While I don't disagree with most of this post, ever since I moved to this country in 2000, the weak party has won the Presidency the same number of times as the strong party and this election will be the tie breaker. That suggests that being strong as a party has not resulted in the kind of results that would make them popular among voters. You can write a whole post about why but if it's the same social media spreading misinformation crap, I'll probably skip that. The fact is that Biden is doing the things that Trump said he would do but failed - on immigration, on military intervention and on trade and industrial policy. This will be the third election in a row that I'll be voting against Trump but I recognize that he has changed the direction of the country by winning the public opinion on issues that both parties were dogmatically against not so long ago. When Romney lost in 2012, the diagnosis from the Republican think tanks was that they had to compromise on illegal immigration/amnesty to do better among Hispanic voters. Trump took the completely opposite stance and now most people are against illegal immigration. IMO he's the most influential President in the last 24 years, for both good and bad.
I think what it actually suggests is that weak parties might have an advantage with the US electoral map specifically. Since 2000, the strong party has won the popular vote in five presidential elections, to the weak party's one. This kind of undercuts your point about popular support, and suggests that isn't really the issue. Maybe the problem is building the voter coalitions that strong parties rely on helps them maintain broad popular support, but inhibits them from zeroing in on the marginal voter.
I'd also push back a bit on the suggestion that Trump is solely responsible for these shifts. The economic policy and foreign policy discourse was already changing during Obama's presidency. Moving away from laissez-faire and ending forever wars were not new notions by the time Trump came on the scene, even if he shifted the dial in the GOP itself.
These kind of arguments is why I think the Democrats may be strong as a party but they are not very smart. The rules of the game are known in advance. It’s childish to complain about the electoral college and geographical distribution of voters. Smart people adapt and come up with strategies to maximize the chances of winning. Winning the popular vote does not in fact, prove that Democrats are popular, just that they are more popular in a two party system. The number of independents is around 40%, suggesting that neither party is very popular. Winning California or New York by 20 points and losing swing states narrowly shows poor strategy more than anything else.
The point of being the strong party is not merely to win. It is to win with a candidate who passes the type of policies you prefer. In this sense, DJT is a terrible candidate for Republicans. This is true because he is weak on America's enemies. He doesn't care about deficits. He is opposed to free trade. And he is generally lazy and incompetent, and fails to get much done at all (any other R candidate would have enacted major changes to Obamacare during that first term).
I would argue that Trump gave all kinds of Republicans what they wanted - tax cuts for the donor class, 3 SC justices, overturning Roe v Wade for the religious right. He would be on the Mount Rushmore of Republican Presidents just for his role in overturning Roe v Wade.
Name a recent Republican presidential candidate who would not have passed a tax cut or nominated Fed. Society approved SCOTUS judges. So, he did 2 things that every other potential R president would have done and failed to do dozens of others...
The goal of overturning Roe v Wade was to substantially reduce the number of abortions in the United States. The number of abortion did not go down after Roe was overturning making it a policy failure.
And note that GWB in 2004 (the one election where the GOP candidate won the popular vote) had the advantage of being an incumbent president during a war that was still popular at the time.
Exactly. In fact no GOP candidate has won the popular vote without some kind of incumbency advantage (from being the sitting president or VP) since 1980. In that time, four Democrats (Bill Clinton, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Biden) have.
Although Bill Clinton (in both of his election wins) had the advantage of a strong third-party candidate (Ross Perot) who split the conservative vote.
I'm reminded of how in this year's British General Election the Labour Party won a landslide because Nigel Farage's Reform UK split the right-wing vote.
There are a lot of factors that go into any political election cycle. There are several quirks in the American electoral system (some unique to the US, and some not) which create outsized impacts on how we view results. When we look at the electoral success of the Republican Party at the federal level they appear fairly strong, if we look under the hood things get...weirder. One quirk of the American electoral system is the Electoral College, and while the Republican Party has won three of the last six elections; it's only won the popular vote once since 2000, and only once since 1992. If we look at House results Republicans have won control of the House 8 out of 12 elections; however, they have only won the popular vote 7 times. Control of the US statewide elections impacted the control of the House of Representatives allowed the GOP to control the house in 2012, and likely 2016.
The Senate is a murkier picture. Again the political geography favors Republicans, but Democrats have outperformed this and done much better. In fact, Republicans frequently nominate awful candidates to lose winnable races. Just in 2022 the Republicans blew the opportunity to win races in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. This is not the first or last time they've done so. Terrible candidates cost Republicans senate seats in Montana (2018), Alabama (2017), Indiana (2016), & Missouri (2012). They certainly did not help in other cases.
Overall, there are many factors which go into political power. Democrats have gotten lucky that their opponents are frequently incompetent (not all of them: Mitch McConnell remains formidable), and Republicans benefit from favorable political geography and reverse polarization.
Exactly what Noah has talked about: by nominating the most electable candidates wherever they can. In tough winnable races in 2020: Democrats nominated Joe Biden (for President), Mark Kelly (for Senate in Arizona), and Rafael Warnock (for Senate in Georgia). Gretchen Whitmer won in Michigan before with the banal phrase: "fix the damn roads." Democrats have not pursued massive Leftist changes at the federal level, they have pushed a far more moderate image than Republicans.
Just because elections are complicated does not mean that what Democrats are doing isn't working.
They can also aim for better policies and outcomes when they are elected and in power. Biden's favorability rating is not exactly a ringing endorsement of his Presidency and neither is Harris in a toss up race with a toxic and extremely unpopular candidate. Usually popular incumbents (or their successors) are re-elected and it didn't happen with Clinton/Gore or Obama/Clinton. It did happen with Reagan/Bush and FDR/Truman.
Note that policies and outcomes in a presidency depend A LOT on the makeup of Congress. During most of Biden's term, Congress has been an absolute shit-show and incapable of doing much of anything. As someone noted, this is partly structural (Senate), partly gerry-mandering (House), and partly a divided country.
There are real limits (thank god) on what a president can do on their own - unfortunately not enough of those limits as we slowly move more and more towards an Imperial Presidency.
Since 2000 the three most impressive electoral performances were:
-Barack Obama beating John McCain (with an open presidency)
-Joe Biden beating an incumbent Donald Trump
-Barack Obama getting re-elected
So since 2000 I think Democrats have done a pretty darn good job electing their candidates into office. It is historically unusual for a sitting vice-president to be elected after their boss. In fact, since 1900 it's happened once: George HW Bush after Ronald Reagan. Every other VP who ran after his boss lost. Although, again, in Gore's defense: he did win the popular vote, and if Gore had won the Presidency I think we're having an incredibly different discussion.
Why Joe Biden is not a popular incumbent is a fascinating discussion in its own right and we could debate whether it's all Democrats fault that inflation took hold in the US. Whether he should have decided to run for a second term, and a bunch of other things. For the purposes of this discussion I think it's more telling that when faced with an unpopular incumbent potentially losing: Democrats chose to replace him. When faced with the same decision in 2016 Republicans stuck with Trump (who, in a fluke, won the Presidency due to the Electoral College).
I respect the fact that American elections are complex. I think the facts are pretty strongly in Democrats favor for being the better party. Instead of making a positive case for Republicans you've chosen instead to just muddy the waters. That's shrewd debating, but not particularly convincing on its own terms.
I don't expect to convince partisan hacks. As an independent, I don't think either party is very good at their primary jobs - policies and governance. Popularity or electoral performance is downstream of that. In fact, at the state level, Republican governors seem to do a better job on an average.
