This all seems a little bit social-media brained. You're essentially comparing the worst Democratic candidate in the cycle against the president of the United States. Why? Just because Hong gets talked about on X doesn't mean she's suddenly a leader of the Democratic party or a major influential figure.
Hong is very obviously an outlier in her crazy, and if you picked Democratic state candidates at random they wouldn't be like her. Ridiculous characters like Hong get the most attention on social media because they're the craziest of the crazy and people like to obsess over them. Most DSA candidates haven't been as crazy as Hong (Mamdani being the obvious positive example), and most Democratic candidates aren't part of the DSA. The actual leaders and presidential hopefuls of the near-term Democratic party aren't Hong or El-Sayed or Piker, but Ossoff and Buttigieg and Newsom and AOC. Whatever you might say about those people, none of them seem interested in cancelling Thanksgiving or declaring America a settler-colonialist state. Why is Francesca Hong the person the Democrats "just are now", but Ossoff and Buttigieg aren't?
The actual Democratic party has put on an overall good show running a bunch of fairly moderate candidates across some pretty difficult districts this cycle. Meanwhile, DSA's El-Sayed (a much more skilled and charismatic politician than his primary opponent) barely scraped through his primary in a blueish state, in a cycle when liberal voters are desperate for any kind of change and are trying a lot of different things. DSA is also being electorally bolstered by the Israel issue, the one place where most of the public agrees with them. The more liberals find an actual message on Israel (and for gods sake stop taking the AIPAC money), the less that's going to work.
This is the supposed leftist takeover? I just don't see it yet. Crazy factions of the left have always existed on the fringes, and the Francesca Hongs of the world seem far less powerful and ascendent than they did in 2014. DSA candidates are electoral underperformers so far. Why should we believe they'll suddenly take over now?
Hi! Reporting from Burlington, Vermont here. My lived experience tells me that far-left governance is both very cruel and very very stupid. And a lot of these "small" elections, like governor, are going to have WAY more power over you than the President does.
I am warning you now. Do not elect someone that has open contempt for you, your values, and the way you want to live your life. That contempt will be reflected in every appointment they make and in every bill they sign.
If you would like an example of how stupid and cruel small fry government can be there is no better example than the time our dear Progy mayor and attorney general allowed homeless drug users to squat in low-income senior housing.
My escape from UVM cohort was a huge political awakening.
Inflection points (during my years there)
BLM rally shouts down invited city councilor present to discuss getting rid of the fighter jet fly-overs, specifically because he was a white man invited on stage. An allied politician.
Second was BLM encampment at Battery Park disbanding over gendered infighting amongst the organizers (man centering self over femmes) as well as accusing well-meaning, largely white volunteers of making them "perform labor" (might have even been emotional labor) by unfairly looking to them for leadership, despite the contradiction that presents with the previous anecdote.
Thank you for this April! I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been frustrated with my local Democratic leadership here in Colorado. As a small private landlord, the constant anti-landlord legislation both passed and proposed has affected me and my business directly way more than any federal official has. Local elections matter!
DSA and Far Left Dems--Mamdani so far the outlier--seem dysfunctional at local governance. Pretty much in the same mold as local MAGA types in deep Red communities that can't pass a budget, and spend all their time screaming about their hatred of minorities and Gays.
Curiously, both Groyper and DSA love Vladimir Putin, and parrot Kremlin talking points, like blaming Ukraine for Russia's invasion.
The only serious *advantages* to DSA types are they don't hate black, Latinos, Women, Gays and anybody not belonging to the approved list of Evangelical churches. Young Republicans now love making jokes about putting Jews in ovens; while the Far Left is merely outraged at Israeli genocide (or almost-genocide) in Gaza, and their obsession with creating a Jewish ethnostate.
So pick your poison: Groypers just itching to fire up a race war and exterminate minorities and race-traitors. Or DSA's who mollycoddle junkies.
Correct. Take Rashida Tlaib. She has the *fucking nerve* to come here and call our country a disgusting shithole?! Would this behavior be tolerated in *any other* nation on the planet?
Since she hates America so much, she should get her wish. Revoke her citizenship, deport her and forbid her from ever setting foot on US soil again.
The first mold spore you see on your strawberries isn’t usually the last. Let me tell you as a former Republican who thought it was fine to ignore the Tea Party’s excesses…
With due respect: every comment like this comes from a former Republican who failed to defend their home party. They uniformly did this because they were more concerned with fighting “the left” than recognizing the actual evil inside their own tent, until it was too late. Now your terrible political and moral judgement has made you an orphan. So here you are, a potential guest in *my home party* still telling me you’re not sure whether you should support us or keep fighting the left. What do you want me to do with your advice? Take you seriously? Build some credibility. Be a team player. Prove to us that if we hand you a weapon you’ll point it at the barbarians who made you an exile, and not at our backs.
With all due respect, why is Trump in office'? Because Biden's terrible judgement couldn't tell 'The Groups' to shove it up their ass like he should have.
A much too large stimulus bill, which economists warned would cause inflation. Weak boarder security which caused a flood of asylum shoppers into cities. Extremely unpopular cultural dictates imposed on unwilling populace. To name just a few.
Most of the inflation spike was just covid rebound - the whole world suffered from inflation. Yes, the stimulus probably added 2-3% to inflation, but Biden had some good, non-"woke" reasons for going that route. He saw what happened in 2009-10 and the anemic recovery from the Great recession. There were legit worries that the hangover from COVID would generate years of weakness.
And it worked. We had bad inflation for a year, but it was brought under control WITHOUT a downturn. The recovery was rapid and strong. Yeah, the political consequences didn't turn out great, but there is a strong case to be made that he did the right thing for our economy.
Read Matt Yglesias on groups, to include him quoting Sen Schumer on the subject. Neither individual can be considered MAGA any more than Eisenhower was the communist that the John Birch Society claimed. I suppose that any specific policy cited, including those cited by Noah Smith herein, won’t meet your criteria for “wildly left wing.”
I've read a lot of Matthew Yglesias. I'm asking here for the specific hard-left policies you think belong to "the Groups" rather than 70-year old Union-loving, American-car driving old man Biden. The previous commenter tossed in all of Biden's industrial policy as being "the Groups" idea, and I found that to be silly. Sure, there was climate policy in there. But you can find tons of evidence that Biden wanted these policies, going back decades.
You are right that at the end of the day if 2028 comes down to a Republican Pinochet vs a Democratic Allende, I’ll revert to my old preference. How many of me are there? I dunno. Do Dems wanna find out? 🤷🏻♂️
The current US President is already operating a masked police force that’s killing Americans in the streets, and ensuring that nobody gets prosecuted for it. So we’re well past your first hypothetical. I’m certain there exists some candidate that Democrats could nominate that would be equally evil. Joseph Stalin’s clone reborn from frozen cells? Pol Pot Jr.? Here in the real world what I suspect will happen that they’ll nominate someone totally dull who once said trans people were nice, this commentariat will decide that they’re looking at radical communism, and run out to vote for the right wing killer candidate as quickly as they can.
Anyway, that’s what the left is telling me. They’re telling me I can never trust people like you to exercise moral judgement, and that the only way forward is to build a politics that slices you out like cancer. I don’t want to believe them, but you’re determined to make me.
I think we probably just agree on this! Your friends don’t want my vote! They’d rather lose with their self-righteous conceit intact than pander to my unprincipled swing voting! Oh well.
GOP radicalization has been going on for a lot longer, basically since Goldwater's 1964 run. Moderate Republicans were drummed out of the party (they were called RINOs) starting in perhaps the 1980s.
Dems are better at self-policing. The brickbats were pulled out almost instantly for the progressive crazies. It's true that right wing extremism creates space for left-wing extremism, because the Dem base likes fighting Dems when the GOP comes out against democracy. But the Dems are nowhere near Jan 6. Different galaxy.
Incumbency and the economy certain helped Reagan in 1984: performance was in line with the fundamentals according to Ray Fair's model.
Reagan was smart to pivot away from, "Cut social spending and social security," to "Cut taxes (and stop caring about the budget deficit)." He was also smart to follow up his unsustainable tax cuts with significant tax hikes, when voodoo economics predictably failed.
My point though was that the red meat wing of the GOP grew starting around 1964. Moderates were in charge during the Nixon era. Reagan appointed a mix of reasonable people like James Baker and George Schultz and kooks like James Watt. As time went on, the kook ratio within GOP administrations only ratcheted upwards. I didn't mean to imply that GOP kookiness has been constant since 1964. No: that was merely the point when kooks got their foot in the door.
Correction. In a post discussing evolving kookiness in the GOP since 1964, it was stated that the kook ratio within Republican administrations invariably ratcheted upwards. That characterization was in error: the author meant to refer to the Republican Party as a whole. The proper metric should focus on GOP congressional kookiness from B1-Bob to MGT and not the Executive branch, where kook prevalence to some extent reflects the personality of the President.
I think yes there is a risk of taking the Online / Social Media side of this (and the mass journalism NYT, WP etc which lazily echoes that out of DC and NY and Calif-cities)
BUT at the same time the experience of 2010 onwards also says to me that it is an error to shrug off and silently walk along. If the Noah et al are not saying otherwise de-facto outside of the Political Obsessives circles what becomes the Face of the Ds is the Hongs and Mamdanis (as is evidently starting to happen in image)
There needs to be a significant effort to elevant the Ossoffs e.g. (I am not per se personally a partisan of Ossoff but on a naive level he seems like a very good example - calling myself naive here) and raise visibility and counterweight.
Else one gets branded whether one likes it or not.
You should go watch Erick Erickson (partisan GOP media) yesterday talk about how rural Georgia farmers (GOP stalwarts) have learned they can get Ossoff on the phone and that he will listen and deliver for them.
As a left libertarian type (I’m weird), anytime someone calls Biden a leftist I laugh so hard I risk choking. The USA’s political scale is so stunted and too focused on cultural items.
but those Ossoff articles are SO BORING. why write about candidates attempting to create good policy when you can just jump into twitter and write a bunch of ragebait??
