I don't think they're scared of competition at all. They have benefitted hugely from educational meritocracy, for example. They are massively credentialist - if you've climbed to the top of academia, or the CDC or whatever, your word is law. What I think is, they have such difficulty thinking outside of those realms, and are so insulated from consequence, that they struggle to articulate themselves in front of any audience that doesn't already agree with them.
“ When, on the other hand, we fight over the 1619 Project”
I’m not into conspiracy theories. But if I was part of a billionaire cabal trying to divert attention away from our looting and pillaging - the whole 1619/CRT would probably be what my highly paid team came up with.
I'm not into conspiracy theories either -- including ones that suggests that a cynical and organized group is using the culture wars to distract from their massively unequal wealth gain. But culture wars issues are certainly areas where they feel that, once they adopt the zeitgeist of the war, they are comfortable with it because it doesn't threaten them anymore. The establishment and those who benefit most from it simply shift their framing of things to embrace the latest moralism, and then that moralism simply serves the status quo.
It's not a conspiracy. It's simply the establishment reacting instinctively to maintain the status quo that keeps it in power.
It looks like a few people and a bunch of dummy accounts convinced everyone that a campaign of hate was being directed at Megan Markle.
It wouldn’t be that hard to get a progressive circle jerk going starting with a relatively small team of provocateurs. And then the nonsense takes on a life of its own.
I’ve thought about this as well. It’s one explanation why it has “come out of the woodwork”, so to speak. Maybe Alex Jones was right all along? Seriously tho, I think there are environmental explanations for the rise in peanut allergies and autism. Why not transgenderism too?
Raises a host of issues. Big if true. If true, transgenderism should be considered a health condition and covered under insurance and disability regulations.
Yes, but genital mutilation as an intervention to prevent suicide resulting from an environmentally-caused mental illness would never get past any ethics board on the planet that wasn't already ideologically captured.
Hi Freddie: I really enjoy your work and am happy to subscribe to the substack. This claim, "People vote based on their needs and the needs of their families, as well they should," is, I believe, not true (the first, empirical clause, not commenting on the normative clause). Check out "Sociotropic Politics: The American Case" by Donald R. Kinder and D. Roderick Kiewiet and its progeny if you're interested in digging into the empirical literature on this.
I've never really understood this "voting against your interests" bit. It feels pretty arrogant and presumptuous to tell someone else what their interests are.
Everyone has *values* and typically, they vote to a large degree based on those. The fact that someone else doesn't share the values you think they should feels dismissive of their ideas, feelings, and morals.
Yes, there is a lot of evidence against self-interest driving vote choice in political science and economics (sometimes in nice ways, like when rich liberals vote for higher taxes). And some evidence in favor, depending on the issue and how you ask. But it's muddy because people have different perceptions of candidates' preferred policies, how proposals would impact them, and how likely it is to matter. Like, did voters really believe we would get Medicare for All if Bernie won the presidency? Hard to say.
Obama would be a fine example of the success of this approach from the center-left (emphasis on the center). His campaign was - for the most part - one of universal messaging. Hope and change, "who _we_ are", our shared history, our shared promise.
Then when he got power, we got Obamacare, which is a very imperfect step towards something most people on the left want - some semblance of universal healthcare. ("Very imperfect" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here but you know what I mean.)
I don't get why this is so hard for people to wrap their heads around. Politics isn't a luxury good. You don't target it to a tiny percentage of the electorate and then wonder why you're not winning in the mass market.
it's remarkable how many people have convinced themselves obama won by just saying "hi i'm obama" and not that he won because people thought he would actually do the things he promised!
Yep! I'm not his biggest fan but he ran a mostly positive campaign and generated hope. A lot of this hope was vague, and (as he's said himself) a lot of it was impressed upon him in a sort of cypher's role. But he wanted healthcare front and center, and it was.
I believed he wanted healthcare. I saw talk about how his mother had to fight insurance companies on the phone from her deathbed. I stopped believing he wanted it when he came out against Medicare For All. There must be something else he wants, and I no longer care what it is. He's doing nothing, except making phone calls every four years to stop the health care candidate from winning.
Right, Obama's phone call switched the votes of over five million primary voters in 2020. They really wanted to vote for Bernie, but that gosh darn Obama phone call made them vote for Biden instead.
