Demography

lj, to me your comments about communism resonate. It is of course difficult for many Europeans and English people to truly understand the absolute taint that the communism/communist label carries in the US. I mean, we have plenty of rightwingers, obviously including hard right, but the automatic demonisation of communism (and even more so socialism) has never had much of a foothold here.

nous, of course your Carville comment suggested this topic to me, but my questions were about a much broader phenomenon.

I understand why pragmatic mainstream Dems want to avoid controversy and emphasize the precarious state of US democracy, but Harris tried that particular approach and it did not cut through.

Surely you don’t believe that this alone (or even mainly) accounts for Harris’s downfall? I agree and made it clear that, at the moment and for reasons I do not entirely understand, emphasising the precarious state of US democracy is not cutting through to the general electorate. But because most of us here see the issue as existential, my point is that emphasising things that would cut through, and make Dem electoral success much more likely, would be the necessary first step towards re-orienting America back towards values that even the GOP pays lip service to, as “the tribute that vice pays to virtue”.

I don’t think Harris’s loss was entirely due to that message. I think what limited Harris (beyond the racism, sexism, and the anger over sweeping the Gaza critics offstage – all of which were a drag, but not a fatal drag on her numbers), was her being forced to shoulder the Biden and DNC tendency towards trying to sound like anodyne neoliberals who value corporate interests.

I don’t think that this is Harris, mind. I do think however that this was the election structure that Harris got plugged into when she took over from Biden, and I think that for her to break this impression would have required more time than she had.

My larger point is that a lot of the ideas that ARE resonating and that ARE cutting through are ideas that require risking the support of the east coast neoliberal pundit class and getting a little AOC. It requires speaking out for unions and against the MBA class. It requires saying that the economy needs to be rebalanced, and that the middle class is owed a larger share of the rewards for the health of the economy. It requires saying that people should be safe, yes, but that our incarceration rates are out of control, and we need to give struggling people more opportunities to keep out of desperation. It means treating law abiding residents of all colors with dignity.

Every single one of those points is going to get you punched for being a sparkly unicorn socialist hippie.

Punch back, and punch harder.

(I’d add the support for women’s health here, but that was one of the things that Harris actually did fight for. It just wasn’t enough to overcome the drag of the DNC history of neoliberalism at the expense of working people.)

It sounds to me like you are respecting the preferences of the people you are addressing.

Yes, but Carville and his kind always present it as an either/or choice, when it can often be a both/and if done with respect.

It requires saying that the economy needs to be rebalanced, and that the middle class is owed a larger share of the rewards for the health of the economy.

I wonder how much those making this (valid!) argument are aware of the differences in what “middle class” means. There’s what economists mean, which isn’t quite the same as what sociologists means. And both are a huge distance from what the general public means.

A big chunk of what sociologists would call working class, especially those in the skilled (and well paid) trades, consider themselves middle class rather than working class. A fair number of those in the lower half of the top third of the income distribution also think of themselves as middle class rather than upper class.

The good news is, an appeal talking about helpiing the middle class will resonate with a lot of people. The bad news is, anyone making such an appeal can count on being denounced by the pedanticly inclined for ignoring what said pundits insist are people who aren’t middle class. No matter that both speaker and audience have the same, different, understanding of the term.

nous, at minimum that needs to be modified for those who are retired. Did I magically shift from middle class to upper class when I retired? After all, I started living on my savings and investments, rather than on a paycheck…

Does a guy getting a multimillion a year salary count as middle class? Not sure that makes sense.

Just saying that any of the definitions that I have seen are seriously flawed. Not to mention mutually contradictory.

Here is Brian Beutler on the issue:

This Is How Democrats Talk Themselves Out Of Wielding Power
Every party wants to win as many elections as possible. But a supermajority can not be a prerequisite for democratic renewal in America.

Let’s peer into a future where Democrats come to power in 2029 with a governing trifecta. In this crystal ball, the only thing we can’t see is how large their majorities will be. We just know they’ve won two national elections in a row.

They will try to pull this off. It’s what parties and candidates exist to do. And—thanks to Donald Trump and a decent roster of wannabe presidents—I think the odds are in their favor.

