Sorry to spoil another one of your asinine strawmen, but no, I don't think the Koch brothers paid off the Democrats to ignore labor issues. They didn't need to.

Remember: the wealth inequality debate blew up under a Democratic government. Mass protests, OWS, all that stuff. Despite being an empowered "labor" party, they did absolutely ****ing nothing about the situation. Then 4 years later, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton still felt like it was super fine to give closed-door campaign speeches to Wall Street executives.

I'm not trying to single out the US or anything. The same thing happened in Canada and most other countries. This is absolutely a conspiracy, but it's not the sort of conspiracy you've alluded to: Liberal parties worldwide realize they no longer have any credibility on economic issues, can't effectively campaign on economic issues without a platform of radical reform, and they have too many business associations to risk threatening that. In the calculus of a professional partisan it simply makes more sense to double down on social justice issues (e.g. have an overnight epiphany that gay people are people). And if loopy people end up dominating the news cycle, so much the better, because at least they aren't talking about how badly they've lost the plot on economics.

Nobody who works for a living should support either mainstream liberal or conservative parties.

Okay, well that doesn’t address the question. None of that accounts for how changes in opinion about social issues among the Democratic base have actually been in front of the Democratic Party, and shifted in politics largely independent of it. Democrats didn’t become woke because HRC ran for president. She ran as a woke candidate because the Democratic base had become woke. Similarly, Bernie Sanders may have legitimized numerous social democratic policies in American politics, but that was largely because a part of the base had already gravitated towards economic issues. There was a demand-side change.

The Democrats promising “unenforceable, unquantifiable social reform” isn’t responsible for BLM, for example. People obviously cared about issues of racial inequality and police brutality.

I'm not suggesting progressives and social justice aren't part of the left liberal coalition. What I'm saying is that the liberal parties have made a deliberate choice to put these issues ahead of all other issues, and a consequence of doing that is giving credibility to more and more extreme opinions as this strategy yields diminishing returns. The liberal parties aren't passive in this transformation; the conversation goes both ways. As an example of this behavior, Clinton didn't just run as a woke candidate in 2016, she actually used extremists to smear Sanders and his supporters ("Bernie bros") for paying too much attention to economic issues and not enough to the unenforceable, unquantifiable social goals that she abruptly embraced. Doing this lent a lot of credibility to some pretty crazy and unreasonable people.

I'd also add that no, this stuff is very obviously not as popular among the democratic base as you suggest it is. The only reason Donald Trump is president today is because of Clinton's labor union losses (which you should note, just for completeness, happened across all demographic groups). Economics was the most important issue in 2016, Clinton had nothing to say about it, and she lost. Economics is still the most important issue and it still will be next year, no matter how much social liberals crow about how racist and transphobic people are. Billionaire child rapist who has bad economic ideas will always beat a saintly nun who effectively has no platform.

I find it odd that you're wanting to die on this hill so much.

No, nobody is saying the ideas originate that way. They occur naturally. In my view at least it's that the ideas only gain party prominence due to them being mostly unenforceable issues that you can spend lots of time speaking about. It's the party platform people responsible, not whoever thought the ideas to begin with.

Healthcare being a large concern is related to job security. For many people a workplace injury means job loss, expensive copays and other out of pocket expenses they can't afford. People are concerned about federal spending because they care about where the money is being spent I'd reckon, not the size of the budget in itself. People are worried about homelessness in case they're ever forced into homelessness, if you ever worked paycheck to paycheck you'll know this feeling.

People are generally more positive about the economy from the polls, but I disagree that people are actually all that invested in race issues over making ends meet still.

So Wookie posted those typical Republican Trump-Trucks in the other thread but I think it's more fitting here.

Tesla doesn't compete with the other auto companies. I mean, some offer competing products, but none of these manufacturers are really super interested in breaking into the EV market. In fact, Tesla's existence benefits them. You see, auto makers are given a certain number of emissions credits. These credits are "spent" to manufacture and sell vehicles which are energy inefficient. Large trucks are energy inefficient. However, large trucks are one of the only areas American car manufacturers excel in, and they're a huge source of profit. So these companies would like to sell more. Tesla cars are technically pollution-free, so they get credits they don't need. So they sell them off to the other auto manufacturers.

