A fascinating article. Since both the Democrats and the Republicans agree on little except resisting transparency and accountability, it's hard for me to guess which one might get overtaken by independents who prize both virtues.
I like the article and agree in part. My area of undecided concern is whether normies can muster the capacity to align and infiltrate.
I have repeatedly explored the thesis that a horseshoe alliance of left wing and far right populists might have the best leverage to form the realignment while the normies in the center ride along.
I use the fresh news of the felled French PM as my textbook example. It took a left-right alliance at the fringes to pull off the no-confidence vote today. The issue of concern: budget austerity. Austerity will always be on the backs of the poor. Government finance needs fresh thinking.
Good writing, as always! The independents need to execute a game plan.
The strategy I like is the historical Progressive Movement. You build a big reform movement among middle class reformers that crosses political parties and focuses on specific issues. You link these issues around a common community, media, and infrastructure and you build in a social and entertainment side like the Chautauquas--big festivals, personalities, concerts, etc. Then once this is powerful enough you launch it into politics like the Conservative Movement did in the Goldwater campaign.
You put into words what I'm trying to do!!!! Bless you! I'm a former Democrat, former liberal Republican, now angry independent! I'm putting my 45+ years of experience and my massive knowledge base to work. I'm building out what I intend to be the best resource on the planet for people who want to run for state or local office (that's where the immediate opportunities are) and/or be better informed voters. And I think the path to success is outside the parties.
I grew up in Nebraska with it's nonpartisan unicameral legislature so that's my frame of reference. It's time to kick the political consultants to the curb and run old fashioned people power campaigns. Who needs $100 million TV ad buys now when everyone can do tiktok videos for their candidates?
I've already loaded a lot of info .. more coming every day. No time to waste. Let's get on it!
Substack seems to be a good starting point! I'm pouring it on to build Information Bank as the resource and info center. I'm also trying to find and follow the thinkers. It's hard to tell who wants to reform the Democratic party and who wants to start something different though. I think many people are on the verge of dumping the party setup we have now.
I'd note that Dan Osborn just started a new PAC, the working heroes fund, to support working class candidates.
Just a thought. Do you want to set up a separate Substack to focus just in this concept? Get it the right name so when people do a search it pops up? Call it something like "A Gathering Place For A New Political Movement, aka The Normies" or something like that. Sorry, but I'm bad at names .. but you get the idea.
There's enormous energy, anger, fear, etc that needs to be channelled. Right now everyone is flopping around. There are a few people like you that are sketching out a path. y'all need to be stitched together in some way or everyone can float ideas.
I actually started this Substack hoping to grow into exactly that kind of community! The problem I've found is Substack isn't built to host communities or help with discovery. I've sent a few notes hoping to build a list of likeminded writers but mostly to crickets.
How do you think this would work? What writers do you have in mind?
Interesting but, to me, unpersuasive because Normie Independents are never going to put up with dealing with the people in a major political party. It takes an ideologue or a self-interested hustler to even want to get involved, certainly at the level implied by "capture." I'm pretty much the Normie you're talking about and I've tried a couple times to "get involved" with the Democratic Party. Life's too short.
I think this is the point! There are more of us than them. I don't have a lot of faith in infiltration because it ends just like you said. I'm more about storming the beach in one go. But it will happen. It's just a matter of how and when.
How, exactly, do you get normal people -- people for whom politics is only a small part of life and inherently blurry -- to "storm the beach in one go?" That stuff is only for the ideologue mentality or someone for whom politics is a business. And where is the beach, exactly? There's always a majority of normal people. But they can't possibly devote the time and energy to party politics. WIth the Democrats, we've already seen multiple times effectively shutting down the Presidential primary process and allowing a handful of "leaders" to foreclose input from the rank and file voter. The MAGA takeover of the Repulbicans is due to Trump and Trump alone. Had Trump not appeared to organize and energize voters around his own personality and powerful leadership, it would simply have been another Tea Party movement.
