Links are at the end, so you better get there one way or t’other.
Unbearably stupid, Biden’s failure to rid his office and home of classified documents. Buncha fucken malarkey.1
There is this, and there is that
Jacobin: A Populism of the Left Can Realign American Politics2
Columbia Journalism Review: The Left Edge of the Possible3
There is this, and there is that
Jacobin ran a long story in advance of the 2022 elections about how Democrats can use leftist economic populism to recapture some electorally significant slices of what are now Trump/GOP constituencies; CJR this week has a history of the once-and-again influential leftish magazine, The American Prospect.
This
The Jacobin story is based in part on a study undertaken by the magazine, the Center for Working Class Politics (CWCP), and polling firm YouGov.4
[T]he working class has a special relationship to progressive policy: it stands to benefit most from the egalitarian and redistributive reforms that anchor left-wing politics. Historically, the greatest triumphs of American progressives in the twentieth century — from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society — were achieved only with a sturdy base of working-class support. The same is true for social- democratic achievements abroad. A progressive politics that does not expand its strength with working-class voters today risks cutting itself loose from the central force that has propelled egalitarian reforms throughout the world.
This is not a simple problem with a clear solution: in fact, the trends have run in the opposite direction for nearly half a century. It is a problem that calls for focused study. Specifically, our work asks three basic questions:
1. How can progressives win in working-class America?
2. How can progressives more effectively engage low-propensity working-class voters across lines of race and geography, especially outside large cities?
3. What are the electoral advantages and disadvantages of various kinds of progressive platforms and messaging? Can different progressive messages work in different areas?
The writer, Jared Abbott, who works at CWCP, drew on polls, studies, and interviews to answer those questions. “There may not be a wide path into the MAGA heartland,” he says, “but there is a path.”
Putting all the pieces together, the CWCP survey found that reaching a key group of Trump-curious working-class voters is possible if Democrats focus on progressive economic issues related to jobs, employ economic populist messaging pitting ordinary people against economic elites, and run candidates from non-elite backgrounds.
We knew that Clinton lost substantial ground to Trump among lower-income voters — she won the demographic but by not nearly as much as Obama did — and that Sanders-like populist policies are attractive to varying degrees across the political spectrum, that the white working class is less than monolithic politically, that lower-income voters are both less likely to vote than any other bloc, and that Republicans who voted against Trump in 2020 are likely to vote for a less uncouth GOP candidate with equally bad policy ideas, as they did with the Trump-endorsed Glenn Youngkin in Virginia.
So the CWCP survey suggests with specificity how to replace those swing-state suburban Republican votes against Trump, which helped Biden to narrow wins in several of those states, with permanent Democratic voters. Whether Democratic party leaders are willing to adopt any of the suggestions is a whole ‘nother question.
Both the Jacobin story and the CWCP report are worth reading, but if you have to pick one of the two, you should go with the story.
That
The American Prospect was founded in 1990 by Robert Kuttner, Robert Reich, and Paul Starr — the latter two of whom went on to serve in the Clinton administration, with Starr working on the ill-fated Clinton health insurance plan and Reich as labor secretary — based on a prospectus they wrote in large part as a reaction to the ‘New Democrats’ represented by the Democratic Leadership Council, which itself was a reaction to the Democratic presidential wipeouts of the 1980s.
“At that point,” Kuttner recalled recently, “the conventional wisdom is that the only thing that’s wrong with the Democrats is that they’re too progressive and they need to become more centrist. This was a drumbeat. It was just in the air.” He and his coauthors . . . felt that The New Republic and The Washington Monthly were too far to the right; The Nation didn’t seem relevant. In the open space between those magazines, Kuttner told me, “you had an expansive philosophical and ideological territory big enough to drive a whole New Deal through.” [The Prospect] embarked on a crusade for what Kuttner—borrowing from Michael Harrington, a founder of what would eventually become the Democratic Socialists of America—liked to call “the left edge of the possible.”
You may recognize the sentiment Kuttner ascribes to Democratic leaders at the time, who arrived at it despite Jesse Jackson’s amazing success in the 1988 presidential primary and Dukasis’s milquetoast liberalism, and the next generation of whom tend to breathe the same air today.