So in reality GM has interest in keeping Tesla around.

Incidentally, nobody here is alleging that they "came from nowhere." The matter at hand is whether their origins are primarily in civil society (down-up) or whether they originate primarily from politicians (up-down).

(got ya before the ninja edit!)



*sigh*



Which is, in part, to say that I'm not alleging that these ideas are more than any others the ideas that galvanize most voters. I do think, however, that they galvanize some of the most passionately politically involved people.

Yeah, I just don't think that this has the same kind of explanatory power you seem to. Let's look at some of the biggest social movements that have arisen in the past few years.

#MeToo. What role did politicians have in fostering that movement? Two New York Times journalists printed allegations about Harvey Weinstein and the result was a massive grassroots social movement. It was eventually co-opted by politicians, for example, when allegations came out about Al Franken, and some politicians tried to harness some of that energy to further their personal presidential ambitions. But it was primarily a grassroots movement that was dedicated towards changing civil society rather than trying to promote change at a political level. Despite all the talk in the media about "the year of the woman" in 2018 (months after #MeToo), Democrats ran on protecting healthcare from the GOP.

Or how about BLM? It's not infrequently said that BLM arose partially out of frustration amongst African Americans that we hadn't made more progress on racial issues despite having an African American president. It was, in some respects, politicians' relative silence on the issue that brought the issue to the fore in civil society.

Or fourth-wave feminism. What about the 2012 elections precipitated its rise in 2012? In the wake of OWS, that election was primarily about economic issues.

Is it really so difficult to believe that people actually care about these issues because they are perceived to be historic injustices in their own right? The civil rights movement, Black Panthers, the March on Washington -- the racial politics of the 1960s don't require the implosion of liberalism to be explained.



I mean, is there a single substantial thing you can point to that was a result of this? I get it: Clinton played dirty. She did in 2008, too. But who was actually elevated to greater prominence because she used racial issues as a cudgel? Gloria Steinem? (Obviously not -- I'm being flippant.) Woke politics was already a factor and had been for several years before the 2016 election. I'm not sure the timing really supports the idea that the 2016 election made them more prominent. I'd still claim that HRC tried to exploit them to her advantage, even if it turned out to be a losing strategy.

I don't think woke politics are actually that popular or galvanizing for voters. It's undoubtedly widespread, however.

I've been pretty convinced by some of the more empirical work being done (some by Zach Goldberg, and cited by Matt Yglesias, but also by others) that suggests that the Democratic party has become a more "racially liberal" party, and that the development has been brought about primarily by white liberals, rather than by racial minorities themselves. Racial minorities are generally more conservative on racial issues than their white liberal counterparts.

It's true that 84% of voters in 2016 said that economic issues were "very important," so that's obviously true nearly across the board. And I agree that the focus on social issues largely at the exclusion of economic issues was a major misstep on the part of the Democrats. They very well may lose in 2020 because they're continuing to pursue that strategy; after all, many working class voters are being driven away from the party because it's increasingly irresponsive to their demands. They aren't an obvious part of the Democratic coalition anymore, and, yes, that's often described by liberals as motivated by "racial resentment" rather than economic grievance.

Also, just to explain, Reid: you did edit your post so I know that you knew what you originally wrote was inadequate, so sorry to hold you to it. Sure enough, I edit my posts a lot (typically just to fix typos that I can't stand, more rarely content), so I appreciate that you changed it to something more subtle and informed. I only took what you originally wrote because I thought it'd push the conversation further, by enabling me to make a clarifying distinction.

My intuition is that these people would tend to be party loyalists, so it makes sense they'd reflect the priorities of the party.

My intuition is that they’re typically ahead of the party.

Outraged twitter idiots maybe, if that’s what you consider “politically involved”.

Who else would engage in political violence?

But also: yes. Activists, journalists, etc.

Well, antifa for one, technically. I don’t know why but something makes me think they care a lot more about economic problems than they do about intersectionality.

I am SO outraged by how racist the cops are, I might even vote in 3 years

You don’t think antifa is on Twitter?