He didn't call the voters, he called whatshisface, Clyburn, and then a lot of other people, for endorsements. Did this win Biden the nomination? Who can say? Did Obama exert effort (that he doesn't seem to take for anything else) to get this result? Yes. That's what I'm saying. What he cares about. What he does.
So the millions of voters who chose Biden over Bernie had no minds of their own? They were just mindlessly following whatever Obama and Clyburn said? Is that really your thesis?
I am not sure if you are or are not praising Obama here, but I don't see a scenario where we get to universal healthcare without the interim step that he accomplished. The Medicaid expansion was a huge change, and it would have been more effective if John Roberts hadn't decided to split the baby to mollify right and center. I have very little patience for red rose twitter people who likely don't know anyone poor enough to have benefitted from this change who make it seem like crumbs and then whine about how the DNC conspired against Bernie Sanders. If Joe Biden can get a permanent fully refundable CTC then he will have bested Obama, but if and when BBB gets passed in some form I expect to hear mostly lamentations about how disappointing it is from the left -- how is that helping?
I meant it in a positive way (for those who want universal healthcare, anyway.) I agree with you completely that steps towards an end goal are more realistic than one final victory.
Not being of the left myself, my diagnosis of the Twitter left is that they're playing with house money. They can let the perfect be the enemy of the good because they don't do the work and they don't campaign to convince the public and they are safely ensconced in their very-online comfort zone, and anything like incremental progress or compromise would risk appearing impure in front of the faithful, so they don't do it. Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit, I don't know.
"But why oh why would you draw that absurd diagram, which makes the message here seem vastly more complicated than it has to be? What on earth is the word “intersectional” doing in a tweet from a presidential candidate during a campaign? Intersectional is a word that should never, ever be used by Democratic candidates for office in public messaging. It sounds like the unnecessary academic jargon it is. The trouble is that so much of left-of-center messaging is directed at insiders rather than average people; you get credit for saying “intersectional” within liberal enclaves and so it pops up again and again where it’s not needed."
This. One thousand times this. The most basic and necessary and critical part of every communication is the parties on the other side. If you have not carefully considered the audience and tailored your message to that audience, you may as well not bother creating the message.
But maybe those messages really are just intended for other liberal elites because liberal elites only consider other elites a worthy audience? I don't believe that, but some days it's hard not to feel cynical.
You needn't even believe in that motive to realize the conclusion. That is, they don't need to think of liberal elites as a *worthy* audience. Rather, they just can't really conceive of an audience that doesn't already agree with them. It's 'let them eat cake' on a cultural scale. (Let them eat snark?)
In 2016 they - the whole Brooklyn seraglio - were talking to themselves. They were sneering at the poorly educated, they were having Hillary make campaign videos about a talking frog (???), they were trying to be technocratic wonks, irony-drenched lower-case leftists, and elder statesmen all at the same time... it just depended on what the mood of the microbrewery was that day. They lurched from tone-deaf moment to tone-deaf moment but never stopped to reflect on how the country at large heard them. All was well in the salon!
I doubt it’s conscious, but I think you’re right. Elites believe (at a core-level, that they don’t even have to think about) that they’re at the top because they’ve earned their spot: through being born into the kind of family that has “earned” a spot in perpetuity, by being smart, by being well educated. By condescending to people who don’t have those same credentials, by not even believing people without those same credentials even know what’s good for them. Scoffing at religious and dogmatic beliefs (which I disagree with, too! But people get to believe whatever they want!) instead of working around or accommodating them. It’s not a good look.
Yet the second word out of their mouth (after "ackshully") is always "privilege", about which they learned chapter and verse at Choate or Harvard-Westlake. Many such cases!
I think that's a fair assessment of many, at least: an unconscious privileging of the ideas and people that share in their well-educated, irony-drenched (great phrasing Always Adblock) values.
Takes some real chutzpah to put up a list of past accomplishments of a Party that you have never joined or supported IN ANY WAY, and indeed spend a lot of time and effort villifying (including in this very piece!), as "my plan".
Phenomenal essay once again, Freddie. I'm not sure what happened but it feels like we got lost in the mid 2010s and started caring more about personalities and culture war than about bread-and-butter issues. Still doesn't feel like we have a message nowadays other than Noun/Verb/January 6.
