Perhaps progressives have always been this way and I just couldn't see it from the inside, but the hubris has become pretty staggering. There's just zero theory of mind - anyone that disagrees must clearly be bought off, somehow, or part of a conspiracy, or simply rotten to the core.
The problem with a highly moralized, Good People vs. Bad People theory of politics is that it has no mechanism to deal with conflicting interests - the very core of politics - even among the (according to them) Good People. The concept that the interests of biological and trans women might occasionally be at odds, and that a compromise may be needed, is met with hands-over-ears "I can't hear you!!"
There is to me a very strong strain of displaced secularised religiousity in Lefty progressivism, they generally don't believe in God (or whatever) but have displaced that action and comportment, that generalised feeling and thinking to what becomes essentially secular religion that is essentially a political identity.
Not per se new, Marxism often was like this.
the problem becoming fundamentally dogmatism in pluralistic democracy is typically a route to failure
(of course to anticipate the likely inevitable Whataboutism, certainly on Right side one sees standard religion erected in that fashion but that's typically more explicity)
What's odd about this (common) critique is that it uses the word "religion" as an insult to so-called progressive ideology, because the critics assume and accept that religion is inherently dogmatic, unreflective and uncompromising. But it's not like any of the positions in this space are free of dogmatism, including the so-called moderate ones. The fact that a majority of people don't want trans women to play on women's sport teams because "gender is determined at birth" is not a less "dogmatic" or "religious" position than the progressive position. It's not a "moderate" opinion, it's just the (current) majority opinion.
Today's piece is about the political wisdom of accepting or adopting the majority opinion in the service of getting elected so that you can govern across the full range of issues in ways that will move society closer to your end goals. It has nothing to do with progressive ideology per se, but it challenges progressives to recognize that their unwillingness to accept sub-optimal majority opinions on certain issues has political costs.
Your example, transgender in women’s sports, has data driven conclusions based upon injuries and competitive advantage. Only if those factors are irrelevant dogma in your view can your argument stand.
The "data" may or may not be the reason this is the majority opinion, but it has nothing to do with the reason people call the "progressive" position on this issue "religious". This is a zero sum transaction -- either trans women lose by not being able to play competitive sports as women, or cis women lose by having to compete against biological males with a competitive advantage. If the data you are referring to establishes that more harm is done to the cis women than to the trans women, then that seems like a perfectly reasonable way to resolve the issue on consequentialist grounds, but that is not the way the issue is commonly discussed and it is not the common critique of the progressive position.
You propose a method without a measure. Who suffers the worst consequences in your terms is purely opinion, but who loses a race or is knocked unconscious is measurable.
I'm not proposing anything - you are. You say you have "data" that answers the question, but have not indicated what the data is or to what it might apply. As for "losing races", that happens to every person but one in every single race, so that can't be "the measure". In your opinion, it's fine to bar a trans woman from competing as a woman in a race if it means that one additional cis woman will lose the race. I'm just saying that while losing a race you might have won is a "cost", so is denying somebody the right to compete altogether.
But obviously some progressives actually are religious, just not in a traditional sense! Talarico and Warnock are two progressives who are actually religious 😎
The 1% of the population that are Trans--and the 7% who are Gays--have always been punching bags for the GOP. But the demonization reached a fever pitch in the last decade when attacking Blacks--and women--became culturally unpopular.
And all for what? To rile up White Grievance, misogyny and Christian Nationalism to empower a party whose *core purpose* is to pass tax cuts for the very wealthy and Big Business. And shower largesse upon fossil fuels--while taxing and obstructing the Green technologies of the future that *still* might yet save our species from the worst of a global catastrophe; and enable us to not get our asses kicked when China inevitably comes for us.
All of which is fomented and enabled by FOX News, AM Talk Radio and the rest of RW media, that is very short on facts and long on mis- and dis-information. That would have you believe that Dem educators race-shame white kids, that Latino illegals are all psycho rapists, and that Haitian illegals will eat your pets. And while you may not personally consume much RW content, RW media sets the national tone, and has moved the Overton Window so far right that the GOP now sees Canada and the rest of the Democratic Socialist industrial world--our traditional allies--as enemies.
I really don't endorse Republicans in my comment, as they are nihilists at best. I care about this stuff *because I want progressives to win*.
Perhaps the trans sports thing was a poorly chosen example because it strikes such a nerve, so let me use others.
There's a conflict of interest between the person who wants to smoke crack on the subway and the person who doesn't want to be around that. Between the person who wants to live in the park and between the person who wants their kids to be able to play there. Between teachers who want zero risk of losing their jobs and students who need good teachers. Between the person who needs a home and the person who doesn't want a new building next door.
The point is Progressive 2026 has no way to handle this because it can't even acknowledge there's a conflict. It doesn't fit the framing, because it's not a conflict between a good, honorable, oppressed person and an evil capitalist or MAGA villain.
Are you fucking serious? Go scroll through reduxx.info. There are schoolgirls getting raped by trans-males while school officials cover it up and protect the perpetrator. Males are winning lawsuits against female salon workers for refusing to touch their penis. There are trans "activists" accusing lesbians of bigotry for refusing to have sex with them. The situation in female prisons is beyond horrific. Some feminist groups like WOLf estimate that 48% of trans-identifying male prisoners are convicted sex-offenders, no doubt because in many blue states these males are legally entitled access to women. It's almost like women and girls used to have separate spaces for a reason.
This is why self-righteousness is so dangerous. The same way that the Catholic Church leadership let pedophilic priests molest children; no amount of horrific abuse is going to change the left's mind about gender ideology. Even worse, abolishing women's rights is more important to them than defeating Trump.
Agree with you that Trans needs out of women's sports.
But hating on Trans people--or Gays in general--is not the answer. If you think that a woman deserves the right to Choose; or that she deserves equal pay + rights before the law, then the GOP is not for you.
I never said we should "hate on trans people", this is exactly what I'm talking about. Go into a progressive circle online or IRL and say that there's simply a conflict between these two groups on this admittedly edge case issue and see how they react.
Why are you lying? For everything wrong with Trump II, he hasn't rolled back abortion rights or equal pay. Meanwhile, Dems are still trying to get a national self-id law passed. Every single Democrat voted for the so called 2025 Equality Act which would outlaw female spaces or anything else that excludeds "women with penises."
Yeah, bro keep telling women they are bigots because they don't want to see, touch, or have sex with the penis of a man pretending to be a woman. See where that gets you. A Republican president, that's where.
Does Trump bear any responsibility for the SC decision to overturn Roe? A lot of women would be surprised to hear your observation/contention that Trump hasn’t done anything to roll back abortion rights.
This is part of the playbook: since gay people won acceptance, piggyback on their success and tell people that if they don't support trans "rights", they're anti-gay. But, (a) check this out: no! and (b) it's you who are anti-gay, since telling people "the only way you can preserve sex differences is to be anti-gay" is not going to work out well for gays.
I regularly read the FOX News website to not be blindsided by some new form of crazy I didn't see coming. I always feel I need a shower afterwards, but noone is forced to ingest this. This is not communist state news, this is actually attractive to people.
Which makes it a lot more dangerous and an a priori strategic reality. If you try to do politics without considering the effects on people who might at least sometimes watch FOX news, you are living in fairy land and - sadly - are actually dangerous.
History may have been bending towards justice before FOX News existed, but now it does exist and the game is fucking different.
And - sadly - vilifying FOX News is not a winning strategy, progressive self-congratulation is not a winning strategy. The only imaginable winning strategy concentrates on the people who might watch FOX News or not and give them a reason not to.
And if that means sacrificing trans-rights to avert outright fascism, I fully do think that is not too high a price.
Fox News publishes a lot of crap. But it isn’t all crap, and it’s dangerous to dismiss something just because they are pushing it. Fox heavily covered the chaos at the border during Biden’s presidency. That was real, and a lot of people cared about it, and Biden’s very slow reaction to it was probably the primary reason (along with inflation) why we lost the 2024 election.
Agree that many/most folks that watch FOX News and its ilk do so because they enjoy it. But the lies, the endless perversions of truth they push as "news" is corrosive to not only American civic culture, our democratic form of government, but also commerce and business. Which is probably why Murdoch left the news division of WSJ unimpeded. But if *educating* ourselves as a nation on the negatives of becoming a FOX Nation are not enough, then we'll get what we deserve.
And please clarify: "sacrificing trans rights to avert outright fascism."
I believe trans people should not be discriminated against in housing or employment.
But here are two trans rights I will happily sacrifice. Right now, I a biological male, can declare myself trans and waltz into the women’s side of a Korean spa so I can ogle naked women (and force them to look at my naked body) and no can question me or my sincerity as a “real” trans person.
#2. I can go out, rape a bunch of women, get caught, convicted and sentenced, and right before I’m sent to prison I can declare: “actually I’m trans. House me with the women”. Again, no one can question me or my sincerity as a “real” trans person.
"Hey dude, you're a really, really, really Great Guy and we can prove it to you. You were right to vote Trump, because Democrats really are some crazy lunatics and we can prove it to you, see here..."
Now, when the job is to try and vilify boring honest middle-of-the road-politicians or even worse Supreme Court judges that are arch-catholic and conservative without being MAGA, then FOX still gives it a go. But to most normal people, that is the line where it doesn't sound believable any more.
When FOX tries to smear Mark Kelly, Jerome Powell or some of the conservative Supreme Court judges that is a strategic win, because many people tune out.
Scare stories about outlandishly dressed transgender people on the other hand: "Couldn't that be true?"
Other than the demonstrating Proggy laundry list owni-causism, this is entirely useless.
If one wants to impede worse outcomes, one engages with the electorate that actually exists, not your desired fantasy electorate of converted Heathen unfaithful.
Of course the Bosses have fooled the Masses. The masses in general are a bunch of fucking rubes. P.T Barnum's dictum still holds true. That's what Madison Avenue *does,* and you damn well know it. But the Ellisons turning CBS--and soon CNN--into FOX-lite is not good, imo, good for the country. We need less dis-/mis-information. Not more. Not if we want to remain a Democratic Republic. A smart, educated, well-informed electorate is essential to retaining American excellence globally.
And I grew up in a pre-Gilded Age America that was more like Canada is now; or pretty much any of our EU allies. When Russians like Putin were just fucking Commies, and hating on them was patriotic and virtuous. Where Walter Cronkite was the standard for truth-telling; not Brett Baier. Where Jeffrey Epstein couldn't get a GOP sweetheart deal to keep abusing teen girls. And since when is defending the rule of law "Proggy owni-causism?"
And btw, Google sez "Proggy" is a rug-making system. And "Causism" is a form of self-healing.