But victory could come in many sizes and shapes. A big question looming over our collective fate is how well Democrats will have to fare in all of the elections between now and 2029 to govern the country through the omnicrisis Trump will leave behind.

Could they make better use of a narrow Senate majority than Joe Biden did in 2021 and 2022? Or will they need a supermajority, like the one Barack Obama enjoyed in 2009 and 2010—the third largest in the entire post-New Deal era.

It goes without saying that more is better; anyone who might be president in 2029 would rather have whopping majorities than slim ones. Extra votes provide a buffer. They broaden the range and ambition of legislation that can become law. They reduce the risk of losing power in subsequent elections.

That Democrats should want and pursue the largest-possible majorities is trivially true. But do they need whopping majorities? Will they fail if they don’t get at least into the high 50s?

That’s the thesis of a new book called Supermajority by Adam Jentleson, the former Harry Reid aide, who later worked for John Fetterman, and now helms the moderate-branded Searchlight Institute.

In an op-ed ahead of its release, Jentleson asserts, “The narrow majorities to which [Democrats have] become accustomed will never be enough to restore a pluralistic democracy and defeat the rise of right-wing authoritarianism.”

He goes on to explain how he thinks Democrats can pull together a supermajority rather than a narrow one. His prescription for party building is basically correct, and uncontroversial. Indeed, Democrats are already doing what he wants.

But I reject this stipulation—that we’re doomed without a supermajority—as much too defeatist.

Fighting Democrats can save democracy with a bare majority. But they have to be fighters.

To restore pluralistic democracy, Democrats need just enough power to:

Abolish the filibuster;

Expand the Supreme Court;

Create at least two new states (but ideally more) out of existing territories of disenfranchised American citizens.

That’s it. This wouldn’t be the end of the project. But it’s the threshold. What’s necessary, but not sufficient. It can be done without a supermajority.

A wider berth would be better. Nobody disputes that. And there’s no inescapable tension between majoritymaxxing and priming Democrats to wield power once they claim it—or at least there shouldn’t be. But to the extent that one of these objectives must come at the expense of the other, democracymaxxing should take precedence.

Everyone has a role to play. Leaders of the progressive insurgency should feel a sense of obligation to disclaim candidates who might win Democratic primaries but lose general elections to fascists. Ambitious red-state Democrats should stand aside for independents who lack the party’s brand baggage, and thus stand better odds of winning statewide.

But it is the work of moderates to ferret out who in the party would stand in the way of democracy protection, and either disabuse them or expose them so that a) they can be targeted by viable primary challengers, and b) party leaders know how much of a buffer they’ll need.

This is, I’d argue, the most important work of all.

In 2021, Democrats had 50 Senate votes, but two of their members were vocal opponents of filibuster abolition. Credible reporting at the time suggested the real number was larger.

This is what cannot happen again. If Democrats come back to power with a narrow majority, at least 50 of them, but ideally all, need to be ready to act.

The Trump experience has hopefully shrunk this pusillanimous, outworn faction. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are gone. Fetterman will not be a senator in 2029. If the number of obstructors is zero, then Democrats can have a mere 50 votes on January 20, 2029 and still restore pluralistic democracy. More would be better. More would insure against illness, death, cold feet, and mischief. But commitment to purpose is the essential ingredient. With resolve, a 50-vote majority can become 54 over the course of a few months.

Here’s another load-bearing claim in Jentleson’s essay: “Even assuming we reform or abolish the filibuster, as we should, the courts will be waiting to strike down our agenda. We should pass court reform, but even then, we will need to replace conservative Supreme Court justices with liberals, a process that will probably take years.”

Wait, what? Years? Why? There are structural court-reform ideas kicking around the pro-democracy world that would take time to implement. But simply adding seats to the court should take days; filling those seats should take weeks; further democracy reforms could begin rolling out immediately thereafter—though some would require new precedents from the unrigged judiciary.

Most of us have no living memory of it; the rest have likely either forgotten, or else never considered its relevance to our crisis of democracy. But the government has dealt with simultaneous Supreme Court vacancies multiple times in its history. And the norm (insofar as anyone thought of it that way) was to run the confirmation processes for those justices simultaneously, rather than stagger them.

