Politico has a story up about infighting in Democratic party politics, Drinking Enemies: Two Cocktail Parties that Reveal the Schism in the Millennial Left. It’s pretty interesting. On the merits, I think Sean McElwee and David Shor are probably correct, and their critics are wrong. The author is clearly trying implicitly and explicitly put up a demographic divide here: Shor* and McElwee are “white dudes,” while their critics are a black woman and a white woman (the latter of whom is a Becky-heiress who rose through Occupy Wall Street).

There’s lots of talk about polling and focus groups, but both sides could benefit from a little history. Contrary to what the critics of Shorism assert in the piece, racism is not just a tool of the powerful to divide the masses. In some cases, like with the Bourbon Democrat elites of the South, it was used crudely, but strong ethnoracial identitarianism was always more salient among the masses. Elites tend toward global affinities and cosmopolitanism, and their adherence to strong local identities is often part of a quid pro quo. The critics of Shorism who believe that racial division is false consciousness that can be overcome with messaging are ignorant.

Second, there is an idea that the arc of history always moves toward cultural and social radicalism. This is just not true, though it may seem to be so. For example, the period between the late 18th century and the Victorian Age saw a shift back toward more puritan moral standards and expectations. The norm around the age of sexual consent that collapsed in radical circles in the late 1960s and into the 1970s faded, and those who espoused radical views were expelled from activist movements in the 1980s. Similarly, attitudes to abortion have remained relatively stable for nearly 50 years, shifting only with the recent collapse of organized religion in the younger age cohorts.

Some on the cultural Left may not believe this, but at some point, radicalism runs up against human nature, the eternal war against normality takes pauses, and the forces of change retreat. What we now call “polyamory” was practiced in the Burned-Over District of upstate New York in the early 19th century and again in the late 1960s and 1970s. Both times the enthusiasm disappeared in the face of the persistence of universal human instincts. Conversely, the culturally liberal “inclusive” attempt to foster racial identitarianism will not lead us anywhere good. Either we’ll pull back, or chaos and conflict will ensue.

* Shor’s parents are Sephardic Jews. His mother has a Latinx surname. So he “presents” as white, but he could claim PoC identity if he wanted.

No big surprises it seems. The r-squared of between 2020 election and 2022 ballot measure is ~0.80, so 80% of the variance in the second can be predicted by variance in the first.

For about two decades after the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, the South dominated American politics. True, there were Northerners like Martin van Buren who became President, but they headed a Southern-dominated coalition. By the 1850s this alignment was not stable because the North was developing industrially and outpacing the population of the South. Nevertheless, it took some time for a realignment to occur, where the Mid-Atlantic regions of the North began to vote with Greater New England as a unit, and so would serve as the basis for Republican domination for decades until FDR broke the old parties.

The 1856 election shows the last time that the old alliance won out, as you can see that the Republican candidate had very little support outside of Greater New England. The combination of the moral fervor of the anti-slavery movement, which eventually won over the whole North, and the unreasonable expectations of the numerically inferior South, eventually brought the rest of the North to the Republican party.

Today I feel I see a bit of the reverse. The Liberal Patriot has a post up, Working Class and Hispanic Voters Are Losing Interest in the Party of Abortion, Gun Control and the January 6th Hearings, that shows the Democrat party catering more and more to the interests of college-educated whites, their intelligentsia. One of the arguments you saw around 2010 is that the McGovern coalition of liberal whites and minorities was now actually feasible. But this presupposed that minorities continued to vote Democrat at the same rates as before. The reality is that minorities without college educations are drifting away from the Democratic party.

What’s left then? The Democrats know what it’s like to run a huge and fractious coalition. With fewer and fewer moderates the party will finally have moral clarity. But victory? That I doubt.

Because our politics have been nationalized, it’s easy to forget there are still regional quirks and variations. Comparing Pew’s 2014 views on abortion by state with 2020 election results, you can see that states like Wyoming, Montana, and Alaska are far more Republican and pro-Trump than they are anti-abortion. That didn’t matter too much…until recently.

Democrats Thought They Bottomed Out in Rural, White America. It Wasn’t the Bottom:

Republicans have never had a demographic stronghold as reliable as Black voters have been for Democrats, a group that delivers as many as nine out of 10 votes for the party. But some Democratic leaders are now sounding the alarm: What if rural, white voters — of which there are many — start voting that reliably Republican?

…

“In rural America the bottom for the Democratic Party is zero,” said Ethan Winter, a senior analyst at the group Data for Progress, who studies voter behavior. “I am serious about this.”

…

Rural, white voters in the past in the North had historic ties to the labor movement and an affinity for the Democratic Party. Increasingly, Mr. Winter said, those voters are more akin culturally to their neighbors to the South than to their local cities and suburbs.