Unless the Dems snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, your Troggies are due for a serious thrashing this November. The current incarnation of the GOP are a spineless, incompetent and corrupt bunch. Other than sealing the border, Trump2 has been a disaster for this country.
Sourly amusing both your belief in the power of advertising (Madison Avenue) and your repetition of the classic Leftist delusions about False Consciousness and if only the masses listened to our True and Correct Information and not the 'misinformation'... (that is information not in our ideological frame)
also sourly amusing the Lefty eggheadism of sterile prissy language parsing.
Electorates are what they are - prissy maundering on about "smart and well-educated" is nothing more than secularised religious "convert the heathen"
Proggy delusions aside, elections are won by meeting an electorate where they are, not dreaming of the conversion of the heathen to your True and Correct views.
You dislike education? In general; or just certain aspects? Or are you simply gung-ho on the Troggy "pull oneself up by the bootstraps" self-learning as an alternative for public education?
And if you honestly believe that large swaths of media *don't* routinely and deliberately engage in mis- and dis-information then I want what you've been smoking, 'cause I'm going to make a mint on it.
Or did you not hear Trump during a fucking Presidential debate claim that Haitians were eating people's pets? Every other sentence out of his mouth is either a lie, an exaggeration, or just flat out wrong.
Conservatism, if not dead, has been severely wounded by Trump2 and the spineless debt-loving GOP Congress that enables him.
It's quite amusing that you mistake criticism and dislike of self-blinding self-congratulatory delusion coming from the highly educated class with dislike of education. Over-weening self-regard is the problem, not education as education. I quite value education, being from a family with centuries of tradition of going to college and having several advanced degrees, but as all things it
In general Musa al Gharbi is quite spot on about the pathologies of the educated "symbolic capitalists" and their own self-deceptions.
the rest of your banging on your own strawmen imported in based on own-prejudices (as I mention noting about Trump, debate,s nor pulling up bootstraps, that's your knee-jerking prejudices about anyone critical of your belief system, with it quasi-religious structure).
that Trump lies as he breathes is irrelevant to my observations about your Proggy preening self-delusions
Then just relax as your Troggies get ass-kicked this November. Assuming SAVE isn't passed. Except for sealing the border, your GOP since '24 has proven itself lousy at governing; but great at corruption and deficit spending. And pedophile protection.
You are so mentally crippled that you insist I support the people I just stated I didn’t.
And you feel like you can make a point by latching onto degrees of positive adjectives (like vs love)?
If you weren’t such a miserable whore, maybe you could understand what people are saying instead of retreating into your deranged trump hating version of the world.
Cut the ad hominen bullshit--it's the refuge of coward and losers. Intellectually weak people who lack the ability to cogently rebut ideas with which they disagree. Or are you are simply projecting the adolescent self-hate you hold for your own negativity and inadequacies? When you're old enough to leave home and go off to college or the miltary you'll gain some appreciation for these concepts.
And yet you *claim* to be a Christian? A post like this on Easter--on Easter--proves you to be deluded, a liar, or a hypocrite. A few more *years* or even decades of loving Jesus Christ in your heart *might* offer you a way out of your self-created mental hell. But you've a long way to go my teenage friend.
I don’t think you’re being ironic - because you’re too much of a self indulgent whore to understand the concept - but making ad hominem attacks while telling someone that those attacks are weak and prove your inability to cogently rebut things is, well, fucking retarded.
Watching you resort to fake psychoanalysis of a stranger you’ve exchanged two messages betrays what a fucking loser you are.
This has been fun, but it seems like you’ve nothing to contribute beyond your original blather I felt inclined to acknowledge, so we probably part ways here.
What is the source of your 7% and 1% numbers? My memory says that a massive federal survey some years ago came up with roughly 3.5% LGBT. Transgender would be a subset of that number.
If you haven't read it, I highly recommend The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathon Haidt. One of its main topics is what you describe as "Good People vs. Bad People" and how that kind of thinking leads to bad outcomes.
Parties like the good people vs bad people strategy. Tribal affinity and hate of the “other” have always been part of human social behavior and are very motivating (for those “good” people in the tribe). Parties love when whatever random beliefs/narratives of the moment become part of someone’s identity. That builds loyal partisans. And once the tribe is formed, narratives can be switched out (we’ve always been at war with Eurasia, we’ve never wanted to defund the police, China can’t have our chips, no more foreign wars etc)
Manipulating people and driving hate is certainly easier than governing competently and campaigning on track record and wise policy. What is depressing is that so many people fall for it and make politics and partisan loyalty so important in their lives. An issue is that the parties and digital and social media companies (and their economic models) are all aligned in wanting us to be rabidly engaged partisans.
Yes, it's always been easier to rally support against something than for something. Successful bad actors have exploited this tribal impulse across recorded human history. In our case, it's the central factor that's permitted a minority party of the rich using highly charged wedge issues to get naïfs' support and ride to power.
Noah's essay implicitly recognizes this and cautions we good government liberals to not make it so easy for them.
And yet if the hope that the moral universe does tend upward dies, what is left?
I freely admit that those who see themselves as ‘Good people’ can often be insufferable about their perceived status, but the idea that we can be such lies at the core of every effort we've ever made to improve ourselves. I would very much prefer a regular measure of that kind of insufferably than, for example, the kind of rabid cynicism about human nature that now permeates our present administration.
Let’s not forget that progressives ended slavery, finally got women the franchise, ended Jim Crow, defeated the Robber Barons, won full marriage rights for gays, gave women the right to control their own bodies, won voting rights for all Americans, and ended the Vietnam War. The fact that those victories need to be won again and again does not detract from their importance.
The problem with the “arc of the universe” quote is that it builds complacency. The arc will bend towards whoever is pulling hardest- the universe doesn’t care if that group is good or bad. If you want the arc to bend towards justice then you need a plan to get there- it won’t bend on its own.
Apparently you are not able to distinguish between Hope and long-term aims and practical near-term excercise.
Progressives did not exist in the period of slavery but it is quite worth noting that pre Civil War their general equivalent, the radical anti-slavery activists (in contrast to broader free soil / anti-slavery) who seem to have had many similarities to the Proggies were spectacularly ineffective in achieving extensive change. Civil rights did not spring full blown at once but progressed step-by-step over a long-period with often public positioning very much more modest than end-goals.
That's the lesson, not mistaking an end state achieved over quite a period to something that sprang full blown from Zeus' head like Athena.
My recollection is that Christians ended slavery and progressives started the Vietnam war, but as noted in the “Animal House” (Nazis bombed Pearl Harbor) scene, “he’s on a roll, don’t stop him”.
Christians (or at least those who called themselves Christians - self-definition often being a moveable feast in religious as well as political circles) both supported and opposed slavery, most often based on their geographical location. Northern churches tended to oppose it. Many southern churches eagerly supported it.
The abolitionist movement was often Christian-based in the north, but hardly solely so.
Our participation in the Vietnam conflict began with our financial and military supply support of the French attempt to retain their long standing pre-war colony because we needed them to join in opposing Russian expansion Central Europe following WWII. It was a purely political decision.
Following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and their subsequent withdrawal, we began our own support for the South Vietnamese government based on the infamous ‘domino theory’ of communist expansion in Southeast Asia following our ‘loss’ of Cnina to the Maoists. This too, was not so much ‘progressive' as it was a politically stimulated anti-communist reaction to the growth of the Sino-Soviet ‘bloc’ in Europe and Asia.
Abolition didn’t start in the US. , and Christians were at the head of the movement, and using religious rationales..
Even in the US, consider John Brown, a Christian and a puritan, not a “progressive”
Kennedy and Johnson gave us the Vietnam war that we know and regret. Yes, there was a time when “progressives” were anti-communists, funny enough. You don’t need to try to explain it away. It just is.
I wasn’t suggesting that abolition started in the US. Indeed, among other, Britain was far ahead of us in that regard. And BTW, one of the main rationales for broad-based abolitionism was Abraham Lincoln’s free labor concept.
Also, to ignore the fact that many southern Christian churches openly espoused slavery rather diminishes your claim that Christians were at the head of the abolitionist movement. Also, of course, the earliest anti-slavery associations in the US were founded by Quakers.
John Brown was a fanatic and a murderer. Among other actions, he and a few of his kind hacked a couple of pro-slavery folks to death with broadswords in Kansas. The fact that he claimed his actions be just or Christian flies in the face of any legal or Christian doctrine that I know of.
It was actually Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers who started us down the road to our debacle in Vietnam. Yes, Kennedy helped to dribble us further into it by enlarging our advisory role, largely because doing so validated his anti-communist creds, as did his equally questionable ‘missile gap’ rhetoric. But he had strong doubts about anything like a land war in Asia. And yes, Johnson put us full bore into it with the Tonkin Gulf resolution. But that doesn’t excuse all the anti-communist rhetoric and activities that preceded both.
If voters are +1 for the GOP on “corruption”, then this is not a policy issue. It’s a messaging and “voters are dumb” problem. While I won’t tell you the Dems are perfect (all Congresspeople and their stock trading are pretty messed up), the GOP has progressed into the “bags full of cash are legal” and “billion dollar bribes are standard” phase. It’s hard to take the rest of these poll results seriously as policy drivers, when that one is so obviously borked.
The single most effective counter would be open primaries (not only party members allowed to vote). They could do this unilaterally and if they don’t do it, their candidate selection may be even worse than before as the moderates are leaving the party. But if they do it their candidate would enjoy unprecedented legitimacy.
Simply switching primaries to approval voting would probably help. In the primaries for the 2016 election, Trump only won pluralities in a lot of states; "Not Trump" usually got more votes than Trump, but the "Not Trump" vote got split among a number of mainstream candidates. About 30-40% of Republican primary voters turned Canditate Trump into Nominee Trump and approval voting might have given us someone like Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz - both strongly right-wing, but at least they're not a goddamn fascist.
It seems like the parties are ripe for some sort of re-alignment, as in the progressive and new deal eras. Democrats are theoretically a working class party that struggles to gain support of actual working class voters. Republicans are theoretically a free market party that is increasingly falling in love with "slopulism" ideas and dumb conspiracies. No idea what a re-alignment would actually look like, but this is really weird time for American politics where nothing the parties do makes much sense to me.
I don't think Republican is inherently free market. In fact I see the GOP as a highly contingent marriage of convenience between very different, orthogonal segments of society, that happened to have "worked" at one point.
The traditional Republican party was always more pro business than pro market. It was about what benefitted the wealthy, with votes purchased by largely symbolic sops to social conservatives.
“That means that even if you believe strongly that you’re morally on the right side of history, you still have to be strategic about picking your battles.”
It’s honestly baffling to me how elusive this seems to so many people. Like, smart, educated people I talk to regularly.
