A DSA amuse-bouche

I’ll say what I always say in these sorts of conversations… As a long-time union member and local leader, one of the things I consistently have to remind members of is that management will always say that what the union wants is not possible, and most of the fights you take on (through the grievance process) will be fights that you will lose. You don’t file a grievance only when you think you will win, you file it to show that you will not let management violate your rights without a fight. And sometimes that also means taking a losing fight into arbitration and spending member dues on lawyer fees just because you need management to see that you are not going to let this particular issue go no matter how hard they try to discourage you.

Too many long-term Democrats sound like management. Not enough sound like labor leaders. It makes it hard for working class Dems and independents to trust them. Bernie, AOC, and Mamdani sound like labor leaders willing to fight for their members, and willing to take on union leadership if leadership has gotten too cosy with management and forgotten the rank-and-file.

If you want to know what “too cosy” sounds like, here’s Schumer in the NYT in 2025:

Look, I talk to a lot of these Republican legislators. I’ve worked with them. Some of them are Trump devotees. But many of them don’t like him, don’t respect him and worry about what he’s doing to our country. Right now he’s so popular they can’t resist him. I mean, so many of them came to me and said: “I don’t think Hegseth should be defense secretary or R.F.K. should be H.H.S. But Trump wants him. He won.” The Republicans would like to have some freedom from Trump, but they won’t until we bring him down in popularity. That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us. And I talk to them. One of the places is in the gym. When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off. [bold is mine]

Jon Stewart was absolutely right to roast Schumer for this. It makes him sound out-of-touch and entitled, and untroubled by the effects of what is happening to people while they wait to get to that magic point where the Repubs start to worry for their own political survival.

It’s shit like this that lies behind the growing number of people declaring themselves independents. They don’t feel supported or represented, and they see no sense of urgency coming from elected officials. They want to see their representatives fight even if they don’t win, and they want to hear them keep fighting even in defeat.

Further to which, this is from a conversation in today’s NYT, headlined Trump Voters are Finally Starting to Sour on Him (FTLTGE):

Longwell: Democratic voters want their leaders to stop acting like peacetime diplomats, recognize the Republican Party for the threat it is and mount an effective counteroffensive. They are deeply frustrated by years of their politicians saying that Trump is an existential threat to democracy, but not acting like democracy is truly at stake.
…..

They need much more aggressive communications strategies. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is a movie I hated, but a communications strategy I endorse. Talk like a normal human being about issues that matter to a vast majority of voters, which are generally the issues tied to material well-being: jobs, health care, education, crime.
But this works only if you have high-level communicators going into these spaces. Charismatic leaders like Jon Ossoff, Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Josh Shapiro and Pete Buttigieg are the Democrats’ strongest messengers. Notice that this has less to do with these candidates’ individual politics — some are centrists, others are progressives — and more to do with their ability to be authentic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/28/opinion/democrats-fighters-trump-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9FA.CQr6.Wp4c0rXqfjFc&smid=url-share

That is why the fight has to be waged in a strategic and concentrated way, unhampered by unnecessary drag.

https://www.newsweek.com/polls-democratic-socialist-positions-traction-republicans-midterms-12353898

• Paid family leave

• Raising the federal minimum wage

• Higher taxes on billionaires

• Medicare for all

• Opposing AI data centers

All fights that need to be waged whether or not the Dems win, because if they do not fight these fights they won’t gain the trust and support they need to keep democracy.

…which the GOP will then use to smear all Dems just in time for an election.

They will do that no matter what, even if the have to invent every last thing (or edit quotes by removing context or adding or substracting words like ‘no’. And the media are afraid to call them out on that (if they are not the spreader in the first place). They claimed that Obama was worse than Hitler and Stalin combined (OK, that failed) and that Biden was a lawless corrupt tyrant and at the same time also sleepy and unaware of what was happening around him (which worked).
Not a fan of St.John of Patmos but his “cause you are lukewarm, I’ll spit you out of my mouth” fits the professional Dems to a t.

And the Dems have absolutely NOT been running against the AI datacenters. That was one of the big issues that bit the Dem choices in the ass in ME and MI, and Newsom has been cuddling up to AI money all along in order to power his media machine.

As cleek and russell both point out, all those ideas are not sole property of the socialists, and the billionaire capitalists are a target of opportunity to be used in fighting back. Expect that you will be called a socialist. Laugh. Go after the billionaires with a counterattack.