Tom Bonier, one of the Democratic Party’s leading experts on voter data and the chief executive of TargetSmart, agreed. “You look at places in the Deep South where the white, rural vote is approaching 90 percent Republican,” he said. “That’s absolutely the concern.”

I actually looked up the Presidential year results from the county I grew up in eastern Oregon, and it doesn’t seem that the Democrats have really eroded much. They still get about 25-30% of the vote every election, which was the case a generation ago. So that suggests that the Deep South model does not hold everywhere, though it may apply to the Border States.

It is pretty obvious from reading The New York Times piece that there is no way that the Democrats are in a position to address the cultural concerns of rural America. Twenty years ago the Democratic whip in the House was David Bonior, who believed Roe vs. Wade was wrongly decided. That sort of stance would be a non-starter for any Democrat except at the most local level now.

It seems likely that Democrats will be competitive at the national-Presidential level, but the way the Senate is apportioned and the ability to pack urban districts in a first-past-the-post system means they’ll have problems in the future winning Congress unless they reposition themselves culturally, which I’m bearish on.

In Bloomberg Matt Yglesias makes the case for a repositioning, The nation and the Democratic Party need a moderate president with populist tendencies and no particular affinity with the cultural left. But he himself notes that the Democratic Party’s staff is just very culturally Left, and just like Donald Trump couldn’t control his administration due to personnel issues, so Biden would have the same problem. Also, we have a historical precedent for repositioning, Bill Clinton’s triangulation after 1994. But do a thought experiment and imagine Biden even attempting to do some of the policies Clinton executed on, like Welfare Reform.

Despite what we thought back then, the 1990’s were a culturally less polarized time.

(the main upside from a Democratic perspective is that the Republicans have not shown much ability to govern and legislate after winning elections)

Both Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, authors of The Emerging Democratic Majority, have turned on the major public message of their book, that demography is destiny and the Democrats just had to wait for the future (the book itself is more subtle, but you can ask Francis Fukuyama how much people look beyond the title).

Teixeria’s essays of late have been very interesting though, as he doesn’t seem to keen on many partisan pieties. His latest, Did the Democrats Misread Hispanic Voters?:

… The reality of the Hispanic population is that they are, broadly speaking, an overwhelmingly working class, economically progressive, socially moderate constituency that cares above all, about jobs, the economy and health care.

…

Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy. Rather, this is a population that overwhelmingly wanted to hear what the Democrats had to offer on jobs, the economy and health care. But the Democrats could not make the sale with an unusually large number of Latino voters in a year of economic meltdown and coronavirus crisis. This suggests there was an opportunity cost to the political energy devoted to issues around race which simply were not that central to the concerns of Hispanic voters and the more radical aspects of which were unpopular with these voters.

This point struck me because in his conversation with Julia Galef David Shor emphasizes over and over how extremely left-wing Democratic operatives are. Shor claims that about 1/3rd of his team as Civis were Democratic Socialists of America members. One individual wasn’t DSA because DSA was too conservative. Shor also implies that Joe Biden’s flip on the Hyde Amendment was dictated by a staff revolt.

My personal experience with friends in academia is that many of them simply are not aware of how socially liberal they are. Their view of what a “conservative” view on a social issue is is just out of touch often. I know for a fact many academics were shocked that California rejected affirmative action again. It’s a majority-minority state. They had expectations.

I wonder about this same problem with Latinx voters, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, but unless they are part of the intelligentsia are not socially bleeding-edge liberal (and don’t consider themselves “Latinx”). A lot of times white academics I know just don’t want to admit that “BIPOC” and Latinx people don’t really agree with them on a lot of these cultural issues, since they believe their views are derived from antiracism, so when nonwhite people disagree it must be false consciousness.

For academics, “this is academic.” But what if the Democrat’s operative class is subject to the same problem?

(I assume the equivalent with Republicans is that they always believe they haven’t “explained” economic libertarianism well to a populace that really isn’t too keen on it)

There’s a new think tank, The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, that recently started up. It caught my attention because it’s headed by my friend Richard Hanania, and Zach Goldberg, of “Great Awokening” fame is a research fellow. I just got done recording a podcast with David Shor and we talked about the role of culture and economics in the modern political parties (the full podcast will be posted this week for subscribers to my Substack, and free in a few weeks on the main podcast site, but you can listen to a few minutes of Shor talking about his Sephardic Jewish background here).

One of the things that Shor mentions is that activists and academics have priors that shape the way questions are asked and therefore the answers that come out of those questions. So, for example, Shor does not accept the idea promoted by many Democrats that the public fundamentally has left-wing economic views. Rather, he seems to think that the perception is due to the manner in which questions are couched and framed by motivated activists and scholars.

Go where the data go, even unto China!

