How Good Is AOC at Politics?

Not very good. Bill Scher makes the necessary points in a piece on the Washington Montly site:

"Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, champion of the Green New Deal, suffered the humiliation of an overwhelming defeat dealt by her fellow House Democrats for a spot on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Also last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders led a successful battle to include direct payments for millions of Americans in the pandemic relief.

One socialist shaped one of the biggest pieces of legislation this year. The other socialist was denied the ability to shape environmental legislation for the next two years. What did one do right, and the other do wrong?....

Sanders is proving more influential than AOC because he grabbed on to a fresh issue with great political potential, while Ocasio-Cortez has spent the post-election period defending her signature positions even though they proved to be political liabilities.

Shortly after Election Day, Ocasio-Cortez pushed the selective data point that “Every single swing-seat House Democrat who endorsed #MedicareForAll won re-election or is on track to win re-election.” That ignores other facts. All of the challengers who endorsed Medicare for All lost their races. The House Democrats with the five narrowest victories—the ones who get the party up to and over the 218-majority threshold—are not single-payer supporters. Nor are three Democratic challengers who successfully flipped seats. Most strikingly, single-payer supporter Kara Eastman lost the Nebraska 2nd congressional district contest by 4.6 percentage points, while single-payer opponent Joe Biden won it by 6.5 percentage points and snagged an Electoral College vote.

Ocasio-Cortez sought to affix blame on House moderates for running weak social media campaigns. Those moderates countered that the claim was an inaccurate attempt to deflect from the problems caused by her edgy positions such as “Defund the Police” and “Green New Deal,” the latter being particularly nettlesome for Democrats who lost in fossil fuel friendly areas, such as Texas Senate challenger MJ Hegar and Rep. Kendra Horn from Oklahoma’s 5th congressional district.

Sanders hasn’t abandoned any of his signature positions, but since the election, he hasn’t dwelled on them either. Instead, he championed direct payments which attracted bipartisan support in the initial round of pandemic relief. Turns out that sending government checks to most Americans is quite popular.....

Sanders wasn’t rigid about the particulars. He identified a popular issue. He leveraged his bully pulpit and power given to individual Senators under the chamber’s rules. He worked with members of the other party who agreed with him and members of both parties who didn’t, to reach a compromise.

After nearly 30 years in Congress, Sanders is well practiced at this sort of legislating. He and his supporters have long bragged about being dubbed the “Amendment King” by Rolling Stone, proof that the socialist was also a pragmatist.

Ocasio-Cortez has only two years in Congress but hasn’t yet shown an interest in being the Amendment Queen. Her reaction to the final relief bill, which was part of a heavily loaded omnibus bill, was outrage that such a package was being rushed to vote with only hours to review the details. She voted for it, but not before trashing the process on Twitter: “This isn’t governance. It’s hostage-taking.”

This is the role where Ocasio-Cortez is most comfortable: the outsider who managed to get inside, exposing how awful the system really is. Such a posture is well suited for a movement politician hoping to upend the status quo, possibly by waging an insurgent campaign for president. But it is not the way to win plum committee assignments and shape legislation.

More importantly, progressives need more wins to refurbish their reputation after the mixed results of the 2020 election. Democratic moderates are far more inclined to distance themselves from progressive agitation. That won’t change so long as the progressive wing is defined by tainted slogans. The way to regain influence is with fresh proposals and to nimbly work the system."

To put it bluntly, the more progressives elevate AOC and her ilk as the model for American progressivism, the less effective they are likely to be. That's an indulgence progressives and the country as a whole can ill afford at this point.

WASHINGTONMONTHLY.COM

What Bernie Sanders Can Teach Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Cut deals. Don't unnecessarily alienate your party. And get the most

Capital and Ideology

What, you haven't yet read Thomas Piketty's 1100 page book Capital and Ideology?? Speaking as someone who is just now reaching the end of this massive tome, I suppose you can be forgiven for a bit of malingering on this one. Still, I really do recommend it highly; there's a tremendous amount of useful information and big picture thinking in the book that you would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. Even if you skip around, you're sure to find some of the sections valuable and mind-expanding.