Before the last election I had a post on r/punk begging “Swing State Punks: Save Us!” go mini-viral, and encountered hundreds of people who seemed genuinely incapable of understanding the point that, yes, you can disagree very strongly with many aspects of a particular candidate, but still recognize that the alternative will likely create much worse real-world outcomes for the things you claim to care about.
One can also like the beliefs a candidate has, and realize the real world outcomes - lawlessness, racial and political discrimination, uncontrolled immigration, an education system oriented toward teachers and activists rather than students and families- are really bad.
2024 was people holding their noses to put a deeply flawed candidate in power because they didn’t like the results of the nice-sounding candidates.
The prohibition of alcohol, a major activist cause in the early 20th century, is another good example: it got enacted, but then failed in practice and ended up being repealed. Temperance activists correctly pointed out that alcohol was heavily implicated in crime, domestic violence, economic harms, and health harms; the strong merits of that argument were enough to convince the government to put the ban in place. But the ban was widely disobeyed, proved impossible to enforce, empowered organized crime and produced a huge wave of corruption and violence. Alcohol itself became more potent and dangerous, with beer and wine replaced with hard liquor. Many people tried to defend prohibition but were ultimately defeated, because it was so clear that the policy had failed on the merits.
This story is widely taught in our history classes, and it ought to be taken seriously by activists as a cautionary tale: sometimes activists pursue something that doesn’t end up working in practice, sometimes for reasons that were not anticipated before the fact. Durable victories are never inevitable, and sometimes the best course is to admit that it wasn’t a good idea after all and give up on it.
Prohibition was a terrible idea, but I get where the temperance activists were coming from. Banning alcohol got to one of the root causes of many of our social problems. When I hear progressive activists talk about needing to enact policies that solve the root cause of our problems, I am often tempted to point out that it didn't work with prohibition. To be fair, at that time, it was probably more realistic to ban alcohol than to aggressively prosecute domestic violence, so that might have been part of it.
“Address the root causes” sounds like wisdom until you realize that many root causes are unknown or unaddressable. Some are addressable and it’s good to address them, but addressing root causes is unlikely to ever be a road to utopia.
I am not a big fan of the whole "address the root cause" plan. Sometimes people are wrong about the root cause -- people engage in motivated reasoning all the time or they have inaccurate information. I would argue that progressives are often wrong about the root causes and I would rather just fix the problem than take a gamble that progressives are right about the root cause and hope whatever they want to do will fix it eventually.
Progressives also often assume that poverty and discrimination are the root causes of all social ills, but while they definitely contribute, they’re clearly not the sole causes.
This may be taught, but I don't think anyone learns any lessons from it, it's more look at what these crazy people in the past did, we could never be that crazy and stupid now. I learned more about prohibition from Ken Burns documentary than I did in school and I have a bachelor's in history.
People do often apply the lessons of prohibition to other drugs and vices (it was cited very often by activists seeking marijuana legalization) but not usually to activism more broadly.
Lots of people don’t think very hard about the lessons of history, but just because other people don’t is no reason not to do it ourselves. Thinking about the lessons of history really can help us make better decisions in the present.
Amen to this. It feels like the Democrat party is being dragged around by the nose by the leftists and hardline progressive factions. I don't mind progressives who have common sense and understand that unpopular positions are ones that should not be leaned into or die on a hill for, but all of these leftist and hardline progressive don't care. Every time I see some progressive influencer with a large YouTube following nod approvingly to some insane or moronic thing Hasan Piker says or does or goes on his livestream, my skin crawls.
The US system of primary elections arguably selects for extremists: the question is why is the Democratic Party hurt far more than the Republicans at the ballot box by the extremists in their ranks?
Having read in the past critical comment on the structural issues of the US Party system Post 1970s 'reforms' I think this goes under-commented.
The primary system that emerged from the poorly thought-through (somewhat magical thinking of 'more democracy is always better' [mean more voting at every stage]) where primaries are struturally like mini-general elections and in most cases contrary to general understandings, the Party (capital P, the legal entity) has near-zero control on who can get on, but such minis structurally are poorly attended in comparison with general, they are recipes for domination / take-over of a party by extreme but organised / motivated sub-factions or fringes.
Since 2000 , I saw it argued, the old habits pre-1970s have more or less dissolved (probably enabled in part by social media) and we are seeing both D & R being wagged by their tails / taken over or over-influenced by comparitevely fringe factions.
The 70s eras reforms for primary democracy were ill-thought-through for perverse effects, what to do to address... (someone with good structural polisci should think hard on actionable possibilities).
From here in the UK I'm also reminded of how the Conservative Party's 1998 decision to give the rank-and-file membership the final say in selecting the party's leader (previously they were elected by the MPs, and before that they were selected by unelected plutocrats: the so-called "grandees") allowed said party to be taken over by the Brexiteers, whom John Major back in the '90s had dubbed "bastards".
Exactly, I am not super familiar with UK situation overall, but I think it's similar in "democratic" particiation ends up meaning "very tiny fringy minorities" can hijack a party
Grandees with longer-term thinking, establishments are in fact good mitigants...
I will note that Biden won his primary fair and square and went on to win the election, while Kamala and Hillary(especially the former) did not win nearly as fair or square and were essentially nominated, and went on to lose the election. So far the empirical evidence is in favor of the primary system as a way to win elections.
First three sinlge party examplesthat are justPresidential election are not "the emperical evidence" -that's cherry picked ANECTDOTE.
Valid analysis is on multi level, and not single party, and multi cycle (as the point was not even Presidential focused)
Second your subjective assertion of "fair and square" is nothing more than personal preferncing dressed up in fuzzy justice language. There is no definition that's objective non-candidate partisan for "fair and square" to assert what you did (and I don't even like either of Harris or above al Clinton so this isn't own preference jdgement)
Third, a candidate winning a sinlge round is NOT THE BLOODY POINT, it is the multi cycle selection effect, and overall party brand image control, as positioning control, relativeto up and down cycle.
Republicans extremists are focused on the in-group and prog extremists are focused on the out-group. Most voters consider themselves part of the in-group.
For pretty much the whole history of the GOP they were the insiders' party and the Democrats were the outsiders' party: much of the realignment between the post-Civil-War era and today is about the status of individual demographics (for example, white Southerners were originally outsiders and are now insiders).
It certainly would help: the problem is getting the local power (especially in red states) to be able to _institute_ open (or jungle) primaries in the first place.
Because Republicans have been brainwashed by billionaire-funded extreme news and social media to either tolerate or agree with Right extremists and make Left extremists seem like a bigger threat than they really are.
Or maybe it's because MAGA fascism has almost entirely displaced old-school GOP conservatism, while the Democratic side is still contested between moderate liberals and the progressive left.
The thing is that a lot of transgender rights *are rights* we've had for a long time, that went unquestioned until very recently. Any less than the *2024* status quo is a false compromise.
At least on some things, I disagree. In particular, discrimination in housing and employment was de-facto legal until 2020 (Bostock), and "since 2020" doesn't count as "a long time" to me since I'm nearly 70. Though that decision was quite "interesting" as even conservatives on the Court agreed that it was covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so in some legal sense those rights existed since 1964 but nobody seemed to notice that until 2020...
I also wonder what you mean by "false compromise" ... a compromise is a description of some political outcome; how can it be "false"?
It would be the case that we would be doing nothing but ceding territory for nothing at all in return, allowing them to simply reengage later down the line and take more, and more, until we are nothing. As an analogy, look at the war in Ukraine. We must have something in return.
Your observations here capture a lot of what troubles me about the self-righteous habits of mind on the left at a time as fraught as now when we need to "read the room" of public opinion on a national scale and respond accordingly. We need less wishful thinking about the moral arc of the universe and realize that many of our values, no matter how deeply held, will always be contested in a pluralistic democracy.
The abortion issue you cite is a good example. I support a woman's right to choose, even beyond the boundaries set in the Roe decision. That is my personal view. But I now see that the Roe decision was probably as good a compromise on this issue, at least on a national level, as we will ever have in our lifetimes. But when Democrats in Congress responded to its repeal in the Dobbs decision, they didn't limit their attempts to restore Roe, but offered "Roe plus" legislation in response, trying to elevate the better-than-Roe regime in blue states to the status of a national standard, settled in their thinking that they were farther along now on their self-defined moral arc.
Sometimes the compromise positions on hot button issues like abortion (the Roe decision), immigration (securing the border and better controlling the asylum pathway to temporary residency) and trans rights (distinguishing between respect for trans children and limiting their right to participate in teenage sports) are the right political decisions for the moment, when one accepts that, in a democracy, no one gets all that they want all of the time, or even some of the time, but can settle for what they can live with now and contest for what they hope for later with the humility that comes from understanding that everyone else has a vote in this as well.
"Arc of history bends towards justice" is the modern day version of "God is on our side!" The expression shows the smugness, sanctimony, and confirmation bias of the speaker, but says nothing about civilization's trajectory.
I really dislike it because it builds complacency. Why work to fight for your issue if the arc is bending your way anyway? The reality is “the arc” will bend towards whoever is pulling on it hardest, and the universe doesn’t care if that’s a good cause or a bad one.
"This nation really can’t afford to keep ping-ponging back and forth between an unpopular Democratic party and a mad rightist personality cult every two to four years."
Makes me wonder how democratic countries like Iceland are consistently ranked as the most stable, peaceful. Denmark, Singapore are politically and economically stable, with trust in their governments, low corruption. Same in New Zealand.
Could it be that what many claim is America's strength - its diversity of people and ideas - makes it difficult to find common cause and stability? And if so, how does a diverse country like Canada seem to maintain more stability? (Not perfect, i know, but better.) It's a conundrum.
Presidential system is inherently disadvantaged. There are research on this showing that parliamentary systems are correlated with higher HDI and better growth (though I doubt causality study has been conducted). In fact, the US is among the very few relatively successful and prosperous presidential systems.
Interesting. I must admit i am also Israeli American. The parliamentary system in Israel is a mess. The multiple small parties that are needed to craft a government create tremendous instability. The current coalition does not represent the majority of Israelis leading to the instability.
Obviously there are different sub types too in terms of electoral method. And there's no one size fit all, but generally speaking you want some kind of Japanese/German/Taiwanese dual voting system to avoid too much fragmentation.
And to state the obvious, if there is no strong centre in your electorate then no voting system can magically create a functioning democracy.
There's no shortage of candidates to explain this difference.
One may be religion. Americans are far more religious than other developed countries and religious fervour tends to reinforce people's beliefs and their confidence in them. The metaphysical framework that religion supplies is a factor as well. Abortion probably seems much worse to someone who believes that a human soul is present in a fertilised ovum.