Truman barely won in 1948, the results were like 2020 Truman won the popular vote by 4.5% but Dewey the margin in the tipping point state California was around 0.25%.
Truman's case is muddied by the fact that FDR already won 4 times. Technically JFK/LBJ also qualifies. The basic argument remains that if the incumbent is very popular, their successor can just run on continuity and start with an advantage. Both Gore and Clinton should have won but fell short. Why they fell short is debatable but most think that it's because they were poor candidates, further undercutting the argument that Democrats are better at selecting their candidates compared to Republicans.
Definitely agree on Trump's level of influence. Everything now revolves around being pro-trump or anti-trump. And he clearly understood the necessity of the party takeover after eking out a victory against Clinton (something Obama had no interest in). And the abandonment of the China accomodationist stance was really due to him.
What i think you're missing with the weak and strong party both winning the presidency is the decisive interventions of the Democratic Party (post-Trump) in 2018 (running moderate candidates), 2020 (lining up behind Biden), and 2024 (forcing Biden out) in the interests of winning elections. IF Trump had lost in 2016 (as everyone expected), Republicans would have shifted to a top-down model to ensure a candidate like him could NEVER win a primary again.
I agree with the basic premise of the argument that Noah has made (and MattY, Ezra or Hanania before him) which defines strength of the party as the degree of control that elites of the party have in terms of marginalizing the freak shows.
Just pointing out that this strength has not translated to electoral dominance because Democrats are not in fact very smart in terms of messaging and policies that would help them build enduring majorities or maximizing their electoral prospects by pursuing more majoritarian policies. That shows both in terms of the percentage of independents and the fact that they're perennial underdogs in the Senate and the House.
I don't think the idea of "electoral dominance" is the right metric due to polarization. It's more about the capture of undecided and swing voters (data that will bear out November). Elites are more of a check on negative behaviors rather than accelerants of positive ones.
In my opinion, Dems swim against the tide with the US being a center right nation with voters in the middle being much more willing to vote Republican than Democrat. Dems are a lot less culturally salient for voters in Middle America (who have inordinate influence in elections) than Republicans - going back to your messaging and policies. Think about how Harris could be neck and neck with Donald Trump despite the strength of the economy. Imagine a stronger Republican elite that could've placed Nikki Haley atop the ticket. Republicans would be running away with the election rn.
"Think about how Harris could be neck and neck with Donald Trump despite the strength of the economy. Imagine a stronger Republican elite that could've placed Nikki Haley atop the ticket."
These seem contradictory. If voters thought that the economy was strong or headed in the right direction, Harris would have had the advantage of being an incumbent and Biden would have much better favorability ratings and Nikki Haley would also struggle against a popular incumbent. The fact is that the economy is a mixed bag and that reflects in a toss up race against an unpopular candidate. I agree with you that Haley would have easily beaten Harris but that's because voters are not happy with how Democrats have governed, which was my original point. The Democrats are not very good at governing either, despite being the "strong" party.
I didn’t put my point across very well, so apologies there. What I meant was that with the economy going strong even with inflation (like job numbers), Harris is still neck and neck proving the problem is elsewhere as you point out with policies and messaging.
Sadly party strength is reflected more internally as crushing dissent more than governing effectively.
Would Trump have got anywhere in US politics in the first place if he hadn't been helped by Russia's stooges in Fox News (Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson)?
Generally reasonable article, although I think it needs to be said that neither the Democrats nor the GOP are a “traditional” political party along the lines of the Labour Party and other groups in other wealthy democracies. They don’t have dues-paying members, a binding political platform (the party platform is more of a “vibes” messaging device), or a strong cohesive internal organization. Which is to say that they’re (excessively imo) candidate-centered parties instead of mass-based parties that you find in many other democracies. But it’s true that, candidate-centric as they are, there’s more muscle on the bone re the Dem internal network
IMO, American parties more closely look like coalitions you find in other countries, rather than true parties. The Dems are basically a coalition of Labor, Green, and Socialists, while the GOP are a coalition of Christian Right, whatever the American equivalent of the Tories is, and right wing nationalists.
Trump's takeover has done a strange job in basically splitting the labor vote on the Dem side and the Tory vote on the GOP side. So your coalition is a little more hazy now than it was 20 years ago, but still roughly equal in number.
Doesn't parliamentary democracy (where the executive is selected by the majority party in the legislature rather than being separately elected) force political parties to be more disciplined than they would be in a US-style presidential democracy?
Yes, but technology, especially television, has made parties also more leader-focused over the last 75 years.
Also, election of many party leaders switched to conventions in the television era, and eventually one-member-one-vote. Some are now even one-citizen-one-vote, essentially open primaries.
Some of the oldest and strongest parties have become weak and primarily leader vehicles in the 21st century.
Because they are now popularly elected by party members or open primaries, in many democracies, the leader has little accountability to the parliamentary party, and they sometimes lack the mechanism or legitimacy to sack their leaders. This is less true in, say, Australia or the UK than Canada or New Zealand.
"Q: 'Right wing activists on abortion and other issues are much more disciplined and strategic than left wing activists, whose theory of change is basically 1) throw soup on painting, 2) ???, 3) profit. But the voting bases are basically the opposite, where the GOP primary consistently elects insane people to lose winnable races, while Democratic primaries mostly nominate widely acceptable candidates. How do you explain this contrast?'
A: If you go back to the origins of electoral democracy 200-300 years ago, you see a basic issue that emerges quickly — the median voter is always poorer than the national mean, so there is a potential electoral majority for redistribution.
There is a set of political forces — the right — that wants to resist that redistribution. And there is a contrary set of forces — the left — that wants to encourage it. The left’s strategy is to make this dynamic explicit and transparent — we the people can seize the levers of power and make ourselves better off. And the right’s strategy is to obfuscate — the left will denigrate God, endanger public safety, weaken our national defenses, and so forth. That’s politics boiled down to its essence.
But this in turn gives rise to the characteristic flaws of the left and the right.
On the left, that’s a kind of romanticism about politics that holds that every issue comes down to the masses versus narrow moneyed elites. It denies that the people themselves may just be wrong or short-sighted, so it believes that the answer to every problem is to raise the temperature with more dramatic stunts and 'calling out.'
On the right, it’s a fondness for conmen and grifters. Because right-wing politics is organized as a conspiracy to mislead people into not voting to give themselves more money, it creates structures that elevate and reward hucksters and flim-flam artists. GOP politicians and conservative media figures elevated Donald Trump as a political spokesman in the Obama years not despite the fact that he’s a fraud and a liar but because he’s a fraud and a liar. They know it would be toxic to put a professor up there to tell people about the Chamley-Judd theorem and why we should cut capital gains taxes. You need someone who’s going to talk about Mexican rapists and how Obama is secretly Kenyan."
How is this analysis affected by the fact that most contemporary Western leftists aren't motivated primarily be the welfare of their working-class countrymen, but more by the welfare of the _global_ poor?
This explains why the contemporary left tends to be very pro-immigration, and willing to sacrifice the living standards of ordinary Westerners in the name of fighting climate change.
