"Who, exactly, is she talking about? Where are they? And how important are they?"
That was my question too. "Infinite Leftists" are, like, 50,000 DSA members or something? Even if you think I am off by 2 orders of magnitude, "Infinite Rightists" are another order larger yet. I believe that "Infinite Leftists" are a negligible political quantity in America. If Wu thinks that focusing on them will "widen the Overton window", I am doubtful. The Infinite Rightists seem quite happy to impute Infinite Leftist views to Matt, after all.
I suppose all will be answered on the podcast. But I might not have time to listen to that until Monday ...
Not much patience for this sort of thing and I admit to a very cursory glance after catching the drift.
Seems like a lack of self-awareness to me. They should perhaps reread the letter from Birmingham jail, slowly, with awareness that it's addressed to them. And they should at least understand that they disagree with it. Which is o.k - it was addressed to perfectly honorable people with reasonable and widely shared views, and much the same objectives.
But King _also_ cared about having a coherent strategy for getting stuff done and was willing to work with people to get half a loaf today, even if he continued to say the whole loaf was morally merited.
Yglesias has written about it several times, and in particular has cited Bayard Rustin's articulation of the problem. If you take racism seriously as an obstacle to achieving racial justice, then you should be _more_ willing to frame redistributive policy (which will inevitably help close racial gaps because people at the low end of the economic scale are disproportionately less-white) in racially-neutral terms, and play the long game of expecting each generation to be a little bit less racist just through exposure to peers.
Yes. There are people who say "Matt wants to throw trans people under the bus!" That is wrong. In Red States, trans people are already under the bus. The question is whether we should crawl under the bus after them, fail to pull them out—and so lose our chance for Medicaid-for-all...
I mean it's not even just a totally unrelated issue like M4A.
If queer activists had come out of the gate in the '70s saying that anyone who opposed gay marriage was EEEEEEVIL and they couldn't possibly even talk with them, then gay rights would never have gotten anywhere. Getting the large majority of people to accept the common humanity of gay people was a battle of inches.
If you want to help trans people, you're going to have to get majorities onboard for policy change. So look for the places where people are conflicted or cross-pressured. Don't say, "Oh, you're one of THOSE people who agree with the 80% consensus on so-and-so, well I could never work with YOU!" and storm off in a huff.
The scenario described strikes me as highly contrived. How do we lose votes by sticking up for allies? What people who vote D now would vote R if Democrats would describe what the anti-trans laws are doing as "The biggest government overreach ever" I mean, that's what very conservative Asa Hutchinson called it.
This is an opportunity to drive a big wedge between social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. Why pass it up?
What kind of friend helps their friend only when it is expedient? You got it in one - a political "friend".
When I moved to WV in 1995 (from SF!) I met many gay/lesbian folks who lived their lives privately and were treated normally. I did tell a youngish gay man "if you want to let your flag fly, move to SF - nobody will care". And over the years acceptance has happened.
I've found out in the past 2 years of a few younger trans folks who living their lives and not being hassled. However, if you grew up here that is a much harder thing to do in a town of 10-15k. The main thing I see people getting outraged over is any sort of public display, straight or not. Do your thing, but do it in your space (which abounds here).
But even WV doesn't recognize common-law marriages which my spouse and I had (for a variety of reasons). You can make it work with good legal documents, and more good legal documents.
I agree, but I wish Progresses would adopt taxation of net emissions ofCO2 (or at least tax reform that hugely increase revenues) as the summum bonum rather than M4A.
One thing I love about being a neoliberal (or as the I would tell the Mrs "a pragmatist") is the full and total OPTIMISM of their view. Yes there are many big problems to solve and yes we Biden did not give us everything right now, but we as a people are brilliant and resourceful and I *know* we can solve anything.
Also the pure optimism is always how I view the state of things - things aren't wonderful but they can be fixed; but more importantly why do people allow themselves to see the sky is falling for every little thing?
I really do not take kindly to this lecture by Matthew Yglesias. Rolling back the established-for-decades best-practice medical care for trans children is a policy decision. It is eliminationist. They have not been particularly candid about their motives. It is discriminatory. It has Asa Hutchinson calling it the "biggest government overrreach ever" But the thing he's mad about is that people like me are too angry about it.
