A laundry list of things for Democrats to keep and to dump if they ever want to win again nationwide.
Keep a woman’s right to choose for the first trimester. Dump abortion until birth unless the mother’s health is at risk.
Keep a concern for climate change and grow nuclear power. Dump intermittent, unreliable renewable energy.
Keep and develop new effective vaccines. Dump vaccine mandates.
Keep equality of opportunity for all. Dump equity of results based on discriminating against men, whites and Asians (aka D.E.I.). Recognize that D.E.I. Is unconstitutional.
Keep the protection of gay and lesbian rights. Dump men in women’s sports, private spaces and prisons. Oh, and mutilating children who might grow up to be gay.
Keep an opportunity for selective high value immigration. Dump sanctuary cities and open borders.
Keep helping the homeless find jobs and a place to live. Dump camping in cities and allowing open drug use.
Keep a concern for due process in criminal justice. Dump letting shoplifters and other petty thieves off the hook.
Do all of the above and they might find their way back to power.
I think that pretty accurately represents what most Americans in the center (on either a traditional liberal – conservative spectrum, or Brokenist–Denialist model) would support, with a couple tweaks. I think most Americans support continued immigration for people of various levels of skill or unskilled labor, and not limited to an elitist conception of “selective high value” immigration. Many Americans support and are proud of our history of being a nation of a broad variety of immigrants who came to work hard and/or live free. But they don’t want open borders, do want our laws to be respected and enforced, and don’t want to reward people who break our laws and skip the line ahead of millions of others around the world who want to come here only if they do it legally. Homelessness is not just a question of finding jobs. A decent part of the homeless population are mentally ill, and a solution for them requires treatment, and for some may require some extent of institutionalization or supervision.
I agree there needs to be some type of “Renewalist” realignment. I don’t know exactly what that will turn out to be. But I think the best chance for success and stability is if it is based on common sense, centrist positions that are supported by the majority of Americans.
One reason I think the Republicans are in much better shape as a party is they have had an ongoing and admittedly messy civil war over what the party should stand for. Right now the populists have zeroed in on the rot in the system and are ready to tear it out. Their biggest weakness is they are not sure how to rebuild it afterwards. They only know that the rot needs to be removed first.
If the Democrats had undergone serious interparty fights this would make for a perfect opportunity for a populist faction of the "left" to undertake a project of rebuilding the Federal Government into something more efficient, more accountable, more transparent, and less authoritarian. Unfortunately, we do not live in that ideal world. The party has been in too lockstep on policy and too enamored with technocracy that I am not sure there is the political capital, dynamism, or trust of the public for this revitalization to occur. It can still happen but there needs to be a major shakeup.
I think the Democrats started to have those fights, but then cast all their heretics out. This was the downside of the Democrats' currently more hierarchical power structure and leadership, combined with cancel culture, combined with the moral fervor that the entire agenda is sacred and cannot be questioned, combined with the narrowing of the coalition. The party was able to maintain discipline and push out any heretics, which seemed great to Democrats until it was revealed it made it impossible to correct major mistakes.
That is what I mean. I thought the anti corporate Bernie side of the party would have some influence going forward. That was subsumed quickly. Hell, I thought the blue dog Democrats would at least be somewhat influential given the party’s degradation in rural American. Nope! The old left part of the party barely even pushed back against the influx of hated Bush neocons into the ranks.
Keep in mind that Team D is the political manifestation of the PMC, which in turn is the hegemonic class. By definition, hegemonic class values are deemed normative, just as, a couple hundred years ago, it would have occurred to almost nobody to question, say, the idea that some people were born to serve and others to be served.
Which heretics were forced out? Bernie and AOC are still in good standing. The GOP, on the other hand, relentlessly purged anyone who tried to resist the MAGA takeover. Democrats welcomed conservative never-Trumpers in with open arms while still keeping the progressive wing of the party mostly onboard. That's the definition of big-tent.
The populist left has been helping the cutout NGOs get trannys into women’s sports. They are too far gone. The author is right. The old Democratic Party already has a fork in it.
"[The Democrats] represent the idea that nothing is fundamentally broken with America that a minor coat of paint can’t fix."
How accurate is that? Don't we Democrats represent the idea that America is fundamentally bigoted, and that it requires our steady hand to keep angling society toward equity (student loans, trans rights, immigrant rights, DEI, criminals' rights, proper language, etc)?
I see those identitarian views as part of the system the establishment is now defending. Although to be fair, there certainly are a few folks in the party's farther wings who see this is a project that has not yet begun.
I don't think that's what happened. I think that's the excuse. In my experience, the supposedly sober professional elites were the ones fully on board and driving this. They blamed it on the left making them do it, but everyone I know in DC of this profile was a vigorous true believer.
Was Nancy Pelosi pushing this stuff harder than AOC? Was Chuck Schumer pushing it harder than Rashida Tlaib? I don't dispute that the establishment jumped aboard the train, but none of them originated any of it. Bernie Sanders always stayed away from identitarian stuff in the past, but he also got on board just as much as any establishment figure. Outside of Bernie I can't think of a single far-left figure that spoke out against identity politics. Center-left establishment types like Jonathan Haidt were the only ones doing that, at least that I know of. Maybe you have other examples?