Good stuff. Here is some root cause of the Republican growth into MAGA, and 2 infinite forces that can't be stopped. They will especially change conservative philosophy.
a. I go back to Movement Conservatism (see Heather Cox Richardson), but my take is that the conservatives, sane and all, in the 1960s, ramping in the 70s and going public in the 80s - initiated a unilateral WAR on the Left, Women of Choice, Progressives, Liberals, Democrats -the entire group.
b. the proof is in what I call the Goebells era of Rush Limbaugh, the Acolyte of Hate. This man spewed hatred, feminazi's, vs the Clintons, personal attacks all the time. Conservatives ACCEPTED and CONDONED HATE against "us" - they did not tamp down Limbaugh, they relished him for his bravado.
c. Limbaugh was followed by other Purveyors of Lies and Hate - Glenn Beck, Mike Savage, Hannity. Formerly respectable people like Lou Dobbs joined the lies and hate crowd.
c. This Unilateral Hate Campaign was joined by ALEC - a conservative model state and local legislative lobbying group. Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, etc - Weaponized RELIGIOUS Hate. Conservative Lawyers were completed conned as idiot smart people by Bork, his instrument at the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo - into the magical mysticism of "Originalism". A fraudulent "theory" of how to interpret the Constitution. The thing about a theory, is it can be tested, and broadly accepted. These ConLawyers, never once put forth an arguement that Originalism was the Best, let alone even Better than other constructs and methodologies to interpret the Constitution.
d. Aligned groups of Hate - like the despicable Wayne LaPierre of the NRA - fomenting hatred against everyone who desires even a smidgeon of Gun Control
e. The Intellectual pseudo pundits of the National Review. Like the now WAPO opinionator, editor of NR, Ramesh Pannuru. This man, along with the esteemed but hateful Princeton Professor, a god for anti-abortion folks, Prof. Robert P. George, calls for the imprisonment of women and doctors doing abortion. And essentially in intellectually swathed words, calling it "murder". Calling abortion "murder" is hate-speech against women who choose.
Trump was always known to be a fraudulent ego-maniacal liar. Yet -as you Noah point out - The conservatives FAILED to dispense with Trump.
Trump - is FRUIT of the Tree of Reagan. Not the overall Reagan would approve, but sometimes those seeds you pick up along the trail and plant at home -- are poison ivy.
I've spent a long time considering just how the GOP fell to a charlatan like Trump. After reading about how the modern "movement" conservatism came about from the Bill Buckley's and the like out of the 50s and National Review, I get it. But man if I don't know how to correct from this. I feel like the path to Trump was plotted long ago
On the actual subject of this post Democrats are entitled to be a strong party because 2004 is the only presidential election where they may have lost the popular vote this century. Democrats can also console themselves that some of their core positions such as abortion rights and health care as a right are actually very popular. Trump was able to capitalize on even some party members being willing to question the accepted conservative ideology and its bad outcomes including epically failed foreign wars.
I'd be interested to hear yours (and everyone else's) take on whether this strong vs weak party phenomenon is a cause or consequence of the shifts in both parties' voter bases. The general picture seems to be Democrat voters have become more educated and high-propensity whilst the GOP's have become less educated and more low-propensity. This could mostly be a result of the populists capturing the GOP, but it may also have deeper roots, e.g., the whole Tea Party movement, which predated Trump. Maybe, however, stuff like the Tea Party was itself a manifestation of party weakness.
As for the Israel-Palestine conflict and the UK, my two cents (or pence) are that regardless of the dynamics within the debate over the conflict itself, the issue is far lower-salience than in the US. The UK has way less influence over the outcome of the conflict than the US does. I also think the general view is that there are bigger fish to fry in a country that hasn't seen real wages grow since the global financial crisis. The pro-Palestine movement briefly took over the Labour party, and got hammered electorally for their troubles. Those on the right in the UK who think they can benefit from taking the opposite approach will probably find out the same thing.
I wonder if anti-Zionism is a bit stronger in the UK due to a perception that the UK was to blame (via the Balfour Declaration) for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the first place?
I’m not so sure about that. I’m British and now I live in France, and it’s about as strong here as in the UK. Some of these people in the UK would talk about the Balfour Declaration. But it struck me more as reflexive anti-Americanism/anti-capitalism, because they saw the two as one and the same. I think these ideas just have more purchase outside of the U.S. than in it because we all have live political debates about how much to go along with whatever the U.S. does.
I don’t know. Some of this is institutional temperament - Democrats as “empaths” and Republicans as “rationals” - as evidenced by the hierarchy and structure of not just the parties, but the advisors, systems, and businesses that define, support, and execute the goals of each party. Democrats, in a word, are more groupthink, Republicans more individualistic. But Democrats have the benefit of a mainstream media that will amplify their messaging (see: Biden dropout, Trump Project 2025, etc). So it’s easier to burn in a message for Party elders and Leadership. Finally, neither party has a monopoly on cranks. There are truly shocking things said by elevated people in both parties over the last 8-10 years. I understand your overall thrust with this essay, but I think your comfort with a specific pov (totally normal and reasonable to have) do naturally color the analysis a bit. I appreciated the intellectual exercise, however.
All those individualistic Republicaccan just happened to decide that cutting taxes to create deficits, restricting immigration and trade was a good idea? Tell it to t he Marines. :)
TNC has clearly done more interviews than this one but the New York Magazine interview was the only one I consumed and that can be read as being anti-occupation rather than anti-Zionist altogether. He in fact said that many of the student protesters said things that he would not.
Doesn't October 7 show that Israel's 2005 decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza was a catastrophic mistake?
Not only did it allow Hamas to build Gaza into a terrorist base that culminated in that massive atrocity 18 years later, but it didn't benefit Israel diplomatically in any way: the international community mostly regarded Gaza as still de facto occupied anyway, and Western progressive opinion was far more dismayed with the periodic "mowing the lawn" bombings of Gaza (that Israel carried out in response to attacks by Gaza-based terrorists) than they ever had been by the occupation itself.
Letting Hamas take over in Gaza and thinking that it was at all possible to do business with them were catastrophic mistakes. Withdrawing from Gaza probably was not because there were too many soldiers protecting too few settlers and Gaza is not part of biblical Israel in anything like the same way as the West Bank. I think King Solomon was supposed to have annexed it.
Note thought that I chose "Gaza-based terrorists" deliberately, because (AFAIK) none of the Israel-Gaza conflicts prior to October 7 were actually initiated by Hamas. They were initiated either by Palestinian splinter factions (such as Islamic Jihad) or by the Israelis themselves.
I think the key thing you're missing from the analysis is that the GOP basically hollowed itself out by outsourcing its agenda-setting functions to right-wing media.
At the time, they *thought* they were getting a strong counterbalance to liberal dominance over the MSM. But what's actually happened is that since RWM is oriented towards both internal (the base) AND external audiences (potential converts susceptible to maximally sensationalist alarmism), it created a channel for both entryism and audience capture. If you're familiar with Sarah Longwell's concept of the GOP's "Triangle Of Doom" (media, base, politicians), the RWM was basically the final leg of the new stool that replaced the party's old tripartite alliance of "social conservatives, fiscal hawks, and national security hawks".
So the party is now basically unmoored from any kind of coherent guiding principles. It operates according to the dictates of its media market. The Triangle Of Doom sets the entire party agenda, but no group of actors within that triangle has enough power to actually control the agenda, so it just burns in whichever direction it can find fuel, like an uncontrolled wildfire.
This is why I don't see a strengthening of the GOP any time soon in its future. The wildfire is just going to have to burn through all its fuel; and _only_then_ will the Triangle Of Doom collapse in on itself. At that point, Duverger's Law will reassert itself, and some sort of right wing party (whether it's called the GOP or not) will coalesce around a new organizing principle.