I did my best to ensure my daughter (a trans woman) is healthy and whole. They can fuckiing sue me and try and prove I harmed her. Unfortunately for that initiative, she was over 18 when it all happened.
I'm unhappy more people aren't completely pissed off about this like I am. But you know, it's personal to me. However, it isn't some pie in the sky perfect world utopian dream. It's established practice that is being rolled back. Yglesias can stuff it.
I am (a) married to a trans activist who testified to the CA legislature for our state's gender-neutral ID law, and (b) gender-queer enough myself that I've been in a situation where I was concerned I might get gay-bashed by a group of drunk guys who were offended by a femme outfit I was wearing (even though I'm pan, not gay :-P ). So it's personal for me too.
Brianna Wu is also a trans woman, if you're not aware.
I am unclear what you are taking as an offensive lecture from Yglesias. He personally is strongly in favor of the blue-state policies on this stuff (although I think he also is in favor of remembering that for-profit medicine in the US _can_ lead to practitioners who encourage doing more stuff than is necessarily merited; my spouse more or less endorses Emily Bazelon's review of the arguments around care for trans kids https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/magazine/gender-therapy.html ).
I have dinged Yglesias for credulously assuming various conservatives were arguing in good faith (particularly Bari Weiss, who published a "whistleblower" report on a trans clinic in Missouri, IIRC, and Matt commented on it with roughly "if this is true it would be bad" w/o observing "but it's probably not true and we should wait for confirmation"). But fundamentally what he's saying about policy goals is right. You have to choose policy goals that are achievable, and engage in the public sphere in a manner that will actually achieve the goals. The issue that he cited in the excerpt Brad pulled here, about whether high school trans kids should be able to play on sports teams of their chosen gender, unfortunately is one on which the mass public has been spun up very effectively by the right wing. There are a lot of reach-able parents, but it will take time and patience to reach them. An otherwise quite liberal friend of mine who lives in Washington state whose daughters play sports was weirdly mad about the idea that some boys might pretend to be girls in order to dominate a sports league. At the same time, he would be an ally on making sure that trans healthcare is available to teens, and that we not have invasive "bathroom bill" policing of people's bodies. We need to pick our battles and do the most good for the folks we say we want to help, and that means not anathemizing people if they're ignorant or hostile in one area but can be allies on some issues in the near-term, and hopefully educated / talked down on other issues in the long run.
I don't get wound up about issues involving trans people in sports. However, I don't really want to have that conversation right now as it is so highly charged with misinformation and misunderstanding, and I see it as a useful platform for anti-trans disinformation.
What I don't see is why going straight at these anti-gender-affirming-care initiatives is bad politics. It's still seems a lot like "trans people are weird and I don't trust 'em" that's holding them back.
Criticizing Republicans for politicizing medical care and saying, "I think we should trust doctors and families to work this out," seems like a completely reasonable approach.
But I still don't understand what you think in any of the cited material from Yglesias says otherwise. Are you talking about where he's referring to Liliana Mason? Because his point there is just exactly the point I'm talking about in regard to earlier iterations of queer rights. If you reject alliance and compromise with anyone that holds a distasteful position on _any_ aspect of trans issues, you've just limited yourself to some tiny minority. If gay activists and straight allies had said in 1970, "We refuse to work with anyone that does not embrace the idea of fully normalizing homosexuality, including granting marriage rights to gay couples," they would've never gotten anywhere.
Activists for trans rights have a choice: Do we want to maintain moral purity, to show off to other activists that we're uncompromising supporters of the theoretical principle of trans rights; or do we actually want to _win_, so that those rights move from theory to practice?
To gain power, intellectual arguments are largely useless. Noah is right that emotional issues like Access to Abortion, an issue with emotional punch, is very important and viable. You are both wrong on who is affected - women and men want their daughters to have access, which is one reason it has such a high agreement amongst Americans.
Lastly, it seems that "intellectuals" are arguing philosophically, rather than based on experience. There is a wealth of experience across nations about what does and does not work - c.f. incarceration and prisons, not to mention policing. This applies to a number of social issues, many of which can be assessed by other countries experiences.
Golly. I've liked so many responses here that I can't tell where I stand on the matter. But Brad, just look: the responses are way more than anything in economics would generate. Lovin' it.
