the issue of populism. Above I discussed Vaush’s day after diagnosis for WTF happened?! I agree with a lot of it. Where I completely agree is the Democrats need to learn to campaign in narratives. Kamala had her strengths but that was not one of them-if anything she goes the opposite she’s too quick to except the narrative of the media or the GOP.
As I also discussed above I fully endorse the leftist critique of the Dems on the economy. Basically what Biden said about presiding over the best economy in years was true.
As Chris Hayes said repeatedly Biden presided over the best economy in his life time.
FN: link
However, the problem is this was regarding the macroeconomy. But on the micro level many voters have continued to struggle mightily-60% live paycheck to paycheck. This was the larger context of inflation-it wasn’t inflation by itself but as an extenuating circumstance-at the same time that Biden and the Dem Governors had not extended the relief payments and the expanded unemployment.
And again-I think both Bernie AND Pelosi-are on the wrong track wether Pelosi blaming trans people or Bernie once again lashing out at “indentity politics” which seem out of Bernie’s mouth to amount to whenever the Democratic party nominates a woman.
Where I do have some differences with Vaush to be sure is on the fraight issue of POPULISM. OTOH By definition I don’t ike populism-I’m a liberal. OTOH it’s been obvious to me since at latest after the Dems big Blue Waby a ve election of 2018 that the Dems weak knees version of institutionalism doesn’t work. No sooner had they won their big wave election-powered by righteous disdain for Donald Trump-you had Pelosi and her lieutenants lecturing us that ‘we can NOT have TOO MANY investigations’ or we would lose the public.
We’d just won big with the public and already the Dem leadership was telling us what we COULD NOT do. Again we see Greg Sargent cum Brian Beulter’s “hardball gap” between the parties. Trump and his GOP co-conspirators are currrently stinking up the whole country with their farts-they won a landslide-they won a HUGE mandate-even though they didn’t. Trump did win the popular vote this time but by a very tiny margin and the GOP has a vanishingly small margin in the House-hopefully Trump keeps poaching their members.
The problem is this is usually where the Dems stop-they pat themselves on the back for being reality based unlike the GOP-remember the W Administration’s dismissal of the “reality based community.”
What they don’t realize is that while the GOP always overstates their political capital-after 2004 W declared “I’ve won political capital and I intend to use it”-they’re modus operandi is not more beneficial: completely understating their own.
So in 2018 after winning a historic midterm the Dems were already trimming their own sails, negotiating against themselves. Putting aside the question of considering how many abuses of power Trump had engaged in how was it POSSIBLE to have TOO MANY investigations? With Trump that’s actually impossible. Next Pelos lecutred us that we shouldn’t impeach Trump-this would be self defeating-for the Dem leaders acting decisively in any direction is self defeating-after all he was “self impeaching.”
In this neologism of Pelosi was contained so much of the Democrats’ self defeating approach. Recently Vaush was on another rant against the Dem establishment, the DNC, etc. As a liberal it wasn’t all easy to hear-though I do agree with a lot of what he said-I disagreed with some of his dismissal of Kamala Harris as a candidate. One point I want to make clear is she COULD have won this election-much as I hate to agree with Cenk Ughur-he is right that had she continued the early strategy of the campaign she would have won.
Her big mistake was getting off her criticism of corporate America-her price gouging proposal was excellent, it was not just a good policy but very populalr with the electorate. Unfortunately she spoke to some insiders who talked her out-perhaps including her brother in law Tony West(!)
FN: See Atlantic piece linked above.
One point that Vaush made I fully agree with is that after January 6 the Dems made the big mistake of presuming he was disqualified-he was done. It had looked that way-as Mitch McConnell was clear in giving him responsibility as did Kevin McCarthy. Though both GOP leaders would keep giving Trump yet another inch-McConnell insisted that impeachment wasn’t the right remedy but that Trump hasn’t gotten away with it YET-there was the legal system.
Mitch McConnell Warns Trump ‘Didn’t Get Away With Anything,’ Can Still Be Criminally Prosecuted – Newsweek
Of course it would be McConnell’s own GOP Supreme Court he worked so hard to appoint-his refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing, ramming through Kavanaugh, the ramming through of Amy Coney Barrett with a week and a half until the 2020 election-that would say Trump COULD NOT be prosecuted.
Indeed, first the George W Bush cum Donald Trump Supreme Court handwaved away the 14th Amendment-as the 2000 Bush v Gore GOP Court had handwaved away the law which dictated the Florida recount had to be completed. John Roberts and his Republican friends flatly contradicted Mitch McConnell. McConnell had said impeachment wasn’t the right remedy rather he should be prosecuted. But Roberts said Trump could not be prosecuted UNLESS the Senate convicted him. Maybe McConnell should have had a chat with the GOP Supreme Court he’d worked so hard to appoint before not voting to impeach?
But the Dems too gave Trump inch after inch. After Biden’s victory he clearly had no heart for prosecuting Trump-his public statements made this self evidently clear.
Biden hopes to avoid divisive Trump investigations, preferring unity
Biden put out this idea very soon post his election victory-just over a week after, indeed despite the fact that Trump for the first time in history refused to recognize the transfer of power. Personally at the time I was freaking out-though even among many of my friends fellow liberal Democrats on Twitter I felt something of a voice in the wilderness. A lot of people really thought this was the end of it. Biden clearly thought it was over-even after January 6 he thought the country should JUST MOVE ON.
Flaw in this premise was Trump was never going to allow us to. Indeed, there’s a great irony that I was one of the most fervent #BidenRemainers in July as he had always been far from my first choice from the beginning. Certainly in 2020, indeed even in 2016 when many were floating the idea of him replacing Hillary clinton I was always very skeptical. After all Biden had the Anita Hill hearings, even more importantly in my mind was his support in 1982 for an abortion ban.
Believe it or not I actually got into an argument with a few female Dems on Twitter back in 2015 who completely dismissed my concern about Biden’s history on abortion and accused me of being man trying to control women’s genitals! Right I’m the one who wants to control women-by arguing they should get to make their own decisions about their body LOL
One of the worst things in politics is to be right too early-which basically sums up the last 9 and a half years of American politics. In 2020 Joe Biden was at best my third choice-my first choice had been: yep, Kamala Harris; my second choice had been Elzabeth Warren.
One big reason these were my top 2-beyond the fact that I’d been a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton-and I was perhaps one of the few men in our country for whom a female President is a featture not a bug-was that both Kamala and Warren had called for prosecuting Trump
FN: Find Harris link
Indeed here’s a very interesting article printed in Esquire in February 2020 which crystallizes the divide on how the Democrats should deal with Trump if they won the 2020 election-which of course they would go on to do. Esquire framed it in an excellent way: Kumbaya or Consequences:
Pete Buttigieg has a regular tagline that he uses in every one of his speeches. Right near the top, he asks his audience, “Imagine that great morning when the sun comes up and Donald Trump isn’t President of the United States.” He dropped it again on Sunday in the roundhouse gymnasium of Lincoln High School here. Then, as he usually does, he went into his customary half-JFK, half-Obama spiel about how a) the only way the modern Democratic party elects presidents is by choosing young, forward-thinking leaders, and b) about how any course correction is going to have to include the entire Democratic Party, independents, and what he calls, “future former Republicans.”
Now, frankly, I find this particular rhetorical line a bit weightless and very ahistorical. All of the successful Democratic candidates to whom Buttigieg is referring—John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—at least were elected statewide, and JFK was a national political figure who almost got nominated for vice president in 1956. (I presume Buttigieg’s leaving out Lyndon Johnson in 1964.) By this measure, Buttigieg, as a former mayor of a mid-sized city who couldn’t even get elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is a much longer shot for the Democrats to take. But, from a more distant perspective, Buttigieg might well be asking the only real question that matters.”
Elizabeth Warren Pledges to Prosecute Trump Administration Corruption
You know, in retrospect, I agree with this author-overall-beyond the narrow point he was trying to make for himself as a candidate who’d never held state office-it does seem a little weightless. OTOH I’ve always thought of Mayor Pete as an ok guy-like he may not be my first choice but certainly someone who if he won, I could live with. Then too, my sympathy for him probably ROSE when I saw all the Bernie Bros booing him. That struck me as so typical for the Bernie Bros-they were, I felt the other side of the coin of the Trump Deplorables. There was a certain iliberal energy in some of Bernie’s supporters-which brings us back to my point abouve about my discomfiture with populism wether of the Right OR the Left.
Unlike other Democrats, the Bernie supporters-who of course hate the party-couldn’t sit and nicely cheer the other candidates they HATED all the other candidates. Like in 2016 when the Bernie supporters linked arms with the Trump supporters in Philly during the convention chanting “Lock her Up!”
To be sure I only apply “Bernie Bros” to one type of Bernie supporter-those who said Bernie or Bust. Vaush was a Bernie guy BUT he came out very strongly against Bernie or Bust. However, Vaush doesn’t like Mayor Pete either-which I disagree with.
Yet reading Buttigeg’s homily here it DOES hit me as rather lacking in weight and substance. If anything it does give me some pause as a potential 2028 candidate-as he clearly aspires to be.
Back to Esquire:
There will come a day when El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago is no longer fouling the Oval Office. The sun will come up that day and all the rest of us will have to wander, blinking, through the rubble left behind because we allowed a criminal enterprise to run the Executive Branch of the government. What should the next president do? We had a dry run in 2009, when Obama took office and determined to run to earth neither the vandals who wrecked the economy, or the officials who turned this country into a nation that tortured people. “Looking forward, not back” became a slogan and then, alas, something of a punchline.”
Exactly-and for Gen Xers like me we’d seen that movie before in 1992 when Bill Clinton’s campaigin slogan had been ‘don’t stop thinking about tomorrow’ and Clinton and the Congressional Dems ended all the investigations into Iran-Contra-to say nothing of Iran Collusion Circa 1980 of which Iran-Contra was one episode of. Of course, the GOP “thanked” Clinton by investigating him for 5 years on the phony Whitewater investigation-THOUGH Clinton-against Hillary’s correct advice-agreed to appoint the Independent Counsel-which after Robert Fisk ran a fair investigation which proved there was no there there, was replaced by Ken Starr who locked up Susan McDougal for years for not lying about the Clintons and locked Monica Lewnisky in a hotel room for 24 hours and threatened her and her mother with 27 years in prison if she didn’t agree to testify against Clinton.
FN: Starr also refused to let her call her lawyer and tell him not to send in that letter thereby entrapping her into perjury.
So the Dems tried to JUST MOVE ON in 1993 and 2009 and the consequences were pretty terrible for the Democrats so in 2019-2020 I was desperate not to repeat this fallacy again. And spoiler alert-to a large extent this is what they did. Biden clearly preferred to move on because “unity.”
Mayor Pete, it turns out-I hadn’t followed him as closely-was also Team Kumbya
The damage facing the next president, whenever he is inaugurated, will be infinitely worse that anything Obama faced, even if the economy doesn’t crater again, and the odds on that are getting pretty good. The Republican Party, as was illustrated by the performance of its congressional caucuses in the matter of the president*’s impeachment, is drunk on constitutional vandalism. It needs to be burned down to ashes and something, anything, built in its place—a vehicle for conservative ideas that doesn’t lean on fantastical economic theories and splinter Protestantism. And the only vehicle available to perform that necessary task is, god help us, the Democratic Party.”
God help us. And this was February 2020. Speaking here in late November 2024, Esquire was right to pray-perhaps none of us prayed enough. What this underscores is that many of us were far from confident the Dems were up to this task as time has shown incontrovertibly they weren’t.
The only two Democratic candidates that have addressed what comes next are Buttigieg, who’s pitching reconciliation and healing, and Senator Professor Warren, who’s already committed herself to investigating and prosecuting such criminals as can be found in the outgoing administration*—and I think we can all assume that they will be fairly thick on the ground. Of course, Joe Biden maintains that he’s sure that, once he’s elected, the Republicans will lose the rats in their brains and willingly compromise with their old pal, Joe.”
Yep. No one’s theory of the case was worse than Joe Biden’s and he’s who we got. Biden honestly thought that once Trump was defeated that was the ballgame-he could just dismiss Trump as “the Former Guy” and everything would be back to normal like gk before the 2016 election again.
This also points to why he and then Kamala Harris failed to win this election: Biden seems to have no clue of how Trump happened beyond declaring him a complete aberration-which explains nothing. He was incapable of seeing even the reactionary froces inside the Republican party that led them to being a Trump cult much less why much of the larger country considered Trump at least a thinkable option who was NOT disqualified.
The cause of Trump’s 2016 win was the same as what reelected him 2024-low wages. And in the campaign Biden completely ignored wages-with all the legitimate bromides about how well the macroeconomy he failed to realize that this is cold comfort for voters if they’re own disposable income has decreased in the last 4 years. Kamala had some good ideas-corporate gouging, having Medicare cover home health costs-but she didn’t amplify or center in her campaign and in fact backed down on going after corporate gouging.
So we went down the road of Team Kumbaya-and we see where this got us-Trump will get away with everything and he’s back bent on retribution and revenge.. But in retrospect it’s clear how we got here-it’s the fallacy that Trump had disqualified himself in 2020 or at least January 6. No-he wouldn’t disqualify himself it was on the Democrats to disqualify him and they failed as largely they never tried.
Biden for his part never learned-even now that he’s lost everything, now that there is even talk that Trump could try to prosecute him in his DOJ-run by Pam Bondi who led Lock Her Up chants in 2016. Even now that his last remaining son has been politically railroaded and may well serve prison time President Joe has learned nothing insists he will neither pardon Hunter Biden nor commute his sentence.
Indeed for those who can’t understand why he never put any real conditions on Netanyahu-even as behind the scenes it was clear Biden had some inclination as to what Bibi was doing; see Barak Ravid-yet he simply refused to ever fight back in an effective way, he might curse Bibi privately in a passive-aggressive way, as he cursed Merrick Garland for appointing David Weiss as Special Counsel-it’s probably for the same reason even now he’s stubbornly insisting he will allow his last suriving son-after having to bury two of them-to be locked up under speciouis pretenses. His devotion to Respectability Politics is greater than his devtion to anything.
UPDATE: As we will see below I was wrong on this last point that he was going to let Hunter be railroaded and very happy to be proved wrong for once on these kinds of pessmistic premonitions.
And it’s no wonder he hates Garland-though just like he did nothing about Bibi but passive agressively grumbling privately he did nothing about Garland beyond the same-Garland’s terrible decision to elevate Weiss’s fishing expedition against Hunter Biden to a Special Counsel directly led to Hunter Biden’s conviction. Yet how much can he criticize Garland seeing as Biden himself chose inexplicably not to fire Weiss in early 2021-normal precedent which Joe supposedly so slavishly follows dicates the new Administration fires all the previous US Attorneys; Biden chose not to fire Weiss just to flex how nonpartisan, how ISTITUITONALIST he was.
Indeed, Biden’s speech after Trump’s win about how much his Administration accopplished rang hollow as Trump will undo everything other than taking credit for Biden’s economy. Seeing Biden gladhanding with Trump in the Oval after the election most of us didn’t see it the way Joe wanted us to-that “the system worked”-but quite the oppposite. Trump praised Biden for the seamless transition-that he refused to give Biden four years ago. It rung pretty hollow. The asymmetry. I have to say as a Democrat this felt all too familiar-it was like 2000 when Gore dismissed objections by Sheila Jackson Lee-as the votes in Florida weren’t counted. Once again, Dems can crow the system worked in defeat to fascism. Many of us are tired of being good losers.
Biden started off the wrong foot on literally his first day. Almost his first act was to assure he’s bringing back Chris Wrey-who had obstructed Democrats in Congress and refused to let them see intelligence on the Russia investigation as we saw in Chapter First Mistake
UPDATE: Further insult is added to injury seeing Trump recenlty telegraph he wanted to fire Wray-by nominating Kash Patel-and Wray meekly “obeying in advance”-falling on his sword in advance by announcing he was leaving when Trump got in giving Trump a gilded path to confirming Patel. But Wray aka Christie’s Bridgegate lawyer- is habitually compliant with Republican party preferences as has characterized his entire tenure.
He never fired Secret Service Director James Murray or SS agentTony Ornato-both who have a lot to answer for in terms of what happened 1/6.
The worst commentary on Biden’s failures in this regard of all is: Louis Dejoy was never fired. Then there was his reluctance to advocate ending the filibuster or expanding the Supreme Court. Yes they may have lacked the numbers to end the filibuster in 2021-2022-though I suspect if Schumer had wanted he could have at least nibbled at eroding it at the edges-but Biden should have at least begun to frame the narrative the filibuster should end, as for the Supreme Court even after it gave Trump Absolute Immunity he still was only willing to nibble around the edges on Supreme Court reform:
“Biden is pushing for three reforms, which he laid out in an op-ed in The Washington Post: term limits, an enforceable code of ethics, and a constitutional amendment to do away with the presidential immunity the Supreme Court recently invented to keep Donald Trump out of jail.”
How Biden’s Court Reform Proposals Could Work—if the Court Would Let Them | The Nation
What was conspicuously missing however was expanding the Court. As Eliie Mystal argued without court expansion it’s not clear how any of these things would be enforced, after all some GOP group would likely appeal these reforms TO THESUPREME COURT-the idea of a constitutional amendment is an obvious nonstarter. Yet Biden could imagine that sooner than a simple up and down vote in a Senate which had eliminated the filibuster and passed expanding the court on an up or down vote.
What Democrats need to learn-assuming they can ever learn-is that it was their job to disqualify Trump. The facts DON’T speak for themselves. Isn’t that clear by now? Again the good news is the voters agreed with the Democrats in 2024 on actual policy issues the bad news is millions didn’t realize this and voted for the party they totally disagree with. Figuing out how to bridge this divide over the next few years is what the Dems are going to have to figure out. One thing they need to get is that it’s a permanent campaign now-the GOP is always campaigning. Remember when Trump was campaigning while he was President-the first time? They need to campaign all the time and on social media. They will have to find their own niche but this is what needs to happen.
UPDATE: Once again I am pleasantly surprised to admit as I discuss below that the need for a permanent campaign has been acknowledged by some of the leading candidates for the next DNC Chairman
I agree with Vaush the party needs to narrativize. One very good point I heard on a show by that GOP operative I mentioned above is that the Democrats have tended to understate their role as the party of social progress. And that post eleciton narrative the last few weeks has been all about the alleged rampant “wokeism” that’s pretty much nonexistent-certainly within the Kamala campaign. The Dems are the party of social progress but they act embarrassed by it and so understate and minimize it-then are accused of being “inauthentic.”