See, this is the sort of thing that would actually make me vote for a local Democrat, until I remember that sending a reasonable local Democrat to Washington just turns them into a faceless backbencher cipher, another tick in the tally strengthening the demonic zombie oligarchs running the federal party.
The main issue with the 1619 Project lies in what it reveals: our "paper of record" is willing to devote a lot of resources to a fundamentally ahistorical project helmed by the shallow and intellectually dishonest Nikole Hannah-Jones. It's pathetic that she's still popular after she publicized her own uniquely shitty version of "if you don't vote for me you ain't black."
I take it you have seen the extraordinary collection of essay and interviews carried out by the Worldwide Socialist Website (WSWS) with top historians?
WSWS did so because it quickly and correctly saw that "1619" was a big cultural project throw out issues of class/wealth and instead replace them with issues of identity/race. Here is the link:
I have indeed! WSWS did some great work there, work that I first encountered some months ago when Matt Taibbi wrote a piece about how Google censored them by pushing them way down in people's search results. Unfortunately losers still whine that he only cares about conservative views that get censored, but such is life.
While the many inaccuracies of her project are insulting, very few people would care if Nikole had just published a book or blog or whatever about it. The NYT's blatantly biased ideological endorsement and backing of the project are the real issues IMO. She'd be nothing without the NYT's many crimes against journalism. Her intellectually dishonest bullshit wouldn't exist, and it certainly would never have become school curriculum.
If "CRT" includes the 1619 Project then I absolutely support anyone protesting against it.
I suspect that most attempts to critique CRT by attacking the 1619 Project will be met with claims that it's not actually CRT at all, but I believe you're right.
I understand Freddie's hesitance to wade into this particular fray, but Taibbi said it best:
"The newest moral panic that the kente-cloth-clad Schumers and Pelosis were suddenly selling, in solidarity with famed progressive change agents like Bank of America, PayPal, Apple, Comcast, and Alphabet, was that any nation capable of electing Trump must always have been a historically unredeemable white supremacist construct, the America of the 1619 Project. The original propaganda line was that “half” of Trump supporters were deplorable racists, then it was all of them, and then, four years in, the whole country and all its traditions were deemed deplorable."
Maybe my long-ass comment on the other post would've been better for this one. I agree that the current messaging sucks, for the reasons you describe. I agree that the examples you propose are infinitely clearer, simpler, more compelling, more "relatable" (ack) -- just better in every way.
But I don't think anything would happen if we had better messaging, because no one in any position of power -- and no one whom the major parties choose to run for office -- intends to do good things for regular people, and that includes any people marketing themselves as Democratic Socialists, progressives, whatever.
AOC and her ilk are distractions, and their purpose is to make us believe "This is why we can't have nice things": We, the inadequate voters, haven't persuaded our fellows to elect people who will act in our interests. (The corollary to that, I suppose, is that we're expected to believe that all the bad things the current legislature does is "what we want, because we elected them" -- pfft.)
Freddie, I know you don’t want the job(s), but I’d vote for you for anything in a fucking heartbeat. Thank you for your diligence in the face of profound asininity. Peace and fortitude to you.
“No, we’re teaching children that all of us have a part to play in healing our country’s racial wounds, and to do that we need to help them understand how destructive slavery and Jim Crow were.”
Do you believe that what is being taught is actually conducive towards this stated goal? You talk about Rufo, so, more specifically do you think the various documents and presentations that he (and various others) have claimed are being taught in schools (and presented in city council meetings and board rooms, etc.) accomplish that?
That's a genuine question. Clearly I don't, and more to the point I have a tremendously hard time seeing how anyone could claim otherwise. And what I again find baffling is that all your writing on this topic leads me to believe that you don't think all that stuff is actually conducive towards the goal I quote above either.
You're right on in your critique, but I would add that, with Bernie at least, a big failing of his presidential campaigns was calling himself a democratic socialist at all. It seems most voters missed the democratic part and only heard socialist, even—or maybe especially—the media types who surely knew better but wanted to paint him as a commie outsider nutjob. (He honeymooned in Russia! ugh) Bernie is really, in my opinion, an old-school FDR-style Democrat. Why not run on that? I'm not a marketing person, but it looks like poor branding was part of the problem.
