Make more, share better: it has to combine supply-side dynamism to fair distribution. But is there any reason to think that that prestidigitational construction and maintenance of such an...
It is almost irrelevant what Klein, or Douthat, says, nor Farrell's exposition of the differences. The proletariat is well acquainted with the fact that Democrats largely do not deliver on their promises.
The reason was well laid out by the Princeton[?] study that showed that Congress enacts policies that support the wishes of the wealthy, not the rest of the nation. Lawrence Lessig explained why - money was in control of Congress, and this needed to change. Sadly, Congress wouldn't change this, and SCOTUS made it worse (and continues to do so, as it has their many decisions on other issues).
The rot for the Democratic Party may have set in before I arrived in the US, but it was quite clear that the Clinton administration was already pandering to the wealthy. The increasing inequality that has resulted has made it a vicious circle of both parties needing the wealthy to finance their campaigns, further driving inequality, and needing the wealthy to donate. The extreme example was set by Musk, who donated $250 million just to support Trump. This wealth funding campaigns and driving up costs is nothing less than obscene.
This is unique to teh USA. In the 1980s, the Tory Party under Thatcher started to go the same way, and so we have the same problem there. It can hardly be a coincidence that in both nations, any attempt to tax teh rich and reduce inequality is met with teh same arguments - the increased taxes won't help, and teh wealthy will leave the country. The use of tax havens and other vehicles to hide income and wealth is just another mechanism to apply leverage to any government to leave them alone.
I am all for wider tents and policies to help reduce inequality, but neither the Democrats for the British Labour Party will do this. [I read today that Canada's Liberal Party is now trying for "austerity to avoid recession", a very anti-Keynesian approach. And this from an ex-banker who supported bank bailouts in the financial meltdown.] Is it any wonder why Sanders and the progressive wing of teh democratic Party are so popular with teh electorate, while the party tries to sideline them from power.
Norman Solomon's piece in teh Guardian today summed it up nicely. The Democratic Party's elites won't do what is necessary to win. The party now has teh same problem that the USA will have going forward when "working" with its erstwhile allies. No one will believe the nation will stick to its promises. Even if the Democrats promise that this time they really will do what the voters ask, will anyone believe them?
I think one of the important things about Farrell's post (which isn't captured in your summary) is his mocking of Douthat's appeal to what is "obvious."
It strikes me that one reason the attempts to chart a path for the Democratic party are so frustrating is that it really isn't obvious what went wrong.
Democrats have made plenty of mistakes, of course, from both the Left or Center but if you compare the party in 2010 to the party now, the shift in political fortune doesn't seem easily explained by looking at their mistakes.
So, to some extent, both Centrists and Leftists look at the elements of the party which they are most familiar with and say, "I don't see an obvious source of the problem in this section, therefor it must be the other faction who is to blame." That isn't to say that each are blameless, but not so much as to provide an explanation.
It feels like the political landscape has shifted under the feet of the Democrats and I'm really not sure which of the following possibilities best explains that:
1) It's all about the media; Democratic politicians don't drive the political conversation, vibes on social media and cable news do . . .
2) It's all about charisma, Clinton and Obama were charismatic, but Trump is more charismatic than anyone who has run against him.
3) There's been a global shift away from center-left parties.
4) It's all about the phones . . . ubiquitous social media has shifted us towards a lower-trust society and that means that the parts of the Democratic messaging that appeal to social solidarity don't have as much appeal as they used to.
All of those feel like they have an element of truth but, again, not enough that I feel like different factions of the party could agree that, whatever their differences, they need to work together to overcome the problems created by (pick 1 of the above). In fact, on that list I think of the first two as left-coded explanations and the latter two as centrist-coded.
I'm not sure Gaza is your best example. The outrage from the nominal left was certainly triggered, at least in part, by the abject failure of Biden's "centrist" approach. Was there opportunism as well? Probably so. But the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. What passed for "centrism" (a dubious term at best) cannot work now even if it might have before.
Nor are Dems guilt-free when it comes to rent protection: NIMBYism; geriatric leadership; failure to tax when they could have (carried interest, anyone?); inadequate stimulus spending in 2009; et al. Such failures lead to stagnation while at the same time they generate no fair allocation of the gains.
If the Dems can't restructure their approach, then they deserve the criticism they get. And those trying to accomplish that don't need advice from the guy who told us that "Charlie Kirk did politics the right way".