It's a very radical book really, in many ways more radical than its more famous cousin, Capital in the 21st Century. But.....if you don't have time, here is an interview of Piketty on the Social Europe site that touches on some of the themes from Capital and Ideology and gives you a flavor of some of the ideas he's playing with.

"Let me first say that I am a European federalist—I believe in Europe. Before describing everything that should be improved, it’s important to remember that European nation-states have been able to build, especially in the decades after World War II, the best social-security system in the world, the least unequal, social-market economic system in the world. This is a great achievement. I am not here to say that everything is bad in Europe—that would be ridiculous. We have built a social system which, by and large, is the least unequal in history, and this is a huge achievement, but this achievement is fragile.

For a long time we thought that it was possible to have the welfare state within each nation-state and then the EU would just be in charge of enforcing the common market and the free flow of goods, services and capital. We realise today that this is not sufficient and if we don’t harmonise tax legislation—and, more generally, if we don’t have some common public policy to regulate capitalism and to reduce inequality—then indeed there is a risk that the divorce between the European project and les classes populaires at some point will just destroy the project itself.

I am very shocked by the fact that, as I show in Capital and Ideology, if you look, referendum after referendum—whether it is in Britain, France or Denmark—wherever you have a referendum over Europe, it’s always the bottom 50 or 60 per cent of income, wealth or education groups which vote against Europe and only the top 10, 20 or 30 per cent which vote for Europe. This cannot be a coincidence.

The explanation according to which the bottom 50 or 60 per cent group are so nationalist, or they don’t like internationalist ideas, is just wrong. There are many examples in history where, in fact, the more disadvantaged socio-economic groups are more internationalist than the elite.

It entirely depends on the political project—the political mobilisation around internationalist ideas—that you present. The problem is that over time the European project has been viewed more and more as being built in the interest of the most mobile and most powerful economic actors. This is indeed very dangerous.

With the Covid crisis, we have an opportunity to try to show to the public opinion of Europe that Europe can be here to reduce inequality. But this will require some deep change in the way we conduct economic and tax policy.

Who is going to repay the large public debt? For now we put everything on the balance sheet of the European Central Bank but at some point we will have to discuss who is going to pay for that. There are solutions which, in fact, come also from the history of Europe itself. Let me remind you that after World War II, in the 1950s, many countries—including in particular Germany—invented some very innovative ways to reduce large public debt, including very progressive tax on very high-wealth individuals.

Germany in 1952 put in place a very ambitious, exceptional, progressive wealth tax, which applied between 1952 and the 1960s: very high-wealth taxpayers had to pay a very large amount of money to the German treasury. This was very successful in the sense that this policy not only helped reduce public debt—it paid for public investment, public infrastructure, and it was part of the very successful postwar growth model.

We are going to have to find something similar in the future, except that now we cannot do it alone. It cannot be just Germany or France or Italy. We will have to have some common tax policy.

Europe has to show its citizens that Europe can mean solidarity—Europe can mean asking more of those who have more and, in particular, of very high-wealth individuals who have more than €1 million or €2 million in assets. They should make an exceptional contribution in the coming years, to repay some of the Covid debt. Some proposals have been put on the table in various countries, including in Germany—very similar in fact to what was actually done in Germany in 1952, when it was a big success."

SOCIALEUROPE.EU

Capital and ideology: interview with Thomas Piketty – Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty tells Robin Wilson how wealth and power can be transferred from capital to workers and citizens.

Back to the Working Class

The chorus of voices is growing louder that the Democrats need to address their working class problem. That's a very good thing because (1) the Democrats are going to have a hell of hard time consistently winning if they continue to do so poorly with working class voters and (2) what the hell is the point of a left party if they are not in reality and in the eyes of these voters the defenders of the working class and its interests?

Matt Yglesias on the virtues of the welfare state and how the Democrats are losing the plot:

"[T]he Awokening is also one of two strands of thinking on the left that prevent embrace of the welfare state from being as fulsome as it should be. We’ve seen a school of thought which holds that the New Deal was Racist and Bad and progressives should talk constantly about unpopular race-targeting ideas even as this costs Democrats votes among non-college voters of all races. The other is the strain of thought that wants to constantly complain about “neoliberalism” and spend all its time going down various regulatory rabbit holes rather than just taxing and spending.