On the one paw, yes, we all can agree that the deplorables are irredeemably sexist, bigoted, transphobic, and whatnot. At most, they are to be lectured like naughty schoolchildren in need of serious reform, at worst, they can go die on opioids or something.
On the other paw, because we, the PMC, are smarter, more educated, more virtuous and have better taste than those clods, it is only natural and fitting that we are entitled by right to the lion's share of The Goodies.
The left thinks it's broken because there is too much racism and income inequality. The right thinks it's broken because of anti-racism and giving too much money to the undeserving. Greenwald thinks we should disband the military, Trump wants to invade Panama. How exactly would the brokenists of both parties come together to fix it?
The critical theory-ized progressives of the Dems were yelling for burning it all down (b/c it’s all transphobic-white-supremacist-capitalist-settler-colonial-microaggressive-literal-violence) until five minutes ago. Now it’s all “our partners in the federal government.” 🙄
I know. You could argue that because they are supporters of the status quo, that they are on the right. Personally feel that the ones shouting Nazi at others are the Nazis this time.
Yep, Democrats enabled populism because they thought it would help them win. Once the fire spread to the right they realized (too late) why populism is actually bad. An ideology that requires an enemy to fight eventually gets mad if you don't fight the enemy. Don't worry, none of them have really learned their lesson. They will keep trying to be Diet-Populism and keep losing to full on Populism.
I like the “Renewalist” idea too, even though I don’t know exactly what it means. It’s inspiring, yet vague in an “all things to all people” kind of way, like Obama‘s “Hope and change.“ I assume it means a majority is going to have to coalesce around a common sense platform. I fully support that and would like to do what I can to make that happen, though for everyone’s sake, it should be done with respect for the separation of powers and individual rights in the US Constitution, and the extent possible, should allow for individual freedom and states’ rights, with a minimal amount of federal government coercion of conformity. Some people in the Brokenist camp want to impose their views on everyone. But that is the exact attitude that many in the Brokenist camp are rebelling against. What is “broken” to them is government (and elite corporate) encroachment on their individual rights to free speech, religion, etc. I think our country will be on stabler ground if we have a “renewal” of real liberty, not just a turnover of people who want to use government power to impose their views on everyone.
This is the best overview of the present moment I’ve seen. Early days and no one really knows now what comes out of this. I’ve also been annoyed by the left / right nomenclature and you describe exactly why. I suspect it’s used because we need something to describe the parties to the conflict. Brokenists vs denialists is descriptive, but these are not the sort of labels that catch on. I wish I had a better suggestion.
Brokenists I actually really like. It captures something. Denialist can take or leave. There isn't a good word that captures burying your head in the sand, but in a way that isn't so negative you feel like you're putting your hand on the scale and just flinging insults.
I agree, it's important in a time of transition like this to use words that make people clearly see what's happening, to make good decisions.
(Although, eventually people will just stick "left" and "right" on whatever settles in because they always have. But, that's for when everything new is already firmly into place).
The opponents of the Federalists were Jefferson's Republicans. Jackson's Democrats grew out of the "old Republican" faction of Jefferson's Republicans, and the Whigs would eventually emerge from the "new Republican" faction of Jefferson's Republicans.
The reason why the Federalists are seen as conservative is because they were supporters of the larger government. The government in those days was run by and for the well off. Government provided almost no services to ordinary people in those times but was funded by excise and other regressive taxes (just like that taxes the British levied that had led to the Revolution).
Consider Hamilton's plan to have the Federal government assume the Revolutionary War debt. Some of that debt had been purchased by speculators at a deep discount who now received the full value of the bonds, securing them a windfall at taxpayers' expense. The tax included one on whiskey that was very unpopular and led to the Whiskey Rebellion.
Who was opposed to Hamilton's scheme? James Madison and others who would band together as Jefferson's Republicans. It is classic rich (Right) vs poor (Left). T
Today the government provides lots of services to ordinary people and the poor get more from government than they pay in, while the rich fet less. So bigger government aids the poor over the rich. So, when government benefits the rich more than the poor as it did 200 years ago, supporting a larger government was Right-wing. Today it is Left-wing.
I came up with a set of rules one could use to classify events as liberal or conservative over time and used them to construct a political oscillator in my political cycles book.
I disagree that our present arrangements of federal power favor the poor. The rich benefit far far more if you take account of the part of the federal iceberg that floats under the surface. Rich democrats have literally shaped culture by deploying some of the billions that flow through the federal apparatus.
I do not know to what you are referring. I know that poor folks pay little in taxes, having little income and no wealth to tax. Millions of them get benefits such as Medicaid, SNAP, Social Security, that cost more than they could pay in taxes.
The easiest way to see this is how the party of the rich have, for many decades, have wanted to cut down the size of government by cutting entitlements and spending on the poor (which has no net-benefit for the rich) rather than National Defense (which protects the property and interests of the rich in proportion to their wealth). You will find that the fraction of total federal revenues that comes from the rich is smaller than the fraction of wealth held by the rich, meaning they are getting a bang for the buck (otherwise they would have decamped for elsewhere).