Good point about how the right-wing media tail is now wagging the GOP dog: that created a golden opportunity for Russia to subvert the US political system!
Internet security expert Philip Hallam-Baker believes the Russians hacked into the Fox News email server in 2014 and used their resulting inside knowledge to manipulate chairman Roger Ailes to stopping the hush money payments to the women he was accused of harassing.
(It's easy to subvert an organization if you're reading its internal communications: for example the CIA coup in Iran in 1953 was made possible by the fact that they knew which Iranian officers were potentially disloyal, thanks to having cracked the Enigma cyphers that were used to encrypt the Iranian internal communications. The CIA as a whole became far less effective once it became public knowledge that Enigma had been cracked.)
The resulting sex scandal removed Ailes along with O'Reilly and several other Fox News leaders, allowing Russia's stooges Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson to become the face of the channel.
They also helped Donald Trump (a dumbass who would have likely got nowhere without Russian help) to win the 2016 GOP primary, by using their Fox News eavesdropping to provide him with inside information on his rivals' campaigns.
FWIW, I’m not trying to pooh-pooh you. I just almost always find that with my own biases and theories and wishcasting, they don’t have to be true for the best analyses surrounding them to be true.
So, there are dozens, if not COUNTLESS ways that it all could have gone down behind the scenes; some nefarious, some less so, some completely innocent. And yet, none of them has to be true in order for me to simply observe this core insight about how the GOP lost control of its agenda-setting, and what that says about the party in general.
To me, this is liberating, because it takes my biases OUT of the equation — and if they ever get touched on, I can treat them with special skepticism. I’m not invested in any of them being particularly true or not.
I've edited my original message to include the source of the theory: he also claims he tried to warn Fox News in 2016 that they'd been compromised, but met with a very angry response.
As to whether the GOP can become a strong party again, I would hypothesize that the current arrangement relies almost entirely upon Donald Trump personally. When he passes from the scene, I would expect a major succession war, and I would not assume that the MAGA types will win that struggle. The Trump imitators have not shown much insight into his secret sauce, and, in fact, I am not sure that it can be replicated.
A lot of our national struggles are really struggles over centralization. Recorded history is largely the story of centralizers winning out over resisters (in governing, but also media, business, agriculture, medicine, etc.)
The twist is that rapid progress has increasingly inflamed the resisters with massive, irresistible change , while the internet has given resisters a means to organize. They certainly feel rage (and I think I have somewhat more sympathy with their feelings than most of educated America feels for them) but really that is all they have. Rage. There exists no program, no set of polices that would make a "resister nation" competitive or sustainable. It is physically impossible to make it 1955 or 1776 or 1450 again, and any nation making such a pretense would be summarily squished by a highly competitive world.
Trump with his celebrity and his media savvy and his largely sincere resentments activated resister Americans. But what would need to follow, I would think, is some level of organized plan forward. Trump won't do that, and I am skeptical that a Vance or a Musk would be able to. Because any successful policy change will run into a wall of popular resistance -- see what happened when they got their way on abortion!
However, the Republican party still contains lots of centralizers. I see them locally, and they tend to win their disputes with resisters, even in red areas. Absent Trump, I strongly suspect they will seize control. And being centralizers, they will know enough to centralize party control. Probably more so than the Dems have done.
In fact, I suspect that the real threat to the centralizers will come from the Vance/Thiel/Deneen types who would solve the problem of unpopularity by finding ways to make popular consent no longer relevant to governance. Iin which case, the whole question of the strength of the two parties would no longer be relevant.
Haven't the Taliban demonstrated that an ultra-reactionary society CAN survive in today's world?
Of course they (and societies in the Greater Middle East more generally) may be especially resistant to modernization because of their clan-based tribal structures. The only thing that seems to work is a ruthless dictatorship that will engage in whatever murders, forced displacements and separation of families it takes to break the tribes.
Ataturk did it (more or less) in Turkey, the Soviets did it in Central Asia, China is now doing it in Xinjiang, but I'm not convinced that Western democracies could do it: after all the British Raj CERTAINLY didn't do it in what is now Pakistan, and the West isn't at all happy with China's Xinjiang policy.
Re: Coates' new book not making much of a splash, I think that's because he does _not_ quite say that Israel was _necessarily_ an illegitimate project from the start. He says the _actually existing_ state of Israel has rendered itself illegitimate, by enforcing something like apartheid or Jim Crow. But Jimmy Carter also tried to tell Americans that, almost a generation ago.
The fact that the incumbent regime in Israel is perhaps more than half made up of war criminals (not to mention a fair number of just-plain-criminal criminals, with their hands in the public fisc) who think ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank would be good, does not mean that _all Israelis_ lack moral standing. There are plenty of Israelis who hate their current government and have put themselves at risk (both from overzealous countrymen, and from being kidnapped by zealots in Palestine), crossing back and forth to try to ameliorate the damage their government is doing.
Currently the popular stance among lefty protestors seems to be insistence that there has to be a one-state solution, with Israeli Jews and Palestinians thrown together to work things out, all the checkpoints immediately torn down, etc. There's no reckoning with the fact that such an arrangement would _instantly_ turn into a civil war, because extremist forces on both sides would start bombing civilians. Given how much better armed the Israeli Jews are, within a few years you'd be right back to the status quo ante, except a bunch more people would be dead.
I guess I think the criticism of Coates current thesis is who decides whether or not a state is legitimate? Why I personally do not like the Israeli government reality is they have the guns and the nukes
1. The Palestinians have made themselves so noxious in the region (eg with Black September, and the PLO's role in causing the original Israeli invasion of Lebanon back in 1982) that other Arab countries are mostly unwilling to take them, and
2. The original Nakba worked because there were millions of Jews (Holocaust survivors in Europe and Jewish refugees from the Arab world) available to repopulate the emptied lands. This is not the case to day, as most of the remaining Jewish diaspora has zero desire to migrate to Israel.
I think the Berkeley kids chanting USA is because despite what a lot of people read or think, the majority of people in every town in American love America. And also, every major college football program has a big enough following - because again, even on the east coast and west coast, people love football and enjoy the atmosphere of a gameday at a major football school.
Basically, despite the fact that California is different than Alabama - in both places, people love America and some uniquely American things are really fun. And so..."U-S-A! U-S-A!" That moment did give me a new appreciation for Pat McAfee
I was there! Both McAfee and we understood the assignment to humorously lean into our stereotypes. So many great signs. And so much booing of Stanford Steve.
Elon Musk is ineligible for the presidency, because he was born in South Africa and is not a natural-born US citizen. He became a US citizen as an adult.
While I don't disagree with most of this post, ever since I moved to this country in 2000, the weak party has won the Presidency the same number of times as the strong party and this election will be the tie breaker. That suggests that being strong as a party has not resulted in the kind of results that would make them popular among voters. You can write a whole post about why but if it's the same social media spreading misinformation crap, I'll probably skip that. The fact is that Biden is doing the things that Trump said he would do but failed - on immigration, on military intervention and on trade and industrial policy. This will be the third election in a row that I'll be voting against Trump but I recognize that he has changed the direction of the country by winning the public opinion on issues that both parties were dogmatically against not so long ago. When Romney lost in 2012, the diagnosis from the Republican think tanks was that they had to compromise on illegal immigration/amnesty to do better among Hispanic voters. Trump took the completely opposite stance and now most people are against illegal immigration. IMO he's the most influential President in the last 24 years, for both good and bad.