The welfare state, however, is not just good on its own terms; it’s good for checking the power of employers and big business (because it gives people exit options) and it’s good for racial equity. The top one percent is a very white group of people, while the poverty rate for African-Americans is more than double the rate for whites. Addressing this with an expanded welfare state is a much more potent tool for advancing racial equity than endless diversity and inclusion programs, and it has the added benefit of being a potentially winning political agenda."

Kevin Drum on the pitfalls of relying on college-educated voters:

"If education is the playing field, then Democrats own only about one-third of it. The rest is Republican territory. This doesn’t mean Democrats can never win in areas with a small number of college grads, but it does mean that they have to work pretty hard to do it.

To put this more simply, recent evidence suggests that Democrats don’t just have a problem with the white working class anymore, but, increasingly, a problem with the working class, period. Unfortunately, this inevitably brings us around to the tedious—but important—question of whether liberals need to move toward the center on social issues.

Needless to say, the progressive wing of the party is massively resistant to this idea. During the election, my Twitter feed was jam packed with quixotic ideas for expanding the Democratic map: eliminating the Electoral College; admitting Washington DC and Puerto Rico as states; packing the Supreme Court; etc. This is all pie-in-the-sky stuff, a desperate attempt to propose anything other than the obvious: embracing social policies that appeal to more people, especially those without college degrees. That’s Politics 101. I don’t know how this is all going to turn out, but I’ll bet it’s going to be a helluva fight."

David Leonhardt on lessons Democrats should learn from this high turnout election:

"In 2020, turnout soared, yet Democrats did worse than expected. Yes, they defeated Trump, but they failed to retake the Senate (for now) and lost ground in the House and in state legislatures.

How could this be, when the big demographic groups with low voter turnout — Millennials, Latinos and Asian-Americans — lean left?

Because the infrequent voters in these groups are less liberal than the frequent voters. “Latino nonvoters, for example, seem to have a higher opinion of Trump than Latino voters,” Yanna Krupnikov, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, told me. Over all, nonvoters split roughly evenly between Democratic leaners and Republican ones, a recent Knight Foundation study found.

Once you think it through, the pattern makes some sense. It involves social class.

People who don’t vote (or who didn’t until 2020) are more likely to be working class — that is, not to have college degrees — than reliable voters, Knight concluded. And working-class Americans are more conservative on several big issues, including abortion, guns and immigration. They’re also less trusting of institutions and elites.

The fact that turnout surged this year and Democrats didn’t do as well as expected is yet another example of the party’s struggles with working-class voters, and not just working-class whites. Whether Democrats can figure out how to do better may be the biggest looming question about American politics."

This is indeed the question and Democrats need to answer it sooner rather than later if they hope to prosper in this decade.

https://www.motherjones.com/.../democrats-have-a-problem.../

https://www.slowboring.com/.../the-welfare-state-is...

https://www.nytimes.com/.../pfizer-vaccine-nba-spotify.html

MOTHERJONES.COM

Democrats have a problem with the working class

The Democratic Party Needs To Be Woke (To the Realities of the American Electorate!)

The Democratic Party definitely needs to be woke. But it's not to the panoply of boutique "social justice" issues so dear to the hearts of so many progressive activists. Instead, they need to be woke to the realities of the actually-existing American electorate and the Democrats' ongoing class problem. Hopefully, some of the analysis coming out of the 2020 election will help make that happen.

Take for example the detailed analysis in the New York Times of neighborhoods dominated by Latino and Asian working class voters. Their analysis of data from 20,000 precincts in 20 cities indicates strongly that Democratic performance seriously deteriorated among Latino and Asian working class voters, as has also been indicated by other precinct-level analyses and currently available survey data.

This is a huge problem. Many liberal Democrats have waved away Democrats' large and ongoing problem with white working class voters because, well, they're white and therefore it must be about race. Nothing we can do about that! Besides, we've still got the nonwhite working class so everything is fine.

Maybe not. As I say in the Times article:

"Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, said he worried before the election that Democrats’ focus on racial justice issues came at the expense of outreach about easing the lives of hard-pressed workers.