True. However those entitlements do more than help a few people out of a jam. They keep vast numbers poor. Dependence on government largesse removes the incentive to work and better oneself. Which is very hard to do when your meager wages are garnished for support of others who do nothing. However your point was that the poor benefit more. Can you still make that case when you take account of all the government money going to cronies in NGOs with six figure salaries? Where does all that money go when the pentagon “loses” it? My guess is the billions that go to relatively rich connected folks exceeds the crumbs handed out to the poor by a lot.
So are we handing out "crumbs" so we should give more, but if we do then we will keep them poor? By your theory, every nation with a strong welfare state should have a higher percentage of poor people than those that don't. The opposite is true.
Yes he probably does (and I have a real problem with that and so does he as a lifelong Democrat). But his total taxes paid is still much more than his secretary and he surely gets less value from government services than that.
Well let's fix it then. First we can get rid of the 24% of the budget we spend on health insurance for the poor and elderly, then we can get rid of the 21% we spend on social security. Next, the 8% that goes to pensioners, the 7% that goes to economic security programs, and the 5% that goes to education. Then we would be able to give the top 1% of Americans back the 46% of the federal budget they pay in taxes and also give the bottom 50% of Americans back the 2% of tax revenue they paid in. That'll show the rich.
Things are more broken than admitted. The Limits To Growth was right, and we passed peak-industrial-economy in early 2019. It looked like COVID lockdowns to hide a bailout in 2020.
TPTB are trying to cull us and have a WW-3 that kills people, but not infrastructure...
Some of them have shifted. I use a two-axis political spectrum with economic left-right and cultural blue-red axes (see link). Matt Taibbi has always struck me as a populist leftist, what I would call a red Leftist.
After the New Deal liberals cracked up the Democratic party was in disarray. The became politically relevant by embracing neoliberalism and emphasizing social liberalism more than the economic kind. That is, they became more Blue and less left. Matt seems to have shifted from the Blue to the Red party. In doing so he shifted from the less economically right to very economically right party.
I strongly disagree with your notion that there is no such thing as left or right. I'd argue what connects the left and right throughout history is the left being for equality-driven social change and the right being the status quo hierarchy. This can be traced to Christianity and master/slave morality (the book Dominion by Tom Holland is a great source for this). Left and right can change and has. In the 19th century, the central battle was republicanism vs monarchy, and in the 20th, it was communism vs capitalism. I think the battle this century seems to be socially liberal/progressive internationalism vs traditionalist nationalism.
I do agree with your framing of the brokenist vs denialist framework. The Republicans are currently channeling the anti-establishment populist energy. It's not like Democrats are all blind. The progressive wing has making this point since 2016, and the abundance faction has been making this point much more recently (I would like to see your opinions on them). The democratic establishment is clearly in denial and a similar state to zombified Reaganism. Now with Trump back in the scene for the final time, the hollowness is exposed; Trump was very good at pulling the Democrats together. I know you wrote about how progressives and liberals are going to split up in a different post, but I find that delusional. If you look at other parties around the world, progressive parties (typically represented through Gree Parties) and Nationalist Populist parties are on opposite sides. I think telling 30% of the party (progressives) to f*** off is suicidal even though there is progressive excess currently (also based on the gallup poll that came out 5 days ago).
It's so popular now to say "the system is broken", no one even asks for evidence anymore. We all just "know" that it's true. Yet the evidence actually shows that racism is declining, income inequality is declining, corruption is declining (or it was until Trump fired all the watchdogs, now who knows). The broken system you speak of is the richest nation in the history of the world, a place with greater tolerance and freedom than has ever existed in human history. That it is not a perfect utopia is not evidence that it's broken, it's evidence of unrealistic expectations. The brokenists can only make our lives worse. Building things is hard, breaking them is easy.
It sort of sounds like you're proving my point! I see which side of the debate you're on.
But seriously, whatever you think the stats say, the experience of the average America does not agree. People don't feel like they have control over their lives. They don't feel like the system is accountable to them. Even if they're doing okay this second, they feel economically precarious and insecure. They don't think anyone is caring about them or listening. They have a point.
Yes, our society as a whole is still quite rich and powerful. At the same time, far too many institutions are no longer working the way we claim. People's needs aren't being met--and could be. This simply isn't good enough and I'm not surprised there's a growing revolt against it. I agree building things is hard, and breaking things much easier. In fact, I'm constantly saying we need to build. But before we can do that, the folks in charge have to admit the status quo isn't working. If you insist the status quo is fine, you'll never build the new things we need to build. And it isn't fine.
I'm also wary about breaking stuff without a plan, which is why I'm not a breaker. I'm a Renewalist. But my very real frustration with the left is, while the right is just breaking things, the left will never, ever, build anything we need because it's too busy patting itself on the back about what a great job it's doing (and for a small slice of people like them it is). They don't listen to people and think there isn't anything important for them to build. This is in my opinion worse than breaking even important stuff because after it's broken, people will notice and build something new to replace it. Refusal to acknowledge the problem is a death sentence to progress. It's the Blockbuster Video of politics.
I do agree that you are mostly summing up the new political dynamic that is developing, though I don't think it's necessary to invent new words when we can already just divide people into institutionalists and populists. The difference between them is that one cares about feelings and one cares about facts. The left used to be the home of feelings, and conservatives mocked them for it. Today, Republicans literally argue on TV that a thing is true because people feel that it is true, no different than the ones they used to mock.