Actually, clarification needed. It’s not just “socialist” which is an unnecessarily polarising description for the Dems to eschew, it’s what in our previous conversation we were agreeing to satirically call Woke One. The extreme elements of progressivism and so-called identity politics are also electorally unpopular, and unnecessary to achieve the five political aims we have been discussing. They are the sorts of things which can be debated and decided once a party is in power, and has achieved its primary aims and commitments to the electorate.

(comment got ate?)

Mills – https://www.maine.gov/governor/mills/news/governor-mills-announces-decision-ld-307-2026-04-24

Stevens – https://www.eenews.net/articles/michigan-senate-primary-puts-data-center-politics-to-the-test/

Pritzker: https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2026/02/18/illinois-freezes-data-center-tax-incentives-pritzker-trump-energy

Healy: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/am-against-higher-gas-electric-195400164.html?guccounter=1

Hobbs: https://www.gadgetreview.com/governor-hobbs-signs-pause-on-tax-incentives-for-arizona-data-centers

hell, just read it for yourself: https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-states-where-governor-candidates-support-data-center-moratoriums-12225115

Jeffries may be coming around, but Schumer still seems to be opposed to any sort of government-led slowdown of data center expansion.

Yes, the Dems are starting to realign. That is what I have been saying that they should do. Stevens probably would have won had she done it earlier, and then the media would not have written all of those stories about how the progressive outsiders were challenging the party supported favorites. She gave up a lot of ground to El-Sayed over this one. It was a serious misjudgment.

Getting on the side of public sentiment before the primaries would have done a lot to win the trust of the independents who are deeply suspicious of corporate interests driving the politics of both parties (that is, after all, the consistent message of the disillusioned independents). Waiting until after a public spanking to shift mostly signals that they want to win (re-)election, not that they can be trusted to side with the little guys against powerful corporate lobbies.

But I’m glad to see that the shift is happening because now, at least, the bolder of the Dem candidates can get out from under the drag of this issue. And with any luck, they can drag Schumer over the line as well. Better if they could replace him with someone who is more attuned to the current mood of the country, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.

I think nous is absolutely right to harp on the importance of “narrative” when it comes to influencing voters. As a voter, I’m trying to figure out what narrative to settle on.

I was helped to this position by Brian Calvert, editor of High Country News, writing about why the magazine chose to dedicate an entire issue to speculative journalism back in 2019:

In June 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before a congressional committee, where he announced, with 99% certainty, that human-caused global warming was real. A year later, the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group formed by fossil fuel companies, began a determined effort to stymie climate action. Hansen, being a scientist, based his testimony on scientific fact. The GCC lobbyists, being slimeballs, based their efforts on telling stories — including, incredibly, the 1992 release of a video claiming that adding CO2 to the atmosphere would boost crop yields and end world hunger.

Thirty years later, we are still fighting stories with facts, and the results have been underwhelming. While it is easy to get frustrated by this state of affairs, it is also easy to understand why it’s happening. Global warming is a human-caused phenomenon that exceeds the human capacity for understanding. The typical institutions that we rely on to guide government policy — science and journalism — have not been fully up to the task. We know this at HCN because we cover, over and again, a changing climate. The facts are there, and the problem is still there — and getting worse. So last December, when the U.S. government issued a damning, detailed assessment on the climate, even we were at a loss with what to do with it. How, we wondered, can we help people understand the importance of all these facts, if the facts aren’t enough to speak for themselves?

I love a ton of what Warren has done on a policy level, but she’s exactly this sort of “fighting stories with facts” speaker, and her primary results reflected that.

Dems need to identify their best storytellers – the ones that cut through to the frustrated and disillusioned independents – and they need to lean into those stories of what we can build together.

nous, funny that you bring up the climate change example, in today’s Comment is Freed here is Sam Freedman on the topic (links disabled for posting purposes).

Also, despite our difference of opinion on Dem tactics, I completely agree with you about the need for a compelling narrative versus facts, depending on who the audience is. Both, of course, are necessary.

How to kill a popular policy
Sam Freedman
Aug 30

Opposing action to tackle climate change is getting tricker. Back in the early 1990s you could just deny it was happening. A group of fossil fuel companies set up a front organisation called “Information Council for the Environment” which put out ads with headlines like: “Some say the earth was warming. Some also said the earth was flat” and “Who told you the earth was warming….Chicken Little?”. Oil firms put out slightly subtler adverts in their own names, while trying to block the 1997 Kyoto Agreement, explaining that the science was terribly uncertain about everything, though their own unpublished research showed otherwise.

