Tag Archives: pundits

Words Of Wisdom

One of my “go to” sources for political news and thoughtful analysis is Talking Points Memo. I nearly always find myself in agreement with its editor, Josh Marshall–and especially in his “cut to the chase” commentaries on our current political situation.

Recently, Marshall considered the navel-gazing of the “usual subjects.” He began by citing two recent Bulwark essays. One, by Matt Yglesias, engaged in the sort of “analysis” that drives me up the wall–Yglesias criticised the Democratic Party for clinging to positions that he believed imposed “a decisive disadvantage when it comes to winning the Senate in 2026 and in a challenging position when it comes to the Electoral College.” He argued for a “major repositioning on issues like guns and fossil fuels (among other issues) to make Democrats more competitive in states like Iowa or Texas.

Jonathan Last made a very different argument–and like Marshall, I found it far more persuasive.

The argument was that Democrats are the opposition and that the role of the opposition, especially in such a binary, Manichean moment, is to systematically disqualify the party in power. Any naval-gazing or attempted rebrands are somewhere between irrelevant and counterproductive.

Amen.

Marshall argues that pundits’ emphasis on policy prescriptions misreads the situation in which we find ourselves–that it is a bias held by people who think and write– and that ignores reality. “Opposition parties win when they manage in whole or in part to discredit the party in power — almost always with a ton of help from the party in power itself.”

I spent 21 years teaching law and public policy. I absolutely believe in the importance of policy prescriptions, in the need to consider what the evidence teaches us about policy decisions and mistakes. But if there is one thing I am absolutely convinced of, it is that elections aren’t won or lost by adjusting the nuances of this or that policy.

As Marshall notes,

Democrats who are currently focused on repositioning the party away from being “woke” sound like they’re in a time warp. People are scared about losing their jobs. They’re upset about authoritarian attacks on the rule of law. There’s deepening pessimism about a looming recession. A big focus on “wokism” seems mostly like someone speaking from the past. It’s just not what people are thinking about right now. They’re worried about Trump and the climate of chaos and uncertainty.

Again: politics is all about salience. That’s why people so frequently get themselves mixed up with polls. Maybe your issue has 80-20 support. But if it’s not what voters are voting on, it’s irrelevant. Americans overwhelmingly oppose Trump White House cuts to medical research. But it’s not getting a lot of traction at the moment. Because most people don’t know about it. It’s not a driving focus of the news. It’s salience is low. So it makes sense for Democrats to do everything they can to focus more attention on it.

There’s a mountain of evidence to the effect that people who are against something are more likely to cast ballots. I am confident that every person who participated in the No Kings Day protests will get to the polls.

As Marshall says, the salient issue right now is Trump and the damage he is doing to America. It isn’t only Democrats who are appalled by the assaults on reason and competence and liberty. As one of my favorite protest signs has it, IKEA has better cabinets, and a majority of Americans recognizes the damage that is being done by these clowns and ideologues–to the economy, to health care, to America’s global role, to constitutional governance.

For that matter, every Republican I worked with “back in the day” when I was a Republican and the GOP was a political party rather than a fascist cult is horrified by Trump and terrified by the direction he is taking the country.

Marshall is absolutely right that Democratic success depends upon opposition to Trump and MAGA, not to the fine-tuning of  a positive vision. As he points out, “the positive vision emerges from the outlines of what you oppose. But fundamentally the job of an opposition is to oppose. Don’t overcomplicate it. It’s not simply that you gain more ground from opposing than from grand-strategizing. You learn more from it too.”

America has a lot of long-term systemic flaws, and we need to pay attention to them and fix them. But right now, we need to rid America of today’s Confederates, the MAGA White Nationalists who are trying to remake us into a very different country.

You don’t debate the best way to make the plane safer while it’s going down.

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Left, Right, Center–REALLY?

As the competition among Democrats vying for the party’s presidential nomination heats up, pundits are warning against taking the party “too far to the left,” or alternatively reminding readers that “centrists” are failing to connect with the party’s rank and file.

We are once again entering bullshit land, where labeling takes the place of analysis. Plop a label on a policy proposal and suddenly it is a call to arms: if the label says “left,” self-identified conservatives and centrists bristle and oppose it; if the label says “centrist” or “moderate,” it is reflexively opposed by self-identified leftists.

Needless to say, no one is considering the proposal on its merits.

This rush to categorize candidates and policies as right, left or center is not just misleading, it is lazy and often irrelevant (not every policy position can be crammed into a nice neat ideological box). This habit has irritated me for years– in fact, in 2003, I wrote about it.

Periodically, someone will respond to a column I have written with a statement beginning “well, you liberals always…” Being dismissed as a liberal always amuses me, because I hold precisely the same political values I held in 1980, when I was the Republican nominee running for Congress against Andy Jacobs, and a fair number of voters found me “too conservative.” The only thing that has changed is the label….

Well, to be fair, the GOP has also changed, galloping off to the radical far right, and pulling the “conservative” label with it. But I stand by the following paragraph:

This mania for labeling people so that we don’t have to engage with them on the validity of their ideas has accelerated during the past few years. Perhaps it is talk radio, with its tendency to reduce everything to name-calling sound-bites. Admittedly, it is much more efficient to call a woman a “feminazi” than to take the time and effort needed to discuss why her positions are untenable. And the tactic certainly isn’t limited to Republicans; Indiana’s very own Evan Bayh has solemnly warned the Democrats against the danger posed by “leftists” like Howard Dean. (I’m not quite sure when Dean’s support for gun rights, the death penalty and a balanced budget became “far left” positions. Perhaps when they were espoused by someone the Senator isn’t supporting.)

Labelling an opponent’s proposal as “extreme” (left or right) is a tactic to undercut that proposal without actually engaging with it.

Allowing citizens to opt into Medicare (i.e. making Medicare a “public option”) or advocating expansion of the program (“Medicare for All”) are hardly proposals to dismantle capitalism. They are proposed solutions to a real and growing problem. Imposing higher marginal tax rates on the rich would return us to tax policies that used to be widely endorsed by both parties. Doing so would hardly turn America into a communist gulag.

These and other proposals may or may not be sound policy. We won’t know if we refuse to   address the particulars of suggested policies and instead simply label and dismiss them.

Pundits notwithstanding, the truth of the matter is that America doesn’t really have the sort of leftists that have long been active in Europe. What passes for left-wing in the United States is moderately progressive. To the extent there is extremism in the U.S., it is on the radical right, and the most important task facing Democrats and Independents is to rid the nation of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.

Flinging labels at each other won’t get that done.

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