Watch On The Waterfront or October Sky. These are fictionalized stories but if you need feelings then you need to see someone else's experience to be persuaded. Today many people say the system is broken because college costs so much money that people go deep into debt. But 60 years ago, a kid who's dad was the lead foreman of a wealthy company couldn't afford to go to college. No one was going to loan him anything. When his dad was injured in the mine, the company wouldn't even pay all the medical bills, forcing him to quit school to feed his family. If you were born in a mining town you died there. And they counted their blessings because they had food on the table every night. You think they felt heard? You think they felt like they had more agency over their lives? Before you suggest we start braking things, I think you should think really hard about what life looked like before we built these broken institutions that don't listen to people.
I'm a former conservative, but part of the reason I was comfortable moving left was that I do think we should help the poor. I do think we should expand our social safety net, we have the money. The US only collects 16% of it's GDP in tax revenue, for most rich countries it's 20-30%. But it's also clear that so many well-intentioned ideas backfire, hurting the people they are supposed to help. Rent control hurts renters. Price controls increase prices. A political party that prioritizes feelings over facts will make people's lives worse. 75% of Americans wouldn't pay $100 to stop climate change. Shall we listen to their feelings and bake?
Obviously you can't build a political movement that dismisses the views of voters, but voters change their minds based on what their leaders tell them. Republicans used to be all for the free market, now they cheer tariffs and hate corporations almost as much as Democrats. Rather than feeding those fears by denying the historic luxury that even poor Americans live in, maybe the left should tell them an inspiring message rooted in facts?
I remember reading the original Tablet essay on Brokenism when it first came out. It was memorable because it described a certain political dichotomy that had heretofore gone mostly nameless so well.
I myself am emblematic of the sort of journey described here. I was raised as a progressive New England Democrat in a WASP household watching The West Wing. When I was a young man, George W. was evil incarnate. I couldn’t vote for Gore but I did vote for Dean and then Kerry. And when Obama arrived on the national stage I practically swooned (I can still remember being electrified by his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention). I eventually even worked as an organizer on his 2008 primary campaign for about six months.
Fast forward eight years and in hindsight Obama was a huge disappointment. He spoke of hope and change, but largely delivered the dreary politics of the status quo and the establishment. And towards the end of his second term, I started to notice something new, something that was changing. And that something was what would later come to be known, roughly and probably imprecisely, as Wokism. The first big eye opener for me was the defenestration of Brendan Eich at Mozilla. That is the first instance of modern “cancel culture” that I can recall (or at least that made an impression on me). While I personally supported gay marriage, the idea that a guy could lose his job over a handful of past political donations to an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative was unsettling to me. It struck me as deeply wrong, and an ominous precedent. An unwelcome extension of the political into the private.
Likewise I found myself unsettled by the consequences of the Obama era’s push to force colleges to start operating Title IX star chambers to persecute young men accused of sexual assault. No one supports sexual assault of course, but it became clear very quickly that a whole lot of injustice was being dished out by what amounted to kangaroo courts where the male’s guilt was assumed and his ability to defend himself was purposefully limited. There were also cases where it was fairly clear that accusations were being made over encounters that were at worst ambiguous, and occasionally fabricated entirely. Who here remembers the infamous Rolling Stone cover story about “Jackie” at UVA (“A Rape on Campus”), who was allegedly gang raped at a fraternity but was later revealed to have concocted the whole story? Rolling Stone had to retract it, but not before it touched off a moral panic. This too unsettled me. The mob mentality, the overt illiberalism, the injustice of it all.
By 2016 I was disillusioned and discontent. When Donald Trump came down the escalator I thought he was a buffoon, but damnit if he didn’t start making sense about a lot of stuff. He talked about tariffs and deindustrialization, issues that had been near and dear to me since college and where I’d been deeply disappointed with the Democrats for a long time. He very publicly rejected the Neocon line and called the Iraq War a mistake to Jeb Bush’s face (and didn’t I just love that). He had my interest. I voted for Bernie Sanders and then watched in increasing fury as the entire Democratic establishment did everything they possibly could to sandbag him and push Hillary over the top. When it came down to Trump and Hillary in the general election, I made the switch.
And that’s because I am a Brokenist. When the choice was between the status quo and breaking with it, I pulled the lever for breaking stuff.
I've long wondered why I had difficulty placing myself on the Left-
Right spectrum. Delighted to discover I'm a Brokenist.
A laundry list of things for Democrats to keep and to dump if they ever want to win again nationwide.
Keep a woman’s right to choose for the first trimester. Dump abortion until birth unless the mother’s health is at risk.
Keep a concern for climate change and grow nuclear power. Dump intermittent, unreliable renewable energy.
Keep and develop new effective vaccines. Dump vaccine mandates.
Keep equality of opportunity for all. Dump equity of results based on discriminating against men, whites and Asians (aka D.E.I.). Recognize that D.E.I. Is unconstitutional.
Keep the protection of gay and lesbian rights. Dump men in women’s sports, private spaces and prisons. Oh, and mutilating children who might grow up to be gay.