The problem with this comment is that Hong is on track to win the Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin. Doesn’t that say something about Democratic voters? She’s not featured in the discourse merely due to nutpicking on social media.
I don't know the details of WI politics all that well, but this DSA insurgency seems to me like a mix of:
-Democratic voters are very angry at the establishment for losing to Trump. They want their party to be more aggressive and stop losing to terrible Republicans. To try to find the right message, they're trying a lot of different things in different places.
-The established party put up some really bad candidates in a few places, which makes them vulnerable to weird insurgents. Cuomo, Stevens, etc were unusually bad and easy to beat.
-The establishment party is behind public opinion on the Israel issue. Voters are angry about this, which gives DSA types a temporary opening.
None of this is great, but it doesn't imply that people love Hong or are going to choose people like her nation-wide. Again, most Democratic candidates are not like Hong, and the leaders of the party do not sound like her!
You're making fair points, and I think everything you mentioned is part of the story.
However, I disagree when you write that this doesn't suggest that Democratic primary voters might "choose people like her" nationwide, and I don't think this is merely a "temporary opening." Perhaps when DSA candidates were only winning in deep blue areas, it was possible to make that argument, but now we're seeing DSA and DSA-aligned candidates getting nominated in purple areas. That's exactly what one would expect to see if this is the beginning of a nationwide trend. Of course, neither one of us has a crystal ball to predict exactly how much the socialist movement will grow. But in my view, what we're seeing is more consistent with a genuine, growing national movement with serious ideological commitments.
I think one part of the story you're missing is simply that the millennial generation, which has long been relatively friendly to socialism, is now advancing into middle age and gaining more political power. I was born the same year as Francesca Hong, and in certain key ways, she reminds me of many other millennials I've known. We came of age during the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street, and frankly, during a time of overall deep disappointment relating to our career prospects and societal upward mobility (Noah has written a little about that latter point).
If what we're seeing represents the entry of millennial left-wing politics into the mainstream, as I suspect, then the DSA insurgency is not just a temporary fad.
This 100%. TG isn't being canceled. Eat Turkey, watch FB and think about pilgrims if you so choose.
I don't get this abt noah. why do people make so much hay out of this? Why bother uplifting some of this lady's bs? What are her actual good policy ideas and are her bad ones, critique them and make suggestions? Why is that so hard?
Pieces like this help the right and hurt the left.
I think this is just a thing moderate Dems have been conditioned to do for decades. They're afraid of backlash. They're scared that if you move even a little bit left on policy, the normie American will go buck wild, put on a clan hood, and burn down the country.
Call it a modern-day harvest festival; call it Stuff Your Face, Lay Around and Watch The Game and Belch Day. Most modern Americans don’t really connect Thanksgiving with Pilgrims and Squanto and whatever else we were told about in first grade. They see it as a holiday from work where you get to eat lots of rich food and (if you’re lucky) hang out with family and friends.
Maybe the terminally online left has an ideological bone to pick, and maybe the hard right still thinks of it in simplistic “Pilgrims First Holiday” terms. But the vast, vast majority of us go “turkey! Stuffing! Mashed potatoes as gravy transport vehicle! No work!”
I don’t know if Noah writes this stuff to please the conservatives in his audience, or if he’s genuinely stupid. I used to think it was the former, and now I’m starting to tilt towards the latter. You cannot in any seriousness point to a small handful of candidates who have had minimal influence on Democratic policy and say “this is who the Democrats are now” immediately after you point out the counterexample of the GOP which demonstrates what a genuinely captured party looks like.
I disagree with the premise. One party adheres to the rule of law and one does not. If you’re playing “both sides” games you deserve the shithole country you’re going to end up living in.
I'm skeptical of the strength of the DSA trend, but I'm a lot more skeptical of anyone calling Noah stupid.
I'm still trying to figure out if Noah is over-indexing on Twitter and FoxNews headlines, but now that the DSA has gone from winning mayoral races to placing candidates in governor and senator races, I'm starting to worry.
Let me correct. Noah isn’t stupid. Noah is *being* stupid. Getting sucked into a social media rabbit hole and coming to absurd conclusions (repeatedly, on this specific issue) is *being* stupid. Intelligent people do this all the time, trust me, I’m a computer scientist and work with plenty of geniuses who cannot apply logic on issues where they have a strong emotional connection.
(With that said: saying “I mostly agree with you on the merits but am willing to disregard my own analysis because I dislike that you’ve insulted the intelligence of a person I hold in high repute” is also a bad look. Maybe we’ll get to a place where the DSA takes over the Democratic Party someday, but we’re not there now and Noah is arguing that we might be. He’s just wrong.)
I love Noah, but he is definitely over indexed to Twitter. Most Dems and even far left people I know never even heard of Hong before this article. Most Dems and Left leaning people I know also think Piker is a scam artist, grifter and low info idiot who doesn't help discourse. I don't see anyone thinking he is a kingmaker. Let's hope Hong doesn't win the primary... I just think she has better name recognition at this point but I'm hoping Crowley pulls it out or Hong loses in the general election. Far Leftists will only learn by losing at this point imo.
I hope y'all are right, but I'm reminded of Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk and a dozen other nutball right-wingers who seemed too ridiculous to take seriously until they were commanding audiences of millions and visiting the White House to talk policy. I hope Piker is just a low-info grifter. Hell, Donald Trump was a call-in joke on a weekend morning show a few years before he was president. I don't know which imbeciles to take seriously anymore.
Milwaukee Wisconsin resident here. Hong just had good hustle and the rest of the field was poorly know, flat or incompetent and sometimes 2 out of 3. Milwaukee does currently have around 900 DSA members and a couple reps in office, but that's against a population of near a million. They consistently fail to make it to run-offs for mayor or county exec in our nonpartisan elections. Partially because it's majority minority city and they aren't that popular with minority populations.
Hong didn't campaign on DSA themes, but on smiles, energy, passion and being super concerned about helping people improve their lives and being anti-establishment.
Before this week, I saw 2-3 Hong pieces of Hong outreach and exactly zero from the rest of the Democratic Primary field, despite having working on past Dem campaigns.
Hong hasn't gotten much challenging attention until the final week or two after many voters have already voted or developed commitments.
So even if the Dem "establishment" hasn't been incompetent in office, they sure seem so when it comes to candidate recruitment and campaigning.
Well, I'm in Milwaukee Wisconsin, but the certainty of Hong's victory is a little overstated, much like it was for El-Sayed. Probably the winner, but also possibly by a lot less than predicted, or not at all. The Wisconsin field was extremely lame and overpopulated with non-aggressive flat campaigners who didn't want to criticize Hong and have split support and resources until the bitter end. A lot of people don't do policy and just look for someone who seems nice and cares about what they do. Hong got that message around, called the others "the establishment", and didn't get any deeper critique until last week or two.
.... That said... It's a CF at best as the most likely outcomes are either her or the election interfering Trump sycophant in governors office.
I ceased being a Republican during Bush 2, when they spent like Democrats as soon as they got the power. I’m left homeless, disgusted with MAGA and despairing that presumably intelligent people are silent or adhering to the DSA and/or far left Woke, neither of which consider historical realities. Again, thanks.
You also see a lot of unhidden sympathy for Hamas and other terrorist groups (prog-washed as "resistance"). As history has shown, leftists see moderate liberals as their biggest enemy, even more than conservatives. A very bleak Weimar-era vibe here.
If one re-reads Orwell writing about the W. European Left of the 1930s one sees quite a lot of similarities in both the educated class ideological Left of that era and now, including indeed seeing the center - "near enemy" as a better target than well the actual fascists
The DSA or at least some of its candidates seem to be explicitly so. Dalialeza Chevalier seeks to end all interracial marriages including those that already exist. Others seek to end all corporations and to abolish billionaires. The stench of Bolsheviks is pervasive.
I am not sure that is true. I am very anti Hamas, and fully detest what they did to Israel. BUT what Israel has done in response is also reprehensible. BOTH the Israelis and Palestinians deserve hope, and a place to live. Gaza has been the home to Palestinians for more than 3000 years and I do not believe, Israel has the right to subjugate them.
I'm mr. two state solution myself, but that's super untrue my guy. Arab forces invaded and settled contemporary Palestine in the 7th century; the only people who've been there for 3000 years are the Jews.
Not actually, the Babylonian captivity ended 2500 years ago. The inhabitants of Judea were always mixed. Egyptians, Jews, Romans, Phoenicians, etc. Many of these people coming in by conquering the area. Even the Jewish kingdoms themselves, if the Old Testament is to be believed, conquered their near neighbors to seize all of what's now Israel. So they themselves displaced some older inhabitants.
i never suggested the jews are guilt free-- no groups are. but my point stands--of all the groups you mention there,only one has had uninterrupted cultural and demographic presence in Palestine .
You claimed that 3000 years of residence bequeathed rights and something like ownership to land occupied by others. Perhaps you like to make unspecific claims so you can wiggle out of your language when convenient.
The old Bible maps of Kings David and Solomon, show Gaza firmly in Philistine control, as that has always been their homeland through recorded history.
When the Phoenicians are being introduced to try and solve a present day conflict, things have gone awry.
Archeology and Biblical exegesis are not the way forward: 2 peoples have conflicting claims on the same plot of land in the present day. I think the question is how to move forward and I am pretty sure what was going on during the bronze age doesn't matter a whit.
All I am trying to say is Palestinians have some rights and deserve a place to live. What the Israelis are currently doing is little different to the ghettos the Germans forced the Jews into in early WW2. The Israelis of all people should know better.