I think you're missing the elephant in the room: people who vote for Trump don't care about traditional Dem efforts to make life better materially. All they care about is waging culture war. Winning the war isn't the issue--they have no idea what they mean by winning--just fight it, destroy stuff, put smarty pants Hahvahd types you in your place, is enough for them. If you haven't by now convinced them that they're being conned, you never will this side of a 1930s economic collapse.
Brad - I think you’re getting triggered by unrelated 1990s trauma here rather than reading and interpreting what I actually said. This is not, actually, a post about whether the left of the Democratic party is more or less treacherous than the centrist wing - a topic I’m sure we have different views on, but which I don’t think is interesting or useful to debate because it would devolve into yelling about how to interpret history or past hypotheticals.
It is an argument about whether the ways in which Popularists view politics constrain the ability of the Democratic party to experiment in ways that are similar to left demands for ideological homogeneity. The actual proposed villain is the Median Voter Theorem become the One True Principle For Ensuring Party Success In All Affairs - if you’ve disagreements with that claim, which is the claim I am actually making, fire away!
The characterization of the left "groups" in this article and in others fails to grapple with the questions of morality and civil rights. It is far easier to demand forbearance of a faction seen as demanding radical policies than it is to tell a persecuted minority that their suffering must endure (or worsen) for the benefit of a greater cause. Maybe it is true, maybe a cold utilitarian calculation netting out the pain of the few against the threats to the many will result in a better outcome. But that argument has to be made directly. Advocates of "moderation" have to look at, for example, the trans community and tell them they will need to endure an absence of civil rights for the greater good.
But first there’ll be fascism, and in all likelihood blood, lots of it, not all of it the blood of members of the oppressed classes. (Do I really need to explain who the oppressed classes are these days, or name those who aren’t members of those classes now, but will be soon enough? Must I translate this good faith evaluation into German so that the good liberal historians in the audience can recognize the fact that the rhyming of history is never, ever something that can be safely made light of?) Ah, fuck it. ¡Salsipuedes! Sauve qui peut! I’m so fucking tired of these earnest centrists with their politically well-calculated fingers in the dikes. I mean, I love them dearly, I even respect them, but dear sweet Jesus…! Me, I’m gonna head for a cave somewhere and see can I transcribe a few things the wayback machine can no longer be relied upon to salvage once The Trumpistas succeed in powering the Internet with coal-fired steam engines, and the tech bros’ trumpeted gladnesses have every single fucking one of them come to pass.
I'm not sure I share Our Host's pessimism. Over the last decade, our "Groups" have improved immeasurably. Their leadership now is more likely now to prefer power over purity: AOC, Bernie, Mamdani. The Working Families Party is ruthlessly practical, preferring a bad D in a purple district to a lefty loser. The DSA's feckless refusal to endorse AOC (over Palestine) was ignored by almost the entire progressive wing of the party. Their economics is approaching and often overlapping with the realistic. As I see it, progressives are approaching the Abundance Agenda with (a merited) cautious skepticism rather than jeremiads of rage. Labor has become on board with immigration.
And the centrists may be improving, as well. The Schumers and Jeffrieses of the world now treat their elected left as part of the coalition, rather than juveniles to be humored. They are less likely to assume defensive crouches against the more idiotic of the remaining Groups. Just the other day, The Atlantic--house organ of the centrists--issued a cautious defense of the political economy of Mamdani's rent stabilization plan. (The centrists are beginning to realize that political economy is more important in policy planning than economics.)
Yes, it will be hard for a single political party to stand for both dynamism and redistribution. In the long run, it is likely impossible. But there is nothing like a common enemy for welding a coalition together. As long as the Republicans are a significant threat, I see grounds for optimism.
Ezra Klein did a great interview with then Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack where he refused to allow Vilsack to get away with the "rural people have values and work hard" baloney and kept pressing and pressing for exact answers. Someone needs to pin Klein down and keep at him in the same manner to force him to define exactly who he himself will push under the bus to make the Democratic Party more to his liking. Will he personally take the young trans adults and throw them under the wheels of Republican SUVs to make the party seem less squicky to him? Who else? What chunks of women's rights will be sliced off and sacrificed? Black people? He needs to be really specific. Exactly who please - and does he expect the people so sacrificed to continue voting for Democratic candidates?
As Al Davis, owner of the original Oakland Raiders so well put it many years ago, "Just Win Baby!" Until the party sucks it up and decides to be competitive in every single election up and down the ballot, they will be consigned to wandering in the desert. I listened to Klein's article while I was out walking this morning and he encapsulates what needs to be done. Find district and state appropriate candidates and run for office.
