Though I tend to avoid using the term “Liberal” because the term has so many different meanings, I agree with your categories and analysis.
My one disagreement is that I think that you underestimate the extent to which the Center-Left is adopting authoritarian methods, such as censorship and harassing the opposition. This is not coming from the Utopian Left, but the Center-Left in North America and Europe. And the practice is decidedly illiberal.
I don't actually disagree that professionals in the center left are driving a lot of the problems. The question is whether this is ideologically their own idea, due to adopting left utopian ideas out of solidarity, or cowardice. I think it's a bit of all of the above. But I also think the solution has to start with knocking the professionals out of their bubble and making them see themselves again as sensible ideological center liberals.
I am actually writing a series of articles on that very topic.
I think that it is rooted in the unachievable goal of Equality which is central to all ideologies of the Left, how the Left makes that goal central to a person’s moral identity, and their unwillingness to confront this fundamental contradiction. This leaves the Center-Left vulnerable to manipulations by Utopians who refuse to compromise with reality.
If the Left focused on achievable goals that actually helped the disadvantaged, they could make a real difference, but that means giving up their claim to a higher morality:
Can't wait to read it! The other part I think is a disagreement over whether people are fundamentally good or disappointing. If you think people are inherently good, you think policies will work that don't work if many people are in fact disappointing.
Biden was not smart enough or competent enough to resist caving to the far left wing of his party. He left the Democratic Party in shambles from which it may never recover.
If the remaining party leaders (whoever they might be) were smart (which they are not) they would look closely at at Trump’s many executive orders (EO’s) and maybe find a few popular ones that they could agree with and then use those along with the more popular positions that they currently endorse as the basis for a resurgence in 2026 and 2028.
So what’s currently in their bag that people don’t hate and what can be done with them to make them more salable to a majority.
First, a woman’s right to an abortion is one but many believe there should be some time limit put on its availability. So consider limiting it to the first trimester except to protect the health of the mother or when the fetus is not viable.
Second, most people are worried about climate change but the intermittent renewable energy sources located far from load centers Democrats are currently pushing will never provide reliable energy. The best answer is nuclear power plants located at existing coal fired plant locations that already have cooling and distribution infrastructure and are located near where electricity is needed. We also should be leading an international effort to develop geoengineering solutions to the problem because we will never reduce carbon emissions in time to stave off disaster.
Third, most people support vaccinations when their development is transparent and their use is voluntary. Use that approach to offset the current anti-vaccine rhetoric of the Republicans.
Back to Trump’s executive orders. There are three worth considering supporting.
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay there and work to improve their living conditions.
His second acceptable EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, and spaces, and even more diabolical the mutilation of innocent children in pursuit of the impossible.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
Would these actions help the Democrats recover? Who knows but absent change there is no hope for them.
The distinction between liberals and progressives in this analysis isn't well argued.
Much of what Americans call progressivism differs little ideologically or in terms of hard policy from social liberalism. Both were movements designed to expand human freedom via government intervention that still saw a place for private property and markets in way socialism didn't. Indeed the Keynesian economics which underpinned this progressivism was developed by a card carrying Liberal: John Maynard Keynes.
If liberals were so ideologically different from progressives, David Lloyd George (who helped created Britain's equivalent of social security) wouldn't have been deploying New Deal rhetoric in the 1930s.
The author writes "The Democrats’ great accomplishment was to successfully combine into one coalition groups that previously stood on opposite sides of the aisle."
This is true, but not mentioned is HOW they did this. These two groups were traditionally on opposite sides (and are again today) for a reason. They don't have much in common. The same thing is true of the current Republican working-class coalition. Working class people have nothing in common with the business and investor elites who have formed the core of the Republican party since its beginning.
The New Deal coalition was created in 1933 by implementation of a policy that directly benefitted millions of working class people in a tangible way. FDR went on the radio and spelled out what he was doing as it was happening to them, creating an understanding in the minds of working people that their government was acting to help them because FDR and the Democrats were in charge. As a result of this, in the 1934 election, they gave a great victory to the Democrats instead of the usual defeat the president's party gets in non-presidential elections.
What sustained the New Deal coalition going forward was continued delivery of an economy that worked for ordinary people. That is, one that operated under stakeholder capitalism. When Democrats failed to do what was necessary to maintain this economy, they eventually lost the working class.