There’s basically no evidence of any connection between Palestinians and the ancient Philistines. they were a Greek people who invaded the southern coastal plain of Israel thousands of years ago. They practiced a Greek religion and spoke an Indo-European language completely unrelated to the Semitic languages of the Levant. In other words, they had essentially nothing in common with the Muslim Arabs who practice Islam, speak Arabic, and began arriving in Israel in large numbers only after the Battle of Yarmuk in AD 636. By that point, the Philistines had already disappeared from the archaeological record for roughly a thousand years.
i agree with wm that the palestinan claim to the land is only weakened by treading into antiquity; best to just focus on the right now
One of the best and most important things we can do to save and improve democracy is end party primaries.
These elections horrifically magnify the power of the extremes on the left and right, often leaving people in the general election the choice of only between two horrific candidates, like in Wisconsin. Instead, we need a completely open first round election, with anyone from any party on the ballot who qualifies (like by number of signatures), with qualification standards high enough to keep the number of candidates usually between three and seven, and it should be a ranked-choice election, of course, so as to prevent spoilers, or a small plurality from winning. Then, there should perhaps be a general election of the top two.
Yes, with ranked-choice you could say the runoff is unnecessary, but in many people's minds it would add legitimacy. However, you might get the primary problem, where many people wait until the general to vote, and so the passionate extremes dominate the first round too much still. So maybe just one big many candidate open ranked-choice election would be best.
All of the blue and purple states can do this, and greatly decrease the power of the extreme left and right. It can constitutionally be done by passing a law in the legislature, signed by the governor, or by referendum. This may seem too technical, but it is absolutely crucial today. We are in such serious danger from these party primaries.
The huge problem with the California primary is that it's not ranked-choice. This allows several moderate candidates to split the moderate vote and be beaten with pluralities by focused single extremist candidates. Ranked-choice is absolutely essential.
I’d prefer ranked choice, but I’m not convinced it matters for most races.
My experience is that below statewide offices, you’re lucky to get 2 candidates anyway. Even if there are 3 or 4 candidates, odds are they’re all pretty bad.
And why can’t a party exclude a candidate who claims party affiliation? Maybe they have that power but it is unused. Republicans should have just said no to Trump and Democrats should have said no to Hong instead of participating.
It is probably best to let voters decide, just let them decide amongst all the options from any self-identified party in a big, open ranked-choice primary.
It's a world of probabilities. We are far more likely to get out, for something at least in the ballpark of democracy to survive, if we put forth more, or far more, electable candidates. Centrist candidates got us here and aren't going to get us out? How about people using thinking like that and voting for Ralph Nader in 2000 instead of Al Gore. This allowed George W. Bush to win and put Roberts and Alito on the Supreme Court. Those seats would have gone to Democrats instead if not for those Nader voters, and democracy and human decency would be profoundly more safe today. The planet would be profoundly more safe today. Thinking about the difficult reality and probabilities and accepting half a loaf as better than none may not be as satisfying and glamourous, but it makes the world a far better place.
Hong, for example, will very likely just lose in Wisconsin, putting an authoritarian henchman at the top in that pivotal swing state, where he can have great influence in rigging what may be the deciding election in 2028. There's a significant chance that may be what makes the difference in us becoming like Putin's Russia, plus all the other terrible things that Republican will do in that state. A moderate would have very likely, by contrast, won, preventing all of that. But too many people chose to ignore reality and thinking to make the feel good choice.
The problem is prioritizing winning seats over making policy changes. You assume that winning leads to policy. We have not seen that: winning becomes the goal in and of itself and that means that making policy changes becomes antithetical to winning, because it could harm potential donors and voters.
There is no point in winning power if you aren't willing to use it.
This is a good point, certainly in normal times. But first you have to get elected, and that means not campaigning with someone as reprehensible as Pikar, not saying Thanksgiving glorifies genocide. Then, once you are in, you vote for Medicare for All, and even if you lose the legislature as a result, it was worth it, since for something like that try-and-see is the key. Once people have it, it will be very hard to take it away.
But these are not normal times. We are in dire danger of horrific tragedy, democracy being completely murdered, having to live under a Putin-like regime, for ourselves and our posterity. The overwhelming focus has to be on stopping that, not trans-women playing in women's sports. And number one on that is stop the authoritarian Republicans from getting elected and appointing Judge Cannons and henchmen generals and having the control of the government to rig elections.
And as a side note, the best estimate I've seen is that 90 million native Americans died during the colonization and expansion of this country. Thanksgiving isn't *about* celebrating a genocide, but it does celebrate a genocide.
You can look at the actual Thanksgiving event at the time as a celebration of sharing, alliance, and friendship. I don't think that those pilgrims were out to kill and plunder those tribes, like the Conquistadors, etc. Certainly, making us like Putin's Russia by not choosing your battles will not go back in time, and will only make the world today a horrifically worse place.
The issue there is that we've had three decades of 'run to the left in the primary, run to the center in the general' and it becomes almost impossible to identify who will actually keep their promise to support something like Medicare for all. At an extreme, you get folks like Susan Collins, who pretty much destroyed the right to an abortion while insisting the whole time she was in favor of it.
Similarly with stopping authoritarian Republicans. We got Mueller, and Comey, and four different prosecutions dying quietly under democratic administrations. So now people are looking for candidates who are committed hard enough that they can't pivot away from fighting.
You have to get elected first. That is paramount. It's game over if you don't. But, you don't always have to settle for people like Biden and Merrick Garland. There are very electable people who are smarter than that. Shapiro is smart and tough, and very electable. So is Arizona Senator Mark Kelley.
For an apparent socialist, cancelling Thanksgiving is rather Scrooge-like, isn't it?
Especially in America, where there is no federally mandated paid leave, and the average worker only takes 10 to 15 days' leave a year. Let people have their long weekend, for crying out loud!
One hates the people and institutions with actual power and responsibility, the other hates scapegoats and minorities? Seems like a rather relevant difference.
More than any other post I have read online, this post speaks for me, Noah. This is exactly how I see things.
As you note, these people are not liberals. You do not have to watch very closely to realize that their support for majority rule and freedom of speech is tenuous at best.
Some take solace in the fact that they are not nearly a majority within the overall Democratic Party. And it is true that they are mostly winning in bright blue areas. However, their influence and visibility is magnified many times over by the amplification of the media, which is desperate for eyeballs.
Which not only gives them undue power, but also provides assistance to the reactionaries on the right. Remember that Hitler was greatly aided in his rise to power by Marxist opponents.
I see a lot of comments from Glau, but I don't understand them. Liberals don't support the common good? What are you referring to? So, socialists would be better? Like all those successful socialist countries out there, huh?
Medicare for all, gov support of childcare, increase min wage, etc. Basically all the items that were in the Build Back Better bill because of socialists that liberals pulled out and killed to try and keep Manchin happy.
That's why I say 'do not support the common good'. I'd add things like wealth taxes, ending ICE, student loan forgiveness, defending the civil service, stuff like that as well.
After reading the Garry Kasparov article today, the fact that Mandani encouraged people not to vote for Kamala is the only thing I need to know about him. This is someone who benefits from a kakistocratic authoritarian in power, because it makes his kakistocracy the lesser of two.
The willingness on the far right and far left to look the other way on Jew hate while appalling in itself, is a symptom of a very unhealthy national political system. The inability or unwillingness of any adults in the room to speak up has me fearing a DSA Democrat going up against a Carlson approved Republican in ‘28. Amazing to me we are dealing with a scenario like this with the economy doing ok—imagine if we fall into a recession between now and then?
Hi Noah: Perhaps you should listen more to what people are actually saying (rather than the social media chatter). Here is Abdul El Sayed on why is NOT a member of DSA:
"Too much of a scientist, I guess. I’m a capitalist who reads about capitalism. And when you read about capitalism, it is very clear, even to the originators who coined the idea, that the biggest risk to capitalism was not going to be government regulation, as much as the corporatists want you to think it is. It was always going to be monopoly. And we know that hyper-capitalism tends toward monopoly. We also understand that that happens in part because, when a corporation gets big enough, it has enough power to start “rent seeking,” which is a fancy way of saying influencing government action to protect its own interests. And that’s the place we are right now in capitalism. I think small business is amazing. I think it’s a really efficient way to move capital into the areas where it can be really efficient to create a lot of jobs. I’m just not a socialist. And so I want capitalism to work the way it was supposed to work, not the way that the corporations tell us it’s supposed to work" (quoted by Matt Stoller).
Does this not sound like straight out of Adam Smith?
The "our communities" language was more painful than the anti-Thanksgiving stuff because that was half of my Twitter feed back in the day. Some people would use the day specifically to promote indigenous creators, digital and otherwise.
Quick search engining finds that Wisconsin has 11 tribal entities amounting to 1-2% of the population. I also learned that the Oneida now reside in Wisconsin after having been kicked out of the original Hodenosaunee Confederacy land.
Let's see, The GOP is unacceptable bc it has been thoroughly taken over by its (previous) extreme 'wing', see young groypers. Meanwhile, Dems are in danger of becoming unacceptable bc they are fielding some candidates from their extreme wing, see young leftists. ??
I think that is called generational change.
Ofc, its more than that. Noah is citing young DSA types (and groypers) that seem to be very _tone deaf_. That is, they seem either waaaay too extreme (i.e. wanting to literally cancel Thanksgiving when they get in office... good luck) OR too willing to say the quiet part out loud (That many young people currently celebrate 'Friendsgiving' on that day).
To someone who is a little older, this just looks like really bad politics.
And it IS bad politics... until it ISN'T.
The oldest Millenials are 45 now, but we have only had Boomer presidents. That is what the gerontocracy is about. How does the torch get passed from the Boomers (now 65+) to the Millenials (now 45 and under). Assuming ofc that there will never be a GenX president (sorry Gavin), being too cringey to both the Boomers and MIllennials. :)
The first successful Millennial president (it will happen eventually) is going to say things that make Boomers recoil and cringe and clutch their pearls. That is inevitable, and will be a feature of them talking to and activating their base (hopefully of well-informed and well meaning young people, not groypers).
Don't you remember when Boomer Bill Clinton played the sax on _Arsenio Hall_ and the greatest generation folks (who had locked the POTUS up until then) lost their collective minds!?!