I think what it actually suggests is that weak parties might have an advantage with the US electoral map specifically. Since 2000, the strong party has won the popular vote in five presidential elections, to the weak party's one. This kind of undercuts your point about popular support, and suggests that isn't really the issue. Maybe the problem is building the voter coalitions that strong parties rely on helps them maintain broad popular support, but inhibits them from zeroing in on the marginal voter.
I'd also push back a bit on the suggestion that Trump is solely responsible for these shifts. The economic policy and foreign policy discourse was already changing during Obama's presidency. Moving away from laissez-faire and ending forever wars were not new notions by the time Trump came on the scene, even if he shifted the dial in the GOP itself.
These kind of arguments is why I think the Democrats may be strong as a party but they are not very smart. The rules of the game are known in advance. It’s childish to complain about the electoral college and geographical distribution of voters. Smart people adapt and come up with strategies to maximize the chances of winning. Winning the popular vote does not in fact, prove that Democrats are popular, just that they are more popular in a two party system. The number of independents is around 40%, suggesting that neither party is very popular. Winning California or New York by 20 points and losing swing states narrowly shows poor strategy more than anything else.
The point of being the strong party is not merely to win. It is to win with a candidate who passes the type of policies you prefer. In this sense, DJT is a terrible candidate for Republicans. This is true because he is weak on America's enemies. He doesn't care about deficits. He is opposed to free trade. And he is generally lazy and incompetent, and fails to get much done at all (any other R candidate would have enacted major changes to Obamacare during that first term).
I would argue that Trump gave all kinds of Republicans what they wanted - tax cuts for the donor class, 3 SC justices, overturning Roe v Wade for the religious right. He would be on the Mount Rushmore of Republican Presidents just for his role in overturning Roe v Wade.
Name a recent Republican presidential candidate who would not have passed a tax cut or nominated Fed. Society approved SCOTUS judges. So, he did 2 things that every other potential R president would have done and failed to do dozens of others...
You're the one trying to make the argument that Trump did not do things that other Republicans would have, not me.
The goal of overturning Roe v Wade was to substantially reduce the number of abortions in the United States. The number of abortion did not go down after Roe was overturning making it a policy failure.
Based on your logic, the religious right should be very unhappy about it.
Democrats are the dumb party. Republicans are the dumber party.
And note that GWB in 2004 (the one election where the GOP candidate won the popular vote) had the advantage of being an incumbent president during a war that was still popular at the time.
Exactly. In fact no GOP candidate has won the popular vote without some kind of incumbency advantage (from being the sitting president or VP) since 1980. In that time, four Democrats (Bill Clinton, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Biden) have.
Although Bill Clinton (in both of his election wins) had the advantage of a strong third-party candidate (Ross Perot) who split the conservative vote.
I'm reminded of how in this year's British General Election the Labour Party won a landslide because Nigel Farage's Reform UK split the right-wing vote.
There are a lot of factors that go into any political election cycle. There are several quirks in the American electoral system (some unique to the US, and some not) which create outsized impacts on how we view results. When we look at the electoral success of the Republican Party at the federal level they appear fairly strong, if we look under the hood things get...weirder. One quirk of the American electoral system is the Electoral College, and while the Republican Party has won three of the last six elections; it's only won the popular vote once since 2000, and only once since 1992. If we look at House results Republicans have won control of the House 8 out of 12 elections; however, they have only won the popular vote 7 times. Control of the US statewide elections impacted the control of the House of Representatives allowed the GOP to control the house in 2012, and likely 2016.
The Senate is a murkier picture. Again the political geography favors Republicans, but Democrats have outperformed this and done much better. In fact, Republicans frequently nominate awful candidates to lose winnable races. Just in 2022 the Republicans blew the opportunity to win races in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. This is not the first or last time they've done so. Terrible candidates cost Republicans senate seats in Montana (2018), Alabama (2017), Indiana (2016), & Missouri (2012). They certainly did not help in other cases.
Overall, there are many factors which go into political power. Democrats have gotten lucky that their opponents are frequently incompetent (not all of them: Mitch McConnell remains formidable), and Republicans benefit from favorable political geography and reverse polarization.
Counterpoint - all these facts are well known. What have the Democrats done to maximize their chances of winning based on this knowledge?
Exactly what Noah has talked about: by nominating the most electable candidates wherever they can. In tough winnable races in 2020: Democrats nominated Joe Biden (for President), Mark Kelly (for Senate in Arizona), and Rafael Warnock (for Senate in Georgia). Gretchen Whitmer won in Michigan before with the banal phrase: "fix the damn roads." Democrats have not pursued massive Leftist changes at the federal level, they have pushed a far more moderate image than Republicans.
Just because elections are complicated does not mean that what Democrats are doing isn't working.
They can also aim for better policies and outcomes when they are elected and in power. Biden's favorability rating is not exactly a ringing endorsement of his Presidency and neither is Harris in a toss up race with a toxic and extremely unpopular candidate. Usually popular incumbents (or their successors) are re-elected and it didn't happen with Clinton/Gore or Obama/Clinton. It did happen with Reagan/Bush and FDR/Truman.
Note that policies and outcomes in a presidency depend A LOT on the makeup of Congress. During most of Biden's term, Congress has been an absolute shit-show and incapable of doing much of anything. As someone noted, this is partly structural (Senate), partly gerry-mandering (House), and partly a divided country.
There are real limits (thank god) on what a president can do on their own - unfortunately not enough of those limits as we slowly move more and more towards an Imperial Presidency.
Clinton and Obama also had the same constraints throughout most of their Presidential terms. Both had higher average approval ratings than Biden.
Since 2000 the three most impressive electoral performances were:
-Barack Obama beating John McCain (with an open presidency)
-Joe Biden beating an incumbent Donald Trump
-Barack Obama getting re-elected
So since 2000 I think Democrats have done a pretty darn good job electing their candidates into office. It is historically unusual for a sitting vice-president to be elected after their boss. In fact, since 1900 it's happened once: George HW Bush after Ronald Reagan. Every other VP who ran after his boss lost. Although, again, in Gore's defense: he did win the popular vote, and if Gore had won the Presidency I think we're having an incredibly different discussion.
Why Joe Biden is not a popular incumbent is a fascinating discussion in its own right and we could debate whether it's all Democrats fault that inflation took hold in the US. Whether he should have decided to run for a second term, and a bunch of other things. For the purposes of this discussion I think it's more telling that when faced with an unpopular incumbent potentially losing: Democrats chose to replace him. When faced with the same decision in 2016 Republicans stuck with Trump (who, in a fluke, won the Presidency due to the Electoral College).
I respect the fact that American elections are complex. I think the facts are pretty strongly in Democrats favor for being the better party. Instead of making a positive case for Republicans you've chosen instead to just muddy the waters. That's shrewd debating, but not particularly convincing on its own terms.
I don't expect to convince partisan hacks. As an independent, I don't think either party is very good at their primary jobs - policies and governance. Popularity or electoral performance is downstream of that. In fact, at the state level, Republican governors seem to do a better job on an average.
Truman barely won in 1948, the results were like 2020 Truman won the popular vote by 4.5% but Dewey the margin in the tipping point state California was around 0.25%.
Truman's case is muddied by the fact that FDR already won 4 times. Technically JFK/LBJ also qualifies. The basic argument remains that if the incumbent is very popular, their successor can just run on continuity and start with an advantage. Both Gore and Clinton should have won but fell short. Why they fell short is debatable but most think that it's because they were poor candidates, further undercutting the argument that Democrats are better at selecting their candidates compared to Republicans.