Another factor may be the combination of English and Northern Continental European heritages; the laissez faire outlook of the original English settlers is in constant tension with authoritarian impulses from later waves of migration from Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia etc. It means you end up with people taking odd positions such as those on the right insisting on the freedom to express authoritarian opinions or those on the left insisting that the freedom of minority groups to express their identities is an absolute right that should be enshrined in law.
These effects are possibly amplified by the fear and paranoia that results from extremely high levels of gun ownership and homicides in the US.
Also don't forget, Americans are to a large extent heirs to earlier migrant generations of Europeans who didn't like doing what they were told and were willing to take huge risks to do something about it and set off for the New World. In so far as these are characteristics that can be passed on genetically or culturally, it is perhaps not surprising that modern Americans sometimes seem possessed of a near-pathological individualism. For example, I can't imagine the idea of Sovereign Citizenship emerging from any developed country except the US.
Some of the problem is diversity, but there's also the relative lack in the US of the idea what one should sacrifice a chunk of one's personal desires for the sake of social solidarity. I mean, we're big on "life, liberty, and the pursuit of [personal] happiness". Iceland and Denmark are more culturally/ethnically homogeneous. Of course, Singapore is heavily policed to suppress troublemakers of all kinds.
As a centerist I have become increasingly fed up with both left wing politicians and NGOs promoting rights but having little to say about peoples responsibilities. Also, the Left rebranded as ‘Progressives’. This allowed them to label their opponents as ‘Regressives’, a claim that is by no means true. Many of their hobbyhorses are far from progressively changing society in the true meaning of the term. They function as political mouthpieces for a range of special interest associations.
Both Progressives and Hard Right players are now gripped by a secular religious fervour about their belief systems. Having diminished the power of the Christian and other clergy we now have a bunch of new ‘Priests’ delivering the ‘New Puritanism’.
Your definition of ‘progressives' seems rather limited. I’d suggest that it is progressives (in a general sense) who best understand that we are both the inheritors of and the participants in the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex ongoing experiment in human society and government ever attempted. It is a concept about which Americans have, on the whole, become far too complacent in assuming the strength of our Republic over the years since we were the Arsenal of Democracy.
While some who label themselves as progressives have often gone rather too far down the road of self-proclaimed righteousness, some degree of secular fervor is necessary if we are to preserve the nation we were designed to be.
I think it's a mistake for the broad left to regard this as being about compromising on key moral issues, either with republicans or with the general public. It's actually about improving on our own ideas, being willing to revise your moral view of the world based on harsh experience.
Progressives and liberals are both part of the Democratic coalition, which prides itself (generally) on being liberal and educated. One of the hallmarks of being an educated person is that you're willing to adjust your ideas based on events. You out try your theories in the real world, see if they work, and when something doesn't work you look for what to fix.
In the 2010s, a lot of progressive liberal ideology was very compelling in theory. There was a lot of (solid or not) academic research behind the big ideas of the Democratic movement, and the Obama and Biden coalitions had a rare opportunity to put a whole bunch of these liberal and leftist ideas into practice. There were all kinds of notions about equality and fairness and how society would be organized, ideas that were previously only in the realm of academic theory all abruptly made into policy all at once.
In the end, some of these ideas worked, and some of them didn't! Progressives and liberals alike need to be using this time to look at what we can improve about our theories to better prepare them for the next time we have power in the real world. Did our approach to health care actually work? To crime? To education? To self-identification of transgender people? What aspects of the 2010s liberal coalition created backlash and why? When we lost an argument, why did we lose? What went wrong? This isn't just about moving towards the mythical 'center', the correct answer might be some completely different direction. But if an idea generated enormous public backlash when we tried it, it's likely that something was wrong with the idea or its presentation. How do we fix it next time?
I think a lot of what voters want to see change Democrats. They want to see a party that recognizes some of its past mistakes and has learned from them. This doesn't mean self-flagellation or compromise or weakness, it just means updating our narratives from what they were in the the 2010s. It means taking the things that are wonderful about progressivism or liberalism, while improving on the areas that didn't work.
I don't think we can reach some kind of grand compromise with fascists by capitulating on our key issues. Make one compromise with them and they'll just move to the next issue down the line, taking our rights one by one. Instead we should focus on making our ideas better and learning from our mistakes, purely from our own sake. Because we want to win the argument and learn from the places we went wrong.
Maybe a clearer way to think about this is that I don't think Trumpism as a movement is especially interested in compromise with liberals on policy, and this affects the strategic incentives around opposing them.
I live in Portland. A few months ago, Trump declared my city a "warzone" and said it was "on fire" and he sent in a bunch of masked goons to tear gas and kidnap my neighbors. Short of swinging the election against Trump, is there some meaningful policy change or concession Portland could have made to prevent this from happening? The whole thing was a fabrication based on a Fox News fever dream!
If Minneapolis had compromised on trans sports, would it have prevented Alex Pretty's death? It seems to me that it probably wouldn't have made a meaningful difference - Minneapolis wasn't invaded because of its policies, but because Trumpists enjoy the libidinal thrill of hurting their enemies. They would have found a reason. They're not interested in getting to yes on their policy issues. This all seems relevant to how we go about opposing their movement, and the value of making policy concessions.
In the 80s, there was a powerful right-wing movement that was were very concerned about satanists. People were extremely upset about the idea of satantic cults stealing and devouring their children. Would it have helped anything in that environment if well-meaning liberals had passed a bunch of policies and laws specifically opposing the great Satan? At a certain point, you just have to acknowledge that a lot of moral panics are stupid and fake, and try to persuade people by drawing them back to the real world.
Vast swath of people who escaped the dem party. Many abstaining from voting, but many reluctantly voted for Trump because on some policy issues they believe are directionally right. There are many reluctant Trump voters, and I think just calling them facist is not gonna improve the dem’s position.
The US Civil War to free the slaves was won, and the slave were emancipated. But another century would go by before the Civil Rights Act. A century of Klan terror and lynchings (ethnic cleansing) and Jim Crow (apartheid).
And did the Cicvil Rights Act happen because 100 years had finally passed? I don't think so. It is more likely that result of WWII, and Americans getting a object lesson in what the natural endpoint of race-hatred looks like.
80 years after WWII, we have collectively forgotten that moral lesson, and now hatred and fascism (two American staples) are again on the rise. Only the abject failure of Trump's project can, maybe, remind us of that lesson.
I remember reading a quote by a prominent republican a long time ago saying that the Republican party should not let in the evangelical movement, because religious people are uncompromising in their beliefs and good politics requires compromise.
We're seeing the same thing now on the left. The democrats should never have let the progressives into influence in the party. Progressives are uncompromising.
looked it up, “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.” - Barry Goldwater
We also forget that “progressives” used to be in favor of massive state centralization of power, eugenics, and Communism in general. Noah is right: we remember the popular victories, and forget the dumb ideas and abuses. A little intellectual humility goes a long way. Moderation is not just a tactical pose, it’s an understanding that you have your own biases and blind spots, and should be open to thoughtful debate and disagreement.
"If you’re a progressive, and you believe deeply that racial preferences in hiring, leniency toward petty crime and illegal immigration, and trans women on women’s sports teams are basic human rights, I can’t tell you to change your values or go against your conscience just to win some elections."
No one can tell anyone to change their own values. But we are the Democratic Party, damn it. If people don't like democracy, don't like the idea of majority opinion ruling the day, they are in the wrong place.
We are not trusted because progressives have managed to change the meaning of "democratic" from "majority opinion" to "people being forced to live according to our values, because we believe that that would be good for the majority." Those values are starkly different from, say, JD Vance's, but the underlying arrogance reminds me of him.
As you say, the bubble is central to the problem. These people haven' a clue how they sound to the general public. When I try to explain my center-right neighbors' quite rational perspectives to them, they instantly label such people vile racists whose perspectives are unworthy of analysis.
As long as this stuff remains the face of the Democratic Party (and what with online media, I don't see how to avoid it, regardless of who the candidates are), it will be tough to regain the trust of the public.
Perhaps progressives have always been this way and I just couldn't see it from the inside, but the hubris has become pretty staggering. There's just zero theory of mind - anyone that disagrees must clearly be bought off, somehow, or part of a conspiracy, or simply rotten to the core.
The problem with a highly moralized, Good People vs. Bad People theory of politics is that it has no mechanism to deal with conflicting interests - the very core of politics - even among the (according to them) Good People. The concept that the interests of biological and trans women might occasionally be at odds, and that a compromise may be needed, is met with hands-over-ears "I can't hear you!!"
There is to me a very strong strain of displaced secularised religiousity in Lefty progressivism, they generally don't believe in God (or whatever) but have displaced that action and comportment, that generalised feeling and thinking to what becomes essentially secular religion that is essentially a political identity.
Not per se new, Marxism often was like this.
the problem becoming fundamentally dogmatism in pluralistic democracy is typically a route to failure
(of course to anticipate the likely inevitable Whataboutism, certainly on Right side one sees standard religion erected in that fashion but that's typically more explicity)
What's odd about this (common) critique is that it uses the word "religion" as an insult to so-called progressive ideology, because the critics assume and accept that religion is inherently dogmatic, unreflective and uncompromising. But it's not like any of the positions in this space are free of dogmatism, including the so-called moderate ones. The fact that a majority of people don't want trans women to play on women's sport teams because "gender is determined at birth" is not a less "dogmatic" or "religious" position than the progressive position. It's not a "moderate" opinion, it's just the (current) majority opinion.
Today's piece is about the political wisdom of accepting or adopting the majority opinion in the service of getting elected so that you can govern across the full range of issues in ways that will move society closer to your end goals. It has nothing to do with progressive ideology per se, but it challenges progressives to recognize that their unwillingness to accept sub-optimal majority opinions on certain issues has political costs.
Your example, transgender in women’s sports, has data driven conclusions based upon injuries and competitive advantage. Only if those factors are irrelevant dogma in your view can your argument stand.
The "data" may or may not be the reason this is the majority opinion, but it has nothing to do with the reason people call the "progressive" position on this issue "religious". This is a zero sum transaction -- either trans women lose by not being able to play competitive sports as women, or cis women lose by having to compete against biological males with a competitive advantage. If the data you are referring to establishes that more harm is done to the cis women than to the trans women, then that seems like a perfectly reasonable way to resolve the issue on consequentialist grounds, but that is not the way the issue is commonly discussed and it is not the common critique of the progressive position.
You propose a method without a measure. Who suffers the worst consequences in your terms is purely opinion, but who loses a race or is knocked unconscious is measurable.