The magazine has been influential to one degree or another most of its life, although the probable apex in its first decade was having two of the co-founders in senior Clinton administration positions, even if not to great effect. During the next decade it became an early denizen of the blogosphere; the long-running Tapped blog debuted in 2002 and spawned the likes of Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein, for good or for ill, and Adam Serwer, now a staff writer at The Atlantic, and Jamelle Bouie, now a columnist at the Times.
Another long-time blogger and freelance writer, David Dayen, took the top of the masthead in 2019. Dayen had a reputation for astute economic and political commentary, and like Kuttner had a taste for deeply reported journalism and the mechanics of policy and politics.
One of Dayen’s earliest projects, the Day One Agenda, focused … on what the next Democratic president might be able to achieve. He could sense “a certain despair” about the 2020 election, a feeling that there would be a divided government and nothing would get done. “I said, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous. There are all kinds of things that a president does on their own. We can identify them.’” The idea was not only to help a new Democratic administration, Dayen told me; it was also to take away excuses for Democratic inaction. What began as a twenty-seven-page section in print, in the Fall 2019 issue, eventually expanded to forty stories online. Individually and in aggregate the project made a case for unilateral presidential action: to cancel student debt, to lower drug prices, to create public banks, and to “effectively” legalize marijuana, among other things. The Prospect also built an Executive Action Tracker, which includes more than a hundred things that Joe Biden could do without congressional approval. (As of this writing, he’s taken at least partial action on more than a third of them.)
After the Day One Agenda appeared online, Eric Levitz, a writer at New York, tweeted that the Prospect had “just made policy journalism politically relevant again.” Dayen found that comment gratifying. “Relevance is hard for a little politics magazine,” he said. “You can be popular without being relevant. You can run a bunch of crowd-pleasing, ephemeral pieces and get people to notice them individually. What that comment spoke to, for me, is that this was a relevant line of inquiry, something lasting, a new way of looking at the presidency and what matters about it.”
The Prospect serves as something of a counterpoint to magazines like Jacobin or Dissent, which do pay some attention to process but are aimed at advancing socialism on the ground and electorally more than at examining the grit in the gears, which fascinates Dayen, and which he thinks is a vital project.
When I asked [Dayen] whether he … considered himself a socialist, he suggested that if he had to choose a label, “populist” would be better. More to the point, he said, he thinks of himself as a journalist who believes “we need government mechanisms to remedy the unsustainable inequality in this country that threatens social unrest.” He acknowledged that there will always be something irreducibly ideological about the Prospect, but said “it’s not like, on a scale of one to ten on the left spectrum, we are an eight-point-six.” What interests him far more is figuring out, concretely, which forces, people, and policies are keeping the government and the economy from functioning the way he believes they should. He is particularly insistent that the implementation of policies—the unglamorous bureaucratic wrangling that happens after bills are signed into law—deserves as much attention as the legislative drama that leads to enactment. “A lot of what we do is about just sort of making things work better,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a left-right rubric. I don’t think you get to that point of Are you progressive enough? until you’re effective.”
There’s obviously some tension between the notion that one can’t be ideological without getting the mechanics down, and the notion that you can’t master the mechanics, or recognize which are worthwhile mastering, without an underlying ideology. It’s a good tension; in the two stories excerpted here we see how the two approaches serve to modify one another, although socialists will continue seeing social unrest as a powerful force for good, and process devotees will always look first at keeping the gears turning, or getting them to turn, in the right direction.
Music accompanying this post
Coach Party, “Nothing Is Real;”5 Swell Maps, “Jane from Occupied Europe;”6 She Drew The Gun, "Memories of Another Future;"7 Billy Nomates, “Cacti;”8 Gwenno, "Tresor;"9 Crack Cloud, "Tough Baby."10
Gwenno sings in Welsh and Cornish (I think), in a folk rockish fashion. Crack Cloud are performance artists as much as musicians. Billy Nomates was the only artist who didn’t really draw me in. She’s not bad by any definition; just not a satisfying experience for me. She Drew The Gun is a favorite. Listening primarily to women artists of late.
That, Comrades, is all I got.
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You Better Come On
The observations of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" remain fundamental. The only way of penetrating the "social" perspectives of those voters is to somehow make it clear to them (not to us) that their fundamental economic interests are at stake and that they are being conned. It's a very tough sell because their attitudes about those "social" issues are very strong.
A guess based on my limited contacts with some of the kinds of people we're talking about. If the nature of their research was polling, I would question its validity.