The first report produced by CSPI is not one whose conclusions I am particularly congenial to, The National Populist Illusion: Why Culture, Not Economics, Drives American Politics:

During the Trump presidency, some of the most interesting and innovative thinking on the center right has come from writers and politicians sometimes called “national populists.” This group challenges Republican orthodoxy on questions of economics and suggests that a new policy agenda, focused more on working-class concerns, could realign the U.S. electorate. We consider the plausibility of their claims, examining the relevant scholarly literature and recent trends among voters. The data show that most voters who supported Trump were overwhelmingly driven by cultural rather than economic concerns. This implies that the national populist vision is unlikely to provide major electoral gains for the Republican Party. Trump’s popularity among his supporters suffered very little due to his governing mostly as a conventional Republican politician, and those of his party who have adopted more redistributive voting patterns in Congress in recent years have not realized resulting gains at the ballot box. In fact, the American public gave Trump higher marks on the economy than any other major issue, contradicting the claim that more free market economic policies create an electoral cost. We also note that continuity with previous trends, rather than electoral realignment, was the norm in recent election cycles, meaning that the idea that there has been a major shift towards Republicans becoming the “working class party” is mostly a myth. Republican success in the future will depend on the party speaking to the cultural, rather than economic, concerns of its voters, whether symbolically or in more tangible terms. This can mean championing issues that Republicans have ignored in recent years like opposition to affirmative action, in addition to facilitating the kind of backlash politics towards cultural liberalism among non-white voters that has worked so well among whites in recent decades. Economic policies that seek to address working-class concerns but hinder overall growth can alienate both voters and donors for little gain.

Well, Hanania and company are offered up a prediction. Perhaps in ten years, they’re be profiling them in The Atlantic. I hope they have their crayon drawn charts handy.

Also, if you want 100 proof shit-posting, I recommend Richard’s Twitter account. It’s based.

In 1990 Michael Jordan infamously quipped “Republicans buy sneakers too!” The issue here is that Jordan was a Democrat, and people wanted him to weigh in on North Carolina politics, which were racially polarized at the time. But Jordan was a national figure, whose cultural influence and reach is hard to explain to young people today. At the time I thought Jordan was being kind of a coward. He should have expressed his views, and not stressed too much about it.

I think about that more now because we do live in a very polarized society, and there aren’t unifying figures like Jordan who try to keep politics low-key.

Consider The New York Times. I still subscribe, but just barely. It has slowly and then more quickly turned into the journal of American wokeness. There are huge sections that I don’t even bother reading, because they don’t have any credibility with me. They’re written with a particular audience in mind, and I’m not that audience. It’s preaching to the choir masquerading as reportage. They’ve moved beyond the “view from nowhere,” and though it has been profitable, cultivating a deep and loyal subscriber base, it has reduced the paper’s broader cultural reach.

I thought about that when reading this article on Coinbase, ‘Tokenized’: Inside Black Workers’ Struggles at the King of Crypto Start-Ups Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency company, has faced many internal complaints about discriminatory treatment. It was an interesting piece, and I read it out of curiosity. But it changed my views not at all. It was never going to change my views. The reason is that I feel that the journalists who work in the tech space are very biased, and of course, they were “out to get” Coinbase. If, for example, they couldn’t get sources, they wouldn’t have published a piece with the title “Coinbase faced accusations of racism, but that didn’t check out.” From the beginning, you knew there was only one conclusion that would sell copy, and they were going to find that conclusion. Coinbase has 1,400 employees now. It would be easy enough to find “sources.” The story writes itself.

A lot of my perception of the tech reporters at The New York Times is colored by Mike Isaac, who has a very obnoxious Twitter presence. He’s constantly showing his ass, and you get the feeling that he thinks non-woke people are subhumans who should be sent to reeducation camps. A lot of this is probably performative, and it sure gets him attention and followers. But, it colors my view of the “objectivity” of these reporters as a whole.

The motto of The New York Times is “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” But my view is that it’s some of the news that’s fit to print. And some of the other news, well, let’s just ignore that…

In the 2000’s many bloggers were behind the idea that the “view from nowhere” was a problem. But now that we have moved beyond that, it feels like a frying pan to fire situation.

There’s a similar problem with academia. I see many people in science saying things about coronavirus that I agree with. Their words and views are judicious, often cautious, and on the whole objective. But, there are other moments when they are not talking about coronavirus when they are highly partisan and engage in very harsh language about the tribal Other. For the purposes of coronavirus we are all “in it together.” But the people who are trying to guide the policy…they kind of hate half the population. Or at least they perform in this way in public on social media. It’s what’s expected for the tribe. So you can just scroll through someone’s timeline, and see them engaging in their tribal passions, and then try and flip into objectivity. But what is seen can’t be unseen.

I have no solution for this, but, I do know that friends who are public school teachers are careful what they say on social media. Or they were a decade ago. Perhaps it has changed. The reason is that they need to create a separation between themselves and their students, and putting too much of their personal life and views out there might puncture that distance.