Democrats did not abandon electorally powerful working-class voters in favor of electorally weaker progressives. That would be idiotic and flies in the face of a party that just two decades earlier had been quite adroit about coalition building/maintaining. It was only 12 years since the Truman's victory as defender of the New Deal and Kennedy's victory as destroyer of the New Deal. I rather doubt that Kennedy saw himself as an enemy of the New Deal. He and other 1960's Democrats appear not to have understood that the postwar economy was a fragile thing that required care, not a platform to be used to launch bold new exploits. The Republican Nixon may have been a better steward for the New Deal, just as Gore might have been a better steward for Reaganomics.
My stock response. If you have seen it before I’m sorry, if not enjoy.
After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.
To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party. We are no longer the patriotic, sensible party of FDR and JFK.
Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that gay kids should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.
They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a futile effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.
Democratic mayors allow homelessness to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No, you can’t camp in our city. No, you can’t shit in our streets. No, you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bail to commit more crimes.
The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.
Tghe author writes: "This is the New Deal coalition first established under Franklin Roosevelt. Demographically, it was an alliance of working people, professionals, the middle-class, Black voters, and marginalized groups."
The New Deal coalition did *not* contain professionals, nor did it include women.
I think part of the answer is that liberal technocracy failed to achieve certain goals that left liberals assumed as part of their worldview was possible. For instance, education reform didn’t actually teach everyone to learn to code nor close all the racial gaps. Shoving more people into college just left them with worthless degrees and student loans.
In addition, let liberal social norms led to lower and later family formation amongst professionals, and to be very blunt young single professional ladies are an inherently unstable group.
Right liberals had their own failure in the housing crash of 2008 and the failure of the war on terror. Romney also failed to win Hispanics over.
Now, I’ve got my own thoughts why these things happened (the bell curve, subsidization of single life). But the failure of liberals basically discredited them around the time social media came along. And Obama second term leaned into early woke in order to win re-election. Hillary then did again because she just goes with the flow.
I think there's an aspect here that's on the money. When liberal ideas didn't lead to the expected results, some people doubled down on bad ideas to force through the results they didn't get without realizing their theory of how things worked was actually the problem.
Most people don't have a "theory of how things work" or if they do its based on assumptions they haven't really questioned much and simply inherited. They have "vibes" which is a mix of ideas and feelings that isn't totally logical or consistent.
Democratic feedback loops are less "people figure out better working model of how the world works" and more "I touched that hot stove and it's HOT! I won't touch that again."
That's why we go through cyclical patterns on things like crime. If you asked people how many unarmed black men are killed by the police every year I doubt that you would get an answer more accurate today then in 2020. Nor would they know much about criminal justice statistics and practices. They didn't learn a bunch of new facts and come up with a new worldview.
But in 2020 there was this vibe of "we've got to do something about this" and in 2024 there is a vibe of "we did something and it was a fucking disaster". In 2040 people will have forgotten (and a new generation of young people will grow up without experiencing) that touch the stove moment on crime. And so we will likely make all the same mistakes again.
Of course there is value in this. Its better to take your hand off the stove then keep it there because you've got a complicated intellectual theory about how what your smelling isn't really burning flesh, that's all just misinformation! It's an improvement to be partly right part of the time versus stubbornly wrong in a disastrous way.
In general, I think the best we can do is set up good feedback loops. This is why I tend to favor less government intervention in things, it's harder to iterate and change government policy compared to private decision making. So for instance private schools adapted to COVID way faster than public schools, and this is one reason I favor school vouchers as a way to improve feedback loops.
It's also why we shouldn't ask too much of government, because when it sets a bad or impossible goal it's got the ability to basically force everyone down that path even as you get new data showing its wrong.
I think this is because most people think knowledge is just copying what other people tell them. There are only a few who actually understand the situation and have the judgement to figure out what's going on. This leads to the vibe loops you mentioned. The great mass of "experts" are just repeating what other people told them is true, so they jerk from one conventional wisdom to another. Every once in a while an actual expert looks at the situation and figures out what we really need to do.
Great analysis, spot on!
Excellent analysis. You earned a sub!
Though I tend to avoid using the term “Liberal” because the term has so many different meanings, I agree with your categories and analysis.