I'm not proposing anything - you are. You say you have "data" that answers the question, but have not indicated what the data is or to what it might apply. As for "losing races", that happens to every person but one in every single race, so that can't be "the measure". In your opinion, it's fine to bar a trans woman from competing as a woman in a race if it means that one additional cis woman will lose the race. I'm just saying that while losing a race you might have won is a "cost", so is denying somebody the right to compete altogether.
True!
What, you don’t think God was a progressive?
That said, this confusing word salad suggests nothing so much as an attempt just to throw standard terms about with a certain air of faux expertise.
Ah... the standard online Proggy egghead key words. Word Salad, expertise....
Little else to say about your scribblings here.
Oh I doubt that is the case.
The snide snotty Proggy egghead class rarely lacks for pre-packed responses to prove their virtue and superiority.
Keep that reactionary flag flying as long as you can.
But obviously some progressives actually are religious, just not in a traditional sense! Talarico and Warnock are two progressives who are actually religious 😎
Sure, however my comment was really about the very ostenatiously "irreligious / atheist" component which in On-Line sense is the most visible.
The 1% of the population that are Trans--and the 7% who are Gays--have always been punching bags for the GOP. But the demonization reached a fever pitch in the last decade when attacking Blacks--and women--became culturally unpopular.
And all for what? To rile up White Grievance, misogyny and Christian Nationalism to empower a party whose *core purpose* is to pass tax cuts for the very wealthy and Big Business. And shower largesse upon fossil fuels--while taxing and obstructing the Green technologies of the future that *still* might yet save our species from the worst of a global catastrophe; and enable us to not get our asses kicked when China inevitably comes for us.
All of which is fomented and enabled by FOX News, AM Talk Radio and the rest of RW media, that is very short on facts and long on mis- and dis-information. That would have you believe that Dem educators race-shame white kids, that Latino illegals are all psycho rapists, and that Haitian illegals will eat your pets. And while you may not personally consume much RW content, RW media sets the national tone, and has moved the Overton Window so far right that the GOP now sees Canada and the rest of the Democratic Socialist industrial world--our traditional allies--as enemies.
Is this the America you want?
I really don't endorse Republicans in my comment, as they are nihilists at best. I care about this stuff *because I want progressives to win*.
Perhaps the trans sports thing was a poorly chosen example because it strikes such a nerve, so let me use others.
There's a conflict of interest between the person who wants to smoke crack on the subway and the person who doesn't want to be around that. Between the person who wants to live in the park and between the person who wants their kids to be able to play there. Between teachers who want zero risk of losing their jobs and students who need good teachers. Between the person who needs a home and the person who doesn't want a new building next door.
The point is Progressive 2026 has no way to handle this because it can't even acknowledge there's a conflict. It doesn't fit the framing, because it's not a conflict between a good, honorable, oppressed person and an evil capitalist or MAGA villain.
Are you fucking serious? Go scroll through reduxx.info. There are schoolgirls getting raped by trans-males while school officials cover it up and protect the perpetrator. Males are winning lawsuits against female salon workers for refusing to touch their penis. There are trans "activists" accusing lesbians of bigotry for refusing to have sex with them. The situation in female prisons is beyond horrific. Some feminist groups like WOLf estimate that 48% of trans-identifying male prisoners are convicted sex-offenders, no doubt because in many blue states these males are legally entitled access to women. It's almost like women and girls used to have separate spaces for a reason.
This is why self-righteousness is so dangerous. The same way that the Catholic Church leadership let pedophilic priests molest children; no amount of horrific abuse is going to change the left's mind about gender ideology. Even worse, abolishing women's rights is more important to them than defeating Trump.
Agree with you that Trans needs out of women's sports.
But hating on Trans people--or Gays in general--is not the answer. If you think that a woman deserves the right to Choose; or that she deserves equal pay + rights before the law, then the GOP is not for you.
I never said we should "hate on trans people", this is exactly what I'm talking about. Go into a progressive circle online or IRL and say that there's simply a conflict between these two groups on this admittedly edge case issue and see how they react.
Why are you lying? For everything wrong with Trump II, he hasn't rolled back abortion rights or equal pay. Meanwhile, Dems are still trying to get a national self-id law passed. Every single Democrat voted for the so called 2025 Equality Act which would outlaw female spaces or anything else that excludeds "women with penises."
Take your hate somewhere else.
Yeah, bro keep telling women they are bigots because they don't want to see, touch, or have sex with the penis of a man pretending to be a woman. See where that gets you. A Republican president, that's where.
nope, cry harder about it
Does Trump bear any responsibility for the SC decision to overturn Roe? A lot of women would be surprised to hear your observation/contention that Trump hasn’t done anything to roll back abortion rights.
gays "in general"? Like trans is a flavor of gay?
This is part of the playbook: since gay people won acceptance, piggyback on their success and tell people that if they don't support trans "rights", they're anti-gay. But, (a) check this out: no! and (b) it's you who are anti-gay, since telling people "the only way you can preserve sex differences is to be anti-gay" is not going to work out well for gays.
What about the other issues that April mentioned- like forcing salon workers to wax males? Or housing female prisoners with male rapists?
MediaFactChecks.org rates reduxx.info as basically an extreme-Right hate group, that fails fact checks, with a mixed credibility rating: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/reduxx-bias-and-credibility/
I regularly read the FOX News website to not be blindsided by some new form of crazy I didn't see coming. I always feel I need a shower afterwards, but noone is forced to ingest this. This is not communist state news, this is actually attractive to people.
Which makes it a lot more dangerous and an a priori strategic reality. If you try to do politics without considering the effects on people who might at least sometimes watch FOX news, you are living in fairy land and - sadly - are actually dangerous.
History may have been bending towards justice before FOX News existed, but now it does exist and the game is fucking different.
And - sadly - vilifying FOX News is not a winning strategy, progressive self-congratulation is not a winning strategy. The only imaginable winning strategy concentrates on the people who might watch FOX News or not and give them a reason not to.
And if that means sacrificing trans-rights to avert outright fascism, I fully do think that is not too high a price.
Fox News publishes a lot of crap. But it isn’t all crap, and it’s dangerous to dismiss something just because they are pushing it. Fox heavily covered the chaos at the border during Biden’s presidency. That was real, and a lot of people cared about it, and Biden’s very slow reaction to it was probably the primary reason (along with inflation) why we lost the 2024 election.
I agree. But this makes FOX News itself only more dangerous.
“We” lost the 2024 election because nearly half of American voters bought into one of the most successful con jobs in American political history
“we” in scare quotes? I voted for Harris and dearly wish she had won!
As did I. I was simply modifying the ‘we’ bit. In fact, of course all American voters are ‘we’.
Agree that many/most folks that watch FOX News and its ilk do so because they enjoy it. But the lies, the endless perversions of truth they push as "news" is corrosive to not only American civic culture, our democratic form of government, but also commerce and business. Which is probably why Murdoch left the news division of WSJ unimpeded. But if *educating* ourselves as a nation on the negatives of becoming a FOX Nation are not enough, then we'll get what we deserve.
And please clarify: "sacrificing trans rights to avert outright fascism."
I believe trans people should not be discriminated against in housing or employment.
But here are two trans rights I will happily sacrifice. Right now, I a biological male, can declare myself trans and waltz into the women’s side of a Korean spa so I can ogle naked women (and force them to look at my naked body) and no can question me or my sincerity as a “real” trans person.
#2. I can go out, rape a bunch of women, get caught, convicted and sentenced, and right before I’m sent to prison I can declare: “actually I’m trans. House me with the women”. Again, no one can question me or my sincerity as a “real” trans person.
When what you are suggesting actually begins to happen, let me know. I’ve seen nothing of the sort in any reputable news outlet.
Here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/zsq5fc/wi_spa_controversy_follow_up_with_articles/?rdt=41811 Also https://www.prearesourcecenter.org/resource/lawsuit-female-prisoner-says-she-was-raped-transgender-inmate
Ultimately the basic message of FOX News is:
"Hey dude, you're a really, really, really Great Guy and we can prove it to you. You were right to vote Trump, because Democrats really are some crazy lunatics and we can prove it to you, see here..."
Now, when the job is to try and vilify boring honest middle-of-the road-politicians or even worse Supreme Court judges that are arch-catholic and conservative without being MAGA, then FOX still gives it a go. But to most normal people, that is the line where it doesn't sound believable any more.
When FOX tries to smear Mark Kelly, Jerome Powell or some of the conservative Supreme Court judges that is a strategic win, because many people tune out.
Scare stories about outlandishly dressed transgender people on the other hand: "Couldn't that be true?"
"People are saying."
Agree with your analysis re:media reality, but...it's always easy to sacrifice someone else's rights
Right, like for example sacrificing the rights of tens of millions of minority immigrants because of ideological beliefs in sex mutability.
Ah yes, False Consciounsness.
The Bosses have fooled the masses.
Other than the demonstrating Proggy laundry list owni-causism, this is entirely useless.
If one wants to impede worse outcomes, one engages with the electorate that actually exists, not your desired fantasy electorate of converted Heathen unfaithful.
Of course the Bosses have fooled the Masses. The masses in general are a bunch of fucking rubes. P.T Barnum's dictum still holds true. That's what Madison Avenue *does,* and you damn well know it. But the Ellisons turning CBS--and soon CNN--into FOX-lite is not good, imo, good for the country. We need less dis-/mis-information. Not more. Not if we want to remain a Democratic Republic. A smart, educated, well-informed electorate is essential to retaining American excellence globally.
And I grew up in a pre-Gilded Age America that was more like Canada is now; or pretty much any of our EU allies. When Russians like Putin were just fucking Commies, and hating on them was patriotic and virtuous. Where Walter Cronkite was the standard for truth-telling; not Brett Baier. Where Jeffrey Epstein couldn't get a GOP sweetheart deal to keep abusing teen girls. And since when is defending the rule of law "Proggy owni-causism?"
And btw, Google sez "Proggy" is a rug-making system. And "Causism" is a form of self-healing.
This is a very dangerous delusion. Huge swaths of NYC shifted red in the 2024 election. New York magazine (not exactly a right wing rag) sent a reporter to investigate. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-new-york-election-results-turning-red.html It’s pay walled, but I think it’s so important I pasted it into my own Google doc. These people were not just brainwashed by Fox News: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13MKX0Gem5flaG92oUWnwdeEl9wykt20x_O5GaNZjQkY/edit?usp=drivesdk
thanks
The Fox News Fallacy is one of the most dangerous of many delusions of the Proggy activist fringe.
Unless the Dems snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, your Troggies are due for a serious thrashing this November. The current incarnation of the GOP are a spineless, incompetent and corrupt bunch. Other than sealing the border, Trump2 has been a disaster for this country.