Check the history: Justice Hugo Black retired on September 17, 1971; Justice John Marshall Harlan II retired less than a week later on September 23, 1971. On October 21, Richard Nixon nominated William Rehnquist to replace Harlan and Lewis Powell to replace Black. The Senate confirmed Powell on December 6, Rehnquist on December 10. At this pace, we could have 13 justices by mid-April 2029.

Washington, DC, could then safely be granted statehood. If Puerto Rico chose to join the union, the Senate majority would (probably) jump to 54 by summer, and at least two of the newly elected senators would be out of cycle until after the 2030 midterm.

There are good reasons to want a supermajority, but the idea that we can’t revive democracy without a supermajority concedes too much. Unless the point is to run cover for uncounted moderates and incumbents who intend to stand in the way.

Other moderates have become fixated on elusive supermajorities through pretextual reasoning.

The centrist writer Damon Linker claims, “Dems had 60 seats in the Senate less than two decades ago. That seems impossible now because the party moved sharply left on cultural issues, including immigration, race, gender, crime, etc. Rather than reversing course, some would rather break the system.”

Linker restates a commonly held view in centrist politics, where history more or less begins with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and the supermajorities he enjoyed in his first two years were a product of optimal or near-optimal moderation. In this view, Democrats squandered power through hubris. They concluded demographics were destiny, shed their old-time religion, “moved sharply left,” and lost their majorities, which they can’t possibly win back unless they race to the right.

This is a tendentious and convenient telling. It’s also mostly ahistoric and (as to what is and isn’t possible) I think it’s likely wrong. There’s only one future, and we can’t see it. But Democrats can probably do more or less what they’re already doing and win a Senate supermajority in 2028. Maybe not literally 60 votes. But close.

Here’s a more parsimonious version of events: Long before Obama ran for president, the country was in the midst of a white working-class voter realignment into the GOP. Then George W. Bush’s incompetence and the Great Recession (along with, perhaps, a small assist from Obama and his unique political talents) temporarily bumped this trend into reverse. Democrats won back-to-back landslide elections, including, in 2008, on an agenda that was very progressive for the time! But the Great Recession wasn’t forever, and as old patterns and habits reemerged, we reverted to trend.

Most of the seats Linker laments losing were lost to Republican landslides in 2010 and 2014, when Obama led the party and the moderatism reigned.

I do concede this: Democrats had grown more progressive by 2016 than they were in 2008. They drifted left. Some of this was simply mission fulfillment. Obama didn’t fix everything that was broken or regressive about America. There was more work left to be done. But for the most part, Democrats were conforming to the preferences of their own voters, whose sincere beliefs many centrists simply disdain. As Republicans became more reactionary, Democrats became more educated, with a higher propensity to vote.

Their popular appeal has thus remained near its Obama-era potential. Joe Biden won millions more votes than Barack Obama. Democrats actually won more House seats (a decent proxy for popular appeal) in the 2018 midterms than they did in the analogous 2006 midterms. They lost Senate seats in 2018, because these citizens aren’t optimally distributed. Too many of them live in too few, bigger bluer states.

This surely sucks. And in some realpolitik, almost tautological sense, building a new supermajority will require Democrats to field candidates in red states who side with Republicans on discrete issues, even as Republicans in those same states can get away with being ideologically rigid.

Think James Talarico running as a pro-oil Democrat. Or Adam Hamilton running as a megachurch pastor in Kansas. But that’s the point. What Jentleson wants, and Linker views as impossible, is already happening!

Positioning is just one tactic. There are other limits, and more tactical maneuvers to consider. Republicans have spent billions of dollars fomenting right-wing hatred of self identified Democrats and liberals. Democrats should thus probably stand down altogether in certain red states and back independent candidates who broadly share their values. This is what the party tried to do in Montana, where a Senate seat is up for grabs in November, and an independent named Seth Bodnar shows real strengths as a politician. But the Democratic nominee, Alani Bankhead, refused to drop out ahead of the withdrawal deadline earlier this month. The field is now split.

That is how the potential for a 2029 supermajority gets frittered away. The claim that what imperils us is Democrats [which Democrats?] who simply refuse to “reverse course” [how exactly?] on “immigration, race, crime, etc.” doesn’t withstand real scrutiny.