Even less do they embrace their fine record for economic progress. Above we looked at some numbers which show how far superior the economic record of Democratic vs Repubican administrations are. What Sheffield explains is the extent to which their ecosystem sells a particular party brand of the GOP. The Dems have the issues on their side and each colalition in their larger coalition supports X issue or Y issue but this doesn’t transfer to support for the party as such.
One way would be to frame a large narrative of the democratic party. The party of civil rights and progressive economics. Of FDR and his New Deal who gave us Social Security and Unemployment Insurance, of LBJ with his Great Society who created Medicare and Medicaid. The Dems should celebrate this history but it seems since Jimmy Carter they’ve tended to soft sell it if at all.
Politics has changed drastically in the social media age, Democrats have not
Again what should be abundantly clear after this election is that you can’t assume low information voters know ANYTHING regarding politics. While it was pretty hilarious when it emerged Jill Stein doesn’t even know how many members of Congress we have, probably many who voted for her didn’t know that either. The mistake the Democrats made-certainly I did-is to fail to understand that millions of US voters spend little to no time educating themselves on the issues of importance in our politics.
On the the conventional wisdom that a big failing of Kamala Harris was when she couldn’t name any way she’d be different than Joe Biden I have to admit even in retrospect I have mixed feelings on this.
Right now the very widely held consensus take is that Biden should have dropped out back after the election of 2022. Everyone agrees with Nate Silver now. I, however, was a fervent #BidenRemainer until the bitter end. So am I prepared to admit the error of my ways? I remain conflicted. I agree I missed the level of anti incumbent sentiment-that has been worldwide the last two years-though looking at it form an international standpoint Kamala-Walz and the Dem Congressional candidates actually outpeformed what was a very tough environment. That leads you to the plausible argument that Biden should have gotten out sooner. It’s plausible though I’m still conflicted.
I still wonder that if you ARE the incumbent party you won’t win by pretending you aren’t. My skepticism of dropping Biden in July, 2024 was based on long historical precedent going back to 1932. Between FDR’s landslide win over Herbert Hooever, and Trump’s loss in 2020, the incumbent party had an 8-0 record when it ran its incumbent unopposed. OTOH the 5 parties that had either primaried or forced out their incumbents were 0-5-this was back in July, 2024, now we can add the 2024 Democrats the record is 0-6.
Again what happened on November 5 makes me think twice-maybe there’s some truth idea that this is a different era and inumbency is no longer the advantage it was, indeed, now it’s a disadvantage-Nixon always saw a record as a rap sheet-but I’m still not sure and ironically while Alan Litchman has gotten a lot of crap-as he announced his keys said Harris would win-he COULD just fall back on the idea that incumbency is an important key. I remain conflicted.
But even if dropping Biden WAS the right thing to do I remain very skeptical of the idea that Harris’ response to the question on how she would be different than Biden was a no-brainer. It still strikes me as a very fraught question. Again for an inumbent party to give up and agree-‘yeah the last 4 years have been awful’ doesn’t seem like an inspired strategy.
Interestingly there ARE SOME even now who argue Harris erred in the opposite direction-that she should have embraced Biden. I love this idea for a few reasons-one is I love a nice contrarian take, secondly it’s more in line with my own priors.
Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidency to Donald Trump because she ran an awful campaign.
Ok apologies for interrupting him after one sentence but I don’t agree she ran an AWFUL campaign though I think she made serious mistakes that lost her a winnable-if difficult-election. Again-as noted above-on a relative basis the she and the Democrats actually outperformed relative to other first world incumbent parties and candidates.
Opinion: Harris could have defeated Trump by embracing Biden
UPDATE: The idea that dropping Biden was a big mistake was one shared by many of my Dem friends and followers back in July.
End FN
“Contrary to received wisdom, this was not because she did not adequately distance herself from President Biden — rather, it was because she did not embrace him sufficiently.”
The two dominant issues in the election cut in Trump’s favor. Both were grounded in the experiences of most voters (apart from those doing well enough economically so as not to notice. Each of us has purchased something recently for the first time in a couple of years and been astonished at the increase in its price. This, coupled with the increase in the price of everyday goods, made us feel overwhelmed economically. We want relief. Trump promised us that relief — even if the relief he promised was a mirage.”
Again I have to quibble-did he really? What was the promise? 20 million deportations led by the Pentagon? Tariffs that would amount to a steeply regressive tax hike? What I guess this amounts to once again is Vaush’s point: it’s about vibes. Trump sounded angry-and he was but not because of the struggles over the average American but because the judicial system was rightly trying to hold him accountable-not very effectively true.
OTOH this is exactly right.
Real wages in the U.S. have been stagnant or decreasing for most workers since the 1970s. This occurred while income inequality has soared, and while the top 1 percent own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of the population. Many of us have felt this wage stagnation and lack of wealth less than we might have imagined because of the progressive inclusion of women into the workforce; that means family income fell less than it would have otherwise. But that effect is waning, and many are living from paycheck to paycheck, where a dying washing machine affects what they eat for weeks.
Again this the original sin of Biden’s entire agenda-the notion that after he beat Trump there would be an epiphany. The reason Trump was even possible is the fact of stagnating wages since the 1970s.
Joe Biden endeavored to address the second problem, but to do so, as we emerged out of the pandemic, he created short-term inflation. Given short-term supply problems, to ensure that the U.S. did not sink into a severe recession — or even into a depression — this inflation was necessary. While avoiding a recession or depression, Biden created millions of jobs and kept unemployment low. Most people struggled, but the alternative would have been much worse for many of us. ”
To quibble once again-I think Biden did a number of good things but he was too quick to end the Covid relief checks and the expanded unemployment benefits-which is one reason perhaps many voters look back at the Trump years as better: during 2020 thanks to the relief checks and expanded unemployment disposable income had risen. OTOH my perception is the supply chain issues are what caused the inflation not Biden’s policies.
Biden brought some industry back to the U.S., while combatting climate change. Biden was our best president since Franklin Roosevelt.”
Or at least since LBJ. Here I agree entirely with the first paragraph then disagree with the final part of the second:
Harris could not run from the reality of inflation nor from structural changes in the U.S. economy, but she could have explained what she and Biden have done to ameliorate them, to prevent them from getting much worse. She could have told us a story that made sense of our current situation.”
Yes and this is why IMO the idea that she should have manufactured this framing where she insisted she’s entirely different from Biden on every point was quite mistaken and why even now I’m far from convinced the Democrats would have been better off had they done an open primary-this would be an admission the last four years were a failure-if so then why not support the opposition party? The Democrats were the incumbent party and couldn’t win by running against themselves.
UPDATE: Place below at end of this section on Biden-Harris. CF Back to Brunch and how Dems failed covid response helped Trump win-regarding her point that Biden’s legislation is excellent but won’t be felt YET while the curback in Covid relilef was felt immediately. Lawrence O’Donnell piece with Pete Buttigeg-Pete finally admits Trump lied to him about infrastructure.
Conspiracy theory? that PACE Mark Cuban MAYBE the reason so many of the big Democratic party donors wanted Biden out wasn’t because they were certain he would lose but rather the fear he could still actually win? Considering Cuban was so opposed to Biden’s tax proposal?
Here though I disagree:
Would such a story have convinced all voters? Of course not, but it would have been more effective than her comments and ads telling us that she was going to go after price gouging. Very few voters believed that she had any idea how to address their economic woes, and she failed miserably to convince them otherwise.”
Actually the proposal to do price gouging was very popular with voters-not only were voters upset about rasied prices they did believe the cause was corporate price gouging. Her mistake was to back off of it.
FN: As we saw above evidently at the advice of among others her brother in law Tony West who then appointed Mark Cuban as her corporate handler.
End FN
Again her mistake was to see the GOP narrative that she was a “San Fransico liberal” as something to worry about-if she had run on the $2,000 monthly checks she’d proposed in June, 2020 she would have won going away.
Her proposal for expanding Medicare to cover homecare costs was excellent and extremely popular but she didn’t talk about it much after floating it.
UPDATE: I’ve thought about many of these questions a lot in the six weeks since the terrible day of November 5, 202 when I started this long chapter a few minutes into the next morning.
Its clearer to me then ever that Kamala Harris was to paraphrase HRC in her 2017 book What Happened-ON HER WAY TO WINNING in August during the halcyon days of Brat Summer.
FN: HRC had pointed out correctly that shewas on HER way to winning until the Comey Letter.
End FN
I feel up through the DNC convention Harris-Walz were on their way to winning-even Nate Silver at one time thoguht it was possible she could “meme her way to a win.”
So what happened? A few things. One if that Trump obviously colluded with RFK Jr aka Mr. Wuhan Lab Leaks
FN: crazy 2000 pages of conspiratorial lunacy
behind the scenes for him to drop out. At the time it didn’t seem to have that much impact but in retrospect it’s clear it DID have an impact. It seemed to smother her convention bounce.
More fundamentally the consultant brain people got to her-as we saw above they directed her to drop “Republicans are weird” and “we’re not going back” ie all the stuff that made the early campaign fun-the whole reason she had chosen Walz was “Republicans are weird”-the Dem consultants in all their infinite (un)wisdom “suggested” she drop it as it’s TOO NEGATIVE-these are the alleged EXPERTS on political campaigns and they think “negative” is a bad thing in a campaign to which I have three things to say: negative partisanship, negative partsanship, negative partisanship.
Then Tony West got to her and urged her to drop corporate price gouging or anything that made Corporate America “uncomfotable” or “unsafe”-turns out corporiate price gouging is for them a “microaggression”-turns out there was your “wokeness” in the campaign.
Its also been more and more clear and self evident that the “communication” that dogged first Biden and then Harris was the failure to talk about the economy the right way. But the problem goes back to the entire paradox of Biden’s in many ways very impressive economic record. After the election
Julia Doubleday and Walker Bragman wrote an article at The Gaunlet entitled aptly enough “How Covid Helped Trump Win.”
She argues as I had discussed above that Biden was far too quick to end Covid relief programs. She’s critical overall of Biden’s approach to Covid-in what she calls his “Vaccine only approach.”
On the promise of stability—and with credibility leftover from the Obama administration—Biden won in a landslide, taking back the Blue Wall and thrashing Trump by 7 million votes nationwide. His party, meanwhile, won the House and Senate, and scored key victories in the state races in a census year, ensuring fairer legislative maps for the next decade.
But once in office, Biden’s pandemic management strategy looked very familiar. Instead of following the science and putting workers’ lives before corporate profits, reopening was always the first priority of the new administration, as it had been under the previous one. Armed with the new COVID vaccines and positive early data indicating they were 90 percent effective at preventing transmission of the disease, the new administration decided, as one staffer told The Washington Post, to “vaccine our way out” of the crisis. Without waiting to assess whether vaccine efficacy would wane with time (it did) or whether COVID would quickly mutate around vaccine protection (it did), the political project of “ending the pandemic” began. Nonpharmaceutical interventions and the layered protection strategy many public health experts had been hoping for went out the window as the president moved to put the crisis in the rearview, declare victory, and move on.
A more holistic approach would have seen a push for clean indoor air—something that would also have prepared us for outbreaks of future airborne pandemics, like say, an H5N1 bird flu outbreak. By now, we could have had CO2 monitoring and HEPA filtration as our “new normal,” as well as public education about these tools.
Among the many casualties of this vaccine-only approach was federal pandemic relief. Key programs began expiring shortly after Biden took office without a fight from Democrats. The last round of stimulus payments went out with his American Rescue Plan in March 2021 and were notably $600 shy of the $2,000 he and his party had promised during the Georgia runoffs—Democrats defended the discrepancy by noting that in December, $600 checks had already gone out (with Donald Trump’s name on them). Other programs would quickly follow suit like the Small Business Administration’s restaurant revitalization fund, which ran dry in March 2021. The Paycheck Protection Program ended that May.
In August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium lapsed, prompting freshman Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush to lead a protest on the steps of the Capitol. While she briefly succeeded in shaming the administration into announcing a 60-day extension of protections, the right-wing Supreme Court ultimately killed the plan. The next month, the expanded unemployment programs came to an end.”
Again as I’d argued above I certainly agree this was a serious mistake.
Beyond the devastating human toll, the Biden administration’s COVID response was political malpractice for Democrats and laid the groundwork for Trump’s return. The expiration of COVID relief meant that millions of Americans who had been receiving aid from the federal government under Trump lost it under Biden. The virus continued wreaking havoc on the workforce right as inflation was taking off and the Federal Reserve was hiking interest rates. Many Americans who had managed to save money during the early days of pandemic exhausted those savings by September 2021. The combination of rising prices and loss of relief more than likely fed many Americans’ negative perceptions of the recovering economy.
While Biden did sign major pieces of legislation aimed at creating jobs—the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act—their benefits would take years to be fully realized. ”
Indeed. In many ways politically speaking Biden’s approach was the worst of all worlds. The good things he did in terms of this excellent legislation won’t be felt until the future while the negative impact on people’s lives of winding down covid relief prematurely was felt immediately with the inflation from Covid adding yet more burden on workers.
One thing hard to deny is that Biden is a very unlucky man-his life in many ways has been very tough with all the deaths of those closet to him as well as he’s own health problems. As President he’s been entirely snake bit. He really achieved a number of very impressive things in terms of legislation but he gets credit for none of it-even now as a lame duck his approval rating remains stuck at 39%.
The other night on Lawrence O’Donnell, Lawrence and Pete Buttigieg discussed all the infrastructure projects that Biden got through Congress-truly amazing. But again he’s the unluckiest man, NJ Demo Governor agreed to stand with Trump in front of a new bridge just build that was thanks to Biden’s bills but Trump will get credit for…
FN: Get link
But I also keep thinking about Mark Cuban actually telling people at a campaigiin rally that HE TOLD HARRIS that if she supported Biden’s tax plan he would CAMPAIGN AGAINST HER. And I can’t help but wonder about all the donors post July 27 that demanded Biden step down. Was this because they believed he couldn’t win? Or where they not entirely sure he couldn’t even then and wanted to be sure.
Just a conjecture regarding the motivations of the big donors leaving Biden in droves post June 27 but in retrospect interesting to look at what Seth Abramson said in his warning regarind the danger of a Elon Musk shadow presidency inealry October:
It is only speculation to say that current Vice President Kamala Harris, current vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, and the Democratic Party can overcome the unholy trinity of 500+ MAGA influencers inside the United States amplified by various means—including financially—by the Kremlin, social media platforms run by unscrupulous far-right billionaires whose brotastic “libertarianism” is merely a fig leaf covering an aggressive neo-fascist bent, and a business sector (i) terrified of a future wealth tax, (ii) seduced by promises of Elon Musk slashing regulations left and right as a handpicked Trump “government efficiency czar,” and (iii) the idea that when businesses fail it’s not because of bad management or market factors outside the control of politicians but liberal bugbears like DEI, ESG and CRT.
The business sector fear of the propsect of a future wealth tax-like Biden had proposed-was pretty widely held even among some of wealthy class who purported resist Trump and support the Democrats a la Mark Cuban who as we saw above couldn’t have been more explicit-his warning about campaigining against Harris if she supported Biden’s wealth tax makes it clear that even for an allegedly liberal leaning billionaire like Cuban Trump was still the LESSER of two evils if a wealth tax was behind Door # 2.
FN:
Democrats Can’t Keep Ignoring Covid in 2024 | The New Republic
(1) How COVID Helped Trump Win
Ignoring Public Health May Have Cost Democrats the Election | The New Republic
To return though to the fraught subject of populism I find myself in a pretty precarious position. OTOH I have as is clear in this book a lot of criticism for our institutions. I think Biden’s version of respectability politics has been disastrous. I find myself feeling like a kind of liberal anti institutionalist. It’s been clear to me since 2019 at the lates that institutions will NOT save us.
OTOH I really don’t like populism-this is true definitionally as I’m a liberal. Just why I don’t is brought out very well by the very interesting and important work of Yuval Noah Harai.
He makes some very thought provoking points. One is that information isn’t truth. Another is that democracy isn’t about truth-ie in a sense it’s morally neutral. An election doesn’t reveal the truth at most at best it reveals the preferences of the voters. But because they prefer a particular candidate doesn’t prove that candidate was the better candidate. Indeed this is what happened this year-the voters goofed as they voted against the candidate they actually agreed with and would have been far superior to Trump.
I seem to recall Zizek-in one of his many books-pointing out the fact that historically philosophers have always been quite ambivalent about democracy. This is not surprising considering that philosophers are obsessed by the notion of metaphysical truth-there is non truth in democracy only voter preferences.
Because of this morally neutral aspect of democracy, for it to work we need a certain level of instituional trust. But of course this is exactly what has been missing the last 15 years or so-again going back to the Tea Party wave of 2010. And as Harai persuasively argues democracy can’t survive without trust in institutions. Populism he argues has no room for truth or any other standards. As for trust it no longer matters as popullism naturally ends up in authortarianism-this is no less true of the Left than the Right. This explains why the Bernie Bros linked arums with the Trump Deplorables in Philly at the DNC convention in 2016 chanting “lock her up!”
UPDATE: Of course Hannah Arednt had a lot to say about populism none of it good.
Populism through the eyes of Hannah Arendt: Now and Then • Eyes on Europe
End FN
In this vein Josh Marshall had an article on the problem the Democrats face going forward as a party of institutions in an era of distrust:
A key reason that many people are Democrats today is that they’re attached to a cluster of ideas like the rule of law, respect for and the employment of science and expertise, a free press and the protection of the range of institutions that guard civic life, quality of life and more. On the other side, say we have adherents of a revanchist, authoritarian politics which seeks break all those things and rule from the wreckage that destruction leaves in its path. So Democrats constantly find themselves defending institutions, or “the establishment,” or simply the status quo. Yet we live in an age of pervasive public distrust — distrust of institutions, leaders, expertise. And not all of this distrust is misplaced. Many institutions, professions, and power centers have failed to live up to their sides of the social contract.”
A Party of Institutions In An Era of Distrust – TPM – Talking Points Memo
Absolutely and that remains the challenge for liberals-to restore trust in instituions they have to start working again-which will likely take fairly large reform.
In short, Democrats are by and large institutionalists in an age of mistrust. And that is challenging place to be.
What puts a finer point on the matter is that Democrats often find themselves carrying the water of institutions which do them no favors or are even affirmatively hostile. I think of this a lot when it comes to the establishment press. Civic democrats should and generally are in favor of a free and vital press. But that doesn’t or shouldn’t mean the press exactly as it’s structured right now. That’s not only wrong on the merits; it’s a losers’ game.”
Clearly this book spends most of its time with sharp criqitues of many of our insttutions-starting with the FBI. Indeed it’s always been more than a little ironic with the facile way so many Democrats defend the FBI which literally elected Trump in 2016. One aspect of Dem respectabiilty politics is that there’s an unwritten rule where Democrats have to only nominate Republicans to run the FBI-which as noted in revious chapters still has never had a Democratic Director in its history. I also take a lot of time in this book to critiicze the mainstream false equivalnce media. The media is constnatly being worked by the GOP faux outrage over biased coverage.