Definitely agree on Trump's level of influence. Everything now revolves around being pro-trump or anti-trump. And he clearly understood the necessity of the party takeover after eking out a victory against Clinton (something Obama had no interest in). And the abandonment of the China accomodationist stance was really due to him.
What i think you're missing with the weak and strong party both winning the presidency is the decisive interventions of the Democratic Party (post-Trump) in 2018 (running moderate candidates), 2020 (lining up behind Biden), and 2024 (forcing Biden out) in the interests of winning elections. IF Trump had lost in 2016 (as everyone expected), Republicans would have shifted to a top-down model to ensure a candidate like him could NEVER win a primary again.
Recommend Ezra Klein's interview with Nancy Pelosi for an insider perspective - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-nancy-pelosi.html
I agree with the basic premise of the argument that Noah has made (and MattY, Ezra or Hanania before him) which defines strength of the party as the degree of control that elites of the party have in terms of marginalizing the freak shows.
Just pointing out that this strength has not translated to electoral dominance because Democrats are not in fact very smart in terms of messaging and policies that would help them build enduring majorities or maximizing their electoral prospects by pursuing more majoritarian policies. That shows both in terms of the percentage of independents and the fact that they're perennial underdogs in the Senate and the House.
I don't think the idea of "electoral dominance" is the right metric due to polarization. It's more about the capture of undecided and swing voters (data that will bear out November). Elites are more of a check on negative behaviors rather than accelerants of positive ones.
In my opinion, Dems swim against the tide with the US being a center right nation with voters in the middle being much more willing to vote Republican than Democrat. Dems are a lot less culturally salient for voters in Middle America (who have inordinate influence in elections) than Republicans - going back to your messaging and policies. Think about how Harris could be neck and neck with Donald Trump despite the strength of the economy. Imagine a stronger Republican elite that could've placed Nikki Haley atop the ticket. Republicans would be running away with the election rn.
"Think about how Harris could be neck and neck with Donald Trump despite the strength of the economy. Imagine a stronger Republican elite that could've placed Nikki Haley atop the ticket."
These seem contradictory. If voters thought that the economy was strong or headed in the right direction, Harris would have had the advantage of being an incumbent and Biden would have much better favorability ratings and Nikki Haley would also struggle against a popular incumbent. The fact is that the economy is a mixed bag and that reflects in a toss up race against an unpopular candidate. I agree with you that Haley would have easily beaten Harris but that's because voters are not happy with how Democrats have governed, which was my original point. The Democrats are not very good at governing either, despite being the "strong" party.
I didn’t put my point across very well, so apologies there. What I meant was that with the economy going strong even with inflation (like job numbers), Harris is still neck and neck proving the problem is elsewhere as you point out with policies and messaging.
Sadly party strength is reflected more internally as crushing dissent more than governing effectively.
Enjoying the back and forth :)
Would Trump have got anywhere in US politics in the first place if he hadn't been helped by Russia's stooges in Fox News (Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson)?
Generally reasonable article, although I think it needs to be said that neither the Democrats nor the GOP are a “traditional” political party along the lines of the Labour Party and other groups in other wealthy democracies. They don’t have dues-paying members, a binding political platform (the party platform is more of a “vibes” messaging device), or a strong cohesive internal organization. Which is to say that they’re (excessively imo) candidate-centered parties instead of mass-based parties that you find in many other democracies. But it’s true that, candidate-centric as they are, there’s more muscle on the bone re the Dem internal network
IMO, American parties more closely look like coalitions you find in other countries, rather than true parties. The Dems are basically a coalition of Labor, Green, and Socialists, while the GOP are a coalition of Christian Right, whatever the American equivalent of the Tories is, and right wing nationalists.
Trump's takeover has done a strange job in basically splitting the labor vote on the Dem side and the Tory vote on the GOP side. So your coalition is a little more hazy now than it was 20 years ago, but still roughly equal in number.
Doesn't parliamentary democracy (where the executive is selected by the majority party in the legislature rather than being separately elected) force political parties to be more disciplined than they would be in a US-style presidential democracy?
Yes, but technology, especially television, has made parties also more leader-focused over the last 75 years.
Also, election of many party leaders switched to conventions in the television era, and eventually one-member-one-vote. Some are now even one-citizen-one-vote, essentially open primaries.
Some of the oldest and strongest parties have become weak and primarily leader vehicles in the 21st century.
Because they are now popularly elected by party members or open primaries, in many democracies, the leader has little accountability to the parliamentary party, and they sometimes lack the mechanism or legitimacy to sack their leaders. This is less true in, say, Australia or the UK than Canada or New Zealand.
You've cited Matt Yglesias multiple times. I think another take of his offers a slightly different explanation worth considering.
He went into this at length in https://www.slowboring.com/p/chemtrails-over-the-country-club, but also offered a more concise summary in https://www.slowboring.com/p/house-of-the-mailbag. I'll just quote the whole thing here:
"Q: 'Right wing activists on abortion and other issues are much more disciplined and strategic than left wing activists, whose theory of change is basically 1) throw soup on painting, 2) ???, 3) profit. But the voting bases are basically the opposite, where the GOP primary consistently elects insane people to lose winnable races, while Democratic primaries mostly nominate widely acceptable candidates. How do you explain this contrast?'
A: If you go back to the origins of electoral democracy 200-300 years ago, you see a basic issue that emerges quickly — the median voter is always poorer than the national mean, so there is a potential electoral majority for redistribution.
There is a set of political forces — the right — that wants to resist that redistribution. And there is a contrary set of forces — the left — that wants to encourage it. The left’s strategy is to make this dynamic explicit and transparent — we the people can seize the levers of power and make ourselves better off. And the right’s strategy is to obfuscate — the left will denigrate God, endanger public safety, weaken our national defenses, and so forth. That’s politics boiled down to its essence.
But this in turn gives rise to the characteristic flaws of the left and the right.
On the left, that’s a kind of romanticism about politics that holds that every issue comes down to the masses versus narrow moneyed elites. It denies that the people themselves may just be wrong or short-sighted, so it believes that the answer to every problem is to raise the temperature with more dramatic stunts and 'calling out.'
On the right, it’s a fondness for conmen and grifters. Because right-wing politics is organized as a conspiracy to mislead people into not voting to give themselves more money, it creates structures that elevate and reward hucksters and flim-flam artists. GOP politicians and conservative media figures elevated Donald Trump as a political spokesman in the Obama years not despite the fact that he’s a fraud and a liar but because he’s a fraud and a liar. They know it would be toxic to put a professor up there to tell people about the Chamley-Judd theorem and why we should cut capital gains taxes. You need someone who’s going to talk about Mexican rapists and how Obama is secretly Kenyan."
How is this analysis affected by the fact that most contemporary Western leftists aren't motivated primarily be the welfare of their working-class countrymen, but more by the welfare of the _global_ poor?
This explains why the contemporary left tends to be very pro-immigration, and willing to sacrifice the living standards of ordinary Westerners in the name of fighting climate change.
