Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Unions, Unions, Unions!

They're pretty great--and in a lot of different ways! Harold Meyerson has an article at The American Prospect on unions and voting in 2020, based on a CAP report (linked to below) that I co-authored with Aurelia Glass and David Madland.
"A new study out today from the Center for American Progress Action Fund reveals that one of the constants of American electoral politics is still constant: Union voters still vote more Democratic than their non-union counterparts. Despite Democratic hand-wringing over the flight of working-class men to Republican ranks, an in-depth study of the 2020 presidential vote by Aurelia Glass, David Madland, and Ruy Teixeira reveals that unions were indeed an electoral bulwark against the much-feared drift toward Trump....
As Democrats ponder how to win more support among white and Hispanic working-class voters in particular, the ability of unions to produce more Democratic voters in those groups shows that the appeals of white supremacy and the war on wokeness can be countered in part by the kind of clear economic messaging that unions deliver. Plainly, Democrats themselves can’t deliver such messages as credibly as unions do. When unions speak to members through shop stewards and through friends at the worksite, the message isn’t being delivered by a Democratic establishment that some see as culturally alien and disrespectful. It’s being delivered by one’s peers.
Such messengers are needed now more than ever. The exit polls that I wrote about in the 1980s showed a substantially wider gap between working-class white union members and nonmembers than the six-point margin that divided them in 2020. That, though, was before the decades of economic stagnation and abandonment that befell this group of voters, before they fell prey to deaths of despair and right-wing media (Limbaugh, Fox, social). Democrats can’t do much about that right-wing media, but, as the Biden administration is the first since Harry Truman’s to realize, they had better do their damnedest to bolster unions any way they can."
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Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Once Again on the Five Deadly Sins of the Left

Time to repent!
In case you missed it the first time around, my latest at The Liberal Patriot is a slightly edited version of my recent American Compass piece. My conclusion:
The Future of the Left
The year since I wrote the original essay on the Five Deadly Sins of the Left has not resulted in a sea change in the left’s attitudes embodied in these five sins. Instead, they seem just as or more entrenched than they were. This augurs a future where working class voters continue to drift away from the Left, while highly educated elites increasingly define the left’s profile. The economist Thomas Piketty has referred to this development as the rise of the “Brahmin Left.” For the Brahmin Left, the five deadly sins are virtues, since this is what the enlightened among them believe. But for the working class, as well as less ideological upscale voters, these ideas make the left less attractive.
There is still an opening for a left that promotes universal values, a better model of capitalism, practical problem-solving on climate change, and an economy that delivers abundance for all. But the hour may be getting late. The left needs, without delay, to reject the five deadly sins and embark on a program of de-Brahminization. If they fail to do so, the left is likely to continue to decline in popularity.
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Monday, December 20, 2021

In Defense of Joe Manchin

Sure you hate Joe Manchin. But maybe you shouldn't. It is not only he who has not played this straight and he is not actually wrong about everything.
From the excellent newsletter Full Stack Economics:
"Manchin has had a concrete position on the bill’s structure for quite some time⁠—that its revenues should run concurrently with its spending. That position has simply been ignored by Democratic leadership, who have pushed a bill that is extraordinarily front-loaded and laden with expiring programs.
This is a well-known budget trick I call the frontload gambit. The idea: if you set up a bunch of expiring provisions and use up your budget space as fast as possible, you can hope for them to be extended by a future Congress.
At the behest of House progressives, the current version of the Build Back Better bill this budgeting trick aggressively. Expansions to the child tax credit end after one year, improvements to the Affordable Care Act after four years, and subsidies for childcare after six.
The problem is that this trick isn’t particularly subtle. Anyone who doesn’t notice it is deliberately choosing not to notice it. But Manchin cares about it, and he sees it right there in the CBO score....
There are plenty of reasons to be peeved with Manchin. His skepticism of the transition to clean energy seems retrograde, and his long-run debt concerns are overrated. But on this point, he obviously has the better end of the argument.
First, now is not a particularly good time to have a frontloaded fiscal impulse. As I wrote back in October, the economy is in a short run bottleneck but there is ample borrowing capacity in the longer run. Adding a surge of spending now and pulling back later is perhaps the exact opposite of what should be done.
Second, programs that are fully paid for can be made permanent under the Senate’s reconciliation procedure. Given the likelihood that Republicans will take over one or both houses of Congress soon, it would be better for Democrats to lock in some gains.
Third, it would become a lot easier to explain. The broad, scattershot approach has made it difficult to focus in on a few popular changes and make the bill a referendum on those.
And finally, it would provide a good excuse to cut some programs that aren’t ready for primetime⁠—like the poorly-conceived childcare proposal⁠—and focus on shoring up the more solid ones."
Kevin Drum:
"Republicans claimed—and Manchin agreed—that the BBB bill as it stands is basically just an effort to game the CBO scoring system. And they're right. Everyone does this, including Republicans in their 2017 tax cut, but it's nonetheless true that the rat's nest of programs that start and stop, along with funding that's backloaded, is designed to give the impression of low cost even though Democrats clearly want to try to make all of the programs permanent at some future point.
Manchin wanted a "clean" bill. That is, a bill that included a smaller number of program but funded them permanently. The irony is that this is literally what every single liberal analyst wanted too. Lefties and centrists all agreed that this would be best, since permanent programs can be designed better and are much harder for Republicans to cancel down the line.
And yet that was apparently never on the table. Why? Because analysts may have loved the idea but politicians hated it. It would have meant killing all but two or three programs, and it was impossible to get agreement within the Democratic caucus about which ones to keep. Everyone had their own pet program.
So there you have it. If we had done it Manchin's way, we would have kept his vote and we probably would have gotten a better bill out of it. I wonder why this was so impossible?"
Finally Manchin did actually have a pretty decent counteroffer which was rejected:
"Sen. Joe Manchin III last week made the White House a concrete counteroffer for its spending bill, saying he would accept a $1.8 trillion package that included universal prekindergarten for 10 years, an expansion of Obamacare and hundreds of billions of dollars to combat climate change, three people familiar with the matter said."
So before you join in the next Two Minutes Hate on Manchin maybe think a bit about what and why you're hating.
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Saturday, December 18, 2021