I guess we can count on Noah to be there and call that first Milllennial president too woke?
I'm forty and I am very much the opposite of a pearl clutcher. My issue with DSA/Groypers has nothing to do with finding them offensive. The problem is they are mind numbingly stupid and let petty resentments of various kinds fuel them into conspiracy based zero-sum brainrot and embracing fantasy econ and ideological policing that will make everyone poorer and less free. I'll take something orbiting the truth stated in a cringe way by some boomer over flagrant fantasy from demagogues who "get it" any day of the week.
I don't care that they say stupid things about Thanksgiving or post memes about making the military more macho. I care that they want to enact rent control and gut the tech industry and consider me some kind of race traitor because I'm married to a Jewish man.
Well said! I think we are MUCH more likely to see these sort of 'goofy' econ ideas implemented at city levels (if at all), than at the state level. And I am certain that a Dem US congress is not going to enact any such goofiness.
Let the cities be a 'laboratory of democracy'.
And fortunately, as Noah has pointed out, many of these goofiest ideas (like UBI) have fared very poorly in small studies.
On the flip side, the 'establishment' of now very OLD boomer dems does have a bunch of blindspots. I recall Pelosi lecturing a bunch of Sunrise Rebellion kids about the limits of solar power! That hasn't aged well. :o
Yes, but I live in a city - albeit a moderate blue city in Texas. I want it to stay that way and not for "moderate" to end up meaning San Francisco circa 2020 because the whole party gets dragged so far to the left.
Also, the truly brainrotted don't update the way that normal people do when the policy doesn't work as intended. They just blame the plan not working on more conspiracies.
The concern is how much of the population ends up brainrotted and how strong the brainrot brigade's stranglehold on power can potentially become.
*Edit* I actually saw a bit of this in action during the first anti Trump midterm back in the day when people here (Harris County/Houston) symbolically threw out our boring, normie Republican County Judge Ed Emmett and replaced him with unqualified idealogue Lina Hidalgo. She has since collapsed and slinked away but not before making local politics much dumber, more performative, and more partisan.
Quick question from the european side: I understand that a two party system is the direct result of how the whole electoral system works in the US, but I wonder if the GOP has fallen so low and the Democrats are gradually shifting to the very maximalist left, wouldn't there be space for a third centrist party that could hope to capatilize on the vast majority of moderates fed up or their mainstream parties? The vast majority of voters now identify themselves as indipendent, so I guess there could be a potential massive electoral pool from where to draw votes.
You need to ask the question to Political Scientist who has understanding of the operational mechanics of the different levels of the US elections (of which what Europeans frequently badly misunderstand is the genuine real profound operational Federalism that mid-late 20th century trends have not upended and the post-1970s 'reforms' that basically removed from the two major parties a genuine legal ability to control own brand [i.e. who gets to use their name] operationally).
As a vulgar financial economist, I myself don't have that expertise but I have read enough now to understand that too few people have paid attention to the actual electoral mechanics and guts of the system as it has emerged since Nixon era, and operate even for American pundits with a false concept of underlying mechanics of the system.
In any case all writing by systems oriented analyses I have read have been clear that it's functionally given the way the US and notably its extreme federalism not realistic to dream of European style New Third Party emergence - not per se because of R or D blocking but the systematic mess and complexity (plus structural factors of specifics on how on state by state basis - and again Europeans even with Federal govs badly misunderstand just how really under-the-hood sovereign the US states remain...)
Ok, still a bit confuse. I always thought that the two party system was mostly the direct consequence of the first past the post system that tends to favor big parties (similar to what happens to the UK). This, in conjunction with what Marian pointed before (you need big donors to have even the slight hope of being elected) led to the current effectually two party system.
But my question is: can it be changed? What does the average american think about it? Would a system more proportional and more representative of the political spectrum being more appetibile to the average citizen compared to now?
UK has a party system that is more or less European, the US has something else w/o actual party as party central coherence (downstream in part of no genuine national).
The US has had two party dominance since essentially the early 19th century, there is nothing here that itself ties back to Big Donors as root causal, the systematic issues are much deeper than the current fad of looking at campaing money (certainly money is not nothing but everone over indexes)
What the Average AMerican thinks is not really the point - the average American doesn't really understand our own system mechanics - structrual ones rooted in the deeply federal structure - there is no central government running of elections, this is in gross, a fiction, a mirage.
Changing this is radicaly different than what you as European imagine from a centralised system - it's a lot more like thinking about how to get agreement on EU votes etc changes with every member state Government having veto power on most reform issues.
I get your point, but I still think that the major issue would be the first past the post mechanism. A new party that would like to spend a substantial amount of money, time and effort to build a base in each state will run in a substantial risk of getting zero seats in the vast majority of districts.
In a way we could compare elections for the european parliament to the US ones. Each country has its own electoral system independent from the central one for its own government, but each national party also run for seats in the European Parliament, affiliating to one of the european political families. We elect representives on a proportional basis weighted on the population of the state. A similar system in the US would encourage to have several parties that could form coalitions later on, reducing the risk of fringes taking control of the parties
One of the problems with this is you need to be able to build the institutional capacity to actually win the election outright and moderate normies are not really motivated to commit themselves to a project like that the way idealogues are. The overhead on party formation in Europe is just less when you only need to get 10% of the vote or something to get some seats in Parliament and potentially become part of the coalition where you can wield influence.
Americans also have coalitions - we just build them *before* the election and they get consolidated into a party which is big enough to win.
The incentives are much more to try to wield influence and take over an existing party's superstructure than to make one from scratch. Anyone trying this is fighting a very uphill battle. The question most people face here is not how to find a party which matches their preferences but what faction in what party to align themselves with.
There are some structural changes you could make which would short circuit this in such a way that you end up favoring moderate factions within the parties, but the actual creation of a separate moderate party is extremely unlikely.
The financial threshold is formidable. Current big donors, who usually want something in return for their donations, assess the returns on existing parties as more reliable.
In a proportional system, where a 6 per cent party can still end up being in a coalition government, the financial machine is more willing to take the risk of supporting new upstarts, especially if the public is visibly tired of the old guard.
I agree it is not the same thing, but they are related. I saw genesis of a few small Czech parties close, and having a reasonable budget definitely helps with buildup of a structure. There are people with the necessary know-how and people who will volunteer, but those sets rarely overlap.
I think the problem here would be less financial (quite a bit of money is available for more stability and less whipsawing between extremes), if this third party were perceived as viable.
But the rules throughout the system are designed to minimize the chances of a third party. (Nowhere more dramatically than in presidential elections.) Getting the elected representatives of the two parties to reform the system so as to give a third party a fair chance would be difficult to say the least. But I am thinking that this is what will be necessary if we are attached to having a liberal republic.
Another movement that might attract independents who think that the democrats are too left and the MAGA gop too nuts would be what Tucker Carlson seems to be doing. He hates that Trump has violated his promise to stay out of war and be America First . We will see how that goes 🤔
I would hardly call Carlson centrist, though. There are several centrists in the democratic party, but it usually gets overwhelmed by the most extreme fringes on the long run. It is quite physiological and it happens here in Europe too on the long run. I think a separation is unavoidable at a certain point.
Sen. Chuck Schumer has single handed destroyed US Senate Democratic choices for the past 12 years. We can only thank God for Roy Cooper to return our Senate colors to purple.
The moderates are there, in much greater numbers than the far-right and far-left, and will hand victory to any party that decides to be normal. See the continued popularity of Carney in Canada and the relative sanity of the Conservative party there. The leftist and rightist nutjobs have their own unpopular parties to gather in.
But the US system won't let that situation happen. I'm not optimistic about the country's future.
This all seems a little bit social-media brained. You're essentially comparing the worst Democratic candidate in the cycle against the president of the United States. Why? Just because Hong gets talked about on X doesn't mean she's suddenly a leader of the Democratic party or a major influential figure.
Hong is very obviously an outlier in her crazy, and if you picked Democratic state candidates at random they wouldn't be like her. Ridiculous characters like Hong get the most attention on social media because they're the craziest of the crazy and people like to obsess over them. Most DSA candidates haven't been as crazy as Hong (Mamdani being the obvious positive example), and most Democratic candidates aren't part of the DSA. The actual leaders and presidential hopefuls of the near-term Democratic party aren't Hong or El-Sayed or Piker, but Ossoff and Buttigieg and Newsom and AOC. Whatever you might say about those people, none of them seem interested in cancelling Thanksgiving or declaring America a settler-colonialist state. Why is Francesca Hong the person the Democrats "just are now", but Ossoff and Buttigieg aren't?
The actual Democratic party has put on an overall good show running a bunch of fairly moderate candidates across some pretty difficult districts this cycle. Meanwhile, DSA's El-Sayed (a much more skilled and charismatic politician than his primary opponent) barely scraped through his primary in a blueish state, in a cycle when liberal voters are desperate for any kind of change and are trying a lot of different things. DSA is also being electorally bolstered by the Israel issue, the one place where most of the public agrees with them. The more liberals find an actual message on Israel (and for gods sake stop taking the AIPAC money), the less that's going to work.
This is the supposed leftist takeover? I just don't see it yet. Crazy factions of the left have always existed on the fringes, and the Francesca Hongs of the world seem far less powerful and ascendent than they did in 2014. DSA candidates are electoral underperformers so far. Why should we believe they'll suddenly take over now?
Hi! Reporting from Burlington, Vermont here. My lived experience tells me that far-left governance is both very cruel and very very stupid. And a lot of these "small" elections, like governor, are going to have WAY more power over you than the President does.
I am warning you now. Do not elect someone that has open contempt for you, your values, and the way you want to live your life. That contempt will be reflected in every appointment they make and in every bill they sign.
If you would like an example of how stupid and cruel small fry government can be there is no better example than the time our dear Progy mayor and attorney general allowed homeless drug users to squat in low-income senior housing.