I'm not a socialist or a Democrat. I'm politically homeless now. I'm a Gen-Xer who was a staunch Democrat for decades. My first vote was for Dukakis and I voted nearly straight Dem tickets until after Obama broke my faith. (Yes, I know I should have wised up a whole lot sooner.) I went hard for Bernie—volunteering, donating, serving as a delegate at the three levels in my then-caucus state (Colorado). I changed my voter registration to Independent in disgust after it became clear that the Dems would do anything to stay on their corporate-friendly, third-way, save-Wall-Street-and-screw-Main-Street track. But my lifelong normie Dem friends did not get it. Many thought Bernie was too radical. I spent a lot of time explaining to them that Bernie was trying to rebuild our social safety net and put back the constraints on capitalism that allowed the middle class in which they comfortably grew up to exist in the first place. But the label Bernie saddled himself with was a problem.
So, my question is, are candidates helping or hurting themselves with any type of socialist label, whether it truly applies or not? I agree with you that it will take years of work for dem socialists to build a large base under any circumstance. But maybe minds would change a little faster with a greater attempt to appeal to normies?
For me the socialist label was a nonstarter, because until scarcity is overcome and we don't need people's productive labor in order to be able to eat and have shelter we need a vibrant and functioning market. I would have voted for Bernie if he was the nominee but until that point I was looking for the most viable alternative -- I think that's what is funny about the people who feel like there was a conspiracy against him, when it was more basic, lots of voters did not want a socialist nominee and so when splitting our votes among a bunch of alternatives looked like it might make that happen, we each took action to vote for the person who was most likely to win the nomination who wasn't Bernie, and after South Carolina that was clearly Biden. No conspiracy -- democracy.
I had some fun trying to follow that web as if it were a meaningful diagram, where a spoke directly between Issue A and Issue B ought to mean they should have some sort of unmediated relationship, while no spoke connecting A to C, but one spoke connecting A to B, then another spoke connecting B to C, ought to mean that the relationship between A and C is mediated by B. The results were interesting.
"Infrastructure investments", despite its centrality to the Democrats' message, appears as a hub with only three spokes, none of which link to "Environmental protection", which makes it seem as if ecologically-conscious infrastructure development is not a priority. "Jobs programs for unemployed youth" links directly to "More jobs and higher wages", "Investment in communities of color", and "Universal health care", but not to "Investment in underserved communities", nor does "More jobs and higher wages" link directly to "Investment in underserved communities". Looks like underserved communities are underserved even by this diagram.
Doing informal schematics right isn't easy. Letting go of rigid mathematical relationships in order to produce graphics more legible to humans takes discernment, and there isn't necessarily one right way to do it. But there are a lot of wrong ways.
I’m guessing someone was told to put a bunch of buzzphrases into an image and make them all connected because (as I remember it) Clinton wanted to look like a masterful technocrat. The illegibility was the point - Clinton has mastered these connections, you haven’t, vote for her to get sophisticated solutions and a superior brain.
The saddest possibility, to me, at least, is that the designer knew better but had to please bosses who didn't, or who didn't care. It's not like "talented graphic designer" should be a hard demographic for Democrats to attract.
"Really incredible that this became so controversial in the popularist debate, but the dirty secret of politics is that if you get elected for saying popular things you can also try and slip in the unpopular things when you’re in power. "
That's the David Shor line, but (and I speak as a huge fan), he's wrong. The Republicans spent 30 years saying popular things and then selling out the base and it led to Donald Trump and a radical shift in the party to the point that you can no longer say or do things out of line because they violated the trust for so many years.
And I am completely certain that if moderates voted for Dems saying popular things, and the Dems went in and upped the tax rate and increased immigration and whatever other things Socialists want, that they would start losing in a hurry. History suggests Dem backlashes are far more immediate than Republican ones.
I don't think they're scared of competition at all. They have benefitted hugely from educational meritocracy, for example. They are massively credentialist - if you've climbed to the top of academia, or the CDC or whatever, your word is law. What I think is, they have such difficulty thinking outside of those realms, and are so insulated from consequence, that they struggle to articulate themselves in front of any audience that doesn't already agree with them.
That's fair.
IDK about that? Many academics, doctors I know are intense work out / diet / health regimen people. Freddie fits that mould.
“ When, on the other hand, we fight over the 1619 Project”
I’m not into conspiracy theories. But if I was part of a billionaire cabal trying to divert attention away from our looting and pillaging - the whole 1619/CRT would probably be what my highly paid team came up with.