Then there’s the filibuster and the Supreme Court which Biden and other old guard Democrats seemed very reticent to change. Indeed this goes back to the question of what Kamala should have said regarding how she is different than Biden. Regarding the question of change for some reason this is always framed in terms of who’s in the WH. What about Congress? Structurally it seems the electorate always blames the President if the economy isn’t great. This was the insight Mitch MConnell had in 2009-that it was costless for the Congressional GOP to obstruct Obama because if this undermined the recovery he’d be blamed-as he’s the President.
UPDATE: Recently David Dayen had a post over at The Prospect that discussed McConnell’s scorched earth opposition to Obama in 2009
What We Have Here Is a Rudderless Ship – The American Prospect
What really strikes me about this is how different this is than the stance of so many Democrats currently in the waning moments of 2024-you have John Fetterman saying he may VOTE FOR PETE HEGSETH or KASH PATEL.
Jen Rubin link.
I mean hey-Patel SAID he wouldn’t prosecute Liz Cheney or Adam Schiff-after saying he would the last three years and writing a book in 2023 that vowed to do same. Trump himself has also repeatedly vow to do it with the House GOP recently already putting out a pretextual report that argued for prosecuting Cheney. But Patel told Fetterman April Fools! so what’s there to worry about?
Then there’s Ro Khanna who argues with a straight face that maybe the reason the Democrats lost is they weren’t nice enough to Elon Musk-Biden failed to invite himi to some WH dinner in 2023 or something. Both Fetterman and Khanna-unfortunately they are hardly the only Democrats arguing thus at present commit the crucial logical fallacy that since Trump won and his approval rating is relatively higher than it was in the past the Democrats should “get over their Trump Derangement Syndrome”-Khanna literally uses the words Trump Derangement Syndrome and find ares of agreement.
As Jen Rubin says where can the Democrats compromise on say 20 million deportations, threatening journalists or locking up political opponents?
But the idea that if Trump is popular now-he’s not THAT popular at most we’re seeing about 50-50-Democrats should basically refaiin from challenging him in any way is upside down logic if you’ve ever seen it. It’s not how McConnell proceeded in 2009 to say the least-and it was depressingly effective-his wager proved right voters blamed Obama for the GOP’s obstructionist refusal to in any way cooperate withi Obama in working to achieve economic recovery.
Dayen:
Democrats have a plan to take on Donald Trump in 2025; just ask them. But you’d have to ask all of them, because they all have a different plan.
John Fetterman thinks Democrats should give Trump a pardon on his “bullshit” hush-money case, and support his executive branch nominees, even the controversial ones. Jim Clyburn also favors a Trump pardon, but to create a “clean slate” for the future.
Many Democrats, from Adam Schiff to Ro Khanna to Bernie Sanders, are citing points of possible agreement with Trump and shadow vice president Elon Musk. Some are doing this to look “reasonable,” others perhaps to move some discrete items forward where Trump has made a rhetorical overture, others perhaps to set up an attack later if the common ground fails to emerge.
Sanders and Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado are playing footsie with Trump aides like Health and Human Services secretary-designate Robert Kennedy Jr. Others, however, are highlighting specific conflicts of interest among Trump cabinet nominees. Still others are saying that nobody cares about the cabinet.o
UPDATE: Here Seth Abramson calls out Bernie here for this crucial strategic mistake
FN: This was in contrast to the Great Depression where the country united in the response. In 1934 believe it or not Republican leaders were reluctant to oppose FDR too much-arguing that the public expected them to at least let FDR try.
CF: Aint you glad you joined the Republicans?
To be sure the GOP response was pretty much besides the point-as they were such a small minority in Congress at the time-which would get even smaller the next few elections. So the big picture lesson remains-we have to end the filibuster-as it’s unlikely we’re going to see Democratic majorities of that size again any time soon.
And it worked-as most voters apparently treat the economy as a referendum on the President rather than Congress. Which brings us back again to the vibes based aspect of elections. Ini principle why isn’t it a referendum on Congress? Ideally the best answer for Kamala would have been to blame Congress. There IS precedent for this-Harry Truman ran against the Richard Nixon’s Do Nothing GOP Congress-and it worked.
UPDATE:
But this brings us to THE serious shortcoming of Kamala Harris as a candidate. To be clear-again democracy goofed. She WOULD have been a great President. I fully believe that. Unfortunately she wasn’t a great candidate. I mean most folks are crude Hegelians-so she’s now a “bad candidate” because well she lost, she’s a loser because she lost. That’s as deep as they go into it.
She had her strengths-the campaign was doing very well in August. To be clear I have been right about many things the last 9 and half years of Trump-in terms of how bad he and his party would be, how bad the mainstream media would be etc. But I got 2024 wrong. This is once again because of the radically changed media environment of the last two years-where so many low information voters got their information from Right wing influencers. If you want to understand why I and many Democrats were wrong again you have to look at that Iowa poll where Seltzer had her up by 3 the Saturday before the election. Seltzer was half right-she had Trump up by 14 with men. This actually proved correct at least according to the exit polls, Trump won the male vote by 14. What Seltzer had wrong was women, she had Kamala up by 20 with women, but per the exit polls she won women by only 10.
So Trump won the gender gap. How? One early revelation by some Kamala campaign fokls was that they had a hard time convincing swing voters that Trump was responsible for Dobbs-even though, of course, he is… Again we go back to Vaush’s argument: it’s about vibes not facts. These 15 to 20% of voters in many states who voted for abortion rights AND Trump are why I, Ann Seltzer, and many of us in the Dem base proved fatally wrong.
And this brings us to a very telling interview James Carville had on Greg Sargent’s podcast yesterday. Carville argues persuasively that the Democrats need to learn where all these low information voters-like the millions who voted both for abortion rights and the man who took away abortion rights in many parts of the country and who-per Project 2025-will look to take them away nationally-got their information from. Only then can we figure out what it would take to attempt to correct the disinformation.
Yet Carville went off on a few other tangents in Sargent’s interview that were indicative of a narrative that’s all too common in Democratic elite circles post election-that the Dems have to make sure they don’t get caught protecting trans rights. His insistence that trans people are NOT the civil rights issue of our time is belied by the grotesque dmegoguery of foilks like Nancy Mace and Friends where we’re literally talking about people being deadnamed and banned from bathrooms. He also repeated his snide talk that the Democrats have too many preachy women in the party.
This points to another fallacy-that the Democrats need to focus more on male voters as it’s what Trump did. But this ingores that male voters are the GOP base so for Trump to double down on them makes sense as its doubling down on their own base. OTOH it’s great if the Dems could win more male voters but NOT if it comes at the cost of losing more female voters. It depends on how you intend to win them over-if it’s by talking less about abortion rights thaat would be a huge mistake. The Dems keep making this mistake it seems to me where they think the way to win is to cater to not their own voters but to Center or Right wing voters. Like if you want a xenophobic immigration policy you’re never going to prefer the Democrats-you’re going to prefer the 160 proof version to Bud light.
The reason for Harris’ defeat was she wasn’t able to win enough female voters-10% was a shockingly low margin. The issue is NOT that women don’t care about abortion rights just that the women who don’t follow politics regularly and keep up with the news failed to appreciate that Trump is more responsible than anyone for the overturning of Roe. OTOH Carville is right-Dems need to find these Trump-Roe voters and show them their mistake.
The one thing the Dems definitely can learn from the GOP is that this is a permanent campaign now and much of it is on social media. So Carville’s proposal of doing research for where these Trump-Roe voters get their news is inspired his talk of throwing his own base under the bus is the opposite.
The media terrain is very tough in terms of the parament campaign. As critical of I have been about the legacy media in this book the idea that it is on its last legs is nevertheless very disconcerting. OTOH the legacy media has earned the criticism it gets.
FN:
Marcy Wheelers notes how in the storm and strang over Trump nominating Kash Patel to take over Trumpland the FBI the media focuses only on narrow criticisms of the pick-like he hardly has the normal credentials for the position-ignoring the big threat he is for intelligence, security, and the Rule of Law
Of coudrse to the extent Vaush is right that this is a populist anti institutionalist era the focus on instituaionl niceties may well not seem so compelling for the larger number of low information voters who just elected Trump 2.0 Absolute Immunity Edition.
End FN
That doesn’t mean the implosion of the legacy media is something worth celebrating-quite the contrary.
So at the end of the day there’s a lot of blame to go around for how we got here. You have the continued feclessness of mainstream media and the leadership Democrats
But the “cure” is worse than the disease. As Kyle Kulinski has pointed out as much criticism as legacy media deserves-as is clear from this book no one has been more critical of the mainstream media than me-so-called “independent media” is worse.
(1063) BERNIE TO TRUMP PIPELINE | The Kyle Kulinski – YouTube
Regarding my paradoxical position as an “anti institutionalist liberal”-a phrase I use advisedly because by definition we need institutions but the only way to repair them is to restore trust and that only happens when they start working better again-who hates both the Democrats’ respectabiilty politics AND populism the latest absurdities of Cenk Uyghur underscore the case against both populism AND so called independent media well.
There’s so much here. First of all it makes the author above’s point that popullism always carries within it dicatatorial tendencies. Cenk is now going full Jimmy Dore-it’s important to remember that while very late in the game Cenk finally called out Dore; after basically allowing him to sexually harrass Ana Kasparian for years-though ironically Ana has been leading the race to become Jimmy Dore herself-Dore and Dave Rubin got their start with TYT.
With these recent tweets it’s official-Cenk has gone full blown Nazbol-ie, a classic leftist fellow traveler of fascism. Indeed as we saw in Chapter Fascist Creep there’s a long veritable history of this going back to the 1928 Comniterm-Stalin was a Nazbol where leftists come to despise establishment liberals MORE than the fascists, indeed that fascism has always been a kind of fusion between the Far Right and the Far Left. But his aside about being in the jungle is also telling-he’s celebrating the fall of legacy media but what so-called independent media is supposedly replacing it with his far worse a la Kyle Kulinski.
Vincent Artman on X: “https://t.co/hjDc4dNTFu” / X
Indeed this basically completes a long term Right wing project -CF Chapter Roger Stone-of destroying the media’s ability to be an arbiter of objective truth-now we’re in the era of “what is truth?’-where it’s whatever you want it to be. Again that the legacy media itself contributed greatly to it’s own downfall hardly makes this any less terrifying-as again, without trust in the media and basic institutions democracy can not work.
2024 was the dream walking of Roger Stone and Friends-where low information voters got their news from Right wing propagandists on social media-a la Instagram, TicToc, to say nothing of Elon’s Fake News-for some reason he loves the letter X.
It’s quite accurate to suggest had Musk not taken over Twitter Trump would not be President Elect today. So this rise of “independent media”-that is in reality far more corrupt than even legacy media-in light of all the money these Right wing pundits take a la Tim Pool, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin-AND for that matter Cenk-is directly responsible for the victory of American fascism.
You might say then that Cenk’s lauding of this is worse than naive. But, of course, it’s even worse than that seeing as the last few years TYT itself has amplified the same lies about crime and immigration used on Fox News.
FN: See where Cenk’s own nephew found compelled to call him out.
(1063) How The Young Turks Pushed a Right Wing Propaganda Story | Hasanabi Reacts to Jose – YouTube
Here is another terrible Cenk take for his then upcoming Thanskgiving debate with nephen Hasan:
A few thoughts here. First of all it’s interesting to note this is the same narrative of many centrists.
I mean talk about letting the Right win control the narrative-now the Dems need to do a video to correct every lie the GOP tells about them? The idea that the Dems should work this hard to prove the negative is absurd-I mean should Harris had been on her knees as she assured the public she was significantly opposed to trans women in sports-seeing as there are maybe 6 such cases in high school in the entire country?
BTW Colin Aldred, Ted Cruz’s Senate opponent literally said he’s opposed to it and still lost.
But this is why Cenk claims Hasan is “woke”-unless you explicitly say the worst thing in the world is trans girls playing high school soccer you’re on the “woke radical Left.”
Clearly the moral panic over trans people is the 2024 version of the 2004 freakout over gay marriage-and Cenk and Ana are doing everything they can to redpill their own left leaning audience-thereby making fascism more palatable to leftists At this point he and Ana Kasparian are basically the Grayzone-Cenk is Max Blumenthal maybe Ana is Aaron Mate
This is literally the fallacy of the Grayzone “Left Right alliance” a la the Brown Red alliance
As Vaush put it in a pretty intensive takedown of Jimmy Dore a few years ago the whole point of “Left-Right allaince” or “MAGA Communism” a la Caleb Maupin cum Jackson Hinkle is to make Far Right not to say fascist ideas acceptable to leftists.
Worse than naive is a pretty apt way to describe Cenk’s recent euphoria after getting a single terse response on X by Elon Musk. On November 18 he tweeted out to Elon Musk-more on this below but it’s quite arguable if Elon hadn’t bought Twitter Trump would not have won that election.
That’s all it took-this very terse four word sentence to send Cenk absolutely swooning. He basically spend the next few weeks rhapsodizing over how wonderful the MAGA Right wing is-after all, DEMOCRATS never told him SPECIFIC SUGGESTIONS ARE WELCOME
Cenk decides this represents some major political shift or realignment.
I mean there’s so much wrong in this little screed where do you start? I mean the Republican party is STILL run by religious nuts. This is what’s so frustrating. Indeed the conceit behind the Left’s’ freakout over Kamala Harris going to a few late events in October with Liz Cheney is that the Republican party of Bush-Cheney remains the threat failing to realize that that party is gone-they also miss the trivial fact that Liz Cheney isn’t literally her dad.
Like Cenk and Friends-this is a very common narrative on the Left-think that Trump’s victory has made the Republican party somehow less of a threat when it’s quite the opposite. Indeed there’s a common belief that Trump defeated the GOP of Paul Ryan. But what was the cornerstone of Paul Ryanism? Phasing out Social Security and Medicare.
Yet Cenk Uygur thinks the party of Trump, Elon Musk, and Pete Hegseth is better than the party of Biden-Harris who has Bernie himself admits was the most progressive Administration since FDR-though I’d argue since LBJ.
As for religious nuts, Christian nationalism has never been more triumphant than under Donald Trump-again Dobbs was the culmination of a 45 year fight of the religious right. As for the right to commit “heresy” try criticizing Donald Trump as a member of the GOP Congress and see how far you get. Trump’s win has not been a victory over Paul Ryanism but rather it gave Paul Ryanism a much more attractive bottle.
Indeed, what led to Liz Cheney’s demise was she dared criticize Trump’s coup. Cenk celebrates the fall of legacy media missing the fact that as bad as it is so-called “independent media” like what he does is worse indeed this is how Trump won-by all the misinformation and disinformation including on The Young Turks-who leaned in to the lies about crime and the demonization of trans people.
As for Elon Musk it’s very arguable if he hadn’t taken over Twitter Donald Trump would not have won as he has magnified disinformation since he took over. He’s also engaged in far more “censorship” than the previous regime just to the benefit of the Right-basically every week I’ll come across a message that “this is a tweet from an account you muted” and it will be a big liberal account I follow and certainly didn’t mute.
UPDATE:
Ideology Is Making Our Politics Dumber — The Casual Analyst
As of 11 days ago, Musk has made $70 billion dollars since Trump’s victory.
How Elon Musk added 70 billion dollars to his wealth since Trump won
During the election Musk employed every dirty trick he could to put his thumb on the scale to the benefit of Trump including illegal ones.
Elon Musk Gets Away With Buying Votes as Case Against Him Falls Apart
Then starting in July he started rigging his algorithm even more in the favor of himself and the Far Right
Beyond the $100 dollar checks Musk sent to people even some who didn’t sign the petition
People get $100 without signing America PAC Petition | 9news.com
was the $45 million he spent on misdirection ads around Gaza, etc.
Much of this was about suppressing Kamala’s vote.
Inside the Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris voters
A multipronged dark money effort by advisers to Elon Musk targeted liberals, Jews, Muslims and Black voters with ads that were not quite what they seemed.”
Basically they went to Jews and accused Kamala of being pro Palestine and to the pro Palestinian folks and made the opposite accusation:
Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel
What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post.
Since the election what’s stood out is just how much influence Musk appears to have-while during the election I’d suspected JD Vance might turn out to be Trump’s Dick Cheney, post election it’s looking like Musk himself may turn out to be his Dick Cheney as Musk has had his finger on everything-he’s sat in on conversations between Trump and Zelensky-we won’t get it but really need a readout of THAT conversation-with Turkish President Erdogan, and with Iran’s U.N. Ambassador.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Trump will finally get tired of Musk and send him packing don’t know-again if Trump won thanks to Musk, maybe he can’t send him packing.
UPDATE:
During the election I had thought if God help us Trump won-but God didn’t help us-Vance might be his Dick Cheney. Now it’s looking more like it might be Elon Musk
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/elon-musk-might-end-up-becoming-a-political-puppet-master-under-trump-says-a-key-zuckerberg-ally/ar-AA1vor0J?ocid=msedgntp&pc=ASTS&cvid=da8c3b586d644c599848ebc0200bc106&ei=11
UPDATE: When Musk first took over Twitter Nate Silver-and for that matter Noah Smith-hailed the move as the opening of a new era of free speech
UPDATE:
Elon Musk spent at least $277 million backing Trump and the GOP. Here’s where all that money went.
(1) Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆 on X: “Mr. Free Speech wants to crush the ACLU https://t.co/DnwsO3JUIU” / X
Finally hearing from a Kamala campaign operative about the Elon Effect
UPDATE: The Pardon.
I was pleasantly surprised. If I had to bet I thought the odds were less than 50% that Biden would do it but he did-and good for him. I had figured he’d hang his hat on occupying the moral high ground-which would entail his last living son going to prison based on a wholly politicized prosecution. When the news of Biden pardoning Hunter came out Sunday night the reaction was very telling. OTOH there was lots of the usual tut tutting from the mainstream pundits.
Nate Silver’s freakout was fairy representative-if very unintentionally funny
This is interesting on a lot of levels as it’s very rare for Silver to speak in a normative rather than positive way-therefore you can never really criticize him too easily as he’s just being ejective and scientific, etc. But here he lets his mask slip much like Elon did post Butler PA. Musk represented it as the assignation attempt on Trump changed something for him but in reality he’s been leaning GOP for years-he had explicitly told Twitterers to vote GOP in November, 2022.
Similarly I suspect this freakout by Nate was less spontaneous than opportunistic as was Musk’s alleged Road to Damascus moment post Bulter was. Many seemed to see Biden’s pardon-in response to a politized prosecution- as an opportunity to let the mask slip.