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/the-fight-for-decker-towers-drug-users-and-homeless-people-have-overrun-a-low-income-high-rise-residents-are-gearing-up-to-evict-them-40200776/
My escape from UVM cohort was a huge political awakening.
Inflection points (during my years there)
BLM rally shouts down invited city councilor present to discuss getting rid of the fighter jet fly-overs, specifically because he was a white man invited on stage. An allied politician.
Second was BLM encampment at Battery Park disbanding over gendered infighting amongst the organizers (man centering self over femmes) as well as accusing well-meaning, largely white volunteers of making them "perform labor" (might have even been emotional labor) by unfairly looking to them for leadership, despite the contradiction that presents with the previous anecdote.
Thank you for this April! I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been frustrated with my local Democratic leadership here in Colorado. As a small private landlord, the constant anti-landlord legislation both passed and proposed has affected me and my business directly way more than any federal official has. Local elections matter!
DSA and Far Left Dems--Mamdani so far the outlier--seem dysfunctional at local governance. Pretty much in the same mold as local MAGA types in deep Red communities that can't pass a budget, and spend all their time screaming about their hatred of minorities and Gays.
Curiously, both Groyper and DSA love Vladimir Putin, and parrot Kremlin talking points, like blaming Ukraine for Russia's invasion.
The only serious *advantages* to DSA types are they don't hate black, Latinos, Women, Gays and anybody not belonging to the approved list of Evangelical churches. Young Republicans now love making jokes about putting Jews in ovens; while the Far Left is merely outraged at Israeli genocide (or almost-genocide) in Gaza, and their obsession with creating a Jewish ethnostate.
So pick your poison: Groypers just itching to fire up a race war and exterminate minorities and race-traitors. Or DSA's who mollycoddle junkies.
Correct. Take Rashida Tlaib. She has the *fucking nerve* to come here and call our country a disgusting shithole?! Would this behavior be tolerated in *any other* nation on the planet?
Since she hates America so much, she should get her wish. Revoke her citizenship, deport her and forbid her from ever setting foot on US soil again.
Someone who is willing to demonstrate open contempt, IE calling Hong "crazy"?
Yeah, that's why people who support her aren't voting for centrists. They see the contempt they are held in.
The first mold spore you see on your strawberries isn’t usually the last. Let me tell you as a former Republican who thought it was fine to ignore the Tea Party’s excesses…
With due respect: every comment like this comes from a former Republican who failed to defend their home party. They uniformly did this because they were more concerned with fighting “the left” than recognizing the actual evil inside their own tent, until it was too late. Now your terrible political and moral judgement has made you an orphan. So here you are, a potential guest in *my home party* still telling me you’re not sure whether you should support us or keep fighting the left. What do you want me to do with your advice? Take you seriously? Build some credibility. Be a team player. Prove to us that if we hand you a weapon you’ll point it at the barbarians who made you an exile, and not at our backs.
With all due respect, why is Trump in office'? Because Biden's terrible judgement couldn't tell 'The Groups' to shove it up their ass like he should have.
What precisely did these “Groups” do that was so wildly left-wing and communistic?
A much too large stimulus bill, which economists warned would cause inflation. Weak boarder security which caused a flood of asylum shoppers into cities. Extremely unpopular cultural dictates imposed on unwilling populace. To name just a few.
Most of the inflation spike was just covid rebound - the whole world suffered from inflation. Yes, the stimulus probably added 2-3% to inflation, but Biden had some good, non-"woke" reasons for going that route. He saw what happened in 2009-10 and the anemic recovery from the Great recession. There were legit worries that the hangover from COVID would generate years of weakness.
And it worked. We had bad inflation for a year, but it was brought under control WITHOUT a downturn. The recovery was rapid and strong. Yeah, the political consequences didn't turn out great, but there is a strong case to be made that he did the right thing for our economy.
So “the Groups” caused Biden to invest in stimulating industrial policy? That’s just dumb.
Read Matt Yglesias on groups, to include him quoting Sen Schumer on the subject. Neither individual can be considered MAGA any more than Eisenhower was the communist that the John Birch Society claimed. I suppose that any specific policy cited, including those cited by Noah Smith herein, won’t meet your criteria for “wildly left wing.”
I've read a lot of Matthew Yglesias. I'm asking here for the specific hard-left policies you think belong to "the Groups" rather than 70-year old Union-loving, American-car driving old man Biden. The previous commenter tossed in all of Biden's industrial policy as being "the Groups" idea, and I found that to be silly. Sure, there was climate policy in there. But you can find tons of evidence that Biden wanted these policies, going back decades.
Ok clown 🙄
You are right that at the end of the day if 2028 comes down to a Republican Pinochet vs a Democratic Allende, I’ll revert to my old preference. How many of me are there? I dunno. Do Dems wanna find out? 🤷🏻♂️
The current US President is already operating a masked police force that’s killing Americans in the streets, and ensuring that nobody gets prosecuted for it. So we’re well past your first hypothetical. I’m certain there exists some candidate that Democrats could nominate that would be equally evil. Joseph Stalin’s clone reborn from frozen cells? Pol Pot Jr.? Here in the real world what I suspect will happen that they’ll nominate someone totally dull who once said trans people were nice, this commentariat will decide that they’re looking at radical communism, and run out to vote for the right wing killer candidate as quickly as they can.
Anyway, that’s what the left is telling me. They’re telling me I can never trust people like you to exercise moral judgement, and that the only way forward is to build a politics that slices you out like cancer. I don’t want to believe them, but you’re determined to make me.
I think we probably just agree on this! Your friends don’t want my vote! They’d rather lose with their self-righteous conceit intact than pander to my unprincipled swing voting! Oh well.
If your vote was significant, the GOP wouldn’t have tossed it out like old milk.
GOP radicalization has been going on for a lot longer, basically since Goldwater's 1964 run. Moderate Republicans were drummed out of the party (they were called RINOs) starting in perhaps the 1980s.
Dems are better at self-policing. The brickbats were pulled out almost instantly for the progressive crazies. It's true that right wing extremism creates space for left-wing extremism, because the Dem base likes fighting Dems when the GOP comes out against democracy. But the Dems are nowhere near Jan 6. Different galaxy.
Sure which is why Regan won 49 states in 84, the party had gone so radical...
Incumbency and the economy certain helped Reagan in 1984: performance was in line with the fundamentals according to Ray Fair's model.
Reagan was smart to pivot away from, "Cut social spending and social security," to "Cut taxes (and stop caring about the budget deficit)." He was also smart to follow up his unsustainable tax cuts with significant tax hikes, when voodoo economics predictably failed.
My point though was that the red meat wing of the GOP grew starting around 1964. Moderates were in charge during the Nixon era. Reagan appointed a mix of reasonable people like James Baker and George Schultz and kooks like James Watt. As time went on, the kook ratio within GOP administrations only ratcheted upwards. I didn't mean to imply that GOP kookiness has been constant since 1964. No: that was merely the point when kooks got their foot in the door.
Correction. In a post discussing evolving kookiness in the GOP since 1964, it was stated that the kook ratio within Republican administrations invariably ratcheted upwards. That characterization was in error: the author meant to refer to the Republican Party as a whole. The proper metric should focus on GOP congressional kookiness from B1-Bob to MGT and not the Executive branch, where kook prevalence to some extent reflects the personality of the President.
FGM regrets the error.
Indeed (from essentially identical historical...)
I think yes there is a risk of taking the Online / Social Media side of this (and the mass journalism NYT, WP etc which lazily echoes that out of DC and NY and Calif-cities)
BUT at the same time the experience of 2010 onwards also says to me that it is an error to shrug off and silently walk along. If the Noah et al are not saying otherwise de-facto outside of the Political Obsessives circles what becomes the Face of the Ds is the Hongs and Mamdanis (as is evidently starting to happen in image)
There needs to be a significant effort to elevant the Ossoffs e.g. (I am not per se personally a partisan of Ossoff but on a naive level he seems like a very good example - calling myself naive here) and raise visibility and counterweight.
Else one gets branded whether one likes it or not.
Why is Ossoff any different than Biden? Why should I think he won't just be another moderate face to fool me into voting in a leftist administration?
You should go watch Erick Erickson (partisan GOP media) yesterday talk about how rural Georgia farmers (GOP stalwarts) have learned they can get Ossoff on the phone and that he will listen and deliver for them.
“Biden is a leftist” takes make me laugh and laugh.
As a left libertarian type (I’m weird), anytime someone calls Biden a leftist I laugh so hard I risk choking. The USA’s political scale is so stunted and too focused on cultural items.
Why, oh many potential reasons but if one already has A View, well not much to be done on that point at this stage.
(as an aside, I am no Democrat, never have been so not myself a party partisan at all, but I am firmly anti Trumpism)
Funny, this is the mirror of the question progressives have been asking themselves since Clinton.
but those Ossoff articles are SO BORING. why write about candidates attempting to create good policy when you can just jump into twitter and write a bunch of ragebait??
The problem with this comment is that Hong is on track to win the Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin. Doesn’t that say something about Democratic voters? She’s not featured in the discourse merely due to nutpicking on social media.
I don't know the details of WI politics all that well, but this DSA insurgency seems to me like a mix of:
-Democratic voters are very angry at the establishment for losing to Trump. They want their party to be more aggressive and stop losing to terrible Republicans. To try to find the right message, they're trying a lot of different things in different places.
-The established party put up some really bad candidates in a few places, which makes them vulnerable to weird insurgents. Cuomo, Stevens, etc were unusually bad and easy to beat.
-The establishment party is behind public opinion on the Israel issue. Voters are angry about this, which gives DSA types a temporary opening.
None of this is great, but it doesn't imply that people love Hong or are going to choose people like her nation-wide. Again, most Democratic candidates are not like Hong, and the leaders of the party do not sound like her!
You're making fair points, and I think everything you mentioned is part of the story.