I'm neither ,but, like Burke, I have a basic philosophical view which I keep close to my vest. Politics is the art of the possible and assumes compromises. Just as an aside, when Burke wrote Reflections, some Whigs pointed out that he was more liberal than they were and didn't appreciate being lectured to as if they were radicals. The people who outed Burke , let's say, he especially despised because he felt that it was easier to compromise when your ideological views were obscure, and people publicly stating Burke's views told in confidence to them were making him less effective in the real world .
Brad, I don't understand your puzzlement. Demonizing the opposition has been going on, well, forever. If Brianne has got a clever new name for the demonizers, that's great. What's puzzling about that?
But the hard left (read the young Marx) has always been especially vulnerable to this kind of 'my opponents are bad people escalation'. Their "critical" view claims to see beneath the surface of things. It can't evaluate any opposing argument at face value; it has to attribute opponents' views to who they are - and the slip from pointing to who I am socioeconomically or ideologically to pointing to who I am morally doesn't even require a banana peel.
Well, yes, I agree that the constituency for wasting millions on useless _XYZ_ projects is small, put like that. Now, as soon as we have a trusted agency that can properly define "wasting" and "useless" in a way that everyone in Congress respects...
Note about Burke Reflections...His attack was against a particular set of views and actions, and generalizing about him based on this one book is unsound.
One might add: it’s particularly bad, as a look, for substackers to be punching left on this issue because it’s clear even to outsiders that there are subscriber dollars in it.
Really dislike the conflation(?) between the Wu and Yglesias positions here. The challenge posed by the true far left is very different from the general call not to sell out interest groups in your coalition. You can tell in part by the way that the Yglesias excerpt soft-pedals the transphobic position relative to the actual state of the law, which is getting worse in red states all the time. You can easily oppose the raft of new anti-trans laws and anti-trans misinfo without being unable to compromise things generally.
I'm not conflating them! I am observing that, at least, in the things we quote: Ezra < Matt < Brianna < "Infinite Leftists"—and each sees themself as the left edge of the functional progressive community.
I agree that you’re not conflating them, though the move to say anybody to the left of the speaker is an infinite leftist is also sadly common. I’m much more asserting that the Brianna point about, broadly, fools and grifters, is not the universe-of-the-left which Matt is pretending it to be.
Perhaps "infinite leftism" should be re-named "intellectual acne", or perhaps Marxism-Heatherism. "Leftier-than-thou" is indeed a form of social bullying. (Was it invented by the Jacobins?) And the young are more likely to be in a bullying phase, although some never quite grow out of it.
The issue is not moralism v. pragmatism. Most of us are both at the same time: aspiring toward justice, and doing what we can in this sublunary sphere. You could call it consequentialism v. deontology. But it's worth pointing out that our premier mode of deontological thinking--the legal mode--usually ends up with pragmatic rules, no matter the rhetoric. It's also worth noting that deontology tends to be associated with the more intelligent people on the right. It's a useful tool for justifying human suffering.
There idea of infinite leftists sparked a recollection of Lenin's polemic, "Left wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. Politics based upon an ideological premise seem to inevitably spawn a "purist" wing. One observes this on both the right and left in this country. I shared Matt's frustration with groups unable to take yes for an answer.
A good example of the problems liberals face is the UAW strike. Liberals support government subsidies for electric cars in order to fight climate change. But electric cars require fewer workers to assemble than ICE cars. In the best of all possible worlds, excess auto workers could be retrained as software engineers. In the real world that isn't practical. So do the Democrats back big labor or clean energy? Or do they just try and sit on the fence? Eventually first world countries are going to need to provide their citizens with a guaranteed minimum income that is not based on holding a job. But this is not going to happen anytime soon. And of course illegal immigrants will demand to be included in any minimum income program. I kind of think Peter Turchin is correct that the coming decades will see a lot of disruption and even revolutionary change. And a study of history shows revolutions usually do more harm than good. But as Kurt Vonnegut used to say "and so it goes."
Ideally, liberals would NOT support subsidies to EV in order to fight climate change, but taxation of net CO2 emissions. But if not too high, the subsidies are probably not too far from a second best. The strike is a private dispute between private parties. There is no reason to make it a political issue.
"Who, exactly, is she talking about? Where are they? And how important are they?"