Keep an opportunity for selective high value immigration. Dump sanctuary cities and open borders.
Keep helping the homeless find jobs and a place to live. Dump camping in cities and allowing open drug use.
Keep a concern for due process in criminal justice. Dump letting shoplifters and other petty thieves off the hook.
Do all of the above and they might find their way back to power.
I think that pretty accurately represents what most Americans in the center (on either a traditional liberal – conservative spectrum, or Brokenist–Denialist model) would support, with a couple tweaks. I think most Americans support continued immigration for people of various levels of skill or unskilled labor, and not limited to an elitist conception of “selective high value” immigration. Many Americans support and are proud of our history of being a nation of a broad variety of immigrants who came to work hard and/or live free. But they don’t want open borders, do want our laws to be respected and enforced, and don’t want to reward people who break our laws and skip the line ahead of millions of others around the world who want to come here only if they do it legally. Homelessness is not just a question of finding jobs. A decent part of the homeless population are mentally ill, and a solution for them requires treatment, and for some may require some extent of institutionalization or supervision.
I agree there needs to be some type of “Renewalist” realignment. I don’t know exactly what that will turn out to be. But I think the best chance for success and stability is if it is based on common sense, centrist positions that are supported by the majority of Americans.
One reason I think the Republicans are in much better shape as a party is they have had an ongoing and admittedly messy civil war over what the party should stand for. Right now the populists have zeroed in on the rot in the system and are ready to tear it out. Their biggest weakness is they are not sure how to rebuild it afterwards. They only know that the rot needs to be removed first.
If the Democrats had undergone serious interparty fights this would make for a perfect opportunity for a populist faction of the "left" to undertake a project of rebuilding the Federal Government into something more efficient, more accountable, more transparent, and less authoritarian. Unfortunately, we do not live in that ideal world. The party has been in too lockstep on policy and too enamored with technocracy that I am not sure there is the political capital, dynamism, or trust of the public for this revitalization to occur. It can still happen but there needs to be a major shakeup.
I think the Democrats started to have those fights, but then cast all their heretics out. This was the downside of the Democrats' currently more hierarchical power structure and leadership, combined with cancel culture, combined with the moral fervor that the entire agenda is sacred and cannot be questioned, combined with the narrowing of the coalition. The party was able to maintain discipline and push out any heretics, which seemed great to Democrats until it was revealed it made it impossible to correct major mistakes.
That is what I mean. I thought the anti corporate Bernie side of the party would have some influence going forward. That was subsumed quickly. Hell, I thought the blue dog Democrats would at least be somewhat influential given the party’s degradation in rural American. Nope! The old left part of the party barely even pushed back against the influx of hated Bush neocons into the ranks.
Ah, poor Bernie. Can you imagine how different the last ten years would have gone if he’d been the nominee in 2016?
He'd quickly be steamrolled.
Keep in mind that Team D is the political manifestation of the PMC, which in turn is the hegemonic class. By definition, hegemonic class values are deemed normative, just as, a couple hundred years ago, it would have occurred to almost nobody to question, say, the idea that some people were born to serve and others to be served.
Which heretics were forced out? Bernie and AOC are still in good standing. The GOP, on the other hand, relentlessly purged anyone who tried to resist the MAGA takeover. Democrats welcomed conservative never-Trumpers in with open arms while still keeping the progressive wing of the party mostly onboard. That's the definition of big-tent.
The populist left has been helping the cutout NGOs get trannys into women’s sports. They are too far gone. The author is right. The old Democratic Party already has a fork in it.
"[The Democrats] represent the idea that nothing is fundamentally broken with America that a minor coat of paint can’t fix."
How accurate is that? Don't we Democrats represent the idea that America is fundamentally bigoted, and that it requires our steady hand to keep angling society toward equity (student loans, trans rights, immigrant rights, DEI, criminals' rights, proper language, etc)?
I see those identitarian views as part of the system the establishment is now defending. Although to be fair, there certainly are a few folks in the party's farther wings who see this is a project that has not yet begun.
So the far left foists unpopular beliefs on the rest of the party and the establishment gets blamed for it? Typical.
I don't think that's what happened. I think that's the excuse. In my experience, the supposedly sober professional elites were the ones fully on board and driving this. They blamed it on the left making them do it, but everyone I know in DC of this profile was a vigorous true believer.
Was Nancy Pelosi pushing this stuff harder than AOC? Was Chuck Schumer pushing it harder than Rashida Tlaib? I don't dispute that the establishment jumped aboard the train, but none of them originated any of it. Bernie Sanders always stayed away from identitarian stuff in the past, but he also got on board just as much as any establishment figure. Outside of Bernie I can't think of a single far-left figure that spoke out against identity politics. Center-left establishment types like Jonathan Haidt were the only ones doing that, at least that I know of. Maybe you have other examples?
Ever seen Pelosi in kente cloth?
The irony is that nobody howled "cultural appropriation" because when we do it, then that makes it okay.
On the one paw, yes, we all can agree that the deplorables are irredeemably sexist, bigoted, transphobic, and whatnot. At most, they are to be lectured like naughty schoolchildren in need of serious reform, at worst, they can go die on opioids or something.