However, I disagree when you write that this doesn't suggest that Democratic primary voters might "choose people like her" nationwide, and I don't think this is merely a "temporary opening." Perhaps when DSA candidates were only winning in deep blue areas, it was possible to make that argument, but now we're seeing DSA and DSA-aligned candidates getting nominated in purple areas. That's exactly what one would expect to see if this is the beginning of a nationwide trend. Of course, neither one of us has a crystal ball to predict exactly how much the socialist movement will grow. But in my view, what we're seeing is more consistent with a genuine, growing national movement with serious ideological commitments.
I think one part of the story you're missing is simply that the millennial generation, which has long been relatively friendly to socialism, is now advancing into middle age and gaining more political power. I was born the same year as Francesca Hong, and in certain key ways, she reminds me of many other millennials I've known. We came of age during the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street, and frankly, during a time of overall deep disappointment relating to our career prospects and societal upward mobility (Noah has written a little about that latter point).
If what we're seeing represents the entry of millennial left-wing politics into the mainstream, as I suspect, then the DSA insurgency is not just a temporary fad.
Well said. Also, there's a 0% chance Thanksgiving will actually be canceled anywhere.
This 100%. TG isn't being canceled. Eat Turkey, watch FB and think about pilgrims if you so choose.
I don't get this abt noah. why do people make so much hay out of this? Why bother uplifting some of this lady's bs? What are her actual good policy ideas and are her bad ones, critique them and make suggestions? Why is that so hard?
Pieces like this help the right and hurt the left.
I think this is just a thing moderate Dems have been conditioned to do for decades. They're afraid of backlash. They're scared that if you move even a little bit left on policy, the normie American will go buck wild, put on a clan hood, and burn down the country.
Worst case scenario we rename it to "Indigenous People's Day 2" but carry on celebrating it exactly the same /s
Call it a modern-day harvest festival; call it Stuff Your Face, Lay Around and Watch The Game and Belch Day. Most modern Americans don’t really connect Thanksgiving with Pilgrims and Squanto and whatever else we were told about in first grade. They see it as a holiday from work where you get to eat lots of rich food and (if you’re lucky) hang out with family and friends.
Maybe the terminally online left has an ideological bone to pick, and maybe the hard right still thinks of it in simplistic “Pilgrims First Holiday” terms. But the vast, vast majority of us go “turkey! Stuffing! Mashed potatoes as gravy transport vehicle! No work!”
I don’t know if Noah writes this stuff to please the conservatives in his audience, or if he’s genuinely stupid. I used to think it was the former, and now I’m starting to tilt towards the latter. You cannot in any seriousness point to a small handful of candidates who have had minimal influence on Democratic policy and say “this is who the Democrats are now” immediately after you point out the counterexample of the GOP which demonstrates what a genuinely captured party looks like.
The point is that both parties are going down the toilet, and we shouldn’t have to debate which one is further along.
I disagree with the premise. One party adheres to the rule of law and one does not. If you’re playing “both sides” games you deserve the shithole country you’re going to end up living in.
Neither side should be clear from my comment.
I'm skeptical of the strength of the DSA trend, but I'm a lot more skeptical of anyone calling Noah stupid.
I'm still trying to figure out if Noah is over-indexing on Twitter and FoxNews headlines, but now that the DSA has gone from winning mayoral races to placing candidates in governor and senator races, I'm starting to worry.
Let me correct. Noah isn’t stupid. Noah is *being* stupid. Getting sucked into a social media rabbit hole and coming to absurd conclusions (repeatedly, on this specific issue) is *being* stupid. Intelligent people do this all the time, trust me, I’m a computer scientist and work with plenty of geniuses who cannot apply logic on issues where they have a strong emotional connection.
(With that said: saying “I mostly agree with you on the merits but am willing to disregard my own analysis because I dislike that you’ve insulted the intelligence of a person I hold in high repute” is also a bad look. Maybe we’ll get to a place where the DSA takes over the Democratic Party someday, but we’re not there now and Noah is arguing that we might be. He’s just wrong.)
I love Noah, but he is definitely over indexed to Twitter. Most Dems and even far left people I know never even heard of Hong before this article. Most Dems and Left leaning people I know also think Piker is a scam artist, grifter and low info idiot who doesn't help discourse. I don't see anyone thinking he is a kingmaker. Let's hope Hong doesn't win the primary... I just think she has better name recognition at this point but I'm hoping Crowley pulls it out or Hong loses in the general election. Far Leftists will only learn by losing at this point imo.
I hope y'all are right, but I'm reminded of Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk and a dozen other nutball right-wingers who seemed too ridiculous to take seriously until they were commanding audiences of millions and visiting the White House to talk policy. I hope Piker is just a low-info grifter. Hell, Donald Trump was a call-in joke on a weekend morning show a few years before he was president. I don't know which imbeciles to take seriously anymore.
All great points, and Wisconsin is an outlier because many of the moderate candidates had election killing scandals 🤔😡
Milwaukee Wisconsin resident here. Hong just had good hustle and the rest of the field was poorly know, flat or incompetent and sometimes 2 out of 3. Milwaukee does currently have around 900 DSA members and a couple reps in office, but that's against a population of near a million. They consistently fail to make it to run-offs for mayor or county exec in our nonpartisan elections. Partially because it's majority minority city and they aren't that popular with minority populations.
Hong didn't campaign on DSA themes, but on smiles, energy, passion and being super concerned about helping people improve their lives and being anti-establishment.
Before this week, I saw 2-3 Hong pieces of Hong outreach and exactly zero from the rest of the Democratic Primary field, despite having working on past Dem campaigns.
Hong hasn't gotten much challenging attention until the final week or two after many voters have already voted or developed commitments.
So even if the Dem "establishment" hasn't been incompetent in office, they sure seem so when it comes to candidate recruitment and campaigning.
She also had a lot of Super PAC support from conservatives though she was probably unaware of it. Happily she lost.
Well, I'm in Milwaukee Wisconsin, but the certainty of Hong's victory is a little overstated, much like it was for El-Sayed. Probably the winner, but also possibly by a lot less than predicted, or not at all. The Wisconsin field was extremely lame and overpopulated with non-aggressive flat campaigners who didn't want to criticize Hong and have split support and resources until the bitter end. A lot of people don't do policy and just look for someone who seems nice and cares about what they do. Hong got that message around, called the others "the establishment", and didn't get any deeper critique until last week or two.
.... That said... It's a CF at best as the most likely outcomes are either her or the election interfering Trump sycophant in governors office.
Update: Hong now appears to have lost her primary entirely.
I ceased being a Republican during Bush 2, when they spent like Democrats as soon as they got the power. I’m left homeless, disgusted with MAGA and despairing that presumably intelligent people are silent or adhering to the DSA and/or far left Woke, neither of which consider historical realities. Again, thanks.
You also see a lot of unhidden sympathy for Hamas and other terrorist groups (prog-washed as "resistance"). As history has shown, leftists see moderate liberals as their biggest enemy, even more than conservatives. A very bleak Weimar-era vibe here.
If one re-reads Orwell writing about the W. European Left of the 1930s one sees quite a lot of similarities in both the educated class ideological Left of that era and now, including indeed seeing the center - "near enemy" as a better target than well the actual fascists
Why would the DSA want to condemn decapitating babies? They may need to do that to their own enemies some day.
As opposed to refusing to condemn sniping babies, as those who defend Israel's behavior do?
No Israelis sniped babies you pathological liar.
We are seeing liberals refuse to support leftists even in the face of facism. In this column even. The weimar vibes are coming from inside the house.
fighting right-wing totalitarianism (fascism) doesn't mean supporting left-wing totalitarianism
Obviously. The issue is that you seem to regard left-wing as totalitarian by definition.
Because you DO have to support the left wing in order to fight right wing totalitarianism.
The DSA or at least some of its candidates seem to be explicitly so. Dalialeza Chevalier seeks to end all interracial marriages including those that already exist. Others seek to end all corporations and to abolish billionaires. The stench of Bolsheviks is pervasive.
I am not sure that is true. I am very anti Hamas, and fully detest what they did to Israel. BUT what Israel has done in response is also reprehensible. BOTH the Israelis and Palestinians deserve hope, and a place to live. Gaza has been the home to Palestinians for more than 3000 years and I do not believe, Israel has the right to subjugate them.
I'm mr. two state solution myself, but that's super untrue my guy. Arab forces invaded and settled contemporary Palestine in the 7th century; the only people who've been there for 3000 years are the Jews.
Not actually, the Babylonian captivity ended 2500 years ago. The inhabitants of Judea were always mixed. Egyptians, Jews, Romans, Phoenicians, etc. Many of these people coming in by conquering the area. Even the Jewish kingdoms themselves, if the Old Testament is to be believed, conquered their near neighbors to seize all of what's now Israel. So they themselves displaced some older inhabitants.
i never suggested the jews are guilt free-- no groups are. but my point stands--of all the groups you mention there,only one has had uninterrupted cultural and demographic presence in Palestine .
You claimed that 3000 years of residence bequeathed rights and something like ownership to land occupied by others. Perhaps you like to make unspecific claims so you can wiggle out of your language when convenient.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/17sn9as/map_of_the_empire_of_david_and_solomon_1000925_bc/
The old Bible maps of Kings David and Solomon, show Gaza firmly in Philistine control, as that has always been their homeland through recorded history.
When the Phoenicians are being introduced to try and solve a present day conflict, things have gone awry.
Archeology and Biblical exegesis are not the way forward: 2 peoples have conflicting claims on the same plot of land in the present day. I think the question is how to move forward and I am pretty sure what was going on during the bronze age doesn't matter a whit.
All I am trying to say is Palestinians have some rights and deserve a place to live. What the Israelis are currently doing is little different to the ghettos the Germans forced the Jews into in early WW2. The Israelis of all people should know better.
I just think getting into bronze age boxing matches is a losing argument is all. There is better ground to argue on.