My one disagreement is that I think that you underestimate the extent to which the Center-Left is adopting authoritarian methods, such as censorship and harassing the opposition. This is not coming from the Utopian Left, but the Center-Left in North America and Europe. And the practice is decidedly illiberal.
I say more here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-left-has-hit-a-historical-dead
Thanks, Michael!
I don't actually disagree that professionals in the center left are driving a lot of the problems. The question is whether this is ideologically their own idea, due to adopting left utopian ideas out of solidarity, or cowardice. I think it's a bit of all of the above. But I also think the solution has to start with knocking the professionals out of their bubble and making them see themselves again as sensible ideological center liberals.
I am actually writing a series of articles on that very topic.
I think that it is rooted in the unachievable goal of Equality which is central to all ideologies of the Left, how the Left makes that goal central to a person’s moral identity, and their unwillingness to confront this fundamental contradiction. This leaves the Center-Left vulnerable to manipulations by Utopians who refuse to compromise with reality.
If the Left focused on achievable goals that actually helped the disadvantaged, they could make a real difference, but that means giving up their claim to a higher morality:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-progress-and-upward-mobility
In other words, it is a lack of Honesty and Moral Courage.
Can't wait to read it! The other part I think is a disagreement over whether people are fundamentally good or disappointing. If you think people are inherently good, you think policies will work that don't work if many people are in fact disappointing.
Biden was not smart enough or competent enough to resist caving to the far left wing of his party. He left the Democratic Party in shambles from which it may never recover.
If the remaining party leaders (whoever they might be) were smart (which they are not) they would look closely at at Trump’s many executive orders (EO’s) and maybe find a few popular ones that they could agree with and then use those along with the more popular positions that they currently endorse as the basis for a resurgence in 2026 and 2028.
So what’s currently in their bag that people don’t hate and what can be done with them to make them more salable to a majority.
First, a woman’s right to an abortion is one but many believe there should be some time limit put on its availability. So consider limiting it to the first trimester except to protect the health of the mother or when the fetus is not viable.
Second, most people are worried about climate change but the intermittent renewable energy sources located far from load centers Democrats are currently pushing will never provide reliable energy. The best answer is nuclear power plants located at existing coal fired plant locations that already have cooling and distribution infrastructure and are located near where electricity is needed. We also should be leading an international effort to develop geoengineering solutions to the problem because we will never reduce carbon emissions in time to stave off disaster.
Third, most people support vaccinations when their development is transparent and their use is voluntary. Use that approach to offset the current anti-vaccine rhetoric of the Republicans.
Back to Trump’s executive orders. There are three worth considering supporting.
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay there and work to improve their living conditions.
His second acceptable EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, and spaces, and even more diabolical the mutilation of innocent children in pursuit of the impossible.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
Would these actions help the Democrats recover? Who knows but absent change there is no hope for them.
The distinction between liberals and progressives in this analysis isn't well argued.
Much of what Americans call progressivism differs little ideologically or in terms of hard policy from social liberalism. Both were movements designed to expand human freedom via government intervention that still saw a place for private property and markets in way socialism didn't. Indeed the Keynesian economics which underpinned this progressivism was developed by a card carrying Liberal: John Maynard Keynes.
If liberals were so ideologically different from progressives, David Lloyd George (who helped created Britain's equivalent of social security) wouldn't have been deploying New Deal rhetoric in the 1930s.
The author writes "The Democrats’ great accomplishment was to successfully combine into one coalition groups that previously stood on opposite sides of the aisle."
This is true, but not mentioned is HOW they did this. These two groups were traditionally on opposite sides (and are again today) for a reason. They don't have much in common. The same thing is true of the current Republican working-class coalition. Working class people have nothing in common with the business and investor elites who have formed the core of the Republican party since its beginning.