Good stuff. Here is some root cause of the Republican growth into MAGA, and 2 infinite forces that can't be stopped. They will especially change conservative philosophy.
a. I go back to Movement Conservatism (see Heather Cox Richardson), but my take is that the conservatives, sane and all, in the 1960s, ramping in the 70s and going public in the 80s - initiated a unilateral WAR on the Left, Women of Choice, Progressives, Liberals, Democrats -the entire group.
b. the proof is in what I call the Goebells era of Rush Limbaugh, the Acolyte of Hate. This man spewed hatred, feminazi's, vs the Clintons, personal attacks all the time. Conservatives ACCEPTED and CONDONED HATE against "us" - they did not tamp down Limbaugh, they relished him for his bravado.
c. Limbaugh was followed by other Purveyors of Lies and Hate - Glenn Beck, Mike Savage, Hannity. Formerly respectable people like Lou Dobbs joined the lies and hate crowd.
c. This Unilateral Hate Campaign was joined by ALEC - a conservative model state and local legislative lobbying group. Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, etc - Weaponized RELIGIOUS Hate. Conservative Lawyers were completed conned as idiot smart people by Bork, his instrument at the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo - into the magical mysticism of "Originalism". A fraudulent "theory" of how to interpret the Constitution. The thing about a theory, is it can be tested, and broadly accepted. These ConLawyers, never once put forth an arguement that Originalism was the Best, let alone even Better than other constructs and methodologies to interpret the Constitution.
d. Aligned groups of Hate - like the despicable Wayne LaPierre of the NRA - fomenting hatred against everyone who desires even a smidgeon of Gun Control
e. The Intellectual pseudo pundits of the National Review. Like the now WAPO opinionator, editor of NR, Ramesh Pannuru. This man, along with the esteemed but hateful Princeton Professor, a god for anti-abortion folks, Prof. Robert P. George, calls for the imprisonment of women and doctors doing abortion. And essentially in intellectually swathed words, calling it "murder". Calling abortion "murder" is hate-speech against women who choose.
Trump was always known to be a fraudulent ego-maniacal liar. Yet -as you Noah point out - The conservatives FAILED to dispense with Trump.
Trump - is FRUIT of the Tree of Reagan. Not the overall Reagan would approve, but sometimes those seeds you pick up along the trail and plant at home -- are poison ivy.
I've spent a long time considering just how the GOP fell to a charlatan like Trump. After reading about how the modern "movement" conservatism came about from the Bill Buckley's and the like out of the 50s and National Review, I get it. But man if I don't know how to correct from this. I feel like the path to Trump was plotted long ago
Small but outstanding TYPO
Tulsi Gabbard was a fringe Democratic presidential candidate who has spent most of HIS career
Should be HER career.
Good catch! Their reassignment surgery did, in fact, happen well before their political career. \S
Excuse me, but the last time I checked, Lisa Murkowski was still our GOP senator here in Alaska.
I know she was a write-in. She caucuses with the Republicans. I am not sure she even calls herself a Republican. Does she?
On the actual subject of this post Democrats are entitled to be a strong party because 2004 is the only presidential election where they may have lost the popular vote this century. Democrats can also console themselves that some of their core positions such as abortion rights and health care as a right are actually very popular. Trump was able to capitalize on even some party members being willing to question the accepted conservative ideology and its bad outcomes including epically failed foreign wars.
I'd be interested to hear yours (and everyone else's) take on whether this strong vs weak party phenomenon is a cause or consequence of the shifts in both parties' voter bases. The general picture seems to be Democrat voters have become more educated and high-propensity whilst the GOP's have become less educated and more low-propensity. This could mostly be a result of the populists capturing the GOP, but it may also have deeper roots, e.g., the whole Tea Party movement, which predated Trump. Maybe, however, stuff like the Tea Party was itself a manifestation of party weakness.
As for the Israel-Palestine conflict and the UK, my two cents (or pence) are that regardless of the dynamics within the debate over the conflict itself, the issue is far lower-salience than in the US. The UK has way less influence over the outcome of the conflict than the US does. I also think the general view is that there are bigger fish to fry in a country that hasn't seen real wages grow since the global financial crisis. The pro-Palestine movement briefly took over the Labour party, and got hammered electorally for their troubles. Those on the right in the UK who think they can benefit from taking the opposite approach will probably find out the same thing.
I wonder if anti-Zionism is a bit stronger in the UK due to a perception that the UK was to blame (via the Balfour Declaration) for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the first place?
I’m not so sure about that. I’m British and now I live in France, and it’s about as strong here as in the UK. Some of these people in the UK would talk about the Balfour Declaration. But it struck me more as reflexive anti-Americanism/anti-capitalism, because they saw the two as one and the same. I think these ideas just have more purchase outside of the U.S. than in it because we all have live political debates about how much to go along with whatever the U.S. does.
We promised you this land so we are extra mad at you for believing us? Huh
I don’t know. Some of this is institutional temperament - Democrats as “empaths” and Republicans as “rationals” - as evidenced by the hierarchy and structure of not just the parties, but the advisors, systems, and businesses that define, support, and execute the goals of each party. Democrats, in a word, are more groupthink, Republicans more individualistic. But Democrats have the benefit of a mainstream media that will amplify their messaging (see: Biden dropout, Trump Project 2025, etc). So it’s easier to burn in a message for Party elders and Leadership. Finally, neither party has a monopoly on cranks. There are truly shocking things said by elevated people in both parties over the last 8-10 years. I understand your overall thrust with this essay, but I think your comfort with a specific pov (totally normal and reasonable to have) do naturally color the analysis a bit. I appreciated the intellectual exercise, however.
All those individualistic Republicaccan just happened to decide that cutting taxes to create deficits, restricting immigration and trade was a good idea? Tell it to t he Marines. :)
TNC has clearly done more interviews than this one but the New York Magazine interview was the only one I consumed and that can be read as being anti-occupation rather than anti-Zionist altogether. He in fact said that many of the student protesters said things that he would not.
Doesn't October 7 show that Israel's 2005 decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza was a catastrophic mistake?
Not only did it allow Hamas to build Gaza into a terrorist base that culminated in that massive atrocity 18 years later, but it didn't benefit Israel diplomatically in any way: the international community mostly regarded Gaza as still de facto occupied anyway, and Western progressive opinion was far more dismayed with the periodic "mowing the lawn" bombings of Gaza (that Israel carried out in response to attacks by Gaza-based terrorists) than they ever had been by the occupation itself.
Letting Hamas take over in Gaza and thinking that it was at all possible to do business with them were catastrophic mistakes. Withdrawing from Gaza probably was not because there were too many soldiers protecting too few settlers and Gaza is not part of biblical Israel in anything like the same way as the West Bank. I think King Solomon was supposed to have annexed it.
Note thought that I chose "Gaza-based terrorists" deliberately, because (AFAIK) none of the Israel-Gaza conflicts prior to October 7 were actually initiated by Hamas. They were initiated either by Palestinian splinter factions (such as Islamic Jihad) or by the Israelis themselves.
Certainly the Sheikh Jarrah-rooted conflict of 2 years ago was happily exploited by Hamas whether or not they started it.
I think the key thing you're missing from the analysis is that the GOP basically hollowed itself out by outsourcing its agenda-setting functions to right-wing media.
At the time, they *thought* they were getting a strong counterbalance to liberal dominance over the MSM. But what's actually happened is that since RWM is oriented towards both internal (the base) AND external audiences (potential converts susceptible to maximally sensationalist alarmism), it created a channel for both entryism and audience capture. If you're familiar with Sarah Longwell's concept of the GOP's "Triangle Of Doom" (media, base, politicians), the RWM was basically the final leg of the new stool that replaced the party's old tripartite alliance of "social conservatives, fiscal hawks, and national security hawks".