You'd need a strong and charismatic leader for a Normie revolution. Nothing happens without leadership in politics. We saw what happened with No Labels. No leader, no action.
I agree with the leadership part. But I don't think about this like an army. I think about it more like a wave.
The model I have in mind is the historical nineteenth century Progressive Movement. It's not a top-down or unified political army. It's just a common cause of likeminded people woven together in a loose alliance. They are united as much around politics as around events, entertainment, magazines, and ideas. They produce leaders organically. Then when there are enough of them, they show up at the convention and take the party as the cynics among the political class work to coopt them.
That's how this kind of thing always works in history.
Hope you’re right and not inclined to argue. But the Progressive Movement stood for radical change — on child labor, labor conditions generally, liquor prohibition, women voting, direct election of senators, etc. etc.
Normalcy does not seem like a directed movement for radical change. Just a return to decency, tolerance, reduced ideological heat. To speak of a “Normie Movement” just doesn’t sound real to me.
You assume this has to be a top down effort. I'm talking about bottom up. Recapture city councils, school boards, county commissions, and thecmike. then let everything flow up.
We don't have to do party politics. Dan Osborn ran an incredibly competitive race for US debate from Nebraska as an independent. Check my Substack. I'm working on giving everyone the tools so they can storm the beaches!
The question is, how do independents (like myself) define "normal"?
For a century, "normal" has been the close embrace of the confession we were warned about sixty years ago: "that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can ourselves" ...
... so we don't see the need to make the effort and take the risks of managing our own lives independently from the "experts" and "leaders" with impressive CV's and resumes, yet can't reliably tell any one of us apart from a statistic - and see whether their plans make our individual lives better, or worse.
We conduct ourselves as though life is one big school group project ... the kind that so often ended up with one or two Smart People™ making all the decisions, with everyone else just along for the ride, trusting that the Smart People™ didn't screw it up.
As long as we continue to embrace this, capturing either party, or replacing them with a Normal Coalition, will end up taking us right back to where we are now ... comfortably numb, vulnerable to an elite few who Know Better™ that demand our submission to their definition of the "common good".
Our political class is a reflection of our expectations. It is those expectations that need to be questioned at the most fundamental levels ... in the light of considering that perhaps the only sustainable social contract we have, starts with the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident" ... and live accordingly.
Agree with the premise except for the conclusion. We need to work through parties because it still take a majority to do things in a democratic republic. You need to coordinate half of the population across multiple institutions. It's also important for legitimacy.
The parties, the government, even democracy itself, are only means to the end.
"That TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their JUST powers from the consent of the governed"
Not just any powers, but JUST powers; powers that do not work against the primary objective of legitimate governance: TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS.
Those unalienable rights ... that supersede even a majority vote, which we keep forgetting ... only to be restricted when one's behavior poses a clear, present, and significant interference with the unalienable rights of others, and even then only by due process of law.
But we ask the parties, the government, even democracy itself, to extend far beyond this legitimate mission. And that is how we have created the conditions for this seemingly-intractable conflict that dominates our society today.
Were we to limit and focus our government, the one entity that we authorize to use coercive force to enforce its directives, on the limited, one-size-fits-all task set that pertains to that legitimate mission ...
... coming together to resolve all other issues as individuals and neighbors outside of that coercive force ...
... not only would we need less coercive coordination, it would not turn into perpetuated, intellectually-inbred group projects that ignore most of the distributed intellect in this nation - and persistently require at least some of us to "take one for the team" when they make things worse instead of better in their myopia.
Not only would our conflicts be diminished (and therefore the parties would matter a lot less), we would find that our government would operate more efficiently, effectively and legitimately in what it still does.
Part of the genius exhibited by our founding citizens, is in those four words: TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS. They bound the problem of human governance to a scope that human operatives can reasonably handle it, instead of expanding it to the point that our government operatives are required to be functionally omniscient and infallible in order to get it right for each and every one of us.
A fascinating article. Since both the Democrats and the Republicans agree on little except resisting transparency and accountability, it's hard for me to guess which one might get overtaken by independents who prize both virtues.