On the other paw, because we, the PMC, are smarter, more educated, more virtuous and have better taste than those clods, it is only natural and fitting that we are entitled by right to the lion's share of The Goodies.
yeah, you're reading me right
Well the brokenists have created a self filling prophecy. Now it really all will be broken.
The important thing is for both sides to quickly move onto the project of fixing it.
The left thinks it's broken because there is too much racism and income inequality. The right thinks it's broken because of anti-racism and giving too much money to the undeserving. Greenwald thinks we should disband the military, Trump wants to invade Panama. How exactly would the brokenists of both parties come together to fix it?
I see no evidence of that happening anytime soon.
The critical theory-ized progressives of the Dems were yelling for burning it all down (b/c it’s all transphobic-white-supremacist-capitalist-settler-colonial-microaggressive-literal-violence) until five minutes ago. Now it’s all “our partners in the federal government.” 🙄
I know. You could argue that because they are supporters of the status quo, that they are on the right. Personally feel that the ones shouting Nazi at others are the Nazis this time.
Yep, Democrats enabled populism because they thought it would help them win. Once the fire spread to the right they realized (too late) why populism is actually bad. An ideology that requires an enemy to fight eventually gets mad if you don't fight the enemy. Don't worry, none of them have really learned their lesson. They will keep trying to be Diet-Populism and keep losing to full on Populism.
I like “The Renewalist. This phenomenon is what my Substack “Common Sense” is all about.
We Renewalists need to stick together.
I like the “Renewalist” idea too, even though I don’t know exactly what it means. It’s inspiring, yet vague in an “all things to all people” kind of way, like Obama‘s “Hope and change.“ I assume it means a majority is going to have to coalesce around a common sense platform. I fully support that and would like to do what I can to make that happen, though for everyone’s sake, it should be done with respect for the separation of powers and individual rights in the US Constitution, and the extent possible, should allow for individual freedom and states’ rights, with a minimal amount of federal government coercion of conformity. Some people in the Brokenist camp want to impose their views on everyone. But that is the exact attitude that many in the Brokenist camp are rebelling against. What is “broken” to them is government (and elite corporate) encroachment on their individual rights to free speech, religion, etc. I think our country will be on stabler ground if we have a “renewal” of real liberty, not just a turnover of people who want to use government power to impose their views on everyone.
This is the best overview of the present moment I’ve seen. Early days and no one really knows now what comes out of this. I’ve also been annoyed by the left / right nomenclature and you describe exactly why. I suspect it’s used because we need something to describe the parties to the conflict. Brokenists vs denialists is descriptive, but these are not the sort of labels that catch on. I wish I had a better suggestion.
Thanks!
Brokenists I actually really like. It captures something. Denialist can take or leave. There isn't a good word that captures burying your head in the sand, but in a way that isn't so negative you feel like you're putting your hand on the scale and just flinging insults.
What counts though is finding words people will actually use. Otherwise we’re stuck with left/right.
I agree, it's important in a time of transition like this to use words that make people clearly see what's happening, to make good decisions.
(Although, eventually people will just stick "left" and "right" on whatever settles in because they always have. But, that's for when everything new is already firmly into place).
The opponents of the Federalists were Jefferson's Republicans. Jackson's Democrats grew out of the "old Republican" faction of Jefferson's Republicans, and the Whigs would eventually emerge from the "new Republican" faction of Jefferson's Republicans.
The reason why the Federalists are seen as conservative is because they were supporters of the larger government. The government in those days was run by and for the well off. Government provided almost no services to ordinary people in those times but was funded by excise and other regressive taxes (just like that taxes the British levied that had led to the Revolution).
Consider Hamilton's plan to have the Federal government assume the Revolutionary War debt. Some of that debt had been purchased by speculators at a deep discount who now received the full value of the bonds, securing them a windfall at taxpayers' expense. The tax included one on whiskey that was very unpopular and led to the Whiskey Rebellion.
Who was opposed to Hamilton's scheme? James Madison and others who would band together as Jefferson's Republicans. It is classic rich (Right) vs poor (Left). T
Today the government provides lots of services to ordinary people and the poor get more from government than they pay in, while the rich fet less. So bigger government aids the poor over the rich. So, when government benefits the rich more than the poor as it did 200 years ago, supporting a larger government was Right-wing. Today it is Left-wing.
I came up with a set of rules one could use to classify events as liberal or conservative over time and used them to construct a political oscillator in my political cycles book.
https://www.amazon.com/Cycles-American-Politics-political-economic/dp/0595327214
I disagree that our present arrangements of federal power favor the poor. The rich benefit far far more if you take account of the part of the federal iceberg that floats under the surface. Rich democrats have literally shaped culture by deploying some of the billions that flow through the federal apparatus.
I do not know to what you are referring. I know that poor folks pay little in taxes, having little income and no wealth to tax. Millions of them get benefits such as Medicaid, SNAP, Social Security, that cost more than they could pay in taxes.
The easiest way to see this is how the party of the rich have, for many decades, have wanted to cut down the size of government by cutting entitlements and spending on the poor (which has no net-benefit for the rich) rather than National Defense (which protects the property and interests of the rich in proportion to their wealth). You will find that the fraction of total federal revenues that comes from the rich is smaller than the fraction of wealth held by the rich, meaning they are getting a bang for the buck (otherwise they would have decamped for elsewhere).