This was interesting. The Mooch quickly followed up with this tweet:
Hmmm-but not him right? Indeed, if you peruse Scaramucci’s tweets it’s clear he’s huge crypto guy-Silver’s heroes on The River. So clearly no matter who he voted for his the Mooch’s material interests have been greatly benefitted from Trump’s win.
Substantively speaking, what exactly has someone a white, privileged, white dude like Nate had to tolerate? I mean does it compare to women like Rick Wilson featured on a YouTube video who the state of Texas told could not have an abortion even to save their own lives? The many rape victims who now have less rights than their rapists post Dobbs? Nate would probably gloat it wasn’t a salient political issue this election.
How about the trans people who are now been demonized on a level reminiscent of Nazi Germany-or the Jim Crow South in light of Nancy Mace’s demand that the first trans Congresswoman use the male bathroom? The millions of Latinos who will be hurt by Trump’s promised mass deportations? Or the 60% supermajority of Americans living paycheck to paycheck? Nate-who works for Peter Thiel’s Polymarket, which also sponsors Cenk’s TYT thinks those problems are trivial next to what he’s had to tolerate.
Guess the author of that song “Nobody knows the trouble I have seen nobody knows my sorrow” has nothing on a fatcat member of “The River” like Nate.
UPDATE: Regarding Silver’s indignation over Biden not letting his last living son go to prison over completely trumped up charges the question that begs is how he felt about all the corrupt pardons Trump did. Destiny documented some of Trump’s many corrupt pardons.
Destiny | Steven Bonnell II on X: “https://t.co/z30XB7L0yw” / X
Makes you wonder if Nate was AWARE that Trump has actually done many corrupt pardons.
(4) Deva Hazarika on X: “Just checking something real quick https://t.co/gAO022bSE7” / X
Turns out though there’s always a Nate Silver tweet.
A lot of the Never Trumpers interestingly also had a very tut tut reaction to The Pardon too. Supposedly by pardoning Hunter, now Trump can pardon the J6ers and the rest of his co-conspirators.
Now let me just say as a general prospect, I like the Never Trumpers. I like Tim Miller. But strongly disagree with his take:
I just don’t see it as I don’t see that Biden pardoning Hunter thereby makes him the same as Trump-‘no better than Trump.’ I don’t see that because Biden pardoned his last surviving son who was the victim of an egregiously political prosecution he’s now no better than Trump.
FN:
19 Thoughts On The Pardon Of Hunter Biden
I don’t really agree with Beutler that Biden should have commuted Hunter’s sentence rather than pardoning him prior to-because even then you have the spectre of serving time for conduct that no one without the last name Biden would have served however I do think he makes a good point here:
“Very few Americans grasp how obscene and unethical the GOP’s treatment of the younger Biden has been. That reflects the moral and strategic failure of congressional Democrats and Merrick Garland, who together fed Hunter to the wolves rather than excavate the full truth of Trump 1.0’s corruption of DOJ. If they’d done the latter, Garland would’ve been well positioned to terminate the case long ago. They bent to fear of perceived partisanship rather than act in the interests of justice.”
Part of it is Marcy Wheeler has continually stressed a major failure of the media. But another part is that Biden/Garland let it get here in the first place. OTOH you can certainly criticize Garland for acceding to Weiss’ demand that he be made SC but OTOH it was Biden who needlessly declined to fire Weiss-as was normal for a new Administration in the first place-as usual Biden was so concerned with the optics.
End FN
I generally like Tom Nichols-he has a really excellent book that seems particularly germane at this moment-called the Death of Expertise-which relates to the point I made above on the problem with populism-by definition you can’t have a healthy democracy without a base level of respect for expertise.
FN:
End FN
But I just don’t see this:
Completely agree with Rachel Bitecofer here:
I mean the idea that there will be costs seems pretty unlikely-I mean there hasn’t been yet. There have been no costs for anything Trump has done-not stealing the 2016 election, not the blackmail attempt to force Zelensky to do a phony investigation into Joe Biden in later 2019 after Pelosi declined to hold Trump accountable for Russian Collusion, There were no costs for J6, no costs for stealing 100s of classified and/or sensitive documents as he-finally-walked through the door.
No costs for the many accusations of sexual harassment, sexual assault, or rape-he’s a convicted rapist. There were no costs for all the corrupt pardons he did in his first term. And he’s more powerful now than he was in the 1.0 version as now the Republican Supreme Court has explicitly ruled he has Absolute Immunity. So the idea that for the first time ever there would be costs for Trump’s abuses-if only Biden had allowed his son to be unfairly imprisoned BY TRUMP-doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Basically all the Never Trumpers–excepting I believe Rick Wilson-had this tut-tutting reaction-again I generally like these folks just disagree with them on this. The mainstream media pundits of course we’re all in on the tut-tutting-HE LIED HE LIED which just on a matter of simple logic they don’t KNOW-Biden may well have reconsidered-from what we have heard from the Biden WH he begun to reconsider around Thanksgiving-cemented in his decision no doubt by the nomination of Kash Patel with his enemies list.
FN:
Kash Patel’s Bonkers Enemies List Doesn’t Just Target Democrats
End FN
The idea that NOW Trump has carte blanche to abuse his power-for the first time evidently!-doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Indeed:
100% IS GOING TO DO MORE THIS TIME NO MATTER WHAT BIDEN DOES. What are you 12?” / X
About as low an IQ take as Cenk Uygur’s belief that Trump maybe one of the good guys-really!-as if the last 9 and a half years didn’t happen. When Elon Musk-Cenk says the Democrats are the bad guys for taking money from billinaires yet he likes Elon who’s the richest man in the world and made billions of dollars from Trump’s win-simply said he was ‘open to all specific suggestions’ Cenk creamed his pants. apparently he missed all Musk’s recent tweets about the real ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ is Social Security.
Liberal pundits like Jonathan Chait also joined in the tut tutting.
(1) Jonathan Chait on X: “https://t.co/TZUIPFZL7v” / X
I mean I guess who’s sympathetic is subjective-frankly many do find Hunter sympathetic. If you have heard him speak I find him fairly sympathetic-he comes across as a nice, regular, humble guy to me-I’m not the only one.
BREAKING: JOE BIDEN PARDONS HUNTER BIDEN OF CRIMINAL CHARGES
What’s most sympathetic about Hunter Biden as far as I’m concerned is he was only prosecuted because of who his father is. And that’s the BEST argument for the pardon putting aside politics or the idea that doesn’t pass the laugh test that Trump wasn’t going to pardon the J6ers UNTIL Biden pardoned his politically railroaded last surviving son.
The pardon is completely defensible on the substance as top legal minds have made clear.
Indeed if you want the best argument against the idea that this was a corrupt pardon check out what a Trump supporter sent me-thinking it WON his argument:
It’s as if he didn’t read the second paragraph.
Of course the MSM who could care less about substance went full But Her Emails-Bezos went full blown Dean Baquet on Her Emails:
Indeed, I think Adam Carlson hit it on the nose on the media pearl clutching.
This article in Politico underscores this mainstream media illusion.
“He was right to pardon his son,” said Anthony Coley, a former Biden Justice Department official. “His rationale for doing it, which is that the prosecutions are political, is wrong. Republicans will use Biden’s rhetoric as a supposed proof point to try to reform and recreate DOJ in Donald Trump’s image.”
‘He could not be objective’: Biden risks sullying his legacy to protect Hunter – POLITICO
This IS NOT the point. But I guess this is how all these pearl clutchers are taking it: it’s NOT that all prosecutions are political just that the prosecution of Hunter Biden was-going back to Trump’s attempted shakedown of Zelensky in 2019.
What was very interesting regarding the response, however, was while most of the MSM and pundits were engaging in the usual moral panic, Democratic voters reacted quite differently-as a Dem on Twitter I can attest that I haven’t seen such near universal agreement since Dem Twitter turned against Kirsten Gillibrand after she forced out Al Franken.
If anything the level of agreement has even been greater-Dems LOVED the Hunter Biden pardon. With Franken, probably 90% opposed Gillibrand’s demand Franken resign-as did I. But the support of The Pardon among Democrats here-at least on X-was pretty much 100%-I got more engagement on any tweet I’ve put out there in some time-after all Elon has systematically amplified GOP content while doing the opposite of Dem content. My pro Hunter Biden tweets went fairly viral-at least compared with recent subpar engagement
While as I argued above the media is pearl clutching on the false premise that these norms can be kept alive if we just continue the pretext that they are-even though they’re not-it’s interesting to unpack WHY Democratic voters-at least on social media-loved this move by Joe Biden so much. In this vein let’s go back to Josh Marshall who we quoted above regarding the Democrats’ precarious position as an institutionalist party in an era of distrust of institutions.
FN: Note Mike Kinsley himself called out populism all the way back in 1988.
Another insightful post here by Josh:
Over the past couple weeks, the thought of President Biden pardoning his son entered my head a few times. I tossed it around: good or bad idea? I could see it both ways. I still can. But I am fine with his decision. I’m glad he did it. Biden learned the right lesson: no one gives a fuck about norms. It’s unquestionably true that Hunter Biden wouldn’t be in this position if not for his dad. That’s basically the justification Biden gave. And he’s right. It may sound angry or cynical to say “no one gives a fuck.” But I mean it both in a general way and in this particular way: the reason for Biden not to do this was to allow his son to remain collateral damage of the GOP war against his presidency and to leave him in the hands of the Trump DOJ for at least the next four years all to make a point of principle about being better, different, more righteous, more norm-honoring than Donald Trump.”
Josh Marshall on X: “The Pardon https://t.co/nuqHRR3COh via @TPM” / X
Exactly. This is it: Democrats are sick and tired of being good losers. I know I am. This is why I was suprised-even in Biden sitting down and playing grab ass in the Oval after correctly calling him out as a fascist threat to democracy Biden once again played to type: that the Dems win something by being good losers-sure we lost but we WON the moral high ground.
This book has gone into painstakingly granular historical detail of my own experience over 32 years of being an adult Democrat of voting age-1992 was the first election I was eligible to vote. In those 32 years I don’t have enough hands to possible count in one sit in the number of times the Democrats have been good losers-in Chapter Whitewater I chronicled how Clinton killed the Iran-Contra investigations in 1993 then agreed to appoint the IC that became Ken Starr in 1994-Hillary had rightly urged him not to do it. How different history might have been if he had listened.
There was Bush v. Gore 2000 where Gore didn’t even bother to appeal the Republican Supreme Court’s pushing aside the law that said there must be a recount in Florida to appoint their preferred candidate in George W. Bush.
There was Obama 2009 doing exacty what Clinton did in 1993-‘Let’s look forwards not backwards’-believe it or not-wish I was kidding-it turns out Democratic consultants convinced Kamala Harris to drop “We’re not going back” in August 2024 under the premise it was: BACKWARDS LOOKING. Dems are always trying to LOOK FOWARDS-like when the Dem House in 2019 worried about “too many investigations of Trump” before they were even sworn in and Biden in 2021 before Trump even vacated the Office he lost during a months long failed coup declared he didn’t want to investigate Trump but sought “unity”-see above.
UPDATE: Regarding the Kamala campaign more you learn about it the clear it becomes that this was a winnable election-it was a very tough environment but it was winnable and the one thing I DO agree with Cenk on is that if the election had been in August Harris-Walz WOULD have won. What happened? She started listening to some-really bad-advice from the Dem consultant class. As I touched on above, a consultant did indeed advise her to stop using memes about “weird” and “we’re not going back.”
Over the line came a lot of praise, but also some suggested tweaks. First, said veteran Democratic numbers man Geoff Garin, summarizing their analysis, stop saying, “We’re not going back.” It wasn’t focused enough on the future, he argued. Second, lay off all the “weird” talk — too negative.
Inside the fast-moving launch of Kamala Harris for president | CNN Politics
I mean those were literally two of their best most popular lines-indeed the whole “weird” meme was what led Kamala to choose Tim Walz in the first place-if it weren’t for “weird” he likely would not have been the nominee. As for “We’re not going back” that had the added convenience of being organic-Kamala had used that phrase as a throw away line at an early rally and after the crowd started chanting it back at her it became a meme. Apparenlty Geoff Garin in his infinite wisdom doesn t do memes.
As a matter of trivial fact the whole point of “We’re not going back” IS about going forwards not backwards-the idea was people were determined not to go back TO TRUMP. But evidently this was too subtle for a Geoff Garin. So two of the most popular early Kamala campaign memes-remember brat Summer?-were gone.
Indeed looking back I had not liked when Kamala had told her crowd to stop chanting “Lock Him Up”-it seeemed like literally dousing your own supporters with a sprinkler. At the time I saw an explanation that argued this was the right move for her or otherwise it could damage the cases against Trump. I wasn’t entirely sure I bought this but in the moment accepted PERHAPS there was truth in it. In retrospect this looks like it based on the same premise of dropping “weird” or “we’re not going back.
Above I’d quoted from ES-find name-who talked about the lack of negative partisanship in the Dems attack. Apparently Garin and Friends has never heard of negative partisanship.
FN: This touches on a point that Vaush has made repeatedly-that it’s NOT ENOUGH to go through a laundry list of good policies-in this vein he even admits that Bernie himself-who Vaush is obviously a big fan of-has this limitation. It’s important to have a narrative-not just good policies but also who are the villains? He argues persuasively there is something Democrats SHOULD LEARN-wouldn’t want to be that they do learn-about the public reactoin to the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
(1098) Why Does Everyone Love The Healthcare CEO Assassin? – YouTube
To be clear it’s not that murder is good just that many folks have a hard time having any sympathy for him-after all this is someone who has denied life saving medical treatment for many many people-and presumably slept like a baby after doing so.
The point is that a political narrative needs a great cause as well as enemies and opponents-something the establishment Dems who run the party utterly fail to get.
Of course Democratic VOTERS have a very clear villain-Donald Trump and his GOP co-conspirators. But during the Trump years Dem leaders have preferred to treat Trump as an aberration rather the logical conclusion of the Republican party. Indeed, we see that even with Trump, Geoff Garin and Friends discouraged being “too negative!”-I mean the hatred of Trump by the base is a gift it puts Democrats on the 40 yard line in any election yet they chose to look this gift horse in the mouth?
End FN
At the same time apparently Harris spoke to Tony West and dropped her proposal for corporate price gouging; again, later in the cycle Mark Cuban publicly stated he’d warned her that if he didn’t drop anti corporate rhetoric he’d drop his support.
What’s so incredibly frustrating in all this is that Kamala WOULD have been a very good President-of this I will go the grave believing. While workers were worried about the cost of living and stagnating wages-again the one major economic indicator that dropped during the Trump was disposable income-Kamala AND a Democratic Congress had they elected them would have begun to turn this around. But, of course, neither Harris nor the Congressional Dems made this connection-that the CHANGE could be electing Kamala with a Democratic Congress-that this was why her and the Dems weren’t able to do more to improve things for workers. But once again they didn’t make this argument-as noted above Truman ran against the GOP Congress in 1948 so there is precedent. But this takes us back to what I believe was a fatal shortcoming of Kamala-she tends to accept whatever narrative is put in front of her.
But back to THE PARDON-why has there been almost universal support and, indeed, excitement over this? Democrats are really hungry for ANY sign that the party is finally fighting back and not acting as if there’s some prize for occupying the moral high ground. Among Democratic Twitter there was real defiance and disdain towards elected Dems like Senator Mike Bennett or CA Governor Gavin Newsom that joined in the tut tutting
Indeed many Democrats seemed to think what the President did with the Hunter pardon was something worth replicating.
To this tweet by The Editorial Board I responded:
This quickly emerged as a very widely held view among Democrats:
BIDEN PARDONS HUNTER. NOW PARDON 10 MILLION OF THE REST OF US – 12.2.24 Keith Olbermann
When I said that I meant it but also as so often is the case suspected that Biden would never contemplate anything like this-indeed my assumption was that he probably would let Hunter rot in prison over a blatantly political prosecution over his usual obsession with following norms as he remembers them being followed back in the 1970s, my guess had been he’d as usual let this injustice go forward against his own last surviving son just so he could take a victory lap over once again occupying the alleged moral high ground.
The idea that he could engage in a kind of mass pardoning of potential targets of Trump’s vow to do to all his political enemies what he had done to Hunter Biden seemed little more than a pipedream. So when I so the story that his WH was now suddenly seriously considering just this you could have knocked me over with a feather.
Marcy Wheeler argues against it though I have to admit I don’t think I agree with her to the extent I’m following her argument.
Kash Patel’s Bullets – emptywheel
You Can’t Pardon America’s Way Out of Trump’s Assault on Rule of Law – emptywheel
FN: She makes a few arguments-one is that there’s simply no way any blanket pardon could ever be exhaustive and by definition that’s true. Still in my mind even if you don’t have enough to treat the entire village doesn’t mean you treat no one-you do the best you can.
While she understands why Biden pardoned Hunter she argues this is suboptimal as there had been some very good avenues for discovery. Sure-but obviously Biden’s priority was preventing his son from going to prison on politically motivated trumped up charges rather than see him go to prison but have some good appeals to make later. She was on Nicole Sandler on 12/6 and argued that the people on this level have many economic and legal resources to fall back on.
Emptywheel Fridays on the Nicole Sandler Show 12-6-24
She also pointed to successful cases like Peter Strozk’s or AJ Delgado. Sure but this took years-Strozk won after six years. Personally I’d rather never be prosecuted than being prosecuted maybe even going to jail on politically motivated charges then after years of big money on legal fees I win. I guess my preference is DOING SOMETHING rather than passively waiting for Trump to start prosecuting people then hoping for the best.
To be sure it’s a complex question-as she says these pardons may not even protect everyone but my feeling is you’d rather get caught trying rather than waiting and hoping the system will work.
End FN
Again I’m very pleasantly surprised Biden is even having this conversation. When I thought he was going to hold good on his vow not to pardon Hunter I was prepared to declare it was more evidence he’d learned nothing after all these years even now that he’s lost everything.
Most Democrats love the idea of broad pardons-just yesterday morning Trump repeated his claim that members of the J6 Select Committee should be prosecuted-despite the trivial fact they committed no crime once again underscoring the threat. Why is this? Because it feels like the Dems are finally taking off the gloves, ditching the respctability politics-when they go low we go high-and presmuming that if you can occupy the moral high ground that gets you something. To the contrary you have completely brilliant people like Nate Silver declaring that if they claim to occupy the moral high ground they have to literally be perfectly pure in all they do or they’re no better than the guy who still to this day hasn’t conceded the 2020 election-he again turned down a call to do it yesterday.
I mean is there NO sense of proportion whatsoever? I mean sure jaywalking and armed robbery are both illegal but are you really claiming that the two are equal? Nate sees no difference apparently.