You think extremely online losers are in real life?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

INFANTILIZING SOCIALIST SCUM
[quote=David Brooks]
American progressives have a story to tell, and they are not afraid to tell it. In this story global capitalism is a war zone. Free trade is a racket. Big business and big pharma are rapacious villains that crush the common man.

In this context you need a government prepared for war. You need a government fired by economic nationalism, willing to play trade hardball against our foes. You need a centralized industrial policy to shift investment where it’s needed. You need a government that will protect you, control you and give you things: free college, free child care. As in any war, you want government that is centralized and paternalistic.

Moderates have a different story to tell, but in both parties moderates are afraid to tell it. Moderates are afraid to break from the gloom and carnage mind-set that populists like Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders insist on.

But hope is warranted and must be displayed. In the moderate story, global capitalism is a challenge but also an opportunity field. Over the past generation more people have been lifted out of poverty than ever before. For the first time we have a mass global middle class. This opens up new opportunities, liberates masses of talent and leads to more creativity than ever before.

In the moderate story, government has a bigger role than before, but it is not a fighting, combative role. It is a booster rocket role. It is to give people the skills needed to compete and flourish in this open, pluralistic world. It is to give people a secure base, so they can go off and live daring adventures. It is to mitigate the downsides of change, and so people can realize the unprecedented opportunities.

Statecraft is soul craft. Through the policies they choose, governments can encourage their citizens to become one sort of person or another. Progressives want to create a government caste that is powerful and a population that is safe but dependent. Moderates, by contrast, are trying to create a citizenry that possesses the vigorous virtues — daring, empowered, always learning, always brave.

How to do that? First, learn from the Nordic countries. American progressives sometimes imagine that the Nordic countries are socialist wonderlands. They are not. The Nordic countries have strong social supports and also open free-market economies. In fact, they can afford to have strong welfare policies only because they have dynamic free-market economies.

No Nordic country has a minimum wage law. According to a JPMorgan Chase report, Nordic countries are more open to free trade than the U.S. They have fewer regulations on business creation, fewer licensing regulations.

As Charles Lane pointed out recently in The Washington Post, most Nordic countries have zero estate tax. Nordic health plans require patient co-payments and high deductibles, in stark contrast to Bernie Sanders’s plan. The Nordic countries tried wealth taxes of the sort Elizabeth Warren is proposing, and all except Norway abandoned them because they were unworkable.

The Nordic countries show that social solidarity and economic freedom are not opposite, but go hand in hand. That’s the general approach we want here.

Second, never coddle. Progressives are always trying to give away free stuff. They reduce citizens to children on Christmas morning. For example, Warren and Sanders want to make public college free. But as common sense and recent research tells us, when you give people something free, they value it less. They are more likely to drop out when times get hard.

Moderates want to help but not infantilize. They want to help students finish college, but they want them to at least partly earn their way, to have skin in the game. They want to produce a country that is not full of passive recipients but audacious pioneers.

Third, drive decision-making downward. People become energetic, responsible adults by making decisions for themselves, their families and their communities. Moderates are always aiming to make responsibility, agency and choice as local as possible.

For example, moderates support child care tax credits so parents can decide if they want a day-care model or a parent-stays-home model. But Warren wants to make it hard for families to have choice. She supports only federally funded day care, effectively forcing families into federally funded programs, limiting their choice and making them wards of the system.

Fourth, bring on the world. International competition is more rigorous than national competition. Moderates think Americans can meet that test. Warren’s Green Manufacturing Plan would shield American companies from that competition when competing for government contracts. They wouldn’t have to be excellent, just American.

Fifth, ignite from below. Warren wants to centralize economic decisions, creating a Department of Economic Development — a top-down council of government dirigistes. Moderates emphasize tools that regular people can choose to build their own lives and maximize their own opportunities: wage subsidies, subsidies to help people move to opportunities, charter schools.

These are stark differences, different worldviews. So far in this campaign you’ve heard only one. But moderates have another story, and it is the better one.
[/quote]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/opinion/moderates-progressives-warren.html

Stopped reading very quickly. Nordic countries have all powerful labor unions. That’s the difference. Author doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

enlightened centrism circlejerk

I only posted Brooks' editorial for laughs. The guy's sort of a centrist putz. (The far right also hates him for being a 'phony conservative').