1. How did the anti-slavery Republican party of Lincoln change to be the party of business in the 20th century?
2. Maybe the morality of some Democratic leaders is called to question more often than in the Republican party. Is that is a beautiful picture of Roosevelt and his girlfriend Lucy Mercer ? Evidently it did not bother him to tell the world about his personal relationship with her. Also, our president from 1992 to 2000 had problems of the same type. That is not to say that they were unsuccessful in their jobs, just that, at that time, it must have detracted from their accomplishments.
Was it the extremely religious Pilgrims that gave the nascent US nation such a religious, moralistic streak? The Gilded Age in the US, and the Victorians in Britain, were quite happy with married men having "relationships" with women beyond their wives. One might have thought that the 1960s might have purged the US of such moralistic whining, but no. Religion-based morality has reemerged in the US, making such "relationships" intolerable to the religious right, even though it has turned a blind eye to the current POTUS's many "relationships", as well as multiple divorces. The US remains an anomaly amongst wealthy nations, with a religiosity more in line with poor nations. Of course, the rich are absolved from such morality (e.g., Musk), but our [Democratic] leaders must be beaten with a stick if they transgress.
Why must "sexual morality" have anything to do with morality in other domains? Are they all inextricably bound together - disobey one "commandment", and this implies the disobeying of all the others? Now, I will draw the line at having sex with minors. No exceptions.
So okay then, the Puritans and sex. Who was it said that pornography (and one presumes also the fundamentalist preachers caught with their pants down in cheap motel rooms) is Aphrodite’s revenge? But even if we’ve got a solid handle now on the sex weirdnesses of our sanctimonious Republican deplorables, we still haven’t explained the lies and the videotape correlates—you, know the trumpety, bumpety very stable genius who seems to lie even when the truth would actually serve him better, and Rose Mary Wood’s 18 1/2 minute epiphany. I know, I know, that was audiotape, not videotape, but still….) Will we ever get to the bottom of these depravities? (We already have, you know, and had we not decided it was a fine idea to defund our public school system, maybe more of us would be aware that we had. Sigh….
It is almost irrelevant what Klein, or Douthat, says, nor Farrell's exposition of the differences. The proletariat is well acquainted with the fact that Democrats largely do not deliver on their promises.
The reason was well laid out by the Princeton[?] study that showed that Congress enacts policies that support the wishes of the wealthy, not the rest of the nation. Lawrence Lessig explained why - money was in control of Congress, and this needed to change. Sadly, Congress wouldn't change this, and SCOTUS made it worse (and continues to do so, as it has their many decisions on other issues).
The rot for the Democratic Party may have set in before I arrived in the US, but it was quite clear that the Clinton administration was already pandering to the wealthy. The increasing inequality that has resulted has made it a vicious circle of both parties needing the wealthy to finance their campaigns, further driving inequality, and needing the wealthy to donate. The extreme example was set by Musk, who donated $250 million just to support Trump. This wealth funding campaigns and driving up costs is nothing less than obscene.
This is unique to teh USA. In the 1980s, the Tory Party under Thatcher started to go the same way, and so we have the same problem there. It can hardly be a coincidence that in both nations, any attempt to tax teh rich and reduce inequality is met with teh same arguments - the increased taxes won't help, and teh wealthy will leave the country. The use of tax havens and other vehicles to hide income and wealth is just another mechanism to apply leverage to any government to leave them alone.
I am all for wider tents and policies to help reduce inequality, but neither the Democrats for the British Labour Party will do this. [I read today that Canada's Liberal Party is now trying for "austerity to avoid recession", a very anti-Keynesian approach. And this from an ex-banker who supported bank bailouts in the financial meltdown.] Is it any wonder why Sanders and the progressive wing of teh democratic Party are so popular with teh electorate, while the party tries to sideline them from power.
Norman Solomon's piece in teh Guardian today summed it up nicely. The Democratic Party's elites won't do what is necessary to win. The party now has teh same problem that the USA will have going forward when "working" with its erstwhile allies. No one will believe the nation will stick to its promises. Even if the Democrats promise that this time they really will do what the voters ask, will anyone believe them?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/02/trump-democrats-playbook
Add in "State capture", especially in democracies.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/nov/04/state-capture-corruption-democracy
Amen!
I think one of the important things about Farrell's post (which isn't captured in your summary) is his mocking of Douthat's appeal to what is "obvious."