There’s basically no evidence of any connection between Palestinians and the ancient Philistines. they were a Greek people who invaded the southern coastal plain of Israel thousands of years ago. They practiced a Greek religion and spoke an Indo-European language completely unrelated to the Semitic languages of the Levant. In other words, they had essentially nothing in common with the Muslim Arabs who practice Islam, speak Arabic, and began arriving in Israel in large numbers only after the Battle of Yarmuk in AD 636. By that point, the Philistines had already disappeared from the archaeological record for roughly a thousand years.
i agree with wm that the palestinan claim to the land is only weakened by treading into antiquity; best to just focus on the right now
But your entire premise of longevity and duration is misbegotten.
One of the best and most important things we can do to save and improve democracy is end party primaries.
These elections horrifically magnify the power of the extremes on the left and right, often leaving people in the general election the choice of only between two horrific candidates, like in Wisconsin. Instead, we need a completely open first round election, with anyone from any party on the ballot who qualifies (like by number of signatures), with qualification standards high enough to keep the number of candidates usually between three and seven, and it should be a ranked-choice election, of course, so as to prevent spoilers, or a small plurality from winning. Then, there should perhaps be a general election of the top two.
Yes, with ranked-choice you could say the runoff is unnecessary, but in many people's minds it would add legitimacy. However, you might get the primary problem, where many people wait until the general to vote, and so the passionate extremes dominate the first round too much still. So maybe just one big many candidate open ranked-choice election would be best.
All of the blue and purple states can do this, and greatly decrease the power of the extreme left and right. It can constitutionally be done by passing a law in the legislature, signed by the governor, or by referendum. This may seem too technical, but it is absolutely crucial today. We are in such serious danger from these party primaries.
I live in a state with open primaries (CA, where the top 2 vote getters are balloted regardless of party affiliation).
Trust me, it’s not a panacea that results in better candidates or good governance…
The huge problem with the California primary is that it's not ranked-choice. This allows several moderate candidates to split the moderate vote and be beaten with pluralities by focused single extremist candidates. Ranked-choice is absolutely essential.
I’d prefer ranked choice, but I’m not convinced it matters for most races.
My experience is that below statewide offices, you’re lucky to get 2 candidates anyway. Even if there are 3 or 4 candidates, odds are they’re all pretty bad.
And why can’t a party exclude a candidate who claims party affiliation? Maybe they have that power but it is unused. Republicans should have just said no to Trump and Democrats should have said no to Hong instead of participating.
It is probably best to let voters decide, just let them decide amongst all the options from any self-identified party in a big, open ranked-choice primary.
I honestly think that needs to be done especially when fringe parties like the DSA are getting more influence!
Centrist candidates got us here. Centrist candidates aren't going to get us out.
It's a world of probabilities. We are far more likely to get out, for something at least in the ballpark of democracy to survive, if we put forth more, or far more, electable candidates. Centrist candidates got us here and aren't going to get us out? How about people using thinking like that and voting for Ralph Nader in 2000 instead of Al Gore. This allowed George W. Bush to win and put Roberts and Alito on the Supreme Court. Those seats would have gone to Democrats instead if not for those Nader voters, and democracy and human decency would be profoundly more safe today. The planet would be profoundly more safe today. Thinking about the difficult reality and probabilities and accepting half a loaf as better than none may not be as satisfying and glamourous, but it makes the world a far better place.
Hong, for example, will very likely just lose in Wisconsin, putting an authoritarian henchman at the top in that pivotal swing state, where he can have great influence in rigging what may be the deciding election in 2028. There's a significant chance that may be what makes the difference in us becoming like Putin's Russia, plus all the other terrible things that Republican will do in that state. A moderate would have very likely, by contrast, won, preventing all of that. But too many people chose to ignore reality and thinking to make the feel good choice.
The problem is prioritizing winning seats over making policy changes. You assume that winning leads to policy. We have not seen that: winning becomes the goal in and of itself and that means that making policy changes becomes antithetical to winning, because it could harm potential donors and voters.
There is no point in winning power if you aren't willing to use it.
This is a good point, certainly in normal times. But first you have to get elected, and that means not campaigning with someone as reprehensible as Pikar, not saying Thanksgiving glorifies genocide. Then, once you are in, you vote for Medicare for All, and even if you lose the legislature as a result, it was worth it, since for something like that try-and-see is the key. Once people have it, it will be very hard to take it away.
But these are not normal times. We are in dire danger of horrific tragedy, democracy being completely murdered, having to live under a Putin-like regime, for ourselves and our posterity. The overwhelming focus has to be on stopping that, not trans-women playing in women's sports. And number one on that is stop the authoritarian Republicans from getting elected and appointing Judge Cannons and henchmen generals and having the control of the government to rig elections.
And as a side note, the best estimate I've seen is that 90 million native Americans died during the colonization and expansion of this country. Thanksgiving isn't *about* celebrating a genocide, but it does celebrate a genocide.
You can look at the actual Thanksgiving event at the time as a celebration of sharing, alliance, and friendship. I don't think that those pilgrims were out to kill and plunder those tribes, like the Conquistadors, etc. Certainly, making us like Putin's Russia by not choosing your battles will not go back in time, and will only make the world today a horrifically worse place.
It does no such thing.
The issue there is that we've had three decades of 'run to the left in the primary, run to the center in the general' and it becomes almost impossible to identify who will actually keep their promise to support something like Medicare for all. At an extreme, you get folks like Susan Collins, who pretty much destroyed the right to an abortion while insisting the whole time she was in favor of it.
Similarly with stopping authoritarian Republicans. We got Mueller, and Comey, and four different prosecutions dying quietly under democratic administrations. So now people are looking for candidates who are committed hard enough that they can't pivot away from fighting.
You have to get elected first. That is paramount. It's game over if you don't. But, you don't always have to settle for people like Biden and Merrick Garland. There are very electable people who are smarter than that. Shapiro is smart and tough, and very electable. So is Arizona Senator Mark Kelley.
For an apparent socialist, cancelling Thanksgiving is rather Scrooge-like, isn't it?
Especially in America, where there is no federally mandated paid leave, and the average worker only takes 10 to 15 days' leave a year. Let people have their long weekend, for crying out loud!
They might promote October 7 to a holiday instead.
Or 9 11 if they really wanna be socially unacceptable 😃😆🤔🤮
Groan
The extremists on the left and MAGA seem animated by the same poison of hate, just different flavors.
One hates the people and institutions with actual power and responsibility, the other hates scapegoats and minorities? Seems like a rather relevant difference.
When you animate people with hate, you are the same evil.
Ah yes, the people who are oppressed and victimized are just as evil as the ones doing the oppression, because they both hate.
/S
More than any other post I have read online, this post speaks for me, Noah. This is exactly how I see things.
As you note, these people are not liberals. You do not have to watch very closely to realize that their support for majority rule and freedom of speech is tenuous at best.
Some take solace in the fact that they are not nearly a majority within the overall Democratic Party. And it is true that they are mostly winning in bright blue areas. However, their influence and visibility is magnified many times over by the amplification of the media, which is desperate for eyeballs.
Which not only gives them undue power, but also provides assistance to the reactionaries on the right. Remember that Hitler was greatly aided in his rise to power by Marxist opponents.
If liberals' support for the common good weren't tenuous at best, the socialists wouldn't be winning.
I see a lot of comments from Glau, but I don't understand them. Liberals don't support the common good? What are you referring to? So, socialists would be better? Like all those successful socialist countries out there, huh?
Medicare for all, gov support of childcare, increase min wage, etc. Basically all the items that were in the Build Back Better bill because of socialists that liberals pulled out and killed to try and keep Manchin happy.
That's why I say 'do not support the common good'. I'd add things like wealth taxes, ending ICE, student loan forgiveness, defending the civil service, stuff like that as well.
Look at how any other wealthy country runs their healthcare.
I feel like Mamdani needs to start giving private calls to people.
Like he shares a lot of beliefs, but he knows how to be a normie and not alienate those who don't agree with him.
After reading the Garry Kasparov article today, the fact that Mandani encouraged people not to vote for Kamala is the only thing I need to know about him. This is someone who benefits from a kakistocratic authoritarian in power, because it makes his kakistocracy the lesser of two.
Yep 👍
The willingness on the far right and far left to look the other way on Jew hate while appalling in itself, is a symptom of a very unhealthy national political system. The inability or unwillingness of any adults in the room to speak up has me fearing a DSA Democrat going up against a Carlson approved Republican in ‘28. Amazing to me we are dealing with a scenario like this with the economy doing ok—imagine if we fall into a recession between now and then?
As a long shot, I might opt for Uruguay -- or (in spite of the authoritarianism) perhaps even Singapore.
Hi Noah: Perhaps you should listen more to what people are actually saying (rather than the social media chatter). Here is Abdul El Sayed on why is NOT a member of DSA:
"Too much of a scientist, I guess. I’m a capitalist who reads about capitalism. And when you read about capitalism, it is very clear, even to the originators who coined the idea, that the biggest risk to capitalism was not going to be government regulation, as much as the corporatists want you to think it is. It was always going to be monopoly. And we know that hyper-capitalism tends toward monopoly. We also understand that that happens in part because, when a corporation gets big enough, it has enough power to start “rent seeking,” which is a fancy way of saying influencing government action to protect its own interests. And that’s the place we are right now in capitalism. I think small business is amazing. I think it’s a really efficient way to move capital into the areas where it can be really efficient to create a lot of jobs. I’m just not a socialist. And so I want capitalism to work the way it was supposed to work, not the way that the corporations tell us it’s supposed to work" (quoted by Matt Stoller).
Does this not sound like straight out of Adam Smith?
For what it’s worth, Noah isn’t exactly excited by the anti monopoly camp either.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/im-kind-of-over-the-whole-anti-monopoly?r=1bmwua&utm_medium=ios
Need more patriotic normie evangelism and organizing. America has problems but we're not going to solve them by devolving into an authoritarian state!
The "our communities" language was more painful than the anti-Thanksgiving stuff because that was half of my Twitter feed back in the day. Some people would use the day specifically to promote indigenous creators, digital and otherwise.