To be clear I’m over taking solace in occupying the moral high ground-clearly you get no credit or even recognitiion for it-if Trump does 100 corrupt pardon and Biden does one completely legitimate pardon-again as we saw above it’s very rare that you are prosecuted for simply writing incorrect information on a form and Hunter paid the back taxes and he only went 11 days without a gun permit-and geniuses in their own mind like Nate declare both are equally bad it’s obviously a waste of time.
To be sure you have to be pretty logically confused to NOT see that it’s pretty much impossible to NOT occupy the moral high ground relative to Trump but then Nate and his “The River” pals-who have profited so handsomely from Trump’s victory-again it’s very unlikely Trump wins if Musk hadn’t bought Twitter AND spent a quarter of a billion on the election.
Because no doubt when you look at how Trump has been normalized a big part of it is on the Democrats-starting with Biden’s resolve already a few days after his 2020 victory to not seek accountability but rather unity just as the House Dems a few days after their historic 2018 victory were already fretting about doing too many investigations of Trump two months before they were even sworn in. Let’s face it the only reason you’d even consider to do that many investigations-how could there EVER be TOO MANY investigations of TRUMP?!-is because he’s engaged in so much legal and ethical misconduct.
So basically Biden’s pardon on top of his openness to at least considering a mass pardon of those Trump wants to baselessly pardon has given Dems some hope that MAYBE our party leaders have learned something-personally I’ll believe THAT when I see it. I AM SOMEWHAT encouraged that there are also some Congressional Dems urging the Biden WH to do the preventive pardons.
12/9:
So where do we go from here? I think it’s important to be clear on this: Kamala WOULD have been a very good President. The problems the American people were concerned about-the rising cost of living on top of stagnating wages are not going to be solved by Trump-Vance-quite the opposite. Trump’s econoimc policies will be incredibly regressive. Republican policies always are and they only ever get worse.
Again this is Cenk’s central fallacy-Trump is the WORST version of a Republican. Cenk and Friends are always whining about W’s Neocons failing to get that Trump’s fascist co-conspirators are worse.
To look at that quote from The Casual Analyst again:
When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he offered a radical new conservative vision for the country. He didn’t have data to back up his plan, but neither did his opponents. Well, guess what—the data is in, and we know what it says:
Republicans are bad for the country—for its government, its people, and its economy. And Donald Trump is one of the worst Republicans.
Ideology Is Making Our Politics Dumber — The Casual Analyst
As we discussed above, the really maddingly frustrating thing is most voters AGREE with this-Republican IDEAS are very unpopular BUT they’ve managed to a large extent demonize the Democratic party BRAND-with some help from the Democrats true. It’s also true contrary to Cenk’s fallacy-many on the Left harbor this illusion-Trump is the WORST kind of Republican. Even W recognized the transfer of power-even if he like Trump in 2016 stole power inititally in 2000.
Cenk may believe that Trump is better than say a George W Bush or a Paul Ryan yet Trump like W and Paul Ryan also has a plan to dismantle Social Security and Medicare-the one big difference is that Trump may be successful as Nazbol hacks like Cenk tell progressives to cuddle up with Trump because Elon Musk responded to one tweet he sent one time. To the extent that Trump is seen as less ideological it’s enabled him to accomplish many idoelogical things that more normal Republicans couldn’t-like overturning Roe-yet as we saw above voters still harbor the delusion Trump isn’t a threat to abortion rights.
TCA then discusses a point I’d looked at above: since the postwar era Democrats have systematically presided over better economies than Republicans-the correlation is far to strong to believe it’s just luck.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
Here’s your regular reminder: the economy performs way better under Democrats than Republicans. Decades of data show the U.S. economy consistently outperforms under Democratic presidents compared to Republicans. Key indicators—like job growth, GDP growth, and lower unemployment rates—are all notably stronger during Democratic administrations. Analysis from the Joint Economic Committee reveals that, since WWII, 10 of the country’s 11 recessions began under Republican leadership. This trend isn’t easily chalked up to luck; it reflects differences in policy priorities. Democrats typically emphasize middle-class investment and economic resilience, while Republicans have favored tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, which often fail to spur equivalent growth.”
As he also goes on to point out the national debt also tends to explode under GOP Administrations
Here’s a brief overview of what happens to the national debt:
Democratic Presidents’ Impact:
-
Bill Clinton: Eliminated the deficit and created a budget surplus.
-
Barack Obama: Cut the deficit in half, from $1.41 trillion to $584.6 billion.
-
Joe Biden: Reduced the deficit during his first years in office.
Republican Presidents’ Impact:
-
Ronald Reagan: Increased the deficit from $70 billion to $175 billion.
-
George H.W. Bush: Raised it further to around $300 billion.
-
George W. Bush: Turned a surplus into a $1.2 trillion deficit.
-
Donald Trump: Increased the deficit to over $3 trillion in 2020.
We can discuss what impact the national debt has, or why it’s good, bad, or makes no difference at all. But for now, this is just a reminder: don’t trust a Republican who says they’ll reduce the national debt. There is absolutely no evidence to support this.
This all has the inconvenience of being true though I have some pretty mixed feelings about it-appreciate that he kind of acknowledges the jury remains out on the impact of the national debt as I think this is another way in which in recent years the Dems have fallen for another GOP canard-and I do think this was a factor in the defeat of Harris-Walz. Indeed looking at this numbers you have to imagine Jude Wanniski is smiling somewhere as it vindicates his Two Santa Claus Theory of politics.
The GOP used a Two Santa Clauses tactic to con America for nearly 40 years | Salon.com
His argument was basically that the party that fiscally tightens is the Scrooge party the party that deficit spends is the Santa Claus party.
When he wrote this in the late 1970s-it was a kind of Supply Side manifesto-his warning to Republicans was that they had been going about it wrong playing the role of being Scrooge to the Democrats’ Santa Claus-but voters naturally prefer Santa Claus.
And just so-since then every GOP WH has INCREASED the deficit drastically-while as the other chart shows each Dem WH starting with Bill Clinton has run a fiscal stimulus, ie the deficit was less when they left Office than when they arrived aka fiscal policy tightened during their term.
Democrats have emerged from this period proud of their status as deficit hawks with the significant inconvenience that PACE Wanniski the party which lowers the deficit is Scrooge the party which increases it is Santa Claus. Again the one economic indicator during Biden’s term that was worrisome prior to the election was that disposable income had decreased. Of course, a Republican Santa Claus is different than a Democratic one-Republicans like to raise the deficit through tax cuts weighted in the favor of the rich and military spending as opposed to domestic government spending.
But if all things being equal an incumbent party BENEFITS if fiscal spending ROSE during its term and is undermined if it falls the Dems should stop celebrating the fiscal deficit record but try to go back to being a Democratic Santa Claus-as they were during the New Deal to Great Society years.
And the GOP’s version of Santa Claus has been extravagant indeed-since the first Reagan every Republican President has raised the deficit drastically and the rise is significantly larger than the previous GOP WH-which itself had spent at a level that was then record breaking.
During Biden’s term he didn’t explictly embrace budget hawkery the way Clinton and Obama had but he did preside over a significant fiscal tightening of $1.2 trillion dollars. As for disposable income it hit a record in March 2021 the month of the last Covid relief check.
As suggested above Biden’s big economic mistake was trying to get back to the post Covid normal so fast-in light of the fiscal tightening it’s a little easier to understand why so many Americans remember 2020 so much more favorably now.
UPDATE: Regarding deficits Elon-who is apperetnly AT least the co President at this point-is preaching fiscal rectitude.
Again while the deficit today might well be 7%-as we saw above it’s currently about $1.8 trillion BUT that’s a drop of $ 1.2 trillion during the Biden years so it was considerably larger during the Trump years. But in reality Trump-Musk Musk-Trump could care less about the deficit in some abstract sense-which elected Dems have often mistakenly believed-but rather the justification for deep budget cuts to discretionary government spending AND MOST IMPORTANT to entitlements-that’s the big surprise: Social Security and Medicare.
The GOP tried this in 2005 after W’s alleged “mandate”-“I have political capital and I intend to use it” and again in 2011 post the Tea Party Wave “shellacking” of 2010 but fell short both times. In 2017 they tried and failed to abolish Obamacare.
2025 will be another bite at the apple. Will they be more successful this time? To the extent that many buy into the Cenk Fallacy-that really Trump-Elon and all the other billionaires on his proposed cabinet will pursue progressive working class policies perhaps. Trump has been very successful in snookering many people into voting against their own material interests-not surprising as he’s the king of all charlatans, the charlatan’s charlatan.
But again it’s important resist the urge to be fatalistic. First of all Kamala Harris-assuming she also had a Demo Congress-would actually have done something about the economic concerns of voters. Adam Schiff was going to the Senate and was ready to finally lead Schumer and Friends to end the filibuster. Again this was the RIGHT answer for the question how would she be different-the point was to not accept the framing as was her wont but rather reframe it: the change needs to be a Democratic Congress who will work with her.
Indeed if she’d run on the $2,000 relief checks she’d proposed in June 2020 she would have won. But her campaign had believed the opposite-they thought she needed to kill any notion that she was a “San Francisco liberal’-she had to seel that narrative she’s a sensible centrist. And yes for once Cenk was right-had she continued the campaign she had started in August 2024-a la brat summer-she would have won.
So the Dems would have actually done the policies that might have begun to reverse the long term epidemic of low wages but they didn’t run on it. Provided not just Kamala but the Congressional Dems won. And this was a big part of the problem-neither she or the Congressional Dems made this point. I was just watching Woody Harrelson’s LBJ recently and I have to admit it gave me a pretty big feeling of nostalgia as LBJ’s triumph in 1964 and his passing Voting Rights Act and the Great Society in 1965-Medicare, etc-at this point remains liberalism’s last stand. A Kamala Harris victory this year would have been the liberalism’s comeback. The voters who are all cheering for the assassination of a health insurance exec really dropped the ball. But so did the Democrats as they failed to make the argument.
I like Mike Madrid-on Twitter. But his argument was that Kamala’s positoin on immigration was optimal where she highlighted being tough on the border and soft pedaled the fact she actually supports doing something for the dreamers and a path to citizenship was not born out.
As Vaush says the Dems can’t win the reactionary vote by being 60% Hitler-reactionaries will always go for full 200 proof-if you want mass deportations Trump is your guy-even if the Democrats also like deportations they’ll never love them as much as Republicans do.
The key to the 2024 election was Adam Schiff-his election to the Senate would have been the key, had Kamala and the Congressional Dems won, as Schiff ran on an agenda of ending the filibuster and expanding the court. That was the cruical piece-ending the filibuster. But Democrats don’t coordinate their message-everyone just runs their own race rather than the argument that to pass a progressive agenda you need all three branches-again this is what Mitch McConnell intuited back in 2009. Unless you end the filibuster no Democratic President can ever pass their agenda and then the Left will blame them as they promised to do progressive things-it’s what sunk Clinton in 1993, Obama 2009 and Biden 2021-though even at the end Biden was milquetoast on ending the filibuster.
Speaking of Schiff he is Dem who often seems to get it first-he was the advocate on ending the filibuster and he gets it on what the Dem message needs to be going forward.
If only the Kamala campaign had understood THIS. As we saw above the consultant class directed Kamala to do the opposite-to drop a progressive anti corporate message for “unity”-at her last few events they bragged that her speeches were entirely positive. Again-negative partisanship, negative partisanship, negative partisanship.
Speaking of the consultant class I did read Greg Sargent’s recent interview of the three candidates for DNC Chairman with some interest-as all seem to understand the central issue-the “information ecosystem
FN: Interestingly I see Matthew Sheffield RTed Sargent-I had actually DMed Greg Sheffield’s article-I wonder if that was his first introduction to him?
Elon Musk’s Stunning $250 Million Favor to Trump Should Wake Up Dems
Musk and others helped the GOP run rings around Democrats in the info wars. I asked three leading contenders for party chair how they’d fix this.:”
We have now learned, belatedly, that billionaire Elon Musk spent at least $250 million to help billionaire Donald Trump win the White House. One key part of that spending came in the form of the $20 million Musk dumped into a brazen pro-Trump propaganda campaign. The move highlights with new urgency what you might call the “information gap”—the deficit Democrats face in the info wars, which the next Democratic National Committee chair must have a comprehensive plan to address.
Couple thoughts. One you keep hearing that Kamala had more money than Trump-that might be true of on the book contributions but Elon gave him a quarter of a billion right there while Miriam Adelson-Sheldon Adelson’s widow-gave Trump over $100 million-at least. So just two donors puts him at 35% of the way of Kamala’s entire haul.
And he had plenty of other big donors.
These 26 Billionaires Have Each Given More Than $1 Million to Elect Trump
Back when this article was published in August at this point Linda McMahon had already donated $16 million to Trump. Money well spent as she’s now his Education Secretary nominee-drop in the bucket for her with a net worth of $3.1 billion dollars.
Second-once again if Musk doesn’t take over Twitter, Trump likely doesn’t win the Presidency. In other words the effect of his taking over Twitter has been cataclysmic.
While Ben Wikler is certainly my favorite-honestly feel it’s a no brainer with his sterling record in Wisconsin and his public engagement
Opinion | If Anyone Can Save the Democrats, It’s Ben Wikler – The New York Times
-I was impressed with the answers of the other two leading candidates as well which is pretty encouraging-certainly suggests the next DNC Chairman-hopefully Wikler but even if not will understand the central problem.
Wikler for his part saw the problem coming a mile away.
Musk lavished that $20 million on a shadowy outfit called the RBG PAC, named after the late liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The PAC’s mission was to soften Trump’s position on abortion by absurdly suggesting it’s akin to RBG’s. How many low-information voters this reached is unknown. But it’s another sign that Musk—who also transformed X/Twitter into a sprawling right-wing disinformation machine—and the pro-Trump forces have found potent new ways to swamp the system with propaganda and communicate compellingly with politically unengaged Americans, helping cost Democrats the election and leaving them badly disarmed going forward.”
We don’t know FOR SURE but we do know that Trump was very successful reassuring millions of women desite the fact that he is more responsible than anyone for Dobbs.
To that point Sargent himself has discussed this in the past.
So it’s’ plausible it was pretty successful.
Back to his New Republic article:
So what do the candidates for DNC chair have to say about this disastrous situation? I put the question to three leading hopefuls: Wisconsin state party Chair Ben Wikler, Minnesota state Chair Ken Martin, and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley.
Again Wikler rasied alarms about this back in April-as opposed to the many after the fact claiming clairvoyance:
For Wikler, the party’s central problem became visible back in April, when a little-noticed NBC News poll showed Trump with the support of 53 percent of people who don’t follow news at all and 55 percent of those who get news from YouTube and Google. By contrast, President Biden (who hadn’t yet left the race) earned 55 percent from those who follow network news and 70 percent from those who read newspapers.
This disparity was then exacerbated by the vastly greater presence that Trump and his surrogates have achieved in other cultural spaces not aligned “There are millions of voters who get their news about Democrats from Republicans,” he tells me, and “only hear from the right.”
“There are millions of voters who get their news about Democrats from Republicans,” he tells me, and “only hear from the right.”
We had discussed this above and the disparity was especially exacerbated the last two years. Still I have some mixed feelings on this:
Wikler says Democrats must appear far more on right-leaning political shows—not just Fox News but also podcasts and YouTubes and streamed interviews and the like—especially in nonpolitical spaces. Democrats must “disrupt the right-wing narrative about Democrats,” Wikler says, especially in mediums “that are not particularly political.”
After the election I sort of drunk the Kool-Aid that Harris made a serious mistake in not doing Joe Rogan-though it remains ambiguous exactly why she didn’t’ end up doing it. He himself had publicly acknowledged she hadn’t declined to do it-the argument was about wether she would go to him and that length.
And seeing Rogan simply refuse to speak with Zelensky recently underscores the fact that he is NOT independent he’s a reactionary-always has been in my opinion. Should Democrats do these Right wing influencers? MAYBE to the extent that they do command such a large audience. Nevertheless there are pitfalls and going in there should be no illusion that they are enemy territory.
This I completely agree with-I agree with most that Wikler and the other two applicants say.
Wikler says he’d invest substantial resources in training armies of surrogates to carry out that mission in all these mediums. Wikler would launch research designed to “build a deep, shared understanding” of how these mediums function and who is getting information from them, and how, and then “train, support, and deploy more communicators” to appear in these places.
“It’s the people least likely to seek out information about either party who we lost in this election,” Wikler said. “They’re generally younger, more working-class.” For the party, he said, “solving the information problem has to be a core focus,” requiring a “constant effort to get out of our heads and into the minds of the extraordinarily diverse electorate that is getting information from a dizzying array of places.”
The Dems have to complete reconceive of their understanding of media-they waste way too much time on CNN, ABC, the Sunday shows, etc that very few are watching.
Moving on:
Martin, the Minnesota state chair, says the party must invest “significant resources” in a comprehensive, granular mapping out of how different political demographics get electoral information, including via non-news sources. Martin also sees the information problem as directly linked to a Democratic brand problem, in which “the majority of Americans now believe the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor.” As Martin notes, Republicans have been allowed to keep up a “constant drumbeat hammering away at our brand.”
The brand issue is very real and pretty sad actually. In this vein Wikler frames it perfectly:
“The soul of the Democratic Party is the fight for working people,” Wikler said. “Ours is the party that built the middle class, that won breakthroughs on civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, freedom and opportunity for all—and has so much more to do.”
With Vow to ‘Fight for Working People,’ Wikler Goes for DNC Chair | Common Dreams
This is something Matthew Sheffield touched on-who we discussed above. In a recent episode of his podcast he touched on this: the Democrats are the party of social and economic progress but they don’t lean into it-starting with Jimmy Carter they’ve leaned away from it.
The Democratic brand SHOULD be gold-both domestically and globally in terms of the liberal world order that has guaranteed the peace in Europe since Yalta; of course THIS legacy is now greatly imperiled thanks to November 5. Why isn’t it-again the Dems haven’t even tried to define their own brand leaving a vaccum to the GOP ecosystem all too happy to define them. The Democrats have an extremely rich history post 1932 both domestic and internationally.
FN: Really post 1912 though it’s kind of awkward to brag about Woodrow Wilson even though he was the first truly progressive President-but also an atrocious reactionary on race which is why few might want to talk about him today
Back to Sargent/New Republic:
“Because we’re not in these information spaces, we’ve allowed the Republican Party to define us,” Martin said. “We’re not defining them. We have to be present in every channel.” Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has aptly termed this the “loudness gap.”
It is indeed a very apt term.
To counter it, Democrats must enlist an army of “trusted messengers and validators” in those spaces, Martin said, to “remind people who we are and what we’re fighting for.” Martin noted that during the campaign, Trump reached deep into various nonpolitical markets (as Ilyse Hogue details, Trump worked male-heavy audiences particularly hard). Democrats must find their own large niche audiences as a means to giving “people a sense that you’re one of them,” Martin said, adding: “It can’t be inauthentic.”