The New Deal coalition was created in 1933 by implementation of a policy that directly benefitted millions of working class people in a tangible way. FDR went on the radio and spelled out what he was doing as it was happening to them, creating an understanding in the minds of working people that their government was acting to help them because FDR and the Democrats were in charge. As a result of this, in the 1934 election, they gave a great victory to the Democrats instead of the usual defeat the president's party gets in non-presidential elections.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-dealers-gained-the-ability
What sustained the New Deal coalition going forward was continued delivery of an economy that worked for ordinary people. That is, one that operated under stakeholder capitalism. When Democrats failed to do what was necessary to maintain this economy, they eventually lost the working class.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-deal-order-fell
Democrats did not abandon electorally powerful working-class voters in favor of electorally weaker progressives. That would be idiotic and flies in the face of a party that just two decades earlier had been quite adroit about coalition building/maintaining. It was only 12 years since the Truman's victory as defender of the New Deal and Kennedy's victory as destroyer of the New Deal. I rather doubt that Kennedy saw himself as an enemy of the New Deal. He and other 1960's Democrats appear not to have understood that the postwar economy was a fragile thing that required care, not a platform to be used to launch bold new exploits. The Republican Nixon may have been a better steward for the New Deal, just as Gore might have been a better steward for Reaganomics.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/nixon-gore-the-paths-not-taken
My stock response. If you have seen it before I’m sorry, if not enjoy.
After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.
To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party. We are no longer the patriotic, sensible party of FDR and JFK.
Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that gay kids should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.
They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a futile effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.
Democratic mayors allow homelessness to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No, you can’t camp in our city. No, you can’t shit in our streets. No, you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bail to commit more crimes.
The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.
Tghe author writes: "This is the New Deal coalition first established under Franklin Roosevelt. Demographically, it was an alliance of working people, professionals, the middle-class, Black voters, and marginalized groups."
The New Deal coalition did *not* contain professionals, nor did it include women.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1a31cf92-e1da-478b-b134-79f6e8af3e61_615x255.gif
I think part of the answer is that liberal technocracy failed to achieve certain goals that left liberals assumed as part of their worldview was possible. For instance, education reform didn’t actually teach everyone to learn to code nor close all the racial gaps. Shoving more people into college just left them with worthless degrees and student loans.
In addition, let liberal social norms led to lower and later family formation amongst professionals, and to be very blunt young single professional ladies are an inherently unstable group.
Right liberals had their own failure in the housing crash of 2008 and the failure of the war on terror. Romney also failed to win Hispanics over.
Now, I’ve got my own thoughts why these things happened (the bell curve, subsidization of single life). But the failure of liberals basically discredited them around the time social media came along. And Obama second term leaned into early woke in order to win re-election. Hillary then did again because she just goes with the flow.
I think there's an aspect here that's on the money. When liberal ideas didn't lead to the expected results, some people doubled down on bad ideas to force through the results they didn't get without realizing their theory of how things worked was actually the problem.
+1
Most people don't have a "theory of how things work" or if they do its based on assumptions they haven't really questioned much and simply inherited. They have "vibes" which is a mix of ideas and feelings that isn't totally logical or consistent.
Democratic feedback loops are less "people figure out better working model of how the world works" and more "I touched that hot stove and it's HOT! I won't touch that again."
That's why we go through cyclical patterns on things like crime. If you asked people how many unarmed black men are killed by the police every year I doubt that you would get an answer more accurate today then in 2020. Nor would they know much about criminal justice statistics and practices. They didn't learn a bunch of new facts and come up with a new worldview.
But in 2020 there was this vibe of "we've got to do something about this" and in 2024 there is a vibe of "we did something and it was a fucking disaster". In 2040 people will have forgotten (and a new generation of young people will grow up without experiencing) that touch the stove moment on crime. And so we will likely make all the same mistakes again.
Of course there is value in this. Its better to take your hand off the stove then keep it there because you've got a complicated intellectual theory about how what your smelling isn't really burning flesh, that's all just misinformation! It's an improvement to be partly right part of the time versus stubbornly wrong in a disastrous way.
In general, I think the best we can do is set up good feedback loops. This is why I tend to favor less government intervention in things, it's harder to iterate and change government policy compared to private decision making. So for instance private schools adapted to COVID way faster than public schools, and this is one reason I favor school vouchers as a way to improve feedback loops.
It's also why we shouldn't ask too much of government, because when it sets a bad or impossible goal it's got the ability to basically force everyone down that path even as you get new data showing its wrong.
I think this is because most people think knowledge is just copying what other people tell them. There are only a few who actually understand the situation and have the judgement to figure out what's going on. This leads to the vibe loops you mentioned. The great mass of "experts" are just repeating what other people told them is true, so they jerk from one conventional wisdom to another. Every once in a while an actual expert looks at the situation and figures out what we really need to do.
Pro(re)gressives
Great insight.