I'm not into conspiracy theories either -- including ones that suggests that a cynical and organized group is using the culture wars to distract from their massively unequal wealth gain. But culture wars issues are certainly areas where they feel that, once they adopt the zeitgeist of the war, they are comfortable with it because it doesn't threaten them anymore. The establishment and those who benefit most from it simply shift their framing of things to embrace the latest moralism, and then that moralism simply serves the status quo.
It's not a conspiracy. It's simply the establishment reacting instinctively to maintain the status quo that keeps it in power.
It looks like a few people and a bunch of dummy accounts convinced everyone that a campaign of hate was being directed at Megan Markle.
It wouldn’t be that hard to get a progressive circle jerk going starting with a relatively small team of provocateurs. And then the nonsense takes on a life of its own.
CRT is like the progressing QAnon?
No, the trans cult is the left's QAnon.
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1330/a-world-without-gender/
My money is on the trans issue being mainly due to endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment.
I’ve thought about this as well. It’s one explanation why it has “come out of the woodwork”, so to speak. Maybe Alex Jones was right all along? Seriously tho, I think there are environmental explanations for the rise in peanut allergies and autism. Why not transgenderism too?
Raises a host of issues. Big if true. If true, transgenderism should be considered a health condition and covered under insurance and disability regulations.
Yes, but genital mutilation as an intervention to prevent suicide resulting from an environmentally-caused mental illness would never get past any ethics board on the planet that wasn't already ideologically captured.
I wondered about that too, but would that explain the big increase in female to male transitions?
The really sweet part for the billionaire cabal is that the left does it to itself for free!
Hi Freddie: I really enjoy your work and am happy to subscribe to the substack. This claim, "People vote based on their needs and the needs of their families, as well they should," is, I believe, not true (the first, empirical clause, not commenting on the normative clause). Check out "Sociotropic Politics: The American Case" by Donald R. Kinder and D. Roderick Kiewiet and its progeny if you're interested in digging into the empirical literature on this.
well perhaps "their perceived needs"
Call me a radical, but perceived needs are actual needs, not what some academic thinks their needs should be.
I've never really understood this "voting against your interests" bit. It feels pretty arrogant and presumptuous to tell someone else what their interests are.
Everyone has *values* and typically, they vote to a large degree based on those. The fact that someone else doesn't share the values you think they should feels dismissive of their ideas, feelings, and morals.
Jonathan Haidt?
Yes, there is a lot of evidence against self-interest driving vote choice in political science and economics (sometimes in nice ways, like when rich liberals vote for higher taxes). And some evidence in favor, depending on the issue and how you ask. But it's muddy because people have different perceptions of candidates' preferred policies, how proposals would impact them, and how likely it is to matter. Like, did voters really believe we would get Medicare for All if Bernie won the presidency? Hard to say.
Obama would be a fine example of the success of this approach from the center-left (emphasis on the center). His campaign was - for the most part - one of universal messaging. Hope and change, "who _we_ are", our shared history, our shared promise.
Then when he got power, we got Obamacare, which is a very imperfect step towards something most people on the left want - some semblance of universal healthcare. ("Very imperfect" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here but you know what I mean.)
I don't get why this is so hard for people to wrap their heads around. Politics isn't a luxury good. You don't target it to a tiny percentage of the electorate and then wonder why you're not winning in the mass market.
it's remarkable how many people have convinced themselves obama won by just saying "hi i'm obama" and not that he won because people thought he would actually do the things he promised!
Yep! I'm not his biggest fan but he ran a mostly positive campaign and generated hope. A lot of this hope was vague, and (as he's said himself) a lot of it was impressed upon him in a sort of cypher's role. But he wanted healthcare front and center, and it was.
I believed he wanted healthcare. I saw talk about how his mother had to fight insurance companies on the phone from her deathbed. I stopped believing he wanted it when he came out against Medicare For All. There must be something else he wants, and I no longer care what it is. He's doing nothing, except making phone calls every four years to stop the health care candidate from winning.
Right, Obama's phone call switched the votes of over five million primary voters in 2020. They really wanted to vote for Bernie, but that gosh darn Obama phone call made them vote for Biden instead.