Sourly amusing both your belief in the power of advertising (Madison Avenue) and your repetition of the classic Leftist delusions about False Consciousness and if only the masses listened to our True and Correct Information and not the 'misinformation'... (that is information not in our ideological frame)
also sourly amusing the Lefty eggheadism of sterile prissy language parsing.
Electorates are what they are - prissy maundering on about "smart and well-educated" is nothing more than secularised religious "convert the heathen"
Proggy delusions aside, elections are won by meeting an electorate where they are, not dreaming of the conversion of the heathen to your True and Correct views.
You dislike education? In general; or just certain aspects? Or are you simply gung-ho on the Troggy "pull oneself up by the bootstraps" self-learning as an alternative for public education?
And if you honestly believe that large swaths of media *don't* routinely and deliberately engage in mis- and dis-information then I want what you've been smoking, 'cause I'm going to make a mint on it.
Or did you not hear Trump during a fucking Presidential debate claim that Haitians were eating people's pets? Every other sentence out of his mouth is either a lie, an exaggeration, or just flat out wrong.
Conservatism, if not dead, has been severely wounded by Trump2 and the spineless debt-loving GOP Congress that enables him.
It's quite amusing that you mistake criticism and dislike of self-blinding self-congratulatory delusion coming from the highly educated class with dislike of education. Over-weening self-regard is the problem, not education as education. I quite value education, being from a family with centuries of tradition of going to college and having several advanced degrees, but as all things it
In general Musa al Gharbi is quite spot on about the pathologies of the educated "symbolic capitalists" and their own self-deceptions.
the rest of your banging on your own strawmen imported in based on own-prejudices (as I mention noting about Trump, debate,s nor pulling up bootstraps, that's your knee-jerking prejudices about anyone critical of your belief system, with it quasi-religious structure).
that Trump lies as he breathes is irrelevant to my observations about your Proggy preening self-delusions
More word salad.
Holy shit. This rambling list of whiny progressive blather would be galling if it wasn’t so generic.
I don’t watch Fox News and I hate Trump.
I am Christian and I like America.
You are a moron and might be a loser.
If your post was a caricature I apologize.
Then just relax as your Troggies get ass-kicked this November. Assuming SAVE isn't passed. Except for sealing the border, your GOP since '24 has proven itself lousy at governing; but great at corruption and deficit spending. And pedophile protection.
That you merely *like* America says it all.
You are so mentally crippled that you insist I support the people I just stated I didn’t.
And you feel like you can make a point by latching onto degrees of positive adjectives (like vs love)?
If you weren’t such a miserable whore, maybe you could understand what people are saying instead of retreating into your deranged trump hating version of the world.
Cut the ad hominen bullshit--it's the refuge of coward and losers. Intellectually weak people who lack the ability to cogently rebut ideas with which they disagree. Or are you are simply projecting the adolescent self-hate you hold for your own negativity and inadequacies? When you're old enough to leave home and go off to college or the miltary you'll gain some appreciation for these concepts.
And yet you *claim* to be a Christian? A post like this on Easter--on Easter--proves you to be deluded, a liar, or a hypocrite. A few more *years* or even decades of loving Jesus Christ in your heart *might* offer you a way out of your self-created mental hell. But you've a long way to go my teenage friend.
Happy Easter.
I don’t think you’re being ironic - because you’re too much of a self indulgent whore to understand the concept - but making ad hominem attacks while telling someone that those attacks are weak and prove your inability to cogently rebut things is, well, fucking retarded.
Watching you resort to fake psychoanalysis of a stranger you’ve exchanged two messages betrays what a fucking loser you are.
This has been fun, but it seems like you’ve nothing to contribute beyond your original blather I felt inclined to acknowledge, so we probably part ways here.
But wish you the best, happy Easter as well.
What is the source of your 7% and 1% numbers? My memory says that a massive federal survey some years ago came up with roughly 3.5% LGBT. Transgender would be a subset of that number.
Lord Google sez 9.3% of US was LGBTQ+ in '25. https://www.google.com/search?q=what+%25+of+US+are+LGBTQ%2B+2025&rlz=1C1RXQR_enUS1077US1077&oq=what+%25+of+US+are+LGBTQ%2B+2025&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIICAEQABgWGB4yCAgCEAAYFhgeMggIAxAAGBYYHjIHCAQQABjvBTIHCAUQABjvBTIKCAYQABiABBiiBNIBCjE3ODA3ajBqMTWoAgiwAgHxBQsPa4NBNb2D&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
If you haven't read it, I highly recommend The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathon Haidt. One of its main topics is what you describe as "Good People vs. Bad People" and how that kind of thinking leads to bad outcomes.
Parties like the good people vs bad people strategy. Tribal affinity and hate of the “other” have always been part of human social behavior and are very motivating (for those “good” people in the tribe). Parties love when whatever random beliefs/narratives of the moment become part of someone’s identity. That builds loyal partisans. And once the tribe is formed, narratives can be switched out (we’ve always been at war with Eurasia, we’ve never wanted to defund the police, China can’t have our chips, no more foreign wars etc)
Manipulating people and driving hate is certainly easier than governing competently and campaigning on track record and wise policy. What is depressing is that so many people fall for it and make politics and partisan loyalty so important in their lives. An issue is that the parties and digital and social media companies (and their economic models) are all aligned in wanting us to be rabidly engaged partisans.
Yes, it's always been easier to rally support against something than for something. Successful bad actors have exploited this tribal impulse across recorded human history. In our case, it's the central factor that's permitted a minority party of the rich using highly charged wedge issues to get naïfs' support and ride to power.
Noah's essay implicitly recognizes this and cautions we good government liberals to not make it so easy for them.
Works for me.
And yet if the hope that the moral universe does tend upward dies, what is left?
I freely admit that those who see themselves as ‘Good people’ can often be insufferable about their perceived status, but the idea that we can be such lies at the core of every effort we've ever made to improve ourselves. I would very much prefer a regular measure of that kind of insufferably than, for example, the kind of rabid cynicism about human nature that now permeates our present administration.
Let’s not forget that progressives ended slavery, finally got women the franchise, ended Jim Crow, defeated the Robber Barons, won full marriage rights for gays, gave women the right to control their own bodies, won voting rights for all Americans, and ended the Vietnam War. The fact that those victories need to be won again and again does not detract from their importance.
The problem with the “arc of the universe” quote is that it builds complacency. The arc will bend towards whoever is pulling hardest- the universe doesn’t care if that group is good or bad. If you want the arc to bend towards justice then you need a plan to get there- it won’t bend on its own.
I wasn’t suggesting complacency, rather that the desire to aid in that trajectory is based, at least partially, on the hope that it can be made to.
Apparently you are not able to distinguish between Hope and long-term aims and practical near-term excercise.
Progressives did not exist in the period of slavery but it is quite worth noting that pre Civil War their general equivalent, the radical anti-slavery activists (in contrast to broader free soil / anti-slavery) who seem to have had many similarities to the Proggies were spectacularly ineffective in achieving extensive change. Civil rights did not spring full blown at once but progressed step-by-step over a long-period with often public positioning very much more modest than end-goals.
That's the lesson, not mistaking an end state achieved over quite a period to something that sprang full blown from Zeus' head like Athena.
You seem to be making a distinction without a difference. I said nothing about any time frame.
My recollection is that Christians ended slavery and progressives started the Vietnam war, but as noted in the “Animal House” (Nazis bombed Pearl Harbor) scene, “he’s on a roll, don’t stop him”.
Christians (or at least those who called themselves Christians - self-definition often being a moveable feast in religious as well as political circles) both supported and opposed slavery, most often based on their geographical location. Northern churches tended to oppose it. Many southern churches eagerly supported it.
The abolitionist movement was often Christian-based in the north, but hardly solely so.
Our participation in the Vietnam conflict began with our financial and military supply support of the French attempt to retain their long standing pre-war colony because we needed them to join in opposing Russian expansion Central Europe following WWII. It was a purely political decision.
Following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and their subsequent withdrawal, we began our own support for the South Vietnamese government based on the infamous ‘domino theory’ of communist expansion in Southeast Asia following our ‘loss’ of Cnina to the Maoists. This too, was not so much ‘progressive' as it was a politically stimulated anti-communist reaction to the growth of the Sino-Soviet ‘bloc’ in Europe and Asia.
Abolition didn’t start in the US. , and Christians were at the head of the movement, and using religious rationales..
Even in the US, consider John Brown, a Christian and a puritan, not a “progressive”
Kennedy and Johnson gave us the Vietnam war that we know and regret. Yes, there was a time when “progressives” were anti-communists, funny enough. You don’t need to try to explain it away. It just is.
Times change. Fortunately history can be edited.
I wasn’t suggesting that abolition started in the US. Indeed, among other, Britain was far ahead of us in that regard. And BTW, one of the main rationales for broad-based abolitionism was Abraham Lincoln’s free labor concept.
Also, to ignore the fact that many southern Christian churches openly espoused slavery rather diminishes your claim that Christians were at the head of the abolitionist movement. Also, of course, the earliest anti-slavery associations in the US were founded by Quakers.
John Brown was a fanatic and a murderer. Among other actions, he and a few of his kind hacked a couple of pro-slavery folks to death with broadswords in Kansas. The fact that he claimed his actions be just or Christian flies in the face of any legal or Christian doctrine that I know of.
It was actually Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers who started us down the road to our debacle in Vietnam. Yes, Kennedy helped to dribble us further into it by enlarging our advisory role, largely because doing so validated his anti-communist creds, as did his equally questionable ‘missile gap’ rhetoric. But he had strong doubts about anything like a land war in Asia. And yes, Johnson put us full bore into it with the Tonkin Gulf resolution. But that doesn’t excuse all the anti-communist rhetoric and activities that preceded both.
You are aware that Quakers were Christians?
There’s compelling arguments that black-and-white thinking lowered your realities IQ by 10-20 points.
If voters are +1 for the GOP on “corruption”, then this is not a policy issue. It’s a messaging and “voters are dumb” problem. While I won’t tell you the Dems are perfect (all Congresspeople and their stock trading are pretty messed up), the GOP has progressed into the “bags full of cash are legal” and “billion dollar bribes are standard” phase. It’s hard to take the rest of these poll results seriously as policy drivers, when that one is so obviously borked.
The single most effective counter would be open primaries (not only party members allowed to vote). They could do this unilaterally and if they don’t do it, their candidate selection may be even worse than before as the moderates are leaving the party. But if they do it their candidate would enjoy unprecedented legitimacy.