There’s sadly no obvious way to ensure that every ambitious Democrat in every conceivable battleground is selfless and civic-minded. But keeping the factional peace should be easier than internet-poisoned progressives and centrists make it look. In many ways we’re witnessing it now.

Jentleson writes, “It’s time to shift our focus to building a supermajority,” but as he acknowledges later in the piece, the shift has already begun. “All of these candidates believe in expanding health care access, expanding the safety net and making the wealthy pay their fair share. By merging these core common Democratic values with the heterodoxy that wins in red areas, they are developing an agenda that unites the big tent.”

There’s really nothing to quibble with here. I would only propose broadening the frame, so that the grounds for big-tent unity stand in more precise contrast with fascism. Fascists can pretend to support expanding the safety net; they always pretend to be economic populists. But they hate freedom.

What unites the wings of the Democratic Party? Certain health-care reforms, yes. But at the greatest level of abstraction it’s the stuff the fascists are trying to extinguish: democracy, civil equality, economic fairness, the rule of law.

What divides the party? There are obviously raging disagreements over everything from program design to economic theory. But the main thing that divides them is saboteurs on the left and the center fringes who’d rather lose, or splinter the party, than share it with people who want too much or too little change. Who’d give the country over to fascists rather than hold tight to the things that make us free.

These include cosplay Marxist wreckers in the DSA, and the shills of the Third Way who will, in short order, blow $15 million on a donor-funded campaign against left-wing candidates.

They have no place in the tent. The models of cooperative partnership are the progressive and moderate leaders who collaborate on policy and campaign together. AOC and Pat Ryan. Bernie Sanders and Rebecca Cooke. The Democrats who should dine alone in the party cafeteria are the ones who watched Zohran Mamdani win the Democratic mayoral primary and still tried to get him kicked out of the party. When does Hillary Scholten intend to endorse Abdul el-Sayed?

Higher values are also easier to message than common-ground policy, which drags everyone into the mire of specifics. You all agree about health care? Does that mean you all want socialized medicine? Who’s gonna pay for it?!

A shared commitment to basic freedom is an easier sell.

The new class of Democrats will include more members who identify as “democratic socialists.” I wish they would not insist on this terminology. It is, in most cases, an unnecessary and counterproductive indulgence. “Socialism” is a freighted term in the U.S., and, with perhaps one exception, we’re talking about people who promote FDR-style progressive labor-liberalism. If they insist on calling that “democratic socialism”—for transgressive reasons, or in deference to Bernie Sanders, or as a gesture to the European roots of their vision for reform—then everyone will have more explaining to do.

But that’s why god invented politicians.

During the 2020 primary, Pete Buttigieg contrasted himself with Bernie Sanders not by calling for Sanders’s expulsion from the field, but by calling himself a “democratic capitalist.” Their ideological differences were right there on the surface, but so, too, was their overriding commitment to democracy. We will have to come to terms over how large a role the government should play in the economy, but we are fully united in the belief that if citizens aren’t happy with their economic lives—whether because capitalists have too much power, or because our public programs don’t work well—then they can vote to change things.

This cycle, Florida Democrats will run a former Republican (David Jolly) for governor and a democratic socialist (Angela Nixon) for Senate. In a better system of government, these two politicians would find their homes in different parties. But in our two-party system, for the pendency of the GOP’s fascist formation, they have to align in the united front. They can run against each other and lose. Or they can run together—on the basis of their greatest shared commitments, pulling together the most disparate wings of the pro-democracy movement—and stand a chance.

If they pull it off, Democrats will be one seat closer to a 2029 supermajority. But if they fall short, all is not lost. A supermajority is a worthy goal. It should not be the standard for success. And it cannot be a prerequisite for democratic renewal.

Creating states:
PR, DC for sure. Of course PR has to *finally* come to a decision as to what they want, dammit.

American Samoa has such obnoxious “citizenship status”, that turning it into a state would be a good way to make up for previous fnckery.

Split Texas into “Austin” + “Ungovernable Tribal Dumbfuckistan”

“once that seal is broken, the court will be routinely enlarged by the party in power.”