He didn't call the voters, he called whatshisface, Clyburn, and then a lot of other people, for endorsements. Did this win Biden the nomination? Who can say? Did Obama exert effort (that he doesn't seem to take for anything else) to get this result? Yes. That's what I'm saying. What he cares about. What he does.
So the millions of voters who chose Biden over Bernie had no minds of their own? They were just mindlessly following whatever Obama and Clyburn said? Is that really your thesis?
That is a fair critique of the man.
I actually really like the rhetoric of 2008 Obama. If he had actually done any of that stuff, he would have been a great president.
And that's my point too, exactly: he didn't. He wasn't ever gonna.
Everything from the policies to the vibe was right. The liberals have just retconned it to only be about the vibe.
I am not sure if you are or are not praising Obama here, but I don't see a scenario where we get to universal healthcare without the interim step that he accomplished. The Medicaid expansion was a huge change, and it would have been more effective if John Roberts hadn't decided to split the baby to mollify right and center. I have very little patience for red rose twitter people who likely don't know anyone poor enough to have benefitted from this change who make it seem like crumbs and then whine about how the DNC conspired against Bernie Sanders. If Joe Biden can get a permanent fully refundable CTC then he will have bested Obama, but if and when BBB gets passed in some form I expect to hear mostly lamentations about how disappointing it is from the left -- how is that helping?
I meant it in a positive way (for those who want universal healthcare, anyway.) I agree with you completely that steps towards an end goal are more realistic than one final victory.
Not being of the left myself, my diagnosis of the Twitter left is that they're playing with house money. They can let the perfect be the enemy of the good because they don't do the work and they don't campaign to convince the public and they are safely ensconced in their very-online comfort zone, and anything like incremental progress or compromise would risk appearing impure in front of the faithful, so they don't do it. Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit, I don't know.
"But why oh why would you draw that absurd diagram, which makes the message here seem vastly more complicated than it has to be? What on earth is the word “intersectional” doing in a tweet from a presidential candidate during a campaign? Intersectional is a word that should never, ever be used by Democratic candidates for office in public messaging. It sounds like the unnecessary academic jargon it is. The trouble is that so much of left-of-center messaging is directed at insiders rather than average people; you get credit for saying “intersectional” within liberal enclaves and so it pops up again and again where it’s not needed."
This. One thousand times this. The most basic and necessary and critical part of every communication is the parties on the other side. If you have not carefully considered the audience and tailored your message to that audience, you may as well not bother creating the message.
But maybe those messages really are just intended for other liberal elites because liberal elites only consider other elites a worthy audience? I don't believe that, but some days it's hard not to feel cynical.
You needn't even believe in that motive to realize the conclusion. That is, they don't need to think of liberal elites as a *worthy* audience. Rather, they just can't really conceive of an audience that doesn't already agree with them. It's 'let them eat cake' on a cultural scale. (Let them eat snark?)
In 2016 they - the whole Brooklyn seraglio - were talking to themselves. They were sneering at the poorly educated, they were having Hillary make campaign videos about a talking frog (???), they were trying to be technocratic wonks, irony-drenched lower-case leftists, and elder statesmen all at the same time... it just depended on what the mood of the microbrewery was that day. They lurched from tone-deaf moment to tone-deaf moment but never stopped to reflect on how the country at large heard them. All was well in the salon!
I doubt it’s conscious, but I think you’re right. Elites believe (at a core-level, that they don’t even have to think about) that they’re at the top because they’ve earned their spot: through being born into the kind of family that has “earned” a spot in perpetuity, by being smart, by being well educated. By condescending to people who don’t have those same credentials, by not even believing people without those same credentials even know what’s good for them. Scoffing at religious and dogmatic beliefs (which I disagree with, too! But people get to believe whatever they want!) instead of working around or accommodating them. It’s not a good look.
Yet the second word out of their mouth (after "ackshully") is always "privilege", about which they learned chapter and verse at Choate or Harvard-Westlake. Many such cases!
I think that's a fair assessment of many, at least: an unconscious privileging of the ideas and people that share in their well-educated, irony-drenched (great phrasing Always Adblock) values.
Takes some real chutzpah to put up a list of past accomplishments of a Party that you have never joined or supported IN ANY WAY, and indeed spend a lot of time and effort villifying (including in this very piece!), as "my plan".