Hard agree BUT it’s important to qualify a large niche DEMOCRATIC audience won’t necessarily be male heavy. Again as I argued above there’s a case for Democrats to do shows like Joe Rogan so long as they understand going in it’s enemy territory-assuming Rogan is even willing to have Democrats in the future seeing as he recently flat rejected having Zelensky on under the guise of it would be “propaganda”-apparently only Russian propagandists need apply-Tucker Carlson just did an interview with Lavrov-remember him?
FN: Indeed some people in Putinworld themselves say Tucker Carlson has become a carrier pigeon between Putin and Trump.
Putin’s Pals Say Tucker Carlson Is Acting as a Secret Back-Channel to Trump
End FN
But a large niche Democratic audience-assuming it’s possible-will be different in makeup and appearance than the GOP leaning audience of the Right wing influencers. Again this is apart from wether Dem candidates can and should do Joe Rogan-Aidan Ross-PBD and Friends. On this to repeat myself I go both ways-it’s enemy territory but assuming they are even willing to speak to Democrats in the future-Rogan is talking about doing his broadcasts from Mar-a-Lago in the future-it might still be worth it just in terms of getting in front of such a large audience.
UPDATE: Many of us in the Dem base have been pretty concerned if not freaked out over the recent diffidence of the “DOGE Democrats” like Ro Khanna-with all this talk of campaign donatoins is Musk one of Ro’s donors?-or John Fetterman actually stating he’s open to voting for KASH PATEL despite his threats to jail Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, or Jack Smith under the rationalization that Patel assured him he won’t. Kind of reminds you of Susan Colllins’ lauding Kavanaugh assuring her “Roe is settled law”-in three and a half years he’d vote with 5 other GOP SJC Justices to overturn this alleged settled law
One definite greenshoot is the DNC chair nominees-as we saw above-have seemed to got the memo and understand the assingment
It’s important to understand where the GOP genius lies-it’s focusing like a laser beam on the Right. For a long time Democratic consultant types have presumed that this strategy doesn’t work as the GOP base is a minority of the country-maybe 35% to 40%? But 2024 showed that the Republicans can win by going full base while winning over more low propensity low information with Instagram and Tiktok videos.
The gender gap is the perfect example-the Democrats are like ‘what do we have to do to appeal to men?’ after Dobbs Trump and the GOP co-conspirators didn’t say ‘what do we have to do to appeal to women?’ they doubled down on men with Trump discovering social media manosphere.
In other words the Democratic corollary isn’t to fall all over themselves trying to win over men but doubling down on women. Indeed that’s why they lost this election-Kamala only won women over by 10% while Trump won men by 14%. The mystery isn’t men by 14% but women by only 10%. The big issue here-as we saw above in Sargent’s own tweet-is that so many low propensity, low information voters bought the idea that Trump isn’t personally pro choice-as if that’s the point. Again what matters are the consequences-Trump more than anyone is responsible for overturning Roe whatever is supposedly going on in his soul-assuming he has one.
Should Dems NOT care about young male votes? I wouldn’t quite say THAT BUT the reality is you’re never going to win over everybody and I would not go for the male vote by throwing women under the bus a la James Carville. Again the GOP insight is you don’t shit where you eat-you DON’T throw your own base under the bus. I mean this entire “woke” discourse is implicitly kicking Black people in the teeth every chance it gets as “woke” was initially a phrase of the Black vernacular.
This is why I would argue Sargent is only half right here:
For another, while winning back working-class voters probably requires more populist policies and a real reckoning with some of the party’s potentially alienating cultural stances, anyone who tells you that’s remotely the whole story is deceiving you.”
This is very widely believed-again Sargent’s point is it’s NOT the whole picture-but I want to make the point that it’s widely believed the Democrats should maybe be more “populist”-as a liberal I hate “populism” but agree with the kinds of policies Sargent means here though I would prefer to call them “progressive”-I disagree with the idea about the Dems taking “alienating cultural stances”-I mean which stances? I’ve heard a lot of stuff thrown at a wall to see what sticks but none of it is accurate-“Defund the Police” was an activist thing not the Democratic party. Yet somehow a phrase that all the Democratic insiders had criticized at the time are nevertheless to be held responsible for it. I’ve heard that Latinos were offended by Democrats caling them “Latin X” I mean WHO in the party used that phrase? I can’t think of anyone-including “The Squad”-certainly not Biden or Pelosi.
The Democrats do-or at least did-believe that trans people should have the same baseline civil rights anyone else does-as we saw above there are those who literally want Democrats to say they oppose trans women playing women’s sports-even though that probably describes about 5 athlets in the entirey country. And Colin Aldred DID do a commerical explicitly coming out against “biological me”-ie deadnaming trans women-in women’s sports-and lost by 8 points.
As Vaush says you won’t win by being 75% Hitler-genuine fascists are going to choose 200 proof every time a la Donald Trump.
I think the party should go more exploicity progressive on economic issues-Schiff as quoted above gets this-but I just disagree on the idea about culltural issues. Its not why we lost and being more timid speaking up for the rights of marginalized communities once again gives the GOP another win-obviously many voters will conclude the GOP is right on the principles as the Democrats are so scared to say they support trans rights.
We’re not talking about centering campaigns around the issue-but again no one HAS been doing this but OTOH Dems should not be so panicked over the idea of calling out the Right for it’s blatant transphobia a la Nancy Mace.
FN: while I generally like the Tony Michaels Podcast I disagree with the idea that simply calling out a Nancy Mace is a distraction.
I hate to agree with Hasan but he’s right here-the extremists on trans stuff is the GOP. What “takes the bait” is to act like this is some potent issue they have to be so intimidated by-in 2022 the GOP moral panic over the trans stuff went nowhere. They are the ones obsessed.
So I only half agree with the current widely held-on both the Center and the Left of where the Democrats should go from here:
“New progressive chair: Democrats must refocus on workers and wages to combat Trump’s culture wars
Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, told NBC News that the Democratic Party brand is in tatters and that the party must “re-emphasize core economic issues” to welcome more voters.”
Democrats must combat Trump’s culture wars, new progressive chair says
As this chapter makes abundantly clear LOL I hard agree on an emphasis on an economic agenda that focuses like a laserbeam on the long term low wage epidemic we have seen since the mid 1970s-as we saw above Adam Schiff gets it.
Still I have mixed feelings on the idea that the problem with the Democratic brand is that they’ve been too radical on social issues-as they self evidently have not, indeed it’s arguable they went too far the other way a la Colin Aldred:
The Democratic Party messed up in the 2024 election, says Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, the newly elected chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and it needs a dramatic course shift to rediscover its brand and put winning “above being right.”
Totally agree with Casar here-and I do think there’s good reason to hope he’ll be a very good chair for the HPC:
The Democratic Party messed up in the 2024 election, says Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, the newly elected chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and it needs a dramatic course shift to rediscover its brand and put winning “above being right.”
So over being good losers a la Al Gore 2000, Obama 2016 or Biden 2024. There’s no prize occupying the moral highground-not that Dems should-or could-become moral sociopaths on the level of Trump and his GOP co-conspirators.
FN: Speaking of which I found Hakeem Jeffries response to Wray bending the knee and reisgning without a whimper last night endemic to why the Dems lose-the usual respectability politics.
See Joy Reid.
(1135) House Dems are prepared for second Trump admin: Dem House Leader Hakeem Jeffries – YouTube
He completely minimizes the damage Wray’s compliance in advance does while glazing Wray as he goes out the door-as I discussed on Chapter Biden’s First Mistake-Biden himself should have fired him instead extended him the first day while Trump can’t even wait till January 20 effectively making him a lame duck over a month in advance. As I read it Wray’s resignation glides the path for Kash Patel to begin serve on an interim basis before for Senate confirmation.
But I do have some concerns about this:
In a wide-ranging interview with NBC News on Wednesday, one day before he was officially elected as chair, Casar laid out his vision for the future, saying that Democrats need to return to their roots as the party of the working class. That means welcoming voters who disagree with the left on cultural issues and not being “seen as preachy or disconnected.”
This is something that may sound reasonable on an abstract level until you actually try to unpack it: WHAT cultural issues? Trans issue? That’s the one that’s been raised a lot-again Colin Alred ran a commercial saying ‘I’m a father and I oppose biological men in women’s sports’ and lost by 8 points.
What is “preachy and disconnected”-to not agree that Nancy Mace calling the police on someone who asked her to support trans rights while shaking her hand and getting him arrested for assault is based?
Yet Democrats rather than Nancy Mace are the disconnected ones?
Casar did go on to say this:
In the wake of a devastating defeat to President-elect Donald Trump that Casar insists was avoidable, the congressman said Democrats must refocus their core identity on helping workers and increasing wages — but do so “without throwing vulnerable people under the bus.”
Again abstractly that sounds good-kind of stop defending vulnerable people as that comes across as preachy but without throwing them under the bus? And there’s no empirical evidence that this is why the Democrats lost the election.
FN: I sure hope when he talks about these allegedly divisive cultural issues he isn’t thinking about abortion.
For one thing for women abortion IS an economic issue
It’s also a fact that abortion rights are VERY POPULAR-most of the abortion referendums won November 5. The tricky thing is to help the millions of Americans who voted for abortion rights AND Donald Trump that this voting for the latter undermines the former it cancels it out.
End FN
To reiterate I think he’ll hopefully be a good chair and certainly agree Kamala could have won-she lost by listening to all the wrong people-the consultant class who told her not to focus on wages at least not in a way that makes Mark Cuban or her brother in law Tony West nervous. Speaking of the consultant class I like this part in particular going back to Sargent’s interviews:
“Part of what’s driven this in D.C. is the profit incentive for folks to steer everything to traditional media because that’s where they make their money,” Martin said. He vowed to break the control of the D.C. consultant class on such communications, by preventing consultants driven by “profit” from driving excessive spending into “paid broadcast TV.”
Yes the consultant class has particularly bad political instincts and paid broadcast tv is the bane of Dem existence.
While Martin O’Malley is not my first choice-again that’s Wikler-he makes an excellent point here:
Meanwhile, a third candidate for DNC chair—former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley—notes that Democrats have allowed Republicans to communicate with voters during electoral off-years largely unchallenged. O’Malley says he’d ensure that the party puts more emphasis on what he called “the longer arc of engagement and connection” with both base and swing voters. He’d invest substantial resources in reforming how the party communicates with voters—including during those down periods—and create an entity within the party that specializes in advising campaigns on how to do this, including for races all the way down the ballot everywhere.”
Very true-the GOP understanding it’s ideas are unpopular conducts a permanent campaign while Dems wait until a few months before campaign season to get started.
UPDATE Ryan Cooper makes much the same argument: the message doesn’t matter if the voters don’t see it
Democrats Lost the Propaganda War – The American Prospect
I wasn’t going to quote from him as I think we’ve fleshed out the point but this is so on target:
The intra-Democratic argument over what should be done following their loss in 2024 goes on. Bernie Sanders is arguing for working-class populism. Matt Yglesias has been flogging a “Common Sense Manifesto” arguing for Bill Clinton–style triangulation.”
When Cooper framed it this way I THOUGHT I knew where he was going-and I was wrong.
I have my own thoughts on messaging topics.
And I’m pretty sure I had a good idea what his thoughts are-based on when I used to read him sometimes in his old post on This Week he tends to hew to the Left. But he doesn’t focus on which message is better
He makes a more interesting message-it doesn’t matter which message you choose if voters don’t hear it.
But all this is putting the cart before the horse. Democrats are missing something that is arguably a prerequisite for ideological messaging to have any effect whatsoever: a media apparatus that can get these messages in front of swing voters. The content of the message doesn’t matter if voters never hear it. An obvious place to start would be to build up straightforward reporting operations in news deserts in critical states, and to stop making traditional election broadcast ads the core focus of campaign spending.”
Notably the same point Martin makes. What I didn’t reallize when I came across this article is Cooper actually also knows what Martin is saying.
But Cooper touches on a very paradoxical point regarding finding a more popular message: Trump’s message was VERY UNPOPULAR and-he won…
If advocates of “popularism” like Yglesias are correct, how did Donald Trump win with such wildly unpopular proposals and behaviors? He said he wants to deport 15 to 20 million people (which is unpopular if the question is asked forthrightly); his nominees to the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade; he has been held legally liable for rape; he has been convicted of 34 felonies; and his business empire turned out to be a vast fraud scheme. Trump’s de facto campaign platform, Project 2025, is hugely unpopular.”
I believe two things happened here. First and most importantly, there is a vast and exceptionally well-funded right-wing propaganda machine that pipes Republican messaging directly into tens of millions of homes, day in and day out, influencing people both directly and through conversations with families and neighbors.”
Yes the GOP ecosystem that a number of writers have pointed out-that I quote above. But he also quite rightly calls out the mainstream media.
Second, the mainstream media, for a variety of sociological and political reasons—including outright meddling from Trump-supporting billionaire owners—refused to give Trump the full-blown scandal treatment, with many consecutive days of inflammatory headlines and articles, no matter what he did. Democrats have relied on the MSM to do their messaging for them, but they did not and will not do it. As Josh Marshall writes, “Democrats need to organize their future politics around the simple reality that the establishment media is structurally hostile to the Democratic Party.”
Amen. This is what’s so tricky about the current (dire) media situation is that OTOH the move away from legacy media has hardly been salutary-indeed the big move away from legacy the last two years was a big factor in Trump’s victory-thanks to the low propensity low information voters on social media. OTOH legacy has only gotten worse and they to a large extent built this fiasco. And it is certainly true that the establishment media is structurally hostile to the Democratic Party.
This is the fallacy of assuming that because they narrowly lost to Trump EVERY PART of the Democratic message failed-in reality these voters didn’t hear a lot of it or where so conditioned by bad narratives not to believe it.
As a result, most swing voters simply did not hear about Trump’s platform, or did not believe it if they did. This more or less must be the case given the millions of people who voted for state-level abortion protections while also for the guy who ended Roe and will probably try to pass a national ban, overriding any state-level laws. Interviews of swing voters who went Trump also confirm utterly delusional beliefs. “I think it’s really cool that he’s going to take on fighting the big health care corporations that are charging insane amounts and hopefully get that under control,” one told The New York Times recently.”
Yes and so many chose not to believe Trump is who overturned Roe despite the trivial fact that HE DID.
IN SHORT, DEMOCRATS LOST THE PROPAGANDA WAR, which brings me back to local news. A poll back in April, before Biden dropped out, found that he was winning voters who get their news from newspapers by 49 percentage points, while Trump was winning those who don’t follow political news at all by 26 points. No doubt that is partly demographics, but also partly due to opportunity: In a large chunk of the country, there is no local paper even available, and in a much larger chunk the few papers that remain are private equity–gutted carcasses with little aside from Associated Press reprints.
A recent study by Paul Farhi and John Volk at Northwestern found an even more stark gap in the worst-off counties. Trump won 91 percent of “news desert” counties—where there is no local coverage of any kind—by an average of 54 percentage points. Notably, several of these are heavily Latino counties on the southern Texas border, which saw enormous swings toward Trump.”
This touches on the unsettling spectre of Undocumented MAGA:
Cooper finishes up by namechecking Ken Martin:
Putting this all together: The typical Democratic approach of funneling billions through sporadic ad campaigns on traditional television channels is plainly not working. There are cheaper and more reliable ways to get the party’s messaging in front of persuadable voters, consistently. This would probably require at least partly cracking up the cartel of well-connected party consultants who cream off a large chunk of the spending, as Minnesota Democratic Party chair Ken Martin argues in a case for why he should be chair of the Democratic National Committee.”
Of course the vexing problem is Democratic consultant types love legacy media-even though far fewer are watching them than social media influencers but really appreciate Martin explicitly calling for cracking up the cartel of well-connected party consultants-as again, there’s a good argument THEY lost us the election with all the terrible advice they gave to the Kamala campaign which unfortunately heeded.
Cooper also emphasizes the need-as O’Mallley does as we quoted above-that the Dem focus on not campaigning just during the a few months before an election but all year around as the GOP does-as they need to as their ideas are so unpopular.
There are SOME good signs coming from the Democratic party recently-also some bad ones.
FN:
What’s interesting is one of the Democrats driving this train is Ro Khanna the alleged progressive firebrand. To paraphrase Vaush guess you have to follow their material interests-Khanna is from California. This is a terrible idea and it appears bsides Cenk Uygur a few Dems have it too. Cenk argues what’s the harm-either Elon will do a few good things like cutting the Pentagon or he won’t? The harm is he also plans on doing other things lilke a steep cut in govenrment employees-he cut 80% of his workforce at Twitter-and has already been sending government employees threatening tweets that they’re going to get fired. Then there’s his clear desire to see Social Security and Medicare dismantled.
It’s doubtful he’s going to do a big cut in military spending-besides the trivial fact he hasn’t been elected to anything and has no right to do anything-but even if he were is that worth it in exachgne for cutting the satefy net that sharply? But again it’s unlikley-at the end of the day Elon Musk should be the last person Democrats should want to empower and all you do by joining DOGE is hand this terrible human being a propaganda win making it easier for him to achive his dystopian-“pro natalist” agenda.
Then there’s John Fetterman. When Jim Clyburn suggested pardoning Trump I was freaking out at first then I saw it was in the context of justifying the pardon of Hunter Biden-Clyburn reveaeled he had advised Biden to do it I gave him some slack even though it’s a leigitmately terrible idea
But now Fetterman is on TruthSocial also arguing to pardon Trump? Worse still is he’s claiming the hush money case was politically motivated which is the opposite of the truth. Is Fetterman reporting this as an in kind donation to Trump?
This article underscores in sharp relief the crucial error of the DOGE Democrats
By giving DOGE air these Democrats lend it political legtimacy-as we saw above McConnell and his GOP Caucus had great success from 2010-2014 precisely by refusing to give Obama any bipartisan legitimacy
UPDATE: Fetterman has only gotten worse than last month
Terrible political advice contrast with Beulter’s point-on Chris Hayes
End FN
Pelosi recently spearheaded a move to replace Jerrold Nadler with Jamie Raskin as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Dems-this is IMO a great move. While I like Nadler a lot-as Emptywheel puts it Nadler has a great staff; as we saw in Chapter Impeachment the Nadler and his Judiciary Dems had put together 10 articles of impeachcment for Trump back in August 2019-at a time Pelosi was still Little Ms. He’s Self Impeaching.
But Raskin is clearly the better-ideal-choice for such an outside facing position-Nadler for all his strengths is very introverted not giving to making public commentary-which is what the moment really calls for. Raskin has already sent a message to all the IGs to call him if Trump comes after them.