That was my question too. "Infinite Leftists" are, like, 50,000 DSA members or something? Even if you think I am off by 2 orders of magnitude, "Infinite Rightists" are another order larger yet. I believe that "Infinite Leftists" are a negligible political quantity in America. If Wu thinks that focusing on them will "widen the Overton window", I am doubtful. The Infinite Rightists seem quite happy to impute Infinite Leftist views to Matt, after all.
I suppose all will be answered on the podcast. But I might not have time to listen to that until Monday ...
Not much patience for this sort of thing and I admit to a very cursory glance after catching the drift.
Seems like a lack of self-awareness to me. They should perhaps reread the letter from Birmingham jail, slowly, with awareness that it's addressed to them. And they should at least understand that they disagree with it. Which is o.k - it was addressed to perfectly honorable people with reasonable and widely shared views, and much the same objectives.
But King _also_ cared about having a coherent strategy for getting stuff done and was willing to work with people to get half a loaf today, even if he continued to say the whole loaf was morally merited.
Yglesias has written about it several times, and in particular has cited Bayard Rustin's articulation of the problem. If you take racism seriously as an obstacle to achieving racial justice, then you should be _more_ willing to frame redistributive policy (which will inevitably help close racial gaps because people at the low end of the economic scale are disproportionately less-white) in racially-neutral terms, and play the long game of expecting each generation to be a little bit less racist just through exposure to peers.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/martin-luther-king-jrs-push-for-material
https://www.slowboring.com/p/english-kalla
https://www.slowboring.com/p/back-to-school-mailbag
Yes. There are people who say "Matt wants to throw trans people under the bus!" That is wrong. In Red States, trans people are already under the bus. The question is whether we should crawl under the bus after them, fail to pull them out—and so lose our chance for Medicaid-for-all...
I mean it's not even just a totally unrelated issue like M4A.
If queer activists had come out of the gate in the '70s saying that anyone who opposed gay marriage was EEEEEEVIL and they couldn't possibly even talk with them, then gay rights would never have gotten anywhere. Getting the large majority of people to accept the common humanity of gay people was a battle of inches.
If you want to help trans people, you're going to have to get majorities onboard for policy change. So look for the places where people are conflicted or cross-pressured. Don't say, "Oh, you're one of THOSE people who agree with the 80% consensus on so-and-so, well I could never work with YOU!" and storm off in a huff.
The scenario described strikes me as highly contrived. How do we lose votes by sticking up for allies? What people who vote D now would vote R if Democrats would describe what the anti-trans laws are doing as "The biggest government overreach ever" I mean, that's what very conservative Asa Hutchinson called it.
This is an opportunity to drive a big wedge between social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. Why pass it up?
What kind of friend helps their friend only when it is expedient? You got it in one - a political "friend".
When I moved to WV in 1995 (from SF!) I met many gay/lesbian folks who lived their lives privately and were treated normally. I did tell a youngish gay man "if you want to let your flag fly, move to SF - nobody will care". And over the years acceptance has happened.
I've found out in the past 2 years of a few younger trans folks who living their lives and not being hassled. However, if you grew up here that is a much harder thing to do in a town of 10-15k. The main thing I see people getting outraged over is any sort of public display, straight or not. Do your thing, but do it in your space (which abounds here).
But even WV doesn't recognize common-law marriages which my spouse and I had (for a variety of reasons). You can make it work with good legal documents, and more good legal documents.
I agree, but I wish Progresses would adopt taxation of net emissions ofCO2 (or at least tax reform that hugely increase revenues) as the summum bonum rather than M4A.
One thing I love about being a neoliberal (or as the I would tell the Mrs "a pragmatist") is the full and total OPTIMISM of their view. Yes there are many big problems to solve and yes we Biden did not give us everything right now, but we as a people are brilliant and resourceful and I *know* we can solve anything.
Also the pure optimism is always how I view the state of things - things aren't wonderful but they can be fixed; but more importantly why do people allow themselves to see the sky is falling for every little thing?
I really do not take kindly to this lecture by Matthew Yglesias. Rolling back the established-for-decades best-practice medical care for trans children is a policy decision. It is eliminationist. They have not been particularly candid about their motives. It is discriminatory. It has Asa Hutchinson calling it the "biggest government overrreach ever" But the thing he's mad about is that people like me are too angry about it.
I did my best to ensure my daughter (a trans woman) is healthy and whole. They can fuckiing sue me and try and prove I harmed her. Unfortunately for that initiative, she was over 18 when it all happened.