During the 2000s and 2010s that became an unviable strategy as a strong scientific consensus developed around the reality of global warming. So companies, commentators and politicians who wanted to argue against moves to combat climate change shifted to a new strategy. Now they emphasised the value of oil and gas, and that there was no reason to rush precipitously given uncertainty about the effects. After Joe Biden announced a major plan to tackle climate change, the number of these ads on social media shot up, falling just as fast once Trump won re-election.

While none of this has stopped countries from taking any action, it has helped to limit it, particularly in the US. But in the last year or so there has been another shift. The impact of climate change is now hitting rich western countries hard. It is no longer possible to discount this as a future problem. This summer we have seen extraordinary wildfires, thousands of heat-related deaths, and floods. It is only going to get worse. Public concern is rising and support for net zero remains solid in the UK, despite most press coverage being opposed.

So opponents of action are having to change course again, with a surge of anti-net zero articles and op-eds over the last year or so. The new approach is to argue the damage is now done so we should accept the inevitable and focus on dealing with the consequences rather than waste money by ameliorating further change. It was well illustrated in a recent piece by Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph:

“Climate change is real, but Britain can do almost nothing about it. The war against global warming has been lost, with only grievous collateral damage to show for it….It’s time to accept this sobering reality, cut our losses, cease tilting at (and building) windmills, ditch the despicable con that is net zero, and learn to cope with, and whenever possible, even enjoy, a warmer, drier, more volatile Mediterranean climate, if that is indeed to be our fate.”

Heath is a particularly hyperbolic writer but he is using standard arguments: there is nothing Britain can do by itself; trying will mean irreparably damaging our economy; and will waste time when we should be focusing on adaptation.

This sequence of arguments perfectly matches a theory put forward by the influential economist Albert O. Hirschman in his 1991 book “The Rhetoric of Reaction”. Going back to the expansion of suffrage he shows that those wishing to stop popular progressive policies tend to acknowledge the underlying problem while seeking to prevent action via three forms of argument:

Futility: the reform will make no meaningful difference (Britain can’t change the climate alone)

Jeopardy: the reform may help but will harm some other valuable existing achievement (it will trash our economy)

Perversity: the reform will aggravate the problem it is meant to solve (emissions will go abroad / it will make adaptation harder)

In the rest of the post I’ll look at why these superficially attractive arguments aren’t true when it comes to climate change. But also at how this rhetorical structure keeps reappearing across numerous policy debates. When you have seen in once you see it everywhere. Progressives and centrists use it too. Though these types of criticisms can be true, they are nearly always overstated, yet can be very effective at killing popular policies.

Futility, jeopardy, perversity and climate change

The most popular argument against net zero, the one you hear repeated back in focus groups, is futility: that Britain is too small to solve the problem itself and we are hurting ourselves for no benefit. As Heath puts it: “Britain’s re-embrace of collectivism, of energy rationing, our advanced case of suicidal empathy, have achieved little other than putting us at the mercy of China.”¹

This seems compelling. Britain accounts for less than 1% of global emissions. We cannot do much by ourselves. It is an argument made by the political right in many other countries. But it only works if you know nothing about what is actually happening outside your borders. Currently around 70% of countries (137 out of 198) have a net zero target, covering 79% of the world’s population. Of those that do not most are poor and have low emissions. A majority of the world’s largest companies have a target too. These plans are of varying quality and detail, but many have been directly influenced by ours. It is a field in which we have genuinely shown global leadership (back to the days Margaret Thatcher who was one of the first world leaders to acknowledge the threat).²

We can also see that these global policy shifts are starting to make a real difference. China’s emissions have risen very quickly as it has industrialised in recent decades, but there is good (independent) evidence that they may be starting to fall as a result of massive investment in renewables and nuclear. The US, under Trump, has abandoned efforts at a national level. But plenty of states and companies still have targets and US emissions are falling.³ At a global level we are approaching a plateau as the rate of increase has dropped.

None of this is enough to stop dramatic climate change, which we can already see all around us. But it is much better than the counterfactual where no one had done anything. Climate Action Tracker estimates that policy changes since 2015 have reduced prospective warming from 3.6 degrees to 2.6 degrees by 2100. Given that the impacts of rising temperatures are non-linear – at some points systems start failing and the problems get far worse – this is incredibly important. But it will only stick if policies are retained. And, of course, if they are sped up then we can still bring that number lower.