“In general, it suggests that Democrats’ theory of the case — that their electoral problems were all about race rather than class — was incorrect,” he said."

That's right. The theory of the case has been wrong. Time to get woke.

NYTIMES.COM

Immigrant Neighborhoods Shifted Red as the Country Chose Blue

The Left's Assignment, Should They Decide to Accept It

To be honest, I don't have a lot of confidence that the left will accept this assignment, but I think it is quite clear both what the assignment is and that they should accept it.

The assignment: help Biden succeed. His policy commitments are plenty progressive and it will be a big challenge to make progress on these commitments, even without endless sniping from the left that Biden is not a real progressive and pointless intra-party squabbles. Above all, the Biden administration needs to make rapid progress ending the coronavirus crisis and getting the economy back healthy and into high gear. No progressive dreams will come true until and unless that happens. A mature left would realize that and gladly accept the assignment to help Biden succeed.

Todd Gitlin in USA Today:

"As Donald Trump fades in the rear-view mirror, the all-or-nothing caucus has more urgent concerns. Its idea of the left requires trashing the winner because he was embraced by party elites and, embarrassingly, won primaries against candidates further to the left. Its first mantra is: Moderates will sell you out. Its second: Half a loaf is much worse than no loaf at all, because it will delude the naive masses into believing that things are moving in the right direction....

The sure road to irrelevance under a government that brings together disparate forces is to inflame rage at the moderates more intensely than one mobilizes forces to strengthen “the left wing of the possible,” in Michael Harrington’s memorable phrase.

The unreconciled “we told you so” folks are ever ready to call “Gotcha!” It’s as if the evidence demonstrates (contrary to fact) that progressive congressional candidates are sure to win in moderate distracts. The chorus must always be tuned up, ready to go, to signal to hyper-alert Democrats that their party is, at bottom, nothing more than the neoliberal Tweedledee to Trump’s aspirationally fascist Tweedledum.

What the “we told you so caucus” does not understand is that the whole Democratic Party — moderates as well as the left — shares a stake in helping Biden succeed. Only if he delivers quickly, beginning next month, can progressive politics come to life. If the Democrats win the two Georgia runoffs on Jan. 5, the odds for deep reform are even better, though even if Republicans keep control of the Senate, some doors for progressive change will remain open. Shouting insults at Biden is not the way to make the most of the Democrats’ strength. Neither is cuing up the circular firing squad.

Democratic power can only be anchored, over the longer haul, by showing that Democratic government works for a majority. The only way to peel away some of the less fanatical Trump supporters, over time, is to deliver — to put money in their pockets — to demonstrate that Biden policies stand to shore up a big tent that has room for them, too."

EJ Dionne in the Post:

"Since {Biden's] gains this year over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vote were larger among college graduates and suburbanites than among those without college degrees, he needs to continue his outreach to the less privileged — White but also Latino.

He can do this without breaking faith with the Black voters who gave him decisive majorities. They form a big part of the working class, and would also respond positively to an emphasis on creating well-paying jobs, lifting incomes and, more broadly, themes built around equal dignity.

In her book “The New Working Class: How to Win Hearts, Minds and Votes,” British writer (and Labour Party political adviser) Claire Ainsley highlights the themes of family, fairness, hard work and decency. They are keys to reducing polarization.

At least some of the voters who stuck with Trump did so because they liked his attacks on globalization, were more worried about the economy than the pandemic and felt ignored by conventional politicians. Biden needs to push the parts of his program (its “buy American” components, for example) that speak directly to these frustrations.

The fights he chooses to pick with Republicans should be on behalf of proposals (a higher minimum wage, affordable health insurance, more family-friendly workplaces, political reform to reduce big money’s role in politics) that make clear who is on the side of the forgotten.....

The larger lesson is that culture wars are at the heart of our polarization. If they become ferocious, they will block Biden’s efforts to broaden his reach. As a religious person, Biden — simply by virtue of who he is — can reduce levels of mistrust bred by the growing secular/religious divide, and he needs to handle church/state questions with care. He has a moral obligation to be uncompromising on issues of racial justice, but advocates of change need to find arguments (and, yes, slogans) that appeal across existing lines of division.