I like the article and agree in part. My area of undecided concern is whether normies can muster the capacity to align and infiltrate.
I have repeatedly explored the thesis that a horseshoe alliance of left wing and far right populists might have the best leverage to form the realignment while the normies in the center ride along.
I use the fresh news of the felled French PM as my textbook example. It took a left-right alliance at the fringes to pull off the no-confidence vote today. The issue of concern: budget austerity. Austerity will always be on the backs of the poor. Government finance needs fresh thinking.
Good writing, as always! The independents need to execute a game plan.
The strategy I like is the historical Progressive Movement. You build a big reform movement among middle class reformers that crosses political parties and focuses on specific issues. You link these issues around a common community, media, and infrastructure and you build in a social and entertainment side like the Chautauquas--big festivals, personalities, concerts, etc. Then once this is powerful enough you launch it into politics like the Conservative Movement did in the Goldwater campaign.
You put into words what I'm trying to do!!!! Bless you! I'm a former Democrat, former liberal Republican, now angry independent! I'm putting my 45+ years of experience and my massive knowledge base to work. I'm building out what I intend to be the best resource on the planet for people who want to run for state or local office (that's where the immediate opportunities are) and/or be better informed voters. And I think the path to success is outside the parties.
I grew up in Nebraska with it's nonpartisan unicameral legislature so that's my frame of reference. It's time to kick the political consultants to the curb and run old fashioned people power campaigns. Who needs $100 million TV ad buys now when everyone can do tiktok videos for their candidates?
I've already loaded a lot of info .. more coming every day. No time to waste. Let's get on it!
This is great! One of the first steps is simply getting likeminded folks in a network working together.
Any thoughts on how to do that?
Substack seems to be a good starting point! I'm pouring it on to build Information Bank as the resource and info center. I'm also trying to find and follow the thinkers. It's hard to tell who wants to reform the Democratic party and who wants to start something different though. I think many people are on the verge of dumping the party setup we have now.
I'd note that Dan Osborn just started a new PAC, the working heroes fund, to support working class candidates.
Just a thought. Do you want to set up a separate Substack to focus just in this concept? Get it the right name so when people do a search it pops up? Call it something like "A Gathering Place For A New Political Movement, aka The Normies" or something like that. Sorry, but I'm bad at names .. but you get the idea.
There's enormous energy, anger, fear, etc that needs to be channelled. Right now everyone is flopping around. There are a few people like you that are sketching out a path. y'all need to be stitched together in some way or everyone can float ideas.
The ball is in your court.
I actually started this Substack hoping to grow into exactly that kind of community! The problem I've found is Substack isn't built to host communities or help with discovery. I've sent a few notes hoping to build a list of likeminded writers but mostly to crickets.
How do you think this would work? What writers do you have in mind?
Interesting but, to me, unpersuasive because Normie Independents are never going to put up with dealing with the people in a major political party. It takes an ideologue or a self-interested hustler to even want to get involved, certainly at the level implied by "capture." I'm pretty much the Normie you're talking about and I've tried a couple times to "get involved" with the Democratic Party. Life's too short.
I think this is the point! There are more of us than them. I don't have a lot of faith in infiltration because it ends just like you said. I'm more about storming the beach in one go. But it will happen. It's just a matter of how and when.
How, exactly, do you get normal people -- people for whom politics is only a small part of life and inherently blurry -- to "storm the beach in one go?" That stuff is only for the ideologue mentality or someone for whom politics is a business. And where is the beach, exactly? There's always a majority of normal people. But they can't possibly devote the time and energy to party politics. WIth the Democrats, we've already seen multiple times effectively shutting down the Presidential primary process and allowing a handful of "leaders" to foreclose input from the rank and file voter. The MAGA takeover of the Repulbicans is due to Trump and Trump alone. Had Trump not appeared to organize and energize voters around his own personality and powerful leadership, it would simply have been another Tea Party movement.