Phenomenal essay once again, Freddie. I'm not sure what happened but it feels like we got lost in the mid 2010s and started caring more about personalities and culture war than about bread-and-butter issues. Still doesn't feel like we have a message nowadays other than Noun/Verb/January 6.
See, this is the sort of thing that would actually make me vote for a local Democrat, until I remember that sending a reasonable local Democrat to Washington just turns them into a faceless backbencher cipher, another tick in the tally strengthening the demonic zombie oligarchs running the federal party.
The main issue with the 1619 Project lies in what it reveals: our "paper of record" is willing to devote a lot of resources to a fundamentally ahistorical project helmed by the shallow and intellectually dishonest Nikole Hannah-Jones. It's pathetic that she's still popular after she publicized her own uniquely shitty version of "if you don't vote for me you ain't black."
I take it you have seen the extraordinary collection of essay and interviews carried out by the Worldwide Socialist Website (WSWS) with top historians?
WSWS did so because it quickly and correctly saw that "1619" was a big cultural project throw out issues of class/wealth and instead replace them with issues of identity/race. Here is the link:
https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619
I have indeed! WSWS did some great work there, work that I first encountered some months ago when Matt Taibbi wrote a piece about how Google censored them by pushing them way down in people's search results. Unfortunately losers still whine that he only cares about conservative views that get censored, but such is life.
While the many inaccuracies of her project are insulting, very few people would care if Nikole had just published a book or blog or whatever about it. The NYT's blatantly biased ideological endorsement and backing of the project are the real issues IMO. She'd be nothing without the NYT's many crimes against journalism. Her intellectually dishonest bullshit wouldn't exist, and it certainly would never have become school curriculum.
If "CRT" includes the 1619 Project then I absolutely support anyone protesting against it.
Yes, I believe that the viewpoint and the "1619" project itself are reflections of and part of the actual teaching of Critical Race Theory.
I suspect that most attempts to critique CRT by attacking the 1619 Project will be met with claims that it's not actually CRT at all, but I believe you're right.
I understand Freddie's hesitance to wade into this particular fray, but Taibbi said it best:
"The newest moral panic that the kente-cloth-clad Schumers and Pelosis were suddenly selling, in solidarity with famed progressive change agents like Bank of America, PayPal, Apple, Comcast, and Alphabet, was that any nation capable of electing Trump must always have been a historically unredeemable white supremacist construct, the America of the 1619 Project. The original propaganda line was that “half” of Trump supporters were deplorable racists, then it was all of them, and then, four years in, the whole country and all its traditions were deemed deplorable."
Maybe my long-ass comment on the other post would've been better for this one. I agree that the current messaging sucks, for the reasons you describe. I agree that the examples you propose are infinitely clearer, simpler, more compelling, more "relatable" (ack) -- just better in every way.
But I don't think anything would happen if we had better messaging, because no one in any position of power -- and no one whom the major parties choose to run for office -- intends to do good things for regular people, and that includes any people marketing themselves as Democratic Socialists, progressives, whatever.
AOC and her ilk are distractions, and their purpose is to make us believe "This is why we can't have nice things": We, the inadequate voters, haven't persuaded our fellows to elect people who will act in our interests. (The corollary to that, I suppose, is that we're expected to believe that all the bad things the current legislature does is "what we want, because we elected them" -- pfft.)
Freddie, I know you don’t want the job(s), but I’d vote for you for anything in a fucking heartbeat. Thank you for your diligence in the face of profound asininity. Peace and fortitude to you.
“No, we’re teaching children that all of us have a part to play in healing our country’s racial wounds, and to do that we need to help them understand how destructive slavery and Jim Crow were.”
Do you believe that what is being taught is actually conducive towards this stated goal? You talk about Rufo, so, more specifically do you think the various documents and presentations that he (and various others) have claimed are being taught in schools (and presented in city council meetings and board rooms, etc.) accomplish that?
That's a genuine question. Clearly I don't, and more to the point I have a tremendously hard time seeing how anyone could claim otherwise. And what I again find baffling is that all your writing on this topic leads me to believe that you don't think all that stuff is actually conducive towards the goal I quote above either.
You're right on in your critique, but I would add that, with Bernie at least, a big failing of his presidential campaigns was calling himself a democratic socialist at all. It seems most voters missed the democratic part and only heard socialist, even—or maybe especially—the media types who surely knew better but wanted to paint him as a commie outsider nutjob. (He honeymooned in Russia! ugh) Bernie is really, in my opinion, an old-school FDR-style Democrat. Why not run on that? I'm not a marketing person, but it looks like poor branding was part of the problem.