I'm unhappy more people aren't completely pissed off about this like I am. But you know, it's personal to me. However, it isn't some pie in the sky perfect world utopian dream. It's established practice that is being rolled back. Yglesias can stuff it.
I am (a) married to a trans activist who testified to the CA legislature for our state's gender-neutral ID law, and (b) gender-queer enough myself that I've been in a situation where I was concerned I might get gay-bashed by a group of drunk guys who were offended by a femme outfit I was wearing (even though I'm pan, not gay :-P ). So it's personal for me too.
Brianna Wu is also a trans woman, if you're not aware.
I am unclear what you are taking as an offensive lecture from Yglesias. He personally is strongly in favor of the blue-state policies on this stuff (although I think he also is in favor of remembering that for-profit medicine in the US _can_ lead to practitioners who encourage doing more stuff than is necessarily merited; my spouse more or less endorses Emily Bazelon's review of the arguments around care for trans kids https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/magazine/gender-therapy.html ).
I have dinged Yglesias for credulously assuming various conservatives were arguing in good faith (particularly Bari Weiss, who published a "whistleblower" report on a trans clinic in Missouri, IIRC, and Matt commented on it with roughly "if this is true it would be bad" w/o observing "but it's probably not true and we should wait for confirmation"). But fundamentally what he's saying about policy goals is right. You have to choose policy goals that are achievable, and engage in the public sphere in a manner that will actually achieve the goals. The issue that he cited in the excerpt Brad pulled here, about whether high school trans kids should be able to play on sports teams of their chosen gender, unfortunately is one on which the mass public has been spun up very effectively by the right wing. There are a lot of reach-able parents, but it will take time and patience to reach them. An otherwise quite liberal friend of mine who lives in Washington state whose daughters play sports was weirdly mad about the idea that some boys might pretend to be girls in order to dominate a sports league. At the same time, he would be an ally on making sure that trans healthcare is available to teens, and that we not have invasive "bathroom bill" policing of people's bodies. We need to pick our battles and do the most good for the folks we say we want to help, and that means not anathemizing people if they're ignorant or hostile in one area but can be allies on some issues in the near-term, and hopefully educated / talked down on other issues in the long run.
I don't get wound up about issues involving trans people in sports. However, I don't really want to have that conversation right now as it is so highly charged with misinformation and misunderstanding, and I see it as a useful platform for anti-trans disinformation.
What I don't see is why going straight at these anti-gender-affirming-care initiatives is bad politics. It's still seems a lot like "trans people are weird and I don't trust 'em" that's holding them back.
Criticizing Republicans for politicizing medical care and saying, "I think we should trust doctors and families to work this out," seems like a completely reasonable approach.
But I still don't understand what you think in any of the cited material from Yglesias says otherwise. Are you talking about where he's referring to Liliana Mason? Because his point there is just exactly the point I'm talking about in regard to earlier iterations of queer rights. If you reject alliance and compromise with anyone that holds a distasteful position on _any_ aspect of trans issues, you've just limited yourself to some tiny minority. If gay activists and straight allies had said in 1970, "We refuse to work with anyone that does not embrace the idea of fully normalizing homosexuality, including granting marriage rights to gay couples," they would've never gotten anywhere.
Activists for trans rights have a choice: Do we want to maintain moral purity, to show off to other activists that we're uncompromising supporters of the theoretical principle of trans rights; or do we actually want to _win_, so that those rights move from theory to practice?
What bothers me is the tone policing. "Don't be so angry or we might lose Medicaid for all". For instance.
To gain power, intellectual arguments are largely useless. Noah is right that emotional issues like Access to Abortion, an issue with emotional punch, is very important and viable. You are both wrong on who is affected - women and men want their daughters to have access, which is one reason it has such a high agreement amongst Americans.
Lastly, it seems that "intellectuals" are arguing philosophically, rather than based on experience. There is a wealth of experience across nations about what does and does not work - c.f. incarceration and prisons, not to mention policing. This applies to a number of social issues, many of which can be assessed by other countries experiences.
Golly. I've liked so many responses here that I can't tell where I stand on the matter. But Brad, just look: the responses are way more than anything in economics would generate. Lovin' it.