This does not mean that there are no fair criticisms of the UK’s current energy policy. There are plenty of reasonable technical challenges about the right balance between different clean energies, prospects for new technologies, and how we pay for electricity.⁴ But the idea that we should stop bothering, or do far less than now, is genuinely insane. It is a painful irony that the visible effects of climate change may help people like Heath convince voters that further action is futile.

The “jeopardy” argument is closely linked. Given the supposed futility, spending money ameliorating climate change seems economically harmful. These claims typically require over-estimating the costs. The best assessment for implementing net zero in the UK by 2050 is 0.2% of GDP a year, once the benefits of cheaper fuel, lower heating bills and more efficient equipment have been factored in. This isn’t nothing in a struggling economy but it is not “suicidal”.

But critically this estimate does not include the savings from avoiding higher levels of climate change. These are very hypothetical because the range of potential consequences is wide and encompasses all sorts of second and third order effects like much higher levels of mass migration and military conflicts over water. We don’t, though, need specific numbers to know that 3.6 degrees of warming would be economically vastly more damaging than 2.6 degrees.

It is harder to make the “perversity” argument with climate change: that taking action will actually make the climate worse. This is where Heath makes a cunning diversion from the bog-standard position. By acknowledging that the climate is changing fast he can argue we should focus on adaptation: “We need universal air-conditioning and irrigation…..We will require water reservoirs, pipelines and desalination plants; for that, abundant, cheap electricity will be a must.” And of course he is right that we do need to adapt and that will also cost money, and require electricity. But it is perfectly possible to do both, and reducing the effects of change will make adaptation cheaper in the long-run.

A cleverer “perversity” argument against net zero is that we are simply “offshoring” our emissions to countries with lower standards. The strongest version notes that ramping up costs for, say, steel production via regulation and expensive energy leads to that steel being made in countries that have very little regulation at all. Like most perversity arguments there is truth to it – pretty much any policy has some negative consequences – but they almost never outweigh the benefits. That is the case here. The UK’s overall “carbon footprint” – including imports – has fallen significantly.

The structure of reactionary rhetoric

When people want to argue for something that is popular they will just assert it is a good thing in itself. For the right that would include policies like tax cuts or tougher prison sentences; for the left more funding for schools and hospitals. When the cause is unpopular we see the “peversity/jeopardy/futility” structure pop up over and over again – used in different proportions depending on the issue. Climate change is unusual only in that all three arguments are used at once.

Perversity arguments are particularly useful for opposing policies that help those on middle-to-low incomes, which are typically popular. No one wants to say they are in favour of poverty; much better to argue that progressive policies will make it worse. The classic, centuries-old, perversity argument is that welfare leads to idleness and more poverty. But they come up all the time. Wealth taxes are bad because people will leave the country and we will raise less money. Minimum wage increases are bad because it will lead to more unemployment. Universal healthcare increases demand and thus rationing for those in greatest need.

What makes these arguments so effective is they are true to a point and so it is easy to get away with overstating them. It probably is the case, in the UK, that the recent minimum wage increase for young people is reducing employment. But when it was introduced in 1999 that argument was also made, and then it wasn’t true. If we brought in a substantial tax on all wealth, it probably would cost money, but the argument is used against any increase in existing wealth taxes.

Jeopardy arguments work well against proposed constitutional changes or attempts to clean up politics. These types of policy are often popular in the abstract but not top of voters’ concerns, so the prospect they will cause some other more damaging harm works well.

We saw this in the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum where the “no” campaign hammered away at the financial cost of the change rather than the principle. Compulsory voting is criticised by those who wish to avoid more young and poor people voting as an attack on liberty. As are attempts to limit campaign funding from wealthy donors. The fight over whether we should leave the ECHR will be a major test of jeopardy arguments. Human rights are popular so EHCR membership has to be positioned as denying us the sovereignty we need to deal with crime and immigration. If most voters see that as a greater cost than the benefit of preserving their own rights, the fight can be won.

Again, there is usually some truth to jeopardy arguments but they are nearly always overstated to try and draw attention away from the benefits of the proposed policy. It would have cost money to change the voting system but it was a tiny amount in the scheme of things. Making people vote does reduce liberty, but it’s an extremely minor claim on citizens’ time.