True. However those entitlements do more than help a few people out of a jam. They keep vast numbers poor. Dependence on government largesse removes the incentive to work and better oneself. Which is very hard to do when your meager wages are garnished for support of others who do nothing. However your point was that the poor benefit more. Can you still make that case when you take account of all the government money going to cronies in NGOs with six figure salaries? Where does all that money go when the pentagon “loses” it? My guess is the billions that go to relatively rich connected folks exceeds the crumbs handed out to the poor by a lot.
So are we handing out "crumbs" so we should give more, but if we do then we will keep them poor? By your theory, every nation with a strong welfare state should have a higher percentage of poor people than those that don't. The opposite is true.
I think y’all are both saying the same thing here
Yes.
I dunno about "poor folks" but Warren Buffet famously noted that he pays less taxes, as a precentage of income than does his secretary.
Yes he probably does (and I have a real problem with that and so does he as a lifelong Democrat). But his total taxes paid is still much more than his secretary and he surely gets less value from government services than that.
Sounds like you have a problem with progressive taxation.
Well let's fix it then. First we can get rid of the 24% of the budget we spend on health insurance for the poor and elderly, then we can get rid of the 21% we spend on social security. Next, the 8% that goes to pensioners, the 7% that goes to economic security programs, and the 5% that goes to education. Then we would be able to give the top 1% of Americans back the 46% of the federal budget they pay in taxes and also give the bottom 50% of Americans back the 2% of tax revenue they paid in. That'll show the rich.
Even Donald J Trump was a former democrat. One could say ole school democrats evolved.
True, although I wouldn’t say past tense! More like, both the right and left are in the process of evolving.
Things are more broken than admitted. The Limits To Growth was right, and we passed peak-industrial-economy in early 2019. It looked like COVID lockdowns to hide a bailout in 2020.
TPTB are trying to cull us and have a WW-3 that kills people, but not infrastructure...
I'm not going along with that.
Some of them have shifted. I use a two-axis political spectrum with economic left-right and cultural blue-red axes (see link). Matt Taibbi has always struck me as a populist leftist, what I would call a red Leftist.
After the New Deal liberals cracked up the Democratic party was in disarray. The became politically relevant by embracing neoliberalism and emphasizing social liberalism more than the economic kind. That is, they became more Blue and less left. Matt seems to have shifted from the Blue to the Red party. In doing so he shifted from the less economically right to very economically right party.
That is a shift to the Right.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/an-alternate-american-political-spectrum
I strongly disagree with your notion that there is no such thing as left or right. I'd argue what connects the left and right throughout history is the left being for equality-driven social change and the right being the status quo hierarchy. This can be traced to Christianity and master/slave morality (the book Dominion by Tom Holland is a great source for this). Left and right can change and has. In the 19th century, the central battle was republicanism vs monarchy, and in the 20th, it was communism vs capitalism. I think the battle this century seems to be socially liberal/progressive internationalism vs traditionalist nationalism.
I do agree with your framing of the brokenist vs denialist framework. The Republicans are currently channeling the anti-establishment populist energy. It's not like Democrats are all blind. The progressive wing has making this point since 2016, and the abundance faction has been making this point much more recently (I would like to see your opinions on them). The democratic establishment is clearly in denial and a similar state to zombified Reaganism. Now with Trump back in the scene for the final time, the hollowness is exposed; Trump was very good at pulling the Democrats together. I know you wrote about how progressives and liberals are going to split up in a different post, but I find that delusional. If you look at other parties around the world, progressive parties (typically represented through Gree Parties) and Nationalist Populist parties are on opposite sides. I think telling 30% of the party (progressives) to f*** off is suicidal even though there is progressive excess currently (also based on the gallup poll that came out 5 days ago).
My only comment is that I cannot endorse this hard enough.
It's so popular now to say "the system is broken", no one even asks for evidence anymore. We all just "know" that it's true. Yet the evidence actually shows that racism is declining, income inequality is declining, corruption is declining (or it was until Trump fired all the watchdogs, now who knows). The broken system you speak of is the richest nation in the history of the world, a place with greater tolerance and freedom than has ever existed in human history. That it is not a perfect utopia is not evidence that it's broken, it's evidence of unrealistic expectations. The brokenists can only make our lives worse. Building things is hard, breaking them is easy.
It sort of sounds like you're proving my point! I see which side of the debate you're on.
But seriously, whatever you think the stats say, the experience of the average America does not agree. People don't feel like they have control over their lives. They don't feel like the system is accountable to them. Even if they're doing okay this second, they feel economically precarious and insecure. They don't think anyone is caring about them or listening. They have a point.
Yes, our society as a whole is still quite rich and powerful. At the same time, far too many institutions are no longer working the way we claim. People's needs aren't being met--and could be. This simply isn't good enough and I'm not surprised there's a growing revolt against it. I agree building things is hard, and breaking things much easier. In fact, I'm constantly saying we need to build. But before we can do that, the folks in charge have to admit the status quo isn't working. If you insist the status quo is fine, you'll never build the new things we need to build. And it isn't fine.