It strikes me that one reason the attempts to chart a path for the Democratic party are so frustrating is that it really isn't obvious what went wrong.
Democrats have made plenty of mistakes, of course, from both the Left or Center but if you compare the party in 2010 to the party now, the shift in political fortune doesn't seem easily explained by looking at their mistakes.
So, to some extent, both Centrists and Leftists look at the elements of the party which they are most familiar with and say, "I don't see an obvious source of the problem in this section, therefor it must be the other faction who is to blame." That isn't to say that each are blameless, but not so much as to provide an explanation.
It feels like the political landscape has shifted under the feet of the Democrats and I'm really not sure which of the following possibilities best explains that:
1) It's all about the media; Democratic politicians don't drive the political conversation, vibes on social media and cable news do . . .
2) It's all about charisma, Clinton and Obama were charismatic, but Trump is more charismatic than anyone who has run against him.
3) There's been a global shift away from center-left parties.
4) It's all about the phones . . . ubiquitous social media has shifted us towards a lower-trust society and that means that the parts of the Democratic messaging that appeal to social solidarity don't have as much appeal as they used to.
All of those feel like they have an element of truth but, again, not enough that I feel like different factions of the party could agree that, whatever their differences, they need to work together to overcome the problems created by (pick 1 of the above). In fact, on that list I think of the first two as left-coded explanations and the latter two as centrist-coded.
I'm not sure Gaza is your best example. The outrage from the nominal left was certainly triggered, at least in part, by the abject failure of Biden's "centrist" approach. Was there opportunism as well? Probably so. But the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. What passed for "centrism" (a dubious term at best) cannot work now even if it might have before.
Nor are Dems guilt-free when it comes to rent protection: NIMBYism; geriatric leadership; failure to tax when they could have (carried interest, anyone?); inadequate stimulus spending in 2009; et al. Such failures lead to stagnation while at the same time they generate no fair allocation of the gains.
If the Dems can't restructure their approach, then they deserve the criticism they get. And those trying to accomplish that don't need advice from the guy who told us that "Charlie Kirk did politics the right way".
I think you're missing the elephant in the room: people who vote for Trump don't care about traditional Dem efforts to make life better materially. All they care about is waging culture war. Winning the war isn't the issue--they have no idea what they mean by winning--just fight it, destroy stuff, put smarty pants Hahvahd types you in your place, is enough for them. If you haven't by now convinced them that they're being conned, you never will this side of a 1930s economic collapse.
Brad - I think you’re getting triggered by unrelated 1990s trauma here rather than reading and interpreting what I actually said. This is not, actually, a post about whether the left of the Democratic party is more or less treacherous than the centrist wing - a topic I’m sure we have different views on, but which I don’t think is interesting or useful to debate because it would devolve into yelling about how to interpret history or past hypotheticals.
It is an argument about whether the ways in which Popularists view politics constrain the ability of the Democratic party to experiment in ways that are similar to left demands for ideological homogeneity. The actual proposed villain is the Median Voter Theorem become the One True Principle For Ensuring Party Success In All Affairs - if you’ve disagreements with that claim, which is the claim I am actually making, fire away!
The characterization of the left "groups" in this article and in others fails to grapple with the questions of morality and civil rights. It is far easier to demand forbearance of a faction seen as demanding radical policies than it is to tell a persecuted minority that their suffering must endure (or worsen) for the benefit of a greater cause. Maybe it is true, maybe a cold utilitarian calculation netting out the pain of the few against the threats to the many will result in a better outcome. But that argument has to be made directly. Advocates of "moderation" have to look at, for example, the trans community and tell them they will need to endure an absence of civil rights for the greater good.
But first there’ll be fascism, and in all likelihood blood, lots of it, not all of it the blood of members of the oppressed classes. (Do I really need to explain who the oppressed classes are these days, or name those who aren’t members of those classes now, but will be soon enough? Must I translate this good faith evaluation into German so that the good liberal historians in the audience can recognize the fact that the rhyming of history is never, ever something that can be safely made light of?) Ah, fuck it. ¡Salsipuedes! Sauve qui peut! I’m so fucking tired of these earnest centrists with their politically well-calculated fingers in the dikes. I mean, I love them dearly, I even respect them, but dear sweet Jesus…! Me, I’m gonna head for a cave somewhere and see can I transcribe a few things the wayback machine can no longer be relied upon to salvage once The Trumpistas succeed in powering the Internet with coal-fired steam engines, and the tech bros’ trumpeted gladnesses have every single fucking one of them come to pass.