I'm not a socialist or a Democrat. I'm politically homeless now. I'm a Gen-Xer who was a staunch Democrat for decades. My first vote was for Dukakis and I voted nearly straight Dem tickets until after Obama broke my faith. (Yes, I know I should have wised up a whole lot sooner.) I went hard for Bernie—volunteering, donating, serving as a delegate at the three levels in my then-caucus state (Colorado). I changed my voter registration to Independent in disgust after it became clear that the Dems would do anything to stay on their corporate-friendly, third-way, save-Wall-Street-and-screw-Main-Street track. But my lifelong normie Dem friends did not get it. Many thought Bernie was too radical. I spent a lot of time explaining to them that Bernie was trying to rebuild our social safety net and put back the constraints on capitalism that allowed the middle class in which they comfortably grew up to exist in the first place. But the label Bernie saddled himself with was a problem.
So, my question is, are candidates helping or hurting themselves with any type of socialist label, whether it truly applies or not? I agree with you that it will take years of work for dem socialists to build a large base under any circumstance. But maybe minds would change a little faster with a greater attempt to appeal to normies?
I don't see any advantage of the socialist label.
How quickly they established the Cheka and put Felix Dzerzhinsky in charge has always made me shy of the label.
For me the socialist label was a nonstarter, because until scarcity is overcome and we don't need people's productive labor in order to be able to eat and have shelter we need a vibrant and functioning market. I would have voted for Bernie if he was the nominee but until that point I was looking for the most viable alternative -- I think that's what is funny about the people who feel like there was a conspiracy against him, when it was more basic, lots of voters did not want a socialist nominee and so when splitting our votes among a bunch of alternatives looked like it might make that happen, we each took action to vote for the person who was most likely to win the nomination who wasn't Bernie, and after South Carolina that was clearly Biden. No conspiracy -- democracy.
I had some fun trying to follow that web as if it were a meaningful diagram, where a spoke directly between Issue A and Issue B ought to mean they should have some sort of unmediated relationship, while no spoke connecting A to C, but one spoke connecting A to B, then another spoke connecting B to C, ought to mean that the relationship between A and C is mediated by B. The results were interesting.
"Infrastructure investments", despite its centrality to the Democrats' message, appears as a hub with only three spokes, none of which link to "Environmental protection", which makes it seem as if ecologically-conscious infrastructure development is not a priority. "Jobs programs for unemployed youth" links directly to "More jobs and higher wages", "Investment in communities of color", and "Universal health care", but not to "Investment in underserved communities", nor does "More jobs and higher wages" link directly to "Investment in underserved communities". Looks like underserved communities are underserved even by this diagram.
Doing informal schematics right isn't easy. Letting go of rigid mathematical relationships in order to produce graphics more legible to humans takes discernment, and there isn't necessarily one right way to do it. But there are a lot of wrong ways.
I’m guessing someone was told to put a bunch of buzzphrases into an image and make them all connected because (as I remember it) Clinton wanted to look like a masterful technocrat. The illegibility was the point - Clinton has mastered these connections, you haven’t, vote for her to get sophisticated solutions and a superior brain.
The saddest possibility, to me, at least, is that the designer knew better but had to please bosses who didn't, or who didn't care. It's not like "talented graphic designer" should be a hard demographic for Democrats to attract.
"Really incredible that this became so controversial in the popularist debate, but the dirty secret of politics is that if you get elected for saying popular things you can also try and slip in the unpopular things when you’re in power. "
That's the David Shor line, but (and I speak as a huge fan), he's wrong. The Republicans spent 30 years saying popular things and then selling out the base and it led to Donald Trump and a radical shift in the party to the point that you can no longer say or do things out of line because they violated the trust for so many years.
And I am completely certain that if moderates voted for Dems saying popular things, and the Dems went in and upped the tax rate and increased immigration and whatever other things Socialists want, that they would start losing in a hurry. History suggests Dem backlashes are far more immediate than Republican ones.
Shoot, I forgot to say congrats! I hate the NYTimes anymore, but it doesn't change the fact that getting published there is still a huge deal.