I'm also wary about breaking stuff without a plan, which is why I'm not a breaker. I'm a Renewalist. But my very real frustration with the left is, while the right is just breaking things, the left will never, ever, build anything we need because it's too busy patting itself on the back about what a great job it's doing (and for a small slice of people like them it is). They don't listen to people and think there isn't anything important for them to build. This is in my opinion worse than breaking even important stuff because after it's broken, people will notice and build something new to replace it. Refusal to acknowledge the problem is a death sentence to progress. It's the Blockbuster Video of politics.
I do agree that you are mostly summing up the new political dynamic that is developing, though I don't think it's necessary to invent new words when we can already just divide people into institutionalists and populists. The difference between them is that one cares about feelings and one cares about facts. The left used to be the home of feelings, and conservatives mocked them for it. Today, Republicans literally argue on TV that a thing is true because people feel that it is true, no different than the ones they used to mock.
Watch On The Waterfront or October Sky. These are fictionalized stories but if you need feelings then you need to see someone else's experience to be persuaded. Today many people say the system is broken because college costs so much money that people go deep into debt. But 60 years ago, a kid who's dad was the lead foreman of a wealthy company couldn't afford to go to college. No one was going to loan him anything. When his dad was injured in the mine, the company wouldn't even pay all the medical bills, forcing him to quit school to feed his family. If you were born in a mining town you died there. And they counted their blessings because they had food on the table every night. You think they felt heard? You think they felt like they had more agency over their lives? Before you suggest we start braking things, I think you should think really hard about what life looked like before we built these broken institutions that don't listen to people.
I'm a former conservative, but part of the reason I was comfortable moving left was that I do think we should help the poor. I do think we should expand our social safety net, we have the money. The US only collects 16% of it's GDP in tax revenue, for most rich countries it's 20-30%. But it's also clear that so many well-intentioned ideas backfire, hurting the people they are supposed to help. Rent control hurts renters. Price controls increase prices. A political party that prioritizes feelings over facts will make people's lives worse. 75% of Americans wouldn't pay $100 to stop climate change. Shall we listen to their feelings and bake?
Obviously you can't build a political movement that dismisses the views of voters, but voters change their minds based on what their leaders tell them. Republicans used to be all for the free market, now they cheer tariffs and hate corporations almost as much as Democrats. Rather than feeding those fears by denying the historic luxury that even poor Americans live in, maybe the left should tell them an inspiring message rooted in facts?
I remember reading the original Tablet essay on Brokenism when it first came out. It was memorable because it described a certain political dichotomy that had heretofore gone mostly nameless so well.
I myself am emblematic of the sort of journey described here. I was raised as a progressive New England Democrat in a WASP household watching The West Wing. When I was a young man, George W. was evil incarnate. I couldn’t vote for Gore but I did vote for Dean and then Kerry. And when Obama arrived on the national stage I practically swooned (I can still remember being electrified by his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention). I eventually even worked as an organizer on his 2008 primary campaign for about six months.
Fast forward eight years and in hindsight Obama was a huge disappointment. He spoke of hope and change, but largely delivered the dreary politics of the status quo and the establishment. And towards the end of his second term, I started to notice something new, something that was changing. And that something was what would later come to be known, roughly and probably imprecisely, as Wokism. The first big eye opener for me was the defenestration of Brendan Eich at Mozilla. That is the first instance of modern “cancel culture” that I can recall (or at least that made an impression on me). While I personally supported gay marriage, the idea that a guy could lose his job over a handful of past political donations to an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative was unsettling to me. It struck me as deeply wrong, and an ominous precedent. An unwelcome extension of the political into the private.
Likewise I found myself unsettled by the consequences of the Obama era’s push to force colleges to start operating Title IX star chambers to persecute young men accused of sexual assault. No one supports sexual assault of course, but it became clear very quickly that a whole lot of injustice was being dished out by what amounted to kangaroo courts where the male’s guilt was assumed and his ability to defend himself was purposefully limited. There were also cases where it was fairly clear that accusations were being made over encounters that were at worst ambiguous, and occasionally fabricated entirely. Who here remembers the infamous Rolling Stone cover story about “Jackie” at UVA (“A Rape on Campus”), who was allegedly gang raped at a fraternity but was later revealed to have concocted the whole story? Rolling Stone had to retract it, but not before it touched off a moral panic. This too unsettled me. The mob mentality, the overt illiberalism, the injustice of it all.
By 2016 I was disillusioned and discontent. When Donald Trump came down the escalator I thought he was a buffoon, but damnit if he didn’t start making sense about a lot of stuff. He talked about tariffs and deindustrialization, issues that had been near and dear to me since college and where I’d been deeply disappointed with the Democrats for a long time. He very publicly rejected the Neocon line and called the Iraq War a mistake to Jeb Bush’s face (and didn’t I just love that). He had my interest. I voted for Bernie Sanders and then watched in increasing fury as the entire Democratic establishment did everything they possibly could to sandbag him and push Hillary over the top. When it came down to Trump and Hillary in the general election, I made the switch.
And that’s because I am a Brokenist. When the choice was between the status quo and breaking with it, I pulled the lever for breaking stuff.
For anyone interested, here’s the original Brokenism essay - it’s really good. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/brokenism-alana-newhouse