Quick search engining finds that Wisconsin has 11 tribal entities amounting to 1-2% of the population. I also learned that the Oneida now reside in Wisconsin after having been kicked out of the original Hodenosaunee Confederacy land.
Woke to the left of me, MAGA to the right. Here I am. Stuck in the middle with you.
I remember the scene from Reservoir Dogs all too well.
Let's see, The GOP is unacceptable bc it has been thoroughly taken over by its (previous) extreme 'wing', see young groypers. Meanwhile, Dems are in danger of becoming unacceptable bc they are fielding some candidates from their extreme wing, see young leftists. ??
I think that is called generational change.
Ofc, its more than that. Noah is citing young DSA types (and groypers) that seem to be very _tone deaf_. That is, they seem either waaaay too extreme (i.e. wanting to literally cancel Thanksgiving when they get in office... good luck) OR too willing to say the quiet part out loud (That many young people currently celebrate 'Friendsgiving' on that day).
To someone who is a little older, this just looks like really bad politics.
And it IS bad politics... until it ISN'T.
The oldest Millenials are 45 now, but we have only had Boomer presidents. That is what the gerontocracy is about. How does the torch get passed from the Boomers (now 65+) to the Millenials (now 45 and under). Assuming ofc that there will never be a GenX president (sorry Gavin), being too cringey to both the Boomers and MIllennials. :)
The first successful Millennial president (it will happen eventually) is going to say things that make Boomers recoil and cringe and clutch their pearls. That is inevitable, and will be a feature of them talking to and activating their base (hopefully of well-informed and well meaning young people, not groypers).
Don't you remember when Boomer Bill Clinton played the sax on _Arsenio Hall_ and the greatest generation folks (who had locked the POTUS up until then) lost their collective minds!?!
I guess we can count on Noah to be there and call that first Milllennial president too woke?
I'm forty and I am very much the opposite of a pearl clutcher. My issue with DSA/Groypers has nothing to do with finding them offensive. The problem is they are mind numbingly stupid and let petty resentments of various kinds fuel them into conspiracy based zero-sum brainrot and embracing fantasy econ and ideological policing that will make everyone poorer and less free. I'll take something orbiting the truth stated in a cringe way by some boomer over flagrant fantasy from demagogues who "get it" any day of the week.
I don't care that they say stupid things about Thanksgiving or post memes about making the military more macho. I care that they want to enact rent control and gut the tech industry and consider me some kind of race traitor because I'm married to a Jewish man.
Well said! I think we are MUCH more likely to see these sort of 'goofy' econ ideas implemented at city levels (if at all), than at the state level. And I am certain that a Dem US congress is not going to enact any such goofiness.
Let the cities be a 'laboratory of democracy'.
And fortunately, as Noah has pointed out, many of these goofiest ideas (like UBI) have fared very poorly in small studies.
On the flip side, the 'establishment' of now very OLD boomer dems does have a bunch of blindspots. I recall Pelosi lecturing a bunch of Sunrise Rebellion kids about the limits of solar power! That hasn't aged well. :o
Yes, but I live in a city - albeit a moderate blue city in Texas. I want it to stay that way and not for "moderate" to end up meaning San Francisco circa 2020 because the whole party gets dragged so far to the left.
Also, the truly brainrotted don't update the way that normal people do when the policy doesn't work as intended. They just blame the plan not working on more conspiracies.
The concern is how much of the population ends up brainrotted and how strong the brainrot brigade's stranglehold on power can potentially become.
*Edit* I actually saw a bit of this in action during the first anti Trump midterm back in the day when people here (Harris County/Houston) symbolically threw out our boring, normie Republican County Judge Ed Emmett and replaced him with unqualified idealogue Lina Hidalgo. She has since collapsed and slinked away but not before making local politics much dumber, more performative, and more partisan.
Obama was no boomer, man 😎
Sure. But he also wan't genX... he was just COOL.
Quick question from the european side: I understand that a two party system is the direct result of how the whole electoral system works in the US, but I wonder if the GOP has fallen so low and the Democrats are gradually shifting to the very maximalist left, wouldn't there be space for a third centrist party that could hope to capatilize on the vast majority of moderates fed up or their mainstream parties? The vast majority of voters now identify themselves as indipendent, so I guess there could be a potential massive electoral pool from where to draw votes.
What is your opinion on that ?
You need to ask the question to Political Scientist who has understanding of the operational mechanics of the different levels of the US elections (of which what Europeans frequently badly misunderstand is the genuine real profound operational Federalism that mid-late 20th century trends have not upended and the post-1970s 'reforms' that basically removed from the two major parties a genuine legal ability to control own brand [i.e. who gets to use their name] operationally).
As a vulgar financial economist, I myself don't have that expertise but I have read enough now to understand that too few people have paid attention to the actual electoral mechanics and guts of the system as it has emerged since Nixon era, and operate even for American pundits with a false concept of underlying mechanics of the system.
In any case all writing by systems oriented analyses I have read have been clear that it's functionally given the way the US and notably its extreme federalism not realistic to dream of European style New Third Party emergence - not per se because of R or D blocking but the systematic mess and complexity (plus structural factors of specifics on how on state by state basis - and again Europeans even with Federal govs badly misunderstand just how really under-the-hood sovereign the US states remain...)
Ok, still a bit confuse. I always thought that the two party system was mostly the direct consequence of the first past the post system that tends to favor big parties (similar to what happens to the UK). This, in conjunction with what Marian pointed before (you need big donors to have even the slight hope of being elected) led to the current effectually two party system.
But my question is: can it be changed? What does the average american think about it? Would a system more proportional and more representative of the political spectrum being more appetibile to the average citizen compared to now?
UK has a national system.
US does not. It has a radcially federal one
UK has a party system that is more or less European, the US has something else w/o actual party as party central coherence (downstream in part of no genuine national).
The US has had two party dominance since essentially the early 19th century, there is nothing here that itself ties back to Big Donors as root causal, the systematic issues are much deeper than the current fad of looking at campaing money (certainly money is not nothing but everone over indexes)
What the Average AMerican thinks is not really the point - the average American doesn't really understand our own system mechanics - structrual ones rooted in the deeply federal structure - there is no central government running of elections, this is in gross, a fiction, a mirage.
Changing this is radicaly different than what you as European imagine from a centralised system - it's a lot more like thinking about how to get agreement on EU votes etc changes with every member state Government having veto power on most reform issues.
I get your point, but I still think that the major issue would be the first past the post mechanism. A new party that would like to spend a substantial amount of money, time and effort to build a base in each state will run in a substantial risk of getting zero seats in the vast majority of districts.
In a way we could compare elections for the european parliament to the US ones. Each country has its own electoral system independent from the central one for its own government, but each national party also run for seats in the European Parliament, affiliating to one of the european political families. We elect representives on a proportional basis weighted on the population of the state. A similar system in the US would encourage to have several parties that could form coalitions later on, reducing the risk of fringes taking control of the parties
One of the problems with this is you need to be able to build the institutional capacity to actually win the election outright and moderate normies are not really motivated to commit themselves to a project like that the way idealogues are. The overhead on party formation in Europe is just less when you only need to get 10% of the vote or something to get some seats in Parliament and potentially become part of the coalition where you can wield influence.
Americans also have coalitions - we just build them *before* the election and they get consolidated into a party which is big enough to win.
The incentives are much more to try to wield influence and take over an existing party's superstructure than to make one from scratch. Anyone trying this is fighting a very uphill battle. The question most people face here is not how to find a party which matches their preferences but what faction in what party to align themselves with.
There are some structural changes you could make which would short circuit this in such a way that you end up favoring moderate factions within the parties, but the actual creation of a separate moderate party is extremely unlikely.
The financial threshold is formidable. Current big donors, who usually want something in return for their donations, assess the returns on existing parties as more reliable.
In a proportional system, where a 6 per cent party can still end up being in a coalition government, the financial machine is more willing to take the risk of supporting new upstarts, especially if the public is visibly tired of the old guard.
Never mind financial, that is not the real problem, the real problem is structure, financial is downstream from structure.
I agree it is not the same thing, but they are related. I saw genesis of a few small Czech parties close, and having a reasonable budget definitely helps with buildup of a structure. There are people with the necessary know-how and people who will volunteer, but those sets rarely overlap.
I think the problem here would be less financial (quite a bit of money is available for more stability and less whipsawing between extremes), if this third party were perceived as viable.
But the rules throughout the system are designed to minimize the chances of a third party. (Nowhere more dramatically than in presidential elections.) Getting the elected representatives of the two parties to reform the system so as to give a third party a fair chance would be difficult to say the least. But I am thinking that this is what will be necessary if we are attached to having a liberal republic.
Another movement that might attract independents who think that the democrats are too left and the MAGA gop too nuts would be what Tucker Carlson seems to be doing. He hates that Trump has violated his promise to stay out of war and be America First . We will see how that goes 🤔
I would hardly call Carlson centrist, though. There are several centrists in the democratic party, but it usually gets overwhelmed by the most extreme fringes on the long run. It is quite physiological and it happens here in Europe too on the long run. I think a separation is unavoidable at a certain point.
There plenty of centrist politicians, they are people like Schumer and other establishment democrats! 🙂
Sen. Chuck Schumer has single handed destroyed US Senate Democratic choices for the past 12 years. We can only thank God for Roy Cooper to return our Senate colors to purple.
If the Democrats don't save us this time, we remain unsaved
What a depressing choice for Americans to make. Where have all the moderates gone to ? On both sides. Is there anyway this bell will be unrung?
The moderates are now largely independents. That why I left the Democratic party.
The moderates are there, in much greater numbers than the far-right and far-left, and will hand victory to any party that decides to be normal. See the continued popularity of Carney in Canada and the relative sanity of the Conservative party there. The leftist and rightist nutjobs have their own unpopular parties to gather in.
But the US system won't let that situation happen. I'm not optimistic about the country's future.