Simply switching primaries to approval voting would probably help. In the primaries for the 2016 election, Trump only won pluralities in a lot of states; "Not Trump" usually got more votes than Trump, but the "Not Trump" vote got split among a number of mainstream candidates. About 30-40% of Republican primary voters turned Canditate Trump into Nominee Trump and approval voting might have given us someone like Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz - both strongly right-wing, but at least they're not a goddamn fascist.
It seems like the parties are ripe for some sort of re-alignment, as in the progressive and new deal eras. Democrats are theoretically a working class party that struggles to gain support of actual working class voters. Republicans are theoretically a free market party that is increasingly falling in love with "slopulism" ideas and dumb conspiracies. No idea what a re-alignment would actually look like, but this is really weird time for American politics where nothing the parties do makes much sense to me.
I don't think Republican is inherently free market. In fact I see the GOP as a highly contingent marriage of convenience between very different, orthogonal segments of society, that happened to have "worked" at one point.
The same is clearly true for the democrats.
If you want to be a majority party, you're going to need a lot of different interest groups and viewpoints in it
I'm saying this as a small-c conservative, but the liberal-progressive camp in the US is certainly more idealogocally coherent than the GOP.
Not really. Black Democrats are a huge chunk of the Democratic base, and they include a large number of not terribly progressive voters.
The traditional Republican party was always more pro business than pro market. It was about what benefitted the wealthy, with votes purchased by largely symbolic sops to social conservatives.
Unfortunately, the realignment we've actually been getting is "experts vs crackpots," and the crackpots are winning.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-crank-realignment-is-bad-for
“That means that even if you believe strongly that you’re morally on the right side of history, you still have to be strategic about picking your battles.”
It’s honestly baffling to me how elusive this seems to so many people. Like, smart, educated people I talk to regularly.
Before the last election I had a post on r/punk begging “Swing State Punks: Save Us!” go mini-viral, and encountered hundreds of people who seemed genuinely incapable of understanding the point that, yes, you can disagree very strongly with many aspects of a particular candidate, but still recognize that the alternative will likely create much worse real-world outcomes for the things you claim to care about.
One can also like the beliefs a candidate has, and realize the real world outcomes - lawlessness, racial and political discrimination, uncontrolled immigration, an education system oriented toward teachers and activists rather than students and families- are really bad.
2024 was people holding their noses to put a deeply flawed candidate in power because they didn’t like the results of the nice-sounding candidates.
I wonder how they like the results of the candidate they held their nose and chose. Only been 1 year…
The prohibition of alcohol, a major activist cause in the early 20th century, is another good example: it got enacted, but then failed in practice and ended up being repealed. Temperance activists correctly pointed out that alcohol was heavily implicated in crime, domestic violence, economic harms, and health harms; the strong merits of that argument were enough to convince the government to put the ban in place. But the ban was widely disobeyed, proved impossible to enforce, empowered organized crime and produced a huge wave of corruption and violence. Alcohol itself became more potent and dangerous, with beer and wine replaced with hard liquor. Many people tried to defend prohibition but were ultimately defeated, because it was so clear that the policy had failed on the merits.
This story is widely taught in our history classes, and it ought to be taken seriously by activists as a cautionary tale: sometimes activists pursue something that doesn’t end up working in practice, sometimes for reasons that were not anticipated before the fact. Durable victories are never inevitable, and sometimes the best course is to admit that it wasn’t a good idea after all and give up on it.
Prohibition was a terrible idea, but I get where the temperance activists were coming from. Banning alcohol got to one of the root causes of many of our social problems. When I hear progressive activists talk about needing to enact policies that solve the root cause of our problems, I am often tempted to point out that it didn't work with prohibition. To be fair, at that time, it was probably more realistic to ban alcohol than to aggressively prosecute domestic violence, so that might have been part of it.
“Address the root causes” sounds like wisdom until you realize that many root causes are unknown or unaddressable. Some are addressable and it’s good to address them, but addressing root causes is unlikely to ever be a road to utopia.
I am not a big fan of the whole "address the root cause" plan. Sometimes people are wrong about the root cause -- people engage in motivated reasoning all the time or they have inaccurate information. I would argue that progressives are often wrong about the root causes and I would rather just fix the problem than take a gamble that progressives are right about the root cause and hope whatever they want to do will fix it eventually.
Progressives also often assume that poverty and discrimination are the root causes of all social ills, but while they definitely contribute, they’re clearly not the sole causes.
Poverty in particular, is often the result of bad decisions. Not the cause of them.
Each is a result of the other. It’s a loop.
This may be taught, but I don't think anyone learns any lessons from it, it's more look at what these crazy people in the past did, we could never be that crazy and stupid now. I learned more about prohibition from Ken Burns documentary than I did in school and I have a bachelor's in history.
People do often apply the lessons of prohibition to other drugs and vices (it was cited very often by activists seeking marijuana legalization) but not usually to activism more broadly.
Lots of people don’t think very hard about the lessons of history, but just because other people don’t is no reason not to do it ourselves. Thinking about the lessons of history really can help us make better decisions in the present.
Amen to this. It feels like the Democrat party is being dragged around by the nose by the leftists and hardline progressive factions. I don't mind progressives who have common sense and understand that unpopular positions are ones that should not be leaned into or die on a hill for, but all of these leftist and hardline progressive don't care. Every time I see some progressive influencer with a large YouTube following nod approvingly to some insane or moronic thing Hasan Piker says or does or goes on his livestream, my skin crawls.
The US system of primary elections arguably selects for extremists: the question is why is the Democratic Party hurt far more than the Republicans at the ballot box by the extremists in their ranks?
Having read in the past critical comment on the structural issues of the US Party system Post 1970s 'reforms' I think this goes under-commented.
The primary system that emerged from the poorly thought-through (somewhat magical thinking of 'more democracy is always better' [mean more voting at every stage]) where primaries are struturally like mini-general elections and in most cases contrary to general understandings, the Party (capital P, the legal entity) has near-zero control on who can get on, but such minis structurally are poorly attended in comparison with general, they are recipes for domination / take-over of a party by extreme but organised / motivated sub-factions or fringes.
Since 2000 , I saw it argued, the old habits pre-1970s have more or less dissolved (probably enabled in part by social media) and we are seeing both D & R being wagged by their tails / taken over or over-influenced by comparitevely fringe factions.
The 70s eras reforms for primary democracy were ill-thought-through for perverse effects, what to do to address... (someone with good structural polisci should think hard on actionable possibilities).
From here in the UK I'm also reminded of how the Conservative Party's 1998 decision to give the rank-and-file membership the final say in selecting the party's leader (previously they were elected by the MPs, and before that they were selected by unelected plutocrats: the so-called "grandees") allowed said party to be taken over by the Brexiteers, whom John Major back in the '90s had dubbed "bastards".
Exactly, I am not super familiar with UK situation overall, but I think it's similar in "democratic" particiation ends up meaning "very tiny fringy minorities" can hijack a party
Grandees with longer-term thinking, establishments are in fact good mitigants...
I will note that Biden won his primary fair and square and went on to win the election, while Kamala and Hillary(especially the former) did not win nearly as fair or square and were essentially nominated, and went on to lose the election. So far the empirical evidence is in favor of the primary system as a way to win elections.
Eh? You didn't grasps thisat all.
First three sinlge party examplesthat are justPresidential election are not "the emperical evidence" -that's cherry picked ANECTDOTE.
Valid analysis is on multi level, and not single party, and multi cycle (as the point was not even Presidential focused)
Second your subjective assertion of "fair and square" is nothing more than personal preferncing dressed up in fuzzy justice language. There is no definition that's objective non-candidate partisan for "fair and square" to assert what you did (and I don't even like either of Harris or above al Clinton so this isn't own preference jdgement)
Third, a candidate winning a sinlge round is NOT THE BLOODY POINT, it is the multi cycle selection effect, and overall party brand image control, as positioning control, relativeto up and down cycle.
Anectdote is not data.
Republicans extremists are focused on the in-group and prog extremists are focused on the out-group. Most voters consider themselves part of the in-group.
For pretty much the whole history of the GOP they were the insiders' party and the Democrats were the outsiders' party: much of the realignment between the post-Civil-War era and today is about the status of individual demographics (for example, white Southerners were originally outsiders and are now insiders).
1)More geographically concentrated
2) academia and NGOs/activists survive on government handouts - tighter alignment than, say, corporations and the GOP
What would actually be the downside of open primaries? Wouldn’t this be the remedy?
It certainly would help: the problem is getting the local power (especially in red states) to be able to _institute_ open (or jungle) primaries in the first place.
I don't know that it is.
Biden was elected because of trump extremism
Then, trump was reelected, because the biden extremism.
And now trump is unpopular because of extremism
Because Republicans have been brainwashed by billionaire-funded extreme news and social media to either tolerate or agree with Right extremists and make Left extremists seem like a bigger threat than they really are.
Or maybe it's because MAGA fascism has almost entirely displaced old-school GOP conservatism, while the Democratic side is still contested between moderate liberals and the progressive left.
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/liberalism-did-not-fail-conservatism-did/
The thing is that a lot of transgender rights *are rights* we've had for a long time, that went unquestioned until very recently. Any less than the *2024* status quo is a false compromise.
At least on some things, I disagree. In particular, discrimination in housing and employment was de-facto legal until 2020 (Bostock), and "since 2020" doesn't count as "a long time" to me since I'm nearly 70. Though that decision was quite "interesting" as even conservatives on the Court agreed that it was covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so in some legal sense those rights existed since 1964 but nobody seemed to notice that until 2020...
I also wonder what you mean by "false compromise" ... a compromise is a description of some political outcome; how can it be "false"?
It would be the case that we would be doing nothing but ceding territory for nothing at all in return, allowing them to simply reengage later down the line and take more, and more, until we are nothing. As an analogy, look at the war in Ukraine. We must have something in return.
Your observations here capture a lot of what troubles me about the self-righteous habits of mind on the left at a time as fraught as now when we need to "read the room" of public opinion on a national scale and respond accordingly. We need less wishful thinking about the moral arc of the universe and realize that many of our values, no matter how deeply held, will always be contested in a pluralistic democracy.
The abortion issue you cite is a good example. I support a woman's right to choose, even beyond the boundaries set in the Roe decision. That is my personal view. But I now see that the Roe decision was probably as good a compromise on this issue, at least on a national level, as we will ever have in our lifetimes. But when Democrats in Congress responded to its repeal in the Dobbs decision, they didn't limit their attempts to restore Roe, but offered "Roe plus" legislation in response, trying to elevate the better-than-Roe regime in blue states to the status of a national standard, settled in their thinking that they were farther along now on their self-defined moral arc.