Futility arguments require people to believe that some unfairness or risk simply cannot be ameliorated. As such they are often made about the very biggest issues that seem overwhelming or uncontrollable, like climate change. It was the core argument against lockdowns during the pandemic: there is no point as it just delays the inevitable. In her book “A Problem From Hell” Samantha Power shows how futility arguments were used to block humanitarian interventions during the 1990s in Bosnia and Rwanda.

We can see similar arguments used now against proposals to regulate AI and the tech giants. Or around trying to re-impose social norms against racism in an age without big media gatekeepers. Ultimately, futility arguments are nearly always wrong because there is usually something you can do if you have the will. They are typically made by people for whom inaction is profitable or politically convenient.⁵

Honest arguments

Those on the left or centre also fall back on perversity, jeopardy and futility arguments when faced with a popular policy from the right.

Hirschman notes that progressives are fond of a variant of the jeopardy argument which links together the thing they actually want to protect with some other more popular cause (he calls it “the synergy illusion”). To take a contemporary example, polling is not favourable to universities at the moment, so rather than defend them on their merits many progressives argue that closing them will lead to job losses and economic damage. Another example: international aid is defended on the grounds it will help stop migration or boost our “soft power”, rather than because it is a good thing to do in its own right. (I’ve made these arguments myself).

Perversity arguments often pop up when the right wants to do something progressives see as authoritarian but is popular. School exams will harm learning by focusing all attention on the test; banning drugs will lead to black markets in more potent and dangerous narcotics; putting people in prison will expand criminal networks and increase reoffending.

Futility arguments are less common on the centre-left as progressives tend to want to take action against big systemic risks. But you can find them. When the Conservative government wanted to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, the argument against that worked best in focus groups was that it wouldn’t work so there was no point. The Labour opposition majored on that rather than trying to make a principled case against.⁶

As with the right-wing examples, the issue with all these arguments is not that they are completely wrong, but that they overstate related problems as an attempt to avoid engaging with the primary issue. University closures would lead to substantial job losses, but if you actually believed they should be closed it would be a manageable problem. International aid might help reduce future migration, but in most cases only at the margins. Banning hard drugs does lead to black markets, but typically the overall harm will reduce. Deportations to Rwanda would not have worked as well as the Conservatives claimed but it would have been doable with enough time and money.

People are always going to try and find arguments that land with the public when opposing policies they dislike. And, sometimes, Hirschman’s trio of arguments can have merit. But there is a risk in overusing them, or allowing them to take the full weight of your opposition. They can be very effective in delaying popular policies but risk eroding public confidence in those making them. It can lead to a “crying wolf” effect. Warnings about this most recent rise in the minimum wage were ignored because they had been made so often before. When cuts to aid don’t seem to correlate to any changes in migration, it makes it easier to cut next time. And sometimes they are just outright dishonest.

Identifying these structures of argument allows us to ask more searching questions about the real costs and benefits of policies – and to probe whether commentators and politicians are being wholly honest about their real objections. Often, as with the push against net zero, they reveal the underlying weakness of the position taken by people like Heath. Whereas once climate change could just be denied it now takes extreme rhetorical dextetity to find a reason not to do something about it.

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1
Note that dread phrase “suicidal empathy” again – I recently wrote about how dangerous an idea it is.

2
After leaving office she changed her mind – switching to a conventional ideological opposition against action to stop climate change. Ironically one of the texts that changed her mind was published by a Foundation backed by ExxonMobil, and was part of their campaign to show the effects of global warming were limited.

3
Though there was an increase in energy-related emissions last year, going against the longer-term trend.

4
I’m planning to write something on this at some point but the UK’s basic challenge is that we are dependent on wind for renewables and the costs have not fallen as dramatically as with solar. The places where it makes sense to build windfarms are not near the places with the most people which makes moving electricity around the country complicated. How best to deal with these challenges (and the right mix of nuclear or the viability of technologies like long-term storage) are all debatable, while still thinking that reducing emissions on roughly the current timetable is important.

5
As Hirschman notes futility arguments are popular with communists and the hard left who need people to believe that the incremental benefits of social democracy are futile so as to win support to their more teleological worldview.

6
I was caught out a few months ago making a really bad futility argument a few months ago on the social media ban for under-16s. I said, in a Bluesky post, that lots of teens would find workarounds and still use it. Which is true but that still means there will be a drop in use!