Jamie Raskin ready to battle Trump ‘assault’ 2.0 in new role
What Raskin does seem to have that so many Demo leaders have not is he speaks with an acutal sense of urgency.
UPDATE: I just realized that Raskin wrote the foreward to Bryan Tyler Cohen’s very important book published in August of this year that seems positively psychic now
This is a very good signal that Raskin gets it on the problem of the GOP ecosphere.
In this same vein it’s good to see the rise of AOC as Raskin’s successor on the Oversight Committee.
AOC Finds Unexpected Support in Bid for Oversight Committee Seat
It really is unexpected that establishment Dems are supporting her but they are which gives you hope that maybe they HAVE learned something. From my standpoint I’m not a natural AOC supporter but she’s really won me over the last few years-by showing she actually cares about more than simply tearing down power structures but putting up new ones. This is the problelm with hailing Trump as a “disrupter” it’s far easier to disrupt and breakdown than to build upu.
If even a busted clock is right once a day, AOC was the one time Cenk got it right.
FN: In 2018 in typical hyperbolic fashion Cenk had vowed that the Justice Dems would run candidates in all 535 races in both parties. In September 2018 he recalibrated A LITTLE BIT-and focused soley on one race: AOC’s. Based on this I was never a fan of her’s particularly when she won but she’s won me over the last few years. What’s ironic is she’s won over liberals lilke me while losing much of her initial leftist base a la Jimmy Dore-remember his clownish breakdown when she chose not to do his show?
Vaush had a great breakdown of this.
(1141) AOC Rails Against The Toxic Online Left – YouTube
While Vaush is himself a leftist he admitted that AOC was right-despite also being a lefitst-to often prefer working with liberals in terms of workable alliances in Congress. Indeed all the leftists were interested in was completely undermining government-pointless demands like Force the Vote etc.
AOC has shown she actually cares about building power-which is why she’s found many allies with the establishment liberal types who run the party. It’s NOT about abandoning principles but actually caring enough about them to actually try to implement them.
In general Pelosi deserves credit for pushing to get more young Dems on these committees.
UPDATE: Though in giving Pelosi credit on Raskin apparently she’s actually opposed to AOC and is trying to prevent her becoming the ranking Democrat on Oversight-so a bit more of a mixed bag.
Finally some greenshoots after an election where ll the worst people won.
It was clearly a big win for fascists around the world starting with both Putin and Netanyahu who have so much in common.
AND the Kamla campaign in not having Ahmed speak at the DNC convention.
Meanwhile apparently many Ukrainians now have a more positive view of Trump-even they are far from unsusceptible to his charlatanry-it’s now up to 44% after being just 10% last year kind of recalling all the women who have convinced themselves Trump isn’t THAT anti abortion when he’s the guy who overturned Roe and may be bringing a national 6 week ban.
To be clear it’s still the minority and many Ukrainians-rightly feared a Trump win. Pierce Morgan-who’s now become the head cheerleader for pure Trump hagiography-insists he’s spoken to Trump-a la Morning Joe-no suprise as much as he sucks up to Trump after denouncing him right after J6-Pierce can never explain why J6 is now not disqualifying-and that Trump is NOT going to simply give Russia a huge victory. Of course like Morning Joe he doesn’t explain what Trump said he finds reassuring.
Look in a sense Ukranians are just trying to be hopeful as Olena Tregub notes:
Ukrainians are used to unpredictability and risk and always hope for the best.”
But remember pace Bob Woodward Trump spoke to Putin at least 7 times since leaving Office in 2021-comparativelyl Trump revealed he was speaking to Bibi “almost every day”-do you think it’s possible Gaza NEVER CAME UP?
When Trump talks about ending the war in Gaza I wonder if Netanayu had agreed to wait until after the election a la 1980 Iran Collusion October Surprise.
Maybe there was a prior agreement. While Trump SAYS
He wants the war in Gaza to end ASAP: “What I want is a deal where there’s going to be peace and where the killing stops.” And “I don’t want people from either side killed,” he said, “whether it’s the Palestinians and the Israelis.”
the question is this: is personnel policy or is it not? If it is how confident can you be for the future of the Palestinians considering the hundreds of millions of dollars Trump has taken from the Sheldons or the fact that the same hyper Right wing Zionists are coming back-David Friedman is coming back; Mike Huckabee is a new arrival? In 2018 per Barak Ravid Trump was interested in a two state solution and definitely wanted a Deal of the Century between Israel and the Palestinians and got along quite well with Abas initially. But Friedman pushed to get him to keep his campaign promise to move the embassy to Jerusalem and Abbas didn’t speak to him the final two years after that.
Well played by the Genocide Joe people
Similarly regarding the idea that personnel is policy IF THIS IS TRUE it’s hard to believe the optimism that Trump will get a GOOD deal or at least not a terrible deal for Urkaine is warranted. Again I said IF: IF personnel is policy. I mean MAYBE it’s not maybe someone can run for President and campaign with David Duke then make him AG and yet insist they will support strong enforcement of civil rights for Black folks. Logically that COULD be true. Maybe you can appoint the fox to guard the hen house and he’ll guard the hens rather than eat them.
Trump though has notably surrounded himself by pro Russia hacks-JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard for starters along with Elon Musk not to mention Trump himself. Trump like Vance had repeatedy used the Russian lie that Biden caused the invasion by trying to push Ukraine into NATO.
Indeed, very soon after the election Trump was on the phone with Zelensky joined by Musk. We don’t know what they talked about-though we should we certainly need to know-but why is Musk on the call? Why has he had his finger all over everything? Musk was also on with Trump and Erdogan and he also met with the Iranian ambassador-Trump’s explanation is he didn’t know Musk did that-sure that sounds likely.
UPDATE: And lo and behold the same journalist who noted that more Ukrainians trust Trump has new information that suggests they’re quite mistaken to.
If he doesn’t know that by now how optimistic are you that he ever will?
UPDATE: Olena still says “time will tell” on Trump: I responded
Olena Tregub on X: “@EKloczko Time will tell.” / X
I just don’t understand her optimism-it’s as if Trump was never President and doens’t have a history of surrounding himself with Russian hacks-besides being one himself.
FN:
Indeed for him to be complaining about Ukraine firing inside Russian now is actually a narrative in the manosphere that helped him win the election-Joe Rogan has gone totally Russia simp after the election-Tim Poole has been so for a long time-sure the money he got from the Russians is just a coincidence.
Rogan-Mr. Independence, Mr. “I’ll talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere” refused to speak to Zelensky. In the next breath Rogan announced he was going to do his show from Mar-a-Lago. I’m just saying the wind is clearly blowing in one direction.
FN:
Olena Tregub does make a good point here:
In terms of the unpredictability “how global conflicts will impact your own country”-I guess THIS is where her cautious optimism comes from. But this is pretty unambigious:
In yesterday’s interview with ABC News, Trump said in response to a question as to whether Ukraine’s recent ability to target Russian military targets inside Russia was the right thing to do, he towed the Kremlin line almost verbatim.
“I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia. […] Why are we doing that? We’re just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done”.
The logic in this statement being that if Russia can just hurry up and genocide all those people that live in Ukraine, Ukraine can finally be Russia and everyone can get back to making all that sweet Russian bribe cash.
News of Trump’s statement was celebrated in Moscow, with Putin immediately sending out his own Press Secretary, Dmitry Peskov with “we fully align with Mr Trump’s view” and we are 100% sure they do as Russia’s missile massacres only recently slowed after Ukraine was given this new permission to strike Russian military targets inside Russia with western weapons. With Ukraine no longer allowed to offer consequences for the daily massacres, Putin is free to spend the next 20 years wiping out Ukraine’s civilian population, with no risk, from the safety of Russian territory, under the full protection of the Trump administration.
Putin launches largest missile attack of the war after Trump gives greenlight – Kyiv Insider
Good for Biden
I get it that he has often been criticized as being too slow to get the weapons there or too many conditions but what could be more stark-he’s granted permission to strike inside Russia while Trump is saying he absolutely opposes it Which brings us to a rather amazing question one I never imagined raising or wanting to raise.
UPDATE:
This Atlantic piece gives a fuller extraoplation of the thinking of many in Ukraine-they ARE very concerned about Trump but are hoping for the best-at the end of the day that’s all you can ever do
Ukraine’s Hardest Winter – The Atlantic
UPDATE: Speaking of all the worst people-Peter Thiel’s flopsweat interview with Piers Morgan was a sight to behold. For a number of reasons:
Sweaty Peter Thiel Mocked for Incoherent Answer About CEO Slaying
He really was visibily sweating and stammered and stuttered all over the place when asked about the murder of Health Insurance CEO Brian Thompson. He really seemed freaked out. In the course of his sweating and falling all over himself he also managed to go into a weird metaphysical excursion about how now “atheists no longer believe in religion or science” whatever that’s supposed to mean-basically I read it as his hope that the public who he believes deserve no say over their own government will devolve further and further into illiterate, uninformed nihilism.
Perhaps in the way Timothy Snyder has warned of the idea of human intelligence being reduced almost to the level of an AI program.
(1146) Freedom in the Age of Trump (w/ Timothy Snyder) | The Michael Steele Podcast – YouTube
Despite how flushed and redfaced and at times barely coherent Thiel himself looked-it was quite ironic seeing his rambling appearance that he and Elon Musk fancy themselves these genius male elites who should run society in the future-if there is any benefit in Thiel is compared to him Elon appears thoughtful and charismatic-he did find the time to take a victory lap over liberalism dismissing it as “the ancient regime” and that Biden was the last gaps of it
Notice here the audacious gaslighting-he and his fellow fascist fellow travelers are who support the ancien regime-the preliberal regime.
Again truly the worst people won on November 5
and none worse than him-other than the Project 2025 guy who before the election said he didn’t worry about Trump saying there would be exceptions like rape, incest, and the death of the mother. But any conversation of the worst people have to end like it begun-with Elon Musk
He’s now reportedly using these same despicable tactics to terrorize the government workers he so desires to see fired-he wants to do something to the US similar to what he did to Twitter where 80% of the staff were downsized.
End UPDATE
Could Mitch McConnell emerge as a resistance hero in the next few years at least as an unlikely ally against Trump’s isolationism? There’s reason to hope for just that.
It’s clear while McConnell himself bears great responsibility for the rise of MAGA-going back to 2009 when he chose to prioritize defeating Obama over whipping the recession and fixing the economy then to his unprecedented refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing in 2016 along with his refusal to make a joint statement about Russian interference in September 2016 to his refusal to impeach Trump even while admitting his responsibility for J6:
“There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” he said on the Senate floor. “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. And having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”
He said this while choosing not to vote for impeachment for nakedly partisan, political reasons.
“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while in office,” he said. “He didn’t get away with anything yet. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation.”
We did. Yet was the operative word and yet came on July 1, 2024 when the GOP Supreme Court-that Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump constructed together decreed Trump can and will get away with everything.
Yep that Mitch McConnell. So I never wanted to be in the position of hanging your hat on McConnell of all people saying us but desperate times-it underscores how far we have fallen.
But McConnell clearly is totally opposed to Trump’s isolationist foreign policy agenda.
Mitch McConnell Takes Swipe at Donald Trump for the Second Time in Days
Here was some pretty clear red meat against “America First.”
“McConnell takes indirect swipe at Trump on America’s role in the world.”
“America will not be made great again by those who are content to manage our decline,” he said.
McConnell takes indirect swipe at Trump on America’s role in the world – POLITICO
He is even more unambigous here in terms of who he’s talking about:
Mitch McConnell is still throwing jabs at Donald Trump.
“We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before World War II,” the longtime Republican Senate leader told the Financial Times. “Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.”
McConnell went on to throw stones at Trump’s isolationist tendencies, comparing them to the “raging” President Howard Taft’s. He also said he believes that the “America First” wing of the Republican Party will do irreversible damage to the U.S. standing on the global stage.
“To most American voters, I think the simple answer is, ‘Let’s stay out of it.’ That was the argument made in the ’30s and that just won’t work,” McConnell said. “Thanks to Reagan, we know what does work—not just saying peace through strength, but demonstrating it.”
The longest-serving Senate leader also pushed back against Trump’s “enemy within” rhetoric, noting that Russia and China are bigger threats than citizens on American soil.
Mitch McConnell Not So Subtly Bashes Trump Again in New Interview
Indeed. So as surreal as it may seem at this point this gives you some hope that Trump won’t be able to completely dismantle the postwar liberal world order that’s done us pretty well the last almost 80 years-that FDR negotiated with FDR and Stalin at Yalta.
In this light the fact that Rick Scott Trump’s preferred replacement for McConnell garnered only 13 votes seems even more significant. John Thune the candidate the Republican caucus is a close friend and protege of McConnell. It’s likely they continue to speak regularly-and that McConnell has given him his advice on the various unqualified and dangerous candidates Trump has nominated for his cabinet. In that vein it’s hard to imagine McConnell accepting Tulis Gabbard. In trying to predict who among these terrible candidates in most danger I would put her odds highest. I mean if McConnell is in any way sincere about protecting the US led rules based order how could he possibly support putting a blatant Russia simp in charge of DNI like her-it would be Putin’s greatest coup-other than electing Trump in the first place.
Indeed it turns out Russia has been at the foreign interference game for a long time and Gabbard at DNI would be right up there with when Catherine the Great seduced the last King of Poland-Lithuania
The Toxic Love Affair That Destroyed A Country | by Krystian Gajdzis | Lessons from History | Medium
So assuming McConnell is serious at all-and I tend to suspect he is-she has to be at the top of his bingo card in Trump nominees to reject. Who else might he oppose? Right now the smart money seems to be that while besides Tulsi, RFK Jr and Pete Hegseth may be in some trouble, Kash Patel is likely safe. However, it’s notable that McConnell also pushes back on the idea of “the enemy within” are a bigger threat than Russia and China. Perhaps then he also will opppose Patel-who clearly believes in Trump’s agenda to weaponize the FBI to investigate his political opponents.
Regarding who might not make the cut my guess is that McConnell and Thune are keeping their hands close to their vests but that perhaps they have a list of the most unacceptable candidates and a running tally of how many GOP members oppose each nominee. For all we know there are 20 or 30 people who oppose some of them but they are working on which 4 will oppose-it’s hard to imagine McConnell voting for Gabbard-and again if he doesn’t believe in weaponizing law enforcement perhaps he won’t vote for Patel. The point is to decide who can afford to publicly defy Trump. This is again assuming McConnell is serious.
I do assume actually. The potential fly in the ointment is that while McConnell clearly does believe in standing by the US dominated rules based order and opposes weaponizing the judicial system OTOH he has never been willing to do anything which in any way is inconvenient to the political prospects of the Republican party. This is why he ultimately punted on impeaching Trump and it’s why while there’s some reason for hope there’s also plenty of reason for skepticism that he will be that guy. But he clearly wants to be.
UPDATE: Mitch continuesto escalate
Mitch McConnell: The Price of American Retreat
With all the worst people winning on November 5 there have been a few greenshoots. Mostly Syria and Ukraine. Syria is an amazing turnaround which literally NO ONE saw coming. Indeed this is the first answer to any of the Russia hacks telling you-sure Ukraine’s cause may be just and righteous but they just can’t win. I mean if many believe or claim to believe Ukraine can’t win NO ONE thought the Syrian resistance to Assad could win and then suddenly very unexpectedly-they won despite all the odds.
phlawless: “One struggle, one fight” — Bluesky
There’s so much about this that is inspiring but one aspect in particular is the solidarity between Ukrainians and Syrians. It turns out that Ukraine intelligence was helping the Syrian resistance behind the scenes.
Syrian rebels who came to power in Damascus received drones and other support from Ukrainian intelligence officers seeking to undermine Russia and its Syrian allies, The Washington Post reports.
According to the agency’s knowledgeable sources, Ukrainian intelligence sent about 20 experienced drone operators and about 150 FPV drones to the rebel headquarters in Syria’s Idlib 4 to 5 weeks ago to help Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the leading rebel group based there.
Kyiv’s assistance played only a modest role in the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to Western intelligence sources. But it was notable as part of a broader Ukrainian effort to covertly strike at Russian operations in the Middle East, Africa, and within Russia itself”
Ukraine helped Syrian rebels to overthrow Assad | RBC-Ukraine
Today there were more very positiveheadlines:
Indeed the free Syrian people are quickly becoming a symbol of resistance to an international symbol of resistance against Russia
It’s kind of ironic but at this point maybe for US too-we Westerners, we Americans who think we are the authority on democratic self rule that’s supposed to be our thing our brand. As the Syrians throw off Russia’s authoritarian influence we just elected a government that is very much harboring Russian influence-like the puppet government the Ukranians threw off at the EuroMaiden.
As puts it the Syrian Resistance offers a lot of inspiration to we Americans right now
Again Trump’s nominee for DNI Director is Tulsi Gabbard who was a blatant Assadist hack-who visited him multiple times.
Huffpost counted no less than 7 times Gabbard carried Assad’s water her in the US
7 Times Tulsi Gabbard Went To Bat In Congress For Now-Deposed Syrian Dictator Bashar Assad
But just as Syria throws off the Russian yoke we’ve further entrenched ourselves in it-or at least those millions of Americans who made the mistake of reelecting this madman and voting against their own material interests.
Indeed and that’s check, check, and check for Putin with nominees like Gabbard, Hegseth, and RFK Jr
As for Syria there’s some good and bad news.
Free Syria’s first days: The good, the bad, and the ugly
But at least they have thrown off Assadist dictatorship.
Part of the ugly is Israel and Turkey now have a free hand in Syria too.
Unfortunately it’s hard to be too optimistic about the US calling off their Israeli and Turkish dogs. And here I can’t even talk about Trump as Biden is still President and he’s once again showed himself congenitally incapable of putting ANY conditions on Israel.
FN: Barak Ravid documents how even in 1991 Biden criticized Bush Sr and John Baker for holding back funding. OTOH he’s always been anti settlements. BUT he’s always opposed doing anything about that so…
In Tulsi Gabbard’s reaction to the fall of Assad her stance was to just to say she agrees with “President Trump” on everything in his “fight against Islamic radical terrorism” which underscores she’s pro Assad but anti Muslim-she might talk about “stopping foreign wars” but that most certainly does not mean stopping Israel’s aggression in Gaza.
Reading this Fox News article about how the fall of Assad is a “strategic blow to Iran and Russia” it’s hard not to have some pretty mixed feelings seeing as their guy is Donald Trump for God’s sake who has a very warm history with Putin.