England is oppressive. You get hurt, you call emergency services, all you get is some ambulance coming to take you. In aMeRiCa, you have choices. You either pay $5000 for the ambulance, take an uber, or die. Freedom!

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/pentagon-warns-america-enabling-putin-plan-global-dominance-854009/

Lol, Trump and his 1D chess are so galaxy brain that the pentagon is warning us about it.

Trump got a-BORT-ed!

They also have a low population and huge natural resources that they can export to support a large social safety net. It'd kind of be hard to screw it up.

Interesting to see more than a couple Canadian-born centrists who have become influential in the liberal American intelligencia. David Brooks writing for the New York Times, David Frum writing for the Atlantic...

Maybe this is what the right looks like in a normal country? Or is the 'Canadians are polite and respectful' trope true enough here to stop them from going full Fox News/Glenn Beck on us like the rest of the American right seems to have gone...

GDP per capita isn't all that different between Sweden and the U.S.

The difference being that the US doesn't have a huge chunk of it's GDP coming from selling stuff it happens to have laying around. It's like comparing someone with a monthly payout from a trust fund to to someone who achieves a similar monthly income from starting a small business.

The US has the largest GDP per capita of any country that isn't either trivially small, a tax haven, or a major natural resource exporter.

France has extremely powerful trade unions, and significant social welfare spending, but it doesn't do as well because it doesn't have massive amount of resources that it can use to subsidize it.

Saudi Arabia is managing to!

The US doesn't have "European-style conservatism" because the US has primarily cut its ties with the European national culture out of which it originated, but that's not true of Canada. Canada has maintained its connections both to British and to French culture, at least to some extent, which leaves it open to Canadian conservatives to aspire to restoring the prominence of those traditions in civic life. Americans don't really have that option available to them. It just doesn't make sense in an American context.

Neoconservatism is often tossed around as a term of rebuke which means little more than "hawkish Republican." But in the stricter sense of the term, where Neoconservatism is effectively the thought of Irving Kristol and his followers, there's an emphasis on humanism and virtue that is somewhat similar to that "Canadian" conservative sensibility. I mean, it's one of the most respectable (in my view) forms of conservatism, and a form that's actually deserving of the name. It's a form of conservatism which emphasizes the role of the humanities in distilling and promoting virtuous behavior and good habits of mind. Brooks is definitely that sort of conservative.

Kind of interesting to think about why the US severed itself from British traditions. I suspect a large part of it is the country's republicanism (small-R). Republicanism frequently advocates creating an ethos/culture based on civic participation -- one which was intended to replace religion as the basis of social fabric, and also a new social order that was antithetical to the traditional, monarchical social order. So there's that. Another thought is that it may have something to do with the religious pluralism of the US compared to the dominance of Anglicanism in Canada.

Ah, I knew it! The US was founded by a Masonic plot to undermine traditional conservative, religious/state power structures. (Well, actually, given the secrecy of the constitutional convention, sorta wasn't it...?)

Maybe the whole point of the Founding Fathers was to harness the ideas of the Enlightenment, in order to return us to a social order that was closer to that of the Greeks and Romans (rather than that of the Catholic church). And, well, at face value, it's all pretty much true, according to what we learned in school, right?

Oh yeah! I think that’s true, to a certain extent. Like, if you read Rousseau or Machiavelli, they have a version of the argument you find now, when people say “the only legitimate form of government is liberal democracy.” They think republics are the best form of government. But they don’t conceive of some kind of formal, abstract paradigm that serves as the criteria for what constitutes a republic, as advocates or liberal democracy do. They look to the Roman Republic as an historical model — as a historical instantiation of the ideal, which should be imitated. I expect the founding fathers thought about it in similar terms.

This was true of the PCs in the 1990s, but is absolutely not true of the post-Reform merger Conservatives. These humanist Red Tories have no voice in government anywhere in Canada, and there is nothing so respectable about the Harper/Scheer type Blue Tories. Harper in particular is on record saying that he hates Canada for its European tradition.

Pseudo-democratic hereditary aristocracy founded on slave labor, whose political dysfunction eventually led to its downfall to absolute dictatorship, eventually spending its empire on military adventurism and financing the unsustainable consumption of its rich? I guess.