Sometimes the compromise positions on hot button issues like abortion (the Roe decision), immigration (securing the border and better controlling the asylum pathway to temporary residency) and trans rights (distinguishing between respect for trans children and limiting their right to participate in teenage sports) are the right political decisions for the moment, when one accepts that, in a democracy, no one gets all that they want all of the time, or even some of the time, but can settle for what they can live with now and contest for what they hope for later with the humility that comes from understanding that everyone else has a vote in this as well.
"Arc of history bends towards justice" is the modern day version of "God is on our side!" The expression shows the smugness, sanctimony, and confirmation bias of the speaker, but says nothing about civilization's trajectory.
I really dislike it because it builds complacency. Why work to fight for your issue if the arc is bending your way anyway? The reality is “the arc” will bend towards whoever is pulling on it hardest, and the universe doesn’t care if that’s a good cause or a bad one.
"This nation really can’t afford to keep ping-ponging back and forth between an unpopular Democratic party and a mad rightist personality cult every two to four years."
Makes me wonder how democratic countries like Iceland are consistently ranked as the most stable, peaceful. Denmark, Singapore are politically and economically stable, with trust in their governments, low corruption. Same in New Zealand.
Could it be that what many claim is America's strength - its diversity of people and ideas - makes it difficult to find common cause and stability? And if so, how does a diverse country like Canada seem to maintain more stability? (Not perfect, i know, but better.) It's a conundrum.
Presidential system is inherently disadvantaged. There are research on this showing that parliamentary systems are correlated with higher HDI and better growth (though I doubt causality study has been conducted). In fact, the US is among the very few relatively successful and prosperous presidential systems.
Interesting. I must admit i am also Israeli American. The parliamentary system in Israel is a mess. The multiple small parties that are needed to craft a government create tremendous instability. The current coalition does not represent the majority of Israelis leading to the instability.
Obviously there are different sub types too in terms of electoral method. And there's no one size fit all, but generally speaking you want some kind of Japanese/German/Taiwanese dual voting system to avoid too much fragmentation.
And to state the obvious, if there is no strong centre in your electorate then no voting system can magically create a functioning democracy.
Plus of course Netanyahu (like Trump) is a criminal desperately clinging to power because he knows that he's probably going to prison if he loses it.
There's no shortage of candidates to explain this difference.
One may be religion. Americans are far more religious than other developed countries and religious fervour tends to reinforce people's beliefs and their confidence in them. The metaphysical framework that religion supplies is a factor as well. Abortion probably seems much worse to someone who believes that a human soul is present in a fertilised ovum.
Another factor may be the combination of English and Northern Continental European heritages; the laissez faire outlook of the original English settlers is in constant tension with authoritarian impulses from later waves of migration from Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia etc. It means you end up with people taking odd positions such as those on the right insisting on the freedom to express authoritarian opinions or those on the left insisting that the freedom of minority groups to express their identities is an absolute right that should be enshrined in law.
These effects are possibly amplified by the fear and paranoia that results from extremely high levels of gun ownership and homicides in the US.
Also don't forget, Americans are to a large extent heirs to earlier migrant generations of Europeans who didn't like doing what they were told and were willing to take huge risks to do something about it and set off for the New World. In so far as these are characteristics that can be passed on genetically or culturally, it is perhaps not surprising that modern Americans sometimes seem possessed of a near-pathological individualism. For example, I can't imagine the idea of Sovereign Citizenship emerging from any developed country except the US.
Some of the problem is diversity, but there's also the relative lack in the US of the idea what one should sacrifice a chunk of one's personal desires for the sake of social solidarity. I mean, we're big on "life, liberty, and the pursuit of [personal] happiness". Iceland and Denmark are more culturally/ethnically homogeneous. Of course, Singapore is heavily policed to suppress troublemakers of all kinds.
As a centerist I have become increasingly fed up with both left wing politicians and NGOs promoting rights but having little to say about peoples responsibilities. Also, the Left rebranded as ‘Progressives’. This allowed them to label their opponents as ‘Regressives’, a claim that is by no means true. Many of their hobbyhorses are far from progressively changing society in the true meaning of the term. They function as political mouthpieces for a range of special interest associations.
Both Progressives and Hard Right players are now gripped by a secular religious fervour about their belief systems. Having diminished the power of the Christian and other clergy we now have a bunch of new ‘Priests’ delivering the ‘New Puritanism’.
One cannot resist replying to a namesake.
Your definition of ‘progressives' seems rather limited. I’d suggest that it is progressives (in a general sense) who best understand that we are both the inheritors of and the participants in the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex ongoing experiment in human society and government ever attempted. It is a concept about which Americans have, on the whole, become far too complacent in assuming the strength of our Republic over the years since we were the Arsenal of Democracy.
While some who label themselves as progressives have often gone rather too far down the road of self-proclaimed righteousness, some degree of secular fervor is necessary if we are to preserve the nation we were designed to be.
I think it's a mistake for the broad left to regard this as being about compromising on key moral issues, either with republicans or with the general public. It's actually about improving on our own ideas, being willing to revise your moral view of the world based on harsh experience.
Progressives and liberals are both part of the Democratic coalition, which prides itself (generally) on being liberal and educated. One of the hallmarks of being an educated person is that you're willing to adjust your ideas based on events. You out try your theories in the real world, see if they work, and when something doesn't work you look for what to fix.
In the 2010s, a lot of progressive liberal ideology was very compelling in theory. There was a lot of (solid or not) academic research behind the big ideas of the Democratic movement, and the Obama and Biden coalitions had a rare opportunity to put a whole bunch of these liberal and leftist ideas into practice. There were all kinds of notions about equality and fairness and how society would be organized, ideas that were previously only in the realm of academic theory all abruptly made into policy all at once.
In the end, some of these ideas worked, and some of them didn't! Progressives and liberals alike need to be using this time to look at what we can improve about our theories to better prepare them for the next time we have power in the real world. Did our approach to health care actually work? To crime? To education? To self-identification of transgender people? What aspects of the 2010s liberal coalition created backlash and why? When we lost an argument, why did we lose? What went wrong? This isn't just about moving towards the mythical 'center', the correct answer might be some completely different direction. But if an idea generated enormous public backlash when we tried it, it's likely that something was wrong with the idea or its presentation. How do we fix it next time?
I think a lot of what voters want to see change Democrats. They want to see a party that recognizes some of its past mistakes and has learned from them. This doesn't mean self-flagellation or compromise or weakness, it just means updating our narratives from what they were in the the 2010s. It means taking the things that are wonderful about progressivism or liberalism, while improving on the areas that didn't work.
I don't think we can reach some kind of grand compromise with fascists by capitulating on our key issues. Make one compromise with them and they'll just move to the next issue down the line, taking our rights one by one. Instead we should focus on making our ideas better and learning from our mistakes, purely from our own sake. Because we want to win the argument and learn from the places we went wrong.
I don't think it's a good idea to see the median American voter as a "fascist".
Maybe a clearer way to think about this is that I don't think Trumpism as a movement is especially interested in compromise with liberals on policy, and this affects the strategic incentives around opposing them.
I live in Portland. A few months ago, Trump declared my city a "warzone" and said it was "on fire" and he sent in a bunch of masked goons to tear gas and kidnap my neighbors. Short of swinging the election against Trump, is there some meaningful policy change or concession Portland could have made to prevent this from happening? The whole thing was a fabrication based on a Fox News fever dream!
If Minneapolis had compromised on trans sports, would it have prevented Alex Pretty's death? It seems to me that it probably wouldn't have made a meaningful difference - Minneapolis wasn't invaded because of its policies, but because Trumpists enjoy the libidinal thrill of hurting their enemies. They would have found a reason. They're not interested in getting to yes on their policy issues. This all seems relevant to how we go about opposing their movement, and the value of making policy concessions.
In the 80s, there was a powerful right-wing movement that was were very concerned about satanists. People were extremely upset about the idea of satantic cults stealing and devouring their children. Would it have helped anything in that environment if well-meaning liberals had passed a bunch of policies and laws specifically opposing the great Satan? At a certain point, you just have to acknowledge that a lot of moral panics are stupid and fake, and try to persuade people by drawing them back to the real world.
Vast swath of people who escaped the dem party. Many abstaining from voting, but many reluctantly voted for Trump because on some policy issues they believe are directionally right. There are many reluctant Trump voters, and I think just calling them facist is not gonna improve the dem’s position.
Great essay.
Two historical points.
The US Civil War to free the slaves was won, and the slave were emancipated. But another century would go by before the Civil Rights Act. A century of Klan terror and lynchings (ethnic cleansing) and Jim Crow (apartheid).
And did the Cicvil Rights Act happen because 100 years had finally passed? I don't think so. It is more likely that result of WWII, and Americans getting a object lesson in what the natural endpoint of race-hatred looks like.
80 years after WWII, we have collectively forgotten that moral lesson, and now hatred and fascism (two American staples) are again on the rise. Only the abject failure of Trump's project can, maybe, remind us of that lesson.
I remember reading a quote by a prominent republican a long time ago saying that the Republican party should not let in the evangelical movement, because religious people are uncompromising in their beliefs and good politics requires compromise.
We're seeing the same thing now on the left. The democrats should never have let the progressives into influence in the party. Progressives are uncompromising.
looked it up, “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.” - Barry Goldwater
And the funny thing is, evangelicals, compromised, greatly when they selected trump
Is the "prominent republican" you're thinking of Barry Goldwater by any chance?
I believe so, that sounds right
We also forget that “progressives” used to be in favor of massive state centralization of power, eugenics, and Communism in general. Noah is right: we remember the popular victories, and forget the dumb ideas and abuses. A little intellectual humility goes a long way. Moderation is not just a tactical pose, it’s an understanding that you have your own biases and blind spots, and should be open to thoughtful debate and disagreement.
"If you’re a progressive, and you believe deeply that racial preferences in hiring, leniency toward petty crime and illegal immigration, and trans women on women’s sports teams are basic human rights, I can’t tell you to change your values or go against your conscience just to win some elections."
No one can tell anyone to change their own values. But we are the Democratic Party, damn it. If people don't like democracy, don't like the idea of majority opinion ruling the day, they are in the wrong place.
We are not trusted because progressives have managed to change the meaning of "democratic" from "majority opinion" to "people being forced to live according to our values, because we believe that that would be good for the majority." Those values are starkly different from, say, JD Vance's, but the underlying arrogance reminds me of him.
As you say, the bubble is central to the problem. These people haven' a clue how they sound to the general public. When I try to explain my center-right neighbors' quite rational perspectives to them, they instantly label such people vile racists whose perspectives are unworthy of analysis.
As long as this stuff remains the face of the Democratic Party (and what with online media, I don't see how to avoid it, regardless of who the candidates are), it will be tough to regain the trust of the public.
By far one of your best. Well done.