Fall of Syria’s Bashar Assad is strategic blow to Iran and Russia, experts say
Rebekah Koffler, strategic military intelligence analyst and author of “Putin’s Playbook,” emphasized the significance. “Syria has been a key theater in the broader proxy conflict between Russia and the U.S. losing Assad represents a strategic defeat for Russia, costing them critical bases in the Middle East and further stretching their military resources as they continue fighting in Ukraine.”
Ksenia Svetlova, a senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, described the fallout as, “Russia has been exposed for what it really is- a power that overpromises but underdelivers. They came to Syria with grand ambitions, but apart from helping Assad survive through joint efforts with Iran and Hezbollah, they achieved little. The post-war reconstruction never began, and with Russia now focused on Ukraine, Syria became a secondary priority. Now, Russia has abandoned Assad, revealing itself as an unreliable partner.”
But while this certainly should demonstrate if nothing else Russia is far from invincible help is on the way for Vlad with the return of his very own Manchurian candidate. You can’t help but wonder if David Frum is right alas.
While many are arguing Trump will do alright by Ukraine there’s far more reason to be very skeptical. My guess is it may end up like with Israel-Palestine in 2018
As we speak MAGA Mike Johson is asking for an intel report on the impact of cutting Ukraine aid.
STILL Ukraine has already way exceeded expectations. They weren’t expected to last the weekend when Russia invaded in February 2022. And Ukraine is clear they aren’t going to do a ceasefire without “strong Western support.”
UPDATE: Are we headed for Doha 2.0?
And think of it this way-while Ukraine’s odds are certainly lower than if Kamala had won and American democracy’s chances of survival are considerably lower certainly the odds aren’t as low as they looked for Syria in say 2015.
So while the risk of further US-and European-backsliding is greater than ever
CF:
Steve Levitsky on democratic backsliding
If Syria could overthrow Assad’s murderous regime despite going up against Assad-Putin terror state and Ukraine is still hanging tough maybe we CAN survive the next four years. It’s far from guaranteed but there’s a chance.
Clearly many are not giving up as
Ezra Levin recently reported new record Indivisible membership contrary the terrible narrative that the #Resistance is over.
FN: This is a truly terrible proposal for how the Democrats should fight back-or more to the point not faight back in the next four years. I guess this is the logical conclusion of “popularism” a la Yglesias. The idea seems to be that the Democrats lost so every argument or tactic they’ve ever used in the last 9 and a half years is discredited and the Dems should not criticize Trump for anything other than maybe the performance of the economy and if and when Trump comes for Social Security and Medicare as it certainly seems he will-certainly if you follow Elon Musk’s Twitter feed.
FN: Beutler has criticized this dubious strategy very well.
Democrats need to change their approach to Trump’s second term, top Kamala Harris pollster says
One of the first public airings of Democrats’ strategy suggests they should try something new this time around with the president-elect
The fact that this person is allegedly a “top Kamala Harris pollster” sounds impressive and suffuses this with more authority but did this pollster agree with the idea that they should stop calling Republicans weird or chant “we’re not going back?” or that she should listen to Mark Cuban’s commands and not do the wealth tax in Biden’s tax proposal or that he would “campaign against her?” Cuban said that at a campaign rally: that if she did Biden’s wealth tax he would campaign against her-apparently for Mark Cuban #NeverTrump DIDN’T mean NEVER Trump.
Mark Cuban speaks out against piece of Harris’ tax plan while campaigning for her
If so, then this pollster has no credibility. Back to Politico:
A pollster to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign told top Democratic Party officials on Friday that they must confront President-elect Donald Trump far differently than they did during his first term, urgently pressing them not to focus on every outrage but instead argue that he is hurting voters’ pocketbooks.”
This is not quite the epiphany it may appear at first glance. It’s not so different than Pelosi’s warning just says after their2018 historic landslide that they must not have TOO many investigations of Trump or Biden’s plaintive plea that he valued “unity” over accountability for Donald Trump. Or Bill Clinton in 1993 dropping all Iran Contra investigations under the guise of his campaign song: “Dont stop thinking about tomorrow” after which the GOP thanked him by looking back to 1978 the next five years to make up a phony scandal called Whitewater.
Now the new edict is for Democrats not to focus on “every outrage” but rather focus on no outrage but instead only talk about the economy. But again everything old is young again as the Dem Congressional strategy in 2018 was to only talk about healthcare. But it’s not so much that she thinks Democrats should confront Trump differently as that they should not confront him at all.
The speech by Molly Murphy, which was delivered during one of the Democratic National Committee’s first post-election meetings of its leadership, amounted to a quiet indictment of much of the party’s long-standing approach to Trump. It also marked one of the most candid conversations that top party officials have aired publicly since Trump won.”
“The 2025 playbook cannot be the 2017 playbook,” she said.
What exactly does she think the 2017 playbook was? The #Resistance was more the liberal Democratic base voters-like myself. Many of the establishment Dems were fairly tepid regarding “resistance” back then too-again just a few days after the landslide win they were already warning against “too many investigations” before they were even sworn in before they’d even done one single investigation putting aside the vexing question of how could there be TOO MANY INVESTIGATIONS OF DONALD TRUMP?! I mean how is that even POSSIBLE? The very idea violates the laws of physics.
But whatever the 2017 playbook was supposed to be is it’s legacy so bad? The Democrats had a historical landslide in 2018, they won the Presidency in 2020 and overperformed in 2022. Prior to the November 5 fiasco their record looked pretty decent. Considering the global headwinds against incumbency they over preformed other incumbent parties and candidates in the developed world. Beutler I linked to above has pointed to this Democratic fallacy that if you lose an election EVERYTHING you did failed.
Speaking at a Hyatt Regency hotel in Washington D.C. to the DNC’s executive committee, she said that most Americans support Trump’s transition and that voters “don’t care about who he’s putting in Cabinet positions.”
Ok so she bases this on-what else?-polls. AFAIK there was ONE poll that showed voters approved of his transition. Even assuming these numbers are accurate what specifically do these voters approve OF? Do they know of any reason they shouldn’t approve of them? Do they approve of the fact that Hegseth is a violent drunk who abuses women, doesn’t believe women or gay people should be in the military and wants to use the Pentagon to conduct mass depurations? OR do they not even know this because Democrats have decided to “focus on every outrage?” or to NOT focus on ANY outrage other than maybe prices won’t go down?
She said that Trump will take office more popular than he was when he started his first term, though not as well-liked as President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama were when inaugurated. She stressed that Trump’s strength for years has been that voters approve of his handling of the economy, and that Democrats should aim in his second term to change that.”
Ok Biden was MORE popular than Trump she acknowledges. Did the Republicans take him down by “not taking the bait”, “not focusing on every outrage” and focusing like a laser beam on nothing but the economy? Because his approval rating is higher this time Dems should fondle his balls the next four years?
As we saw above, of course, some Dems like John Fetterman and Ro Khanna are already fondling those very balls.:
Forgive my French at this point I’m maybe a little impatient with the respectability politics 101 primer seeing as Trump is going to be sworn in a little over a month under a mandate to deport 20 million immigrants, end Social Security and Medicare. prosecute his political opponents and the press.
I mean let’s not focus on EVERY outrage-as if that’s even humanly possible seeing as there are so many outrages.
UPDATE: Ok on the other hand here’s some reason for optimism: In Trump’s recent interview on NBC he said that if anyone wants to end the Polio vaccine they’ll have to work very hard to convince him.
She pointed out that key parts of the party’s base, including young people, Latinos and Black voters, drifted away from Democrats this election. And while she said that was driven by high prices, Murphy argued that working-class voters have been steadily moving away from Democrats for several election cycles, suggesting it wasn’t just inflation that was to blame.
She made the case that Democrats have been focused on the wrong issues. For young people and voters of color, she said, “institutions have failed them” and “they may not embrace Trump for wanting to dismantle these institutions, but they certainly don’t hold it against him.”
I mean sure. Kash Patel may have a enemies list with 50 names but allegedly working class voters don’t care about this-so let Trump jail whomever he wants-after all how does this effect these voters pocket books? Then again how much did the Holocaust effect the pocketbooks of the German people-maybe they even helped them with all the slave labor. But honestly I read this as the logical conclusion of Yglesias’ “popularism.”
The Dem consultant playbook is to slavishly obey the polls-the polls say voters are ok with jailing journalists don’t talk about it. All this ignores the point of Ryan Cooper-that the main cause of the defeat wasn’t the choice in message but that many of the low propensity voters weren’t hearing ANY message form the Democrats-as Wikler aptly puts it they were hearing about the Democrats almost entirely from Republicans. As Cooper points out even more aptly no platform is less popular than the GOP’s platform.
I mean the director of Project 2025 is opposed to abortion in any case-even rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. This is such an extreme position it has the support of at most 10% of the electorate. Yet he’s coming to Trump’s WH as OMB Director-or at least Trump has nominated him. Before the election Trump had called for exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother but the Project 2025 didn’t worry-they assured their people Trump didn’t mean it. Now he’s won it’s once again April fools. Now he likes Project 2025.
Maybe-just maybe-you can actually do more than simply accept a dominant narrative of polls or talking heads maybe it’s possible to SHAPE public opinion rather than simply bow to it at every turn. Wild take I know-liable to make the heads of explode of the consultant class.
UPDATE: Ok I thought I was on tilt BEFORE Yglesias’ “popularism” but I just saw his debate on the Bulwark with Tyler Austin Harper
Indeed while I agree with Austin Harper’s idea that the Democrats do more than simply read polls for what is popular they both at the outset agree the Democrats need to “moderate” more on social and cultural issues thereby “allowing more anti abortion, pro gun or homophobic voters into the party.’
I mean wow-there’s so much wrong with this I don’t know where to start. I mean are they arguing the Democrats need to be less vigilant in supporting abortoin rights? It’s just surreal that the GOP position is outlawing abortion in all cases-including rape, incest, and the life of the mother, but BOTH of these dude bros-notable how many supposedly progressive dudes have not let Dobbs in any way mess with their mellow-think it’s the DEMOCRATS who are too extreme on abortion rights? Do the Democrats need to become more homphobic themselves? As we saw above there are some who seem to believe that-see former Clinton aide above.
As for guns in what way are the Democrats anti gun? Because they at least in the past advocated for sensible gun control-the last few years they”ve dropped that a long with any concern to treat immigrants like human beings at lest in terms of rhetoric. This is what’s so frustrating as sensible gun control polls at like 90% approval and the GOP abortion positoin has at most 10% support yet these alleged progressive dude bros get together and before they even start they concede the DEMOCRATS who have 90% of public opinon witih them need to moderate.
I do agree with Austin Harper on his metaphysical skepticism of “popularism” at least he rightly points out that the Dems completely ignore the possibility of actually shaping views and forming a winning coalition. Though the main difference on issues between the two seems to be economic issues-which makes the point I made above that what we’re seeing post election is a basic agreement between Left and Center that the Dems need to move to the Right on “mere social issues” despite in reality their stances not being extreme but quite the opposite though the Left wants to move Left on economic issues. My view is I half agree with the Left-and disagree on both counts with the Center who also wants to move to the Right on economics.
At this point why even be a Democrat a all if you have to move 90% to the Right to be competitive according to Yglesias and Friends-I mean how is it that none of Trump’s very unpopular ideas are seen as “extreme?” I mean if you have to move 90% to the GOP why aren’t you a GOPer?
Again I do agree with Harper it’s about willing a certain politics and putting together coalitions rather than kneeling down in the dust before polls. The best idea I’ve heard among the DNC candidates it to curtail the power of the consultants with their endless array of polls.
UPDATE 2.0 Ok so I REALLY hate Harper’s claim that Trump by being the “antiwar” candidate in talking about things like nuclear war and WWIII. Not sure how much of a Tankie Harper is but those are basically Russian talking points I do NOT think her loss was in any way attributable to supporting Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. I do think as I admitted above her failure to give anything to the pro Palestinian folks was a contributing factor.
After I hated Harper’s claim on this so much I had thought MAYBE Yglesias would have a good response to this but he just made it worse by embracing Harper’s somehow linking “antiwar” with Trump’s virulent anti immigration stance. If there is anything I have to agree with 100% with both Hasan and Vaush it’s that the Democrats get nothing by trying to keep up with the Republicans in the anti immigration arms race. But Yglesias is embracing this allegedly “anti war” positoin by Trump-who actually has already suggested there would be more war in the form of attacking Iran-as it gets him to one of his favorite positions-anti immigration. Again 3% of voters who care a lot about immigration voted for Kamala. Like Vaush says you can’t beat Trump being 80% Hitler
UPDATE:
Another terrible strategy-basically total capitulation while hoping the economy goes bad ie comletely passive andn reactive “strategy” once again the fallacy of Trump “self impeaching.”
Democrats recalibrate their resistance to Trump
Building the Opposition – Democracy Docket
UPDATE: I had thought this was a good sign from Kamala’s deputy manager but in retrosecpt I’m not sure
Rob Flaherty, the former deputy campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, claimed there was “just no value” in candidates speaking to mainstream newspapers like The New York Times or Washington Post.
During an interview Monday with Semafor media editor Max Tani about the Harris campaign’s media strategy, Flaherty claimed, “There’s just no value — with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press — in a general election, to speaking to the New York Times or speaking to the Washington Post, because those [readers] are already with us.”
I tend to agree there’s not much value-as we discuss above the Democrats need to stop leaning on legacy media in general and understand the new media ecosphere is social media. But I don’t think the reason not to is because “the readers are aready with us.”
As evidence for his argument, Flaherty recalled Harris’s viral conversation with Fox News host Bret Baier.
“One of the most important moments of the campaign for the vice president was her interview with Bret Baier,” he said. “That was a huge fundraising moment. It was a huge social moment.”
So his interpretatoin is what? That regular viewers of Fox News were sending them money after seeing Kamala speak on her own terms for once? Skeptical. I read this as the usual overreliance on Democratic consultant types on persuasion rather than turnout among their own party’s partisans
I agree with this.
Citing President-elect Donald Trump’s “smart” campaign stunt serving burgers and French fries at a McDonald’s drive-thru, Flaherty added, “I don’t think TV is dead. It’s still probably the most important thing, but it’s the literal TV and what’s on it that matters.”
That was a very effective campaign stunt I agree. Pretty ironic when you see this proposed cabinet is full of billionaires who’s collective wealth is greater than 64 countries. He’s also right that it’s no longer cable tv news that’s important-certainly the Dems lean to much on getting their message out on Sunday shows with small and declining audience.
But while he’s partially right here he also misses something important:
Flaherty also predicted that in the near-future, the Democratic Party’s left and center-left base would start to drift away from the mainstream media.”
Yes though this has long since started though it is accelerating. But this is a misconception:
“They’re never going to not trust The New York Times, and they’re never going to distrust the Washington Post,” he acknowledged. “But I think that in a Trump era, you’ll start to see frustrations with the mainstream media come to a boil. And I think there will be smart people who try to fill the gap — more individuals who create content on left and center-left messaging.”
Democratic voters don’t trust the NYT at all-again the Times elected Trump in 2016 with the absurd freakout over the emails. The Washington Post had more trust until Bezos nixed the endorsement of Flaherty’s own candidate then WaPo lost 250,000 subscribers. After Bezos patting himself on the back for being “neutral” he’s now announced he’s giving $1 million dollars to Trump’s Inauguration and has raved about how much more optimistic he is about Trump’s second term.
He has declared himself “very optimistic” and that “I’m going to help him.”
Jeff Bezos excited about second Trump term: ‘I’m going to help him’
But the reason for nixing the Kamala endorsement was he wanted to paper to be “neutral.”
Speaking for myself I read WaPo pretty seldomly since the nixed endorsement-I haven’t read the Times since the Comey Letter fiasco. So Flaherty doesn’t entirely get it on Democratic voters. He’s right that Democrats are going to be more on liberal and progressive leaning social media-most of the stuff I watch now is on YouTube-Vaush, Destiny, Hasan, Majority Report, David Pakman, Dylan Burns etc.
But Democrats don’t see WaPo much less the Times as liberal bastions they trust-quite the opposite.
THIS is why Democrats are leaving corporate media-not because we get bored with all the agreement.
That’s a pretty important misconception for a top party operative. Indeed to be honest as a member in good standing of the Democratic party base for a long time I’ve had the perception that high ranking party officials like Flaherty don’t give a crap about actual Democratic voters-you see the same attitude in his lauding of Brett Bair-in their mind we already support them so they don’t have to do ANYTHING for us-to the contrary they tailor everything towards Republicans or right leaning swing voters and independents.
As I discussed above this is the opposite of how the GOP does it-they hug their base, Democrats completely take us for granted. There was a new poll that shows that Democratic voters are very concerned that Democratic party leaders won’t stand up to Trump enough.
At first glance this gave me some optimism-surely when our party leaders see this they’ll quite sucking up to Elon Musk and DOGE-which wants to cut millions of government jobs and dismantle SS and Medicare- and stop saying Biden should pardon Trump. Fetterman goes as far as falsely claiming the hush money case was a political hitjob.
But then I got to thinking sure by 79% to 17% Democrats want Dem politicians to fight Trump harder BUT among independents it’s only 46% to 49%-ie a very small plurality prefers to go for “unity” and overall electorate favors “peace at any price” 48-45. So perhaps folks like Flaherty look at this and say-SURE DEMOCRATS want us to fight harder but they already support us independents prefer unity by 3 whole points so guess we better make nice with Trump and hope he self-impeaches.
Yet how SAVVY is this strategy really? When you look at the 2024 numbers Trump gained about 3 million votes since 2020 but Kamala lost about 6 from her and Biden 2020. Maybe completely taking your own voters and base completely for granted is NOT such an inspired strategy?
This is how the Democratic base actually feels-we’re on our own.
Our big institutions are failing us INCLUDING our Democratic leaders
End FN
With all the shade that some on the Left have for the Never Trumpers I’m a big fan of many of them-including Liz Cheney for that matter though she’s not a Never Trumper she’s a Once Trumper. While I don’t know that I agree with Adam Kinzinger on pardons-he thinks they’re a mistake-while I tend to think maybe Biden should do them-I LOVE the former Congressman’s attitude. And even if I disagree with him on the pardons his opinion can’t handwaved away too easily seeing as he is one of those on Trump’s enemy’s list.
UPDATE: Malcolm Nance has his own proposal for what a new American Resistance-to fascism-could look like
Forming The New American Resistance – by Malcolm Nance
(1147) Team Trump Wants a Fight? BRING IT ON! (w/ Adam Kinzinger) | The Bulwark Podcast – YouTube
He is right that to accept a pardon impcitily suggests you did something wrong while none of the people on Trump-Patel’s list did anything wrong. OTOH I also totally understand and tend to agree with Bill Clinton who says he’s at least open to the idea of HRC getting a pardon.
As Rachel Maddow said in her next show after November 5 : your country needs you now more than ever
As George Orwell said in a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.