That’s a reasonable point. I’m not sure it would happen, but it could.

Personally I’d like to see Thomas and Alito impeached and replaced. It would accomplish the same goal, while retaining the 9 seat SCOTUS.

Unfortunately it would require 2/3 of the Senate and so is unlikely.

As far as the filibuster, it’s one of many Constitutional requirements, laws, and norms that lets non-majority points of view punch above their weight. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes it’s not. But sometimes it is.

Tony P – it’s six years old, and those six years have been longer than most, but…

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/national-survey-finds-bipartisan-support-expansive-view-rights

But since these beliefs are all detail/context free, the battle to be fought is the one over which vision of these rights is going to win the largest share of the people who stated these opinions. I suspect that “equal opportunity” is going to look very different to individuals, even though they all believe in it in principle.

That’s why I keep saying that this is a narrative battle, not a policy battle. No one supports a policy unless they already support the narrative that gives the policy its meaning and context. “We have the best policies,” even if true from an analytical standpoint, isn’t going to win anything unless enough people agree with the story of how that policy fits the world we share.

I’d like to hear from anybody, here or in the punditocracy, which positions on which “political” issues are held by a super-majority of American voters (or citizens, or persons; take your pick)

If we call a super-majority 60%, surely cracking down on insider dealing and other forms of corruption is one? Also, and it would have to be phrased this way, equality before the law?

It’s very hard for me to imagine how some form of universal healthcare wouldn’t have more than 60% support, but I guess given the tendency of US working class voters to consistently vote against their own interests I have to accept that more than 40% would on this issue too…

wonkie – the DSA national committee stuff can safely be ignored. The only power that they have is over whether or not to recognize a local chapter. They are probably a mix of activists, radicals, and narcissists – that’s what you get in left-ish organizations with no money that are mostly run by volunteers. The crazy gets platformed, but the platforms never have enough actual boots-on-the-ground support to go anywhere.

None of the DSA candidates get their money from DSA national, and national has no input into what any of the DSA candidates who have gained national attention are saying or doing. If anything, the national committee is parasitizing the media profiles of their star candidates. Fong did not receive a dime from the national DSA, and the WI DSA is, for all intents and purposes, a name under which Fong’s volunteers gather themselves. The percentage of them that knows or gives a crap about marxism or cares what the national committee says is vanishingly small.

AOC can tell them to FO if she wants, and if they were to try to censure her, they would only kill their own growth, and probably piss off Bernie in the process (who is also bigger than the DSA, and has more political sway than any state or national committee). AOC has twice the followers on her profiles that Bernie does, and Bernie already has about fourteen times as many as the party itself.

No money + fewer followers = no leverage and no influence not given to them by the media itself treating them like they have either of the first two.

As such, the DSA mostly exists as a narrative – of bottom-up political representation free from corporate domination. If you vibe with that vibe, then you will find others and have a chance to build a community and try to do something together. How much legs that has depends entirely on the community and their chosen representative.

But it’s a powerful narrative given our top-down, corporate money and corporate media dominated national politics, and it’s that idea of bottom-up politics that has the DNC nervous.

Also, JFTR, I am not a part of any DSA chapter and have no stake in the party beyond recognizing the power of their central narrative. The Dems are off balance and too top heavy, just as they were when the Clinton’s judo threw them to the right by grabbing a piece of Reagan’s paradigm and riding it into power. Same precariousness, very different mood.

Maybe getting elected and having to actually take responsibility will have the effect of forcing better word choices and making some folks think before they mouth

I’d be surprised if the DSA national committee types ever ran for a competitive public office. They are ideologues who can only function around others who are already committed to the same cause, and they get positions of leadership mostly because everyone else finds that sort of thing tedious, time consuming, and contentious.

You see this all the time in unions. The practical leaders and service-minded members almost never volunteer for the positions that are all about internal politics. Those positions are for the status-seekers.

(Okay, probably not entirely fair, but I find all that infighting arguing in committees over ideological minutia to be exhausting, and I don’t love the endless personal testimony about how they found Union Jesus and the Church of Labor.)

Can de-HisOrangeness-ification work without judicial reforms (in particular SCOTUS) at all.