So the party is now basically unmoored from any kind of coherent guiding principles. It operates according to the dictates of its media market. The Triangle Of Doom sets the entire party agenda, but no group of actors within that triangle has enough power to actually control the agenda, so it just burns in whichever direction it can find fuel, like an uncontrolled wildfire.
This is why I don't see a strengthening of the GOP any time soon in its future. The wildfire is just going to have to burn through all its fuel; and _only_then_ will the Triangle Of Doom collapse in on itself. At that point, Duverger's Law will reassert itself, and some sort of right wing party (whether it's called the GOP or not) will coalesce around a new organizing principle.
Good point about how the right-wing media tail is now wagging the GOP dog: that created a golden opportunity for Russia to subvert the US political system!
Internet security expert Philip Hallam-Baker believes the Russians hacked into the Fox News email server in 2014 and used their resulting inside knowledge to manipulate chairman Roger Ailes to stopping the hush money payments to the women he was accused of harassing.
(It's easy to subvert an organization if you're reading its internal communications: for example the CIA coup in Iran in 1953 was made possible by the fact that they knew which Iranian officers were potentially disloyal, thanks to having cracked the Enigma cyphers that were used to encrypt the Iranian internal communications. The CIA as a whole became far less effective once it became public knowledge that Enigma had been cracked.)
The resulting sex scandal removed Ailes along with O'Reilly and several other Fox News leaders, allowing Russia's stooges Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson to become the face of the channel.
They also helped Donald Trump (a dumbass who would have likely got nowhere without Russian help) to win the 2016 GOP primary, by using their Fox News eavesdropping to provide him with inside information on his rivals' campaigns.
That’s certainly… a theory.
FWIW, I’m not trying to pooh-pooh you. I just almost always find that with my own biases and theories and wishcasting, they don’t have to be true for the best analyses surrounding them to be true.
So, there are dozens, if not COUNTLESS ways that it all could have gone down behind the scenes; some nefarious, some less so, some completely innocent. And yet, none of them has to be true in order for me to simply observe this core insight about how the GOP lost control of its agenda-setting, and what that says about the party in general.
To me, this is liberating, because it takes my biases OUT of the equation — and if they ever get touched on, I can treat them with special skepticism. I’m not invested in any of them being particularly true or not.
I've edited my original message to include the source of the theory: he also claims he tried to warn Fox News in 2016 that they'd been compromised, but met with a very angry response.
As to whether the GOP can become a strong party again, I would hypothesize that the current arrangement relies almost entirely upon Donald Trump personally. When he passes from the scene, I would expect a major succession war, and I would not assume that the MAGA types will win that struggle. The Trump imitators have not shown much insight into his secret sauce, and, in fact, I am not sure that it can be replicated.
A lot of our national struggles are really struggles over centralization. Recorded history is largely the story of centralizers winning out over resisters (in governing, but also media, business, agriculture, medicine, etc.)
The twist is that rapid progress has increasingly inflamed the resisters with massive, irresistible change , while the internet has given resisters a means to organize. They certainly feel rage (and I think I have somewhat more sympathy with their feelings than most of educated America feels for them) but really that is all they have. Rage. There exists no program, no set of polices that would make a "resister nation" competitive or sustainable. It is physically impossible to make it 1955 or 1776 or 1450 again, and any nation making such a pretense would be summarily squished by a highly competitive world.
Trump with his celebrity and his media savvy and his largely sincere resentments activated resister Americans. But what would need to follow, I would think, is some level of organized plan forward. Trump won't do that, and I am skeptical that a Vance or a Musk would be able to. Because any successful policy change will run into a wall of popular resistance -- see what happened when they got their way on abortion!
However, the Republican party still contains lots of centralizers. I see them locally, and they tend to win their disputes with resisters, even in red areas. Absent Trump, I strongly suspect they will seize control. And being centralizers, they will know enough to centralize party control. Probably more so than the Dems have done.
In fact, I suspect that the real threat to the centralizers will come from the Vance/Thiel/Deneen types who would solve the problem of unpopularity by finding ways to make popular consent no longer relevant to governance. Iin which case, the whole question of the strength of the two parties would no longer be relevant.
Haven't the Taliban demonstrated that an ultra-reactionary society CAN survive in today's world?
Of course they (and societies in the Greater Middle East more generally) may be especially resistant to modernization because of their clan-based tribal structures. The only thing that seems to work is a ruthless dictatorship that will engage in whatever murders, forced displacements and separation of families it takes to break the tribes.
Ataturk did it (more or less) in Turkey, the Soviets did it in Central Asia, China is now doing it in Xinjiang, but I'm not convinced that Western democracies could do it: after all the British Raj CERTAINLY didn't do it in what is now Pakistan, and the West isn't at all happy with China's Xinjiang policy.
Re: Coates' new book not making much of a splash, I think that's because he does _not_ quite say that Israel was _necessarily_ an illegitimate project from the start. He says the _actually existing_ state of Israel has rendered itself illegitimate, by enforcing something like apartheid or Jim Crow. But Jimmy Carter also tried to tell Americans that, almost a generation ago.
The fact that the incumbent regime in Israel is perhaps more than half made up of war criminals (not to mention a fair number of just-plain-criminal criminals, with their hands in the public fisc) who think ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank would be good, does not mean that _all Israelis_ lack moral standing. There are plenty of Israelis who hate their current government and have put themselves at risk (both from overzealous countrymen, and from being kidnapped by zealots in Palestine), crossing back and forth to try to ameliorate the damage their government is doing.
Currently the popular stance among lefty protestors seems to be insistence that there has to be a one-state solution, with Israeli Jews and Palestinians thrown together to work things out, all the checkpoints immediately torn down, etc. There's no reckoning with the fact that such an arrangement would _instantly_ turn into a civil war, because extremist forces on both sides would start bombing civilians. Given how much better armed the Israeli Jews are, within a few years you'd be right back to the status quo ante, except a bunch more people would be dead.
I guess I think the criticism of Coates current thesis is who decides whether or not a state is legitimate? Why I personally do not like the Israeli government reality is they have the guns and the nukes
The only actual likely one state solution here is the expulsion of Palestinians.
There are two main things hindering that:
1. The Palestinians have made themselves so noxious in the region (eg with Black September, and the PLO's role in causing the original Israeli invasion of Lebanon back in 1982) that other Arab countries are mostly unwilling to take them, and
2. The original Nakba worked because there were millions of Jews (Holocaust survivors in Europe and Jewish refugees from the Arab world) available to repopulate the emptied lands. This is not the case to day, as most of the remaining Jewish diaspora has zero desire to migrate to Israel.
On 2, the continued struggle over West Bank settlements suggests there's still plenty of demand for land from Israelis.
Anyone who advocates for reparations gets an automatic personal ban from me.
I think the Berkeley kids chanting USA is because despite what a lot of people read or think, the majority of people in every town in American love America. And also, every major college football program has a big enough following - because again, even on the east coast and west coast, people love football and enjoy the atmosphere of a gameday at a major football school.
Basically, despite the fact that California is different than Alabama - in both places, people love America and some uniquely American things are really fun. And so..."U-S-A! U-S-A!" That moment did give me a new appreciation for Pat McAfee
I was there! Both McAfee and we understood the assignment to humorously lean into our stereotypes. So many great signs. And so much booing of Stanford Steve.
Elon Musk is ineligible for the presidency, because he was born in South Africa and is not a natural-born US citizen. He became a US citizen as an adult.