You'd need a strong and charismatic leader for a Normie revolution. Nothing happens without leadership in politics. We saw what happened with No Labels. No leader, no action.
I agree with the leadership part. But I don't think about this like an army. I think about it more like a wave.
The model I have in mind is the historical nineteenth century Progressive Movement. It's not a top-down or unified political army. It's just a common cause of likeminded people woven together in a loose alliance. They are united as much around politics as around events, entertainment, magazines, and ideas. They produce leaders organically. Then when there are enough of them, they show up at the convention and take the party as the cynics among the political class work to coopt them.
That's how this kind of thing always works in history.
Hope you’re right and not inclined to argue. But the Progressive Movement stood for radical change — on child labor, labor conditions generally, liquor prohibition, women voting, direct election of senators, etc. etc.
Normalcy does not seem like a directed movement for radical change. Just a return to decency, tolerance, reduced ideological heat. To speak of a “Normie Movement” just doesn’t sound real to me.
But, as I say. Hope I’m wrong.
You assume this has to be a top down effort. I'm talking about bottom up. Recapture city councils, school boards, county commissions, and thecmike. then let everything flow up.
We don't have to do party politics. Dan Osborn ran an incredibly competitive race for US debate from Nebraska as an independent. Check my Substack. I'm working on giving everyone the tools so they can storm the beaches!
The question is, how do independents (like myself) define "normal"?
For a century, "normal" has been the close embrace of the confession we were warned about sixty years ago: "that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can ourselves" ...
... so we don't see the need to make the effort and take the risks of managing our own lives independently from the "experts" and "leaders" with impressive CV's and resumes, yet can't reliably tell any one of us apart from a statistic - and see whether their plans make our individual lives better, or worse.
We conduct ourselves as though life is one big school group project ... the kind that so often ended up with one or two Smart People™ making all the decisions, with everyone else just along for the ride, trusting that the Smart People™ didn't screw it up.
As long as we continue to embrace this, capturing either party, or replacing them with a Normal Coalition, will end up taking us right back to where we are now ... comfortably numb, vulnerable to an elite few who Know Better™ that demand our submission to their definition of the "common good".
Our political class is a reflection of our expectations. It is those expectations that need to be questioned at the most fundamental levels ... in the light of considering that perhaps the only sustainable social contract we have, starts with the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident" ... and live accordingly.
Then, the parties will matter a lot less.
Agree with the premise except for the conclusion. We need to work through parties because it still take a majority to do things in a democratic republic. You need to coordinate half of the population across multiple institutions. It's also important for legitimacy.
The parties, the government, even democracy itself, are only means to the end.
"That TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their JUST powers from the consent of the governed"
Not just any powers, but JUST powers; powers that do not work against the primary objective of legitimate governance: TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS.
Those unalienable rights ... that supersede even a majority vote, which we keep forgetting ... only to be restricted when one's behavior poses a clear, present, and significant interference with the unalienable rights of others, and even then only by due process of law.
But we ask the parties, the government, even democracy itself, to extend far beyond this legitimate mission. And that is how we have created the conditions for this seemingly-intractable conflict that dominates our society today.
Were we to limit and focus our government, the one entity that we authorize to use coercive force to enforce its directives, on the limited, one-size-fits-all task set that pertains to that legitimate mission ...
... coming together to resolve all other issues as individuals and neighbors outside of that coercive force ...
... not only would we need less coercive coordination, it would not turn into perpetuated, intellectually-inbred group projects that ignore most of the distributed intellect in this nation - and persistently require at least some of us to "take one for the team" when they make things worse instead of better in their myopia.
Not only would our conflicts be diminished (and therefore the parties would matter a lot less), we would find that our government would operate more efficiently, effectively and legitimately in what it still does.
Part of the genius exhibited by our founding citizens, is in those four words: TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS. They bound the problem of human governance to a scope that human operatives can reasonably handle it, instead of expanding it to the point that our government operatives are required to be functionally omniscient and infallible in order to get it right for each and every one of us.