I'm neither ,but, like Burke, I have a basic philosophical view which I keep close to my vest. Politics is the art of the possible and assumes compromises. Just as an aside, when Burke wrote Reflections, some Whigs pointed out that he was more liberal than they were and didn't appreciate being lectured to as if they were radicals. The people who outed Burke , let's say, he especially despised because he felt that it was easier to compromise when your ideological views were obscure, and people publicly stating Burke's views told in confidence to them were making him less effective in the real world .
Brad, I don't understand your puzzlement. Demonizing the opposition has been going on, well, forever. If Brianne has got a clever new name for the demonizers, that's great. What's puzzling about that?
But the hard left (read the young Marx) has always been especially vulnerable to this kind of 'my opponents are bad people escalation'. Their "critical" view claims to see beneath the surface of things. It can't evaluate any opposing argument at face value; it has to attribute opponents' views to who they are - and the slip from pointing to who I am socioeconomically or ideologically to pointing to who I am morally doesn't even require a banana peel.
Well, yes, I agree that the constituency for wasting millions on useless _XYZ_ projects is small, put like that. Now, as soon as we have a trusted agency that can properly define "wasting" and "useless" in a way that everyone in Congress respects...
"If you do, you get screamed at by your own side."
Maybe the problem is considering that there are "sides."
Note about Burke Reflections...His attack was against a particular set of views and actions, and generalizing about him based on this one book is unsound.
One might add: it’s particularly bad, as a look, for substackers to be punching left on this issue because it’s clear even to outsiders that there are subscriber dollars in it.
Really dislike the conflation(?) between the Wu and Yglesias positions here. The challenge posed by the true far left is very different from the general call not to sell out interest groups in your coalition. You can tell in part by the way that the Yglesias excerpt soft-pedals the transphobic position relative to the actual state of the law, which is getting worse in red states all the time. You can easily oppose the raft of new anti-trans laws and anti-trans misinfo without being unable to compromise things generally.
I'm not conflating them! I am observing that, at least, in the things we quote: Ezra < Matt < Brianna < "Infinite Leftists"—and each sees themself as the left edge of the functional progressive community.
So the way you are using the < relation here ... A < B means A is to the right of B?
I don't know that I would say Ezra is to the right of Matt. But maybe that's just because I don't know that < is a total order anyway.
I agree that you’re not conflating them, though the move to say anybody to the left of the speaker is an infinite leftist is also sadly common. I’m much more asserting that the Brianna point about, broadly, fools and grifters, is not the universe-of-the-left which Matt is pretending it to be.
Perhaps "infinite leftism" should be re-named "intellectual acne", or perhaps Marxism-Heatherism. "Leftier-than-thou" is indeed a form of social bullying. (Was it invented by the Jacobins?) And the young are more likely to be in a bullying phase, although some never quite grow out of it.
The issue is not moralism v. pragmatism. Most of us are both at the same time: aspiring toward justice, and doing what we can in this sublunary sphere. You could call it consequentialism v. deontology. But it's worth pointing out that our premier mode of deontological thinking--the legal mode--usually ends up with pragmatic rules, no matter the rhetoric. It's also worth noting that deontology tends to be associated with the more intelligent people on the right. It's a useful tool for justifying human suffering.
There idea of infinite leftists sparked a recollection of Lenin's polemic, "Left wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. Politics based upon an ideological premise seem to inevitably spawn a "purist" wing. One observes this on both the right and left in this country. I shared Matt's frustration with groups unable to take yes for an answer.
A good example of the problems liberals face is the UAW strike. Liberals support government subsidies for electric cars in order to fight climate change. But electric cars require fewer workers to assemble than ICE cars. In the best of all possible worlds, excess auto workers could be retrained as software engineers. In the real world that isn't practical. So do the Democrats back big labor or clean energy? Or do they just try and sit on the fence? Eventually first world countries are going to need to provide their citizens with a guaranteed minimum income that is not based on holding a job. But this is not going to happen anytime soon. And of course illegal immigrants will demand to be included in any minimum income program. I kind of think Peter Turchin is correct that the coming decades will see a lot of disruption and even revolutionary change. And a study of history shows revolutions usually do more harm than good. But as Kurt Vonnegut used to say "and so it goes."
Ideally, liberals would NOT support subsidies to EV in order to fight climate change, but taxation of net CO2 emissions. But if not too high, the subsidies are probably not too far from a second best. The strike is a private dispute between private parties. There is no reason to make it a political issue.