And nothing unites like success (one reason Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” slogan was so effective), so ending the pandemic and restoring the economy should be the Democrats’ lodestar."

So, pretty simple right? Culture wars, bad; helping Biden succeed, good. Time for the left to step up and do what needs to be done.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../2e988662-4172-11eb...

https://www.usatoday.com/.../left-should-help.../3955164001/

USATODAY.COM

The Democratic left needs Biden to succeed. Stop trashing the winner and help him deliver.

Democrats' Sad Performance in House Races in 2020--and Yes, "Defund" and "Socialism" Did Hurt Candidates

David Wasserman is among the best political analysts in the country and he is especially good on House races, his specific beat at the Cook Political Report. He has a new piece out on "Five Takeaways" from 2020 House races.

First, the results: they're not as bad as you think they were--they're worse!

"[I]n the House, Republicans nearly swept the 27 races in our Toss Up column and won seven races in our "Lean" and "Likely" Democrat columns. These included some big upsets: Republicans held every vulnerable seat in Texas, picked up four Biden/Clinton-won seats in California and even picked up two Miami area seats Clinton had carried by more than 15 points in 2016.

In 2018, Democrats won most of the Toss Ups and even four seats we had rated as "leaning" or "likely" Republican — not entirely dissimilar. But this time, instead of a strong majority, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is left with 222 seats and virtually no margin for error — especially with Reps. Cedric Richmond (LA-02), Deb Haaland (NM-01) and Marcia Fudge (OH-11) set to decamp for administration posts."

The only races where Democrats are still holding out hope are New York's 22nd CD, where Rep. Anthony Brindisi trails by 12 votes pending a court-ordered recanvass of votes, and Iowa's 2nd CD, where Democrat Rita Hart is contesting her GOP opponent's certified six vote margin before the House Administration Committee. Otherwise, 25 of the 27 Toss Ups broke to the GOP.

It's clear that we and others in our frenzied, polling-addicted sphere misjudged the down-ballot environment more than in any cycle in recent memory and must assess the polls' (and our own) blind spots before moving on."

And here's Wasserman on an important lesson from the results:

"Republicans' attacks on "socialism" and "defund the police" were potent - and Democrats didn't do enough to blunt them.

Throughout the cycle, Democrats rolled their eyes at Republicans' incessant ads on these themes. After all, a minuscule number of House Democrats actually identify as "democratic socialists" or have advocated reducing police funding.

But in a presidential cycle with plenty of voters who aren't immersed in the policy weeds, these attacks worked. In one ad, former GOP Irvine Mayor Beth Van Duyne was flanked by seven police officers and accused her opponent, Democrat Candace Valenzuela, of siding with "radicals" who want to "defund the police, end cash bail and release criminals."

Van Duyne ended up beating Valenzuela, who ran as the progressive in the Democratic primary, by a point - even though non-whites are now a majority in the suburban Dallas seat and Biden carried the district at the top of the ticket. Although Valenzuela's ads played up her advocacy of school safety on the school board, the damage was too much to overcome.

Relatively few Democratic challengers aired ads inoculating themselves against these attacks. Most chose to stay on "offense" on healthcare and COVID in their messaging. And, many paid the price. Says one GOP consultant, "In 2018, Dems were seen as normal. But after the rise of AOC, the primaries and 'defund the police,' it was easier to paint them as radical."

Democrats' genuinely progressive challengers fared the worst. Medicare-for-All proponents Kara Eastman and Dana Balter lost to GOP Reps. Don Bacon (NE-02) and John Katko (NY-24) by five and ten points respectively, despite Biden carrying both districts by seven points. The DCCC/HMP spent a combined $9.8 million on these two races.

Very few non-incumbent Democrats ran ahead of Biden in their districts, but one was Cameron Webb (VA-05), who touted support from sheriffs in his ads and flipped the script by accusing his GOP opponent of voting to cut police funding. He took 47 percent, two points better than Biden's 45 percent. Had all Democrats outperformed by that much, they would have gained a dozen seats."

Wasserman is probably a Democrat but I believe he's neither particularly left or center. He's just calls 'em as he sees 'em. And I think he's right.