Can any viable progressive effort occur, if it doesn't fix the worsening SOTUS-SCOTUS-ECOTUS veto-power of our reactionary minority?
I'm not sure I share Our Host's pessimism. Over the last decade, our "Groups" have improved immeasurably. Their leadership now is more likely now to prefer power over purity: AOC, Bernie, Mamdani. The Working Families Party is ruthlessly practical, preferring a bad D in a purple district to a lefty loser. The DSA's feckless refusal to endorse AOC (over Palestine) was ignored by almost the entire progressive wing of the party. Their economics is approaching and often overlapping with the realistic. As I see it, progressives are approaching the Abundance Agenda with (a merited) cautious skepticism rather than jeremiads of rage. Labor has become on board with immigration.
And the centrists may be improving, as well. The Schumers and Jeffrieses of the world now treat their elected left as part of the coalition, rather than juveniles to be humored. They are less likely to assume defensive crouches against the more idiotic of the remaining Groups. Just the other day, The Atlantic--house organ of the centrists--issued a cautious defense of the political economy of Mamdani's rent stabilization plan. (The centrists are beginning to realize that political economy is more important in policy planning than economics.)
Yes, it will be hard for a single political party to stand for both dynamism and redistribution. In the long run, it is likely impossible. But there is nothing like a common enemy for welding a coalition together. As long as the Republicans are a significant threat, I see grounds for optimism.
Ezra Klein did a great interview with then Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack where he refused to allow Vilsack to get away with the "rural people have values and work hard" baloney and kept pressing and pressing for exact answers. Someone needs to pin Klein down and keep at him in the same manner to force him to define exactly who he himself will push under the bus to make the Democratic Party more to his liking. Will he personally take the young trans adults and throw them under the wheels of Republican SUVs to make the party seem less squicky to him? Who else? What chunks of women's rights will be sliced off and sacrificed? Black people? He needs to be really specific. Exactly who please - and does he expect the people so sacrificed to continue voting for Democratic candidates?
As Al Davis, owner of the original Oakland Raiders so well put it many years ago, "Just Win Baby!" Until the party sucks it up and decides to be competitive in every single election up and down the ballot, they will be consigned to wandering in the desert. I listened to Klein's article while I was out walking this morning and he encapsulates what needs to be done. Find district and state appropriate candidates and run for office.
1. How did the anti-slavery Republican party of Lincoln change to be the party of business in the 20th century?
2. Maybe the morality of some Democratic leaders is called to question more often than in the Republican party. Is that is a beautiful picture of Roosevelt and his girlfriend Lucy Mercer ? Evidently it did not bother him to tell the world about his personal relationship with her. Also, our president from 1992 to 2000 had problems of the same type. That is not to say that they were unsuccessful in their jobs, just that, at that time, it must have detracted from their accomplishments.
Was it the extremely religious Pilgrims that gave the nascent US nation such a religious, moralistic streak? The Gilded Age in the US, and the Victorians in Britain, were quite happy with married men having "relationships" with women beyond their wives. One might have thought that the 1960s might have purged the US of such moralistic whining, but no. Religion-based morality has reemerged in the US, making such "relationships" intolerable to the religious right, even though it has turned a blind eye to the current POTUS's many "relationships", as well as multiple divorces. The US remains an anomaly amongst wealthy nations, with a religiosity more in line with poor nations. Of course, the rich are absolved from such morality (e.g., Musk), but our [Democratic] leaders must be beaten with a stick if they transgress.
Why must "sexual morality" have anything to do with morality in other domains? Are they all inextricably bound together - disobey one "commandment", and this implies the disobeying of all the others? Now, I will draw the line at having sex with minors. No exceptions.
So okay then, the Puritans and sex. Who was it said that pornography (and one presumes also the fundamentalist preachers caught with their pants down in cheap motel rooms) is Aphrodite’s revenge? But even if we’ve got a solid handle now on the sex weirdnesses of our sanctimonious Republican deplorables, we still haven’t explained the lies and the videotape correlates—you, know the trumpety, bumpety very stable genius who seems to lie even when the truth would actually serve him better, and Rose Mary Wood’s 18 1/2 minute epiphany. I know, I know, that was audiotape, not videotape, but still….) Will we ever get to the bottom of these depravities? (We already have, you know, and had we not decided it was a fine idea to defund our public school system, maybe more of us would be aware that we had. Sigh….