Why Most Democrats' Attitude Toward Joe Manchin Makes No Sense

Never Trumper Tim Miller wants the Democrats to be as successful as possible because, well, Trump and all that. Miller, as I am, is frequently baffled by Democrats' utter cluelessness on some matters of basic politics. One such is the Democrats' Manchin problem:
"[T]his general sense [about Manchin] is reflected in the gap between Biden and Manchin in the state. In a town that prominently features a “Trump 2024: Fuck Your Feelings” sign (irony is dead in West Virginia, too), the Democratic senator maintained a reputation somewhere short of loathing. From these voters' perspective Manchin, wasn’t perfect. But he hadn’t gone full-in with the BLMAntifaCommies.
The ability to maintain that public perception is at the core of the Joe Manchin miracle. And let’s be clear about this, in this political environment the existence of a Democratic Senator in West Virginia is just a notch below loaves and fishes.
Manchin does it by going along with the Democrats just enough to get by, while bucking the party loudly enough to keep the Trump voters in his state happy.
And that tells you all you need to know about the reason why Manchin signaled on Wednesday that he wouldn’t support the current iteration of the Build Back Better plan, with sources in Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office telling NBC that the Democrats would shelve it until at least March.
So the question for Democrats is: What now? For the cable news pundits and Twitter class it seems that the answer to “what now” is “roast Joe Manchin until he tastes like chicken.” And for the casual progressive political observer, I understand that impulse. Manchin has the chance to do something and he’s not. It’s frustrating, I get it.
But for those who are ostensibly trying to influence Democratic party strategy, turning Manchin into the bad guy and railing against him is profoundly stupid. And it is actively harming the Democratic party’s stated goals.
These blue-checked Manchin-haters all seem to want one of three things so that their preferred agenda can pass:
(1) For Joe Manchin to go out in a blaze of social-justice, democracy-saving glory, give up on reelection, and hand the seat over to Republican Cletus Von Ivermectin in 2024.
(2) For Joe Manchin to wake up and realize the people in his state would actually love the Build Back Better plan if only they had a chance to enjoy its bounty.
(3) For the Squad and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to have used their supposed leverage to force Joe Manchin to sign on with the Squad’s spending bill in exchange for getting infrastructure.
None of that is tethered to what is happening in the real world.
Here’s reality when it comes to Joe Manchin and the state of play for the Democratic agenda:
(1) Joe Manchin isn’t interested in blowing up his career to pass the Great Society 2.0.
Now I have real doubts about whether he can win another election in West Virginia in our polarized times, no matter what. But what counts for our present political calculations is whether Manchin thinks he can win. All signs point to yes. Manchin wants to at least have the option to run and win in a state that Joe Biden lost by almost 40 points. And he’s acting as such.
(2) Joe Manchin knows that those who think passing BBB will help him in WV are completely and totally out-of-touch with his electorate. Even if the individual elements of BBB poll well, signing on to a multi-trillion dollar left-wing spending bill would be akin to signing his own political suicide note.
(3) Nancy & Chuck & The Squad never had any leverage over Manchin to begin with. This is a critical point. As long as Manchin remains open to running again in West Virginia, the absolute best thing he could do was stand in the way of legislation that is perceived by his voters as a socialist, AOC/Pelosi, left-wing fantasy. Passing infrastructure gained him exceedingly little politically. Blocking the Squad’s agenda gains him a lot. Some of the best ads he could run in West Virginia would be about how he crushed Pelosi and The Squad’s dreams.
For all these reasons, those of us who live on planet earth knew that Joe Manchin was never going to accede to the left’s demands. Their anger at Joe Manchin didn’t hurt him. Exactly the opposite! The madder lefties get at him, the stronger his political position is at home. Their rage is the spinach that makes his Popeye muscles bulge. He’s fueled by it. And without this ability to wedge against his own party, he would die a quiet, but noble, death. Like Heidi Heitkamp, or Mark Pryor, or Claire McCaskill, and all the other long-gone, red-state Democrats.
The only spending bill Manchin was ever going to support was one that leaders in his party, and left-wing celebrities, hate. Because that’s how he would sell it to the folks at the Groves-Mann Funeral Home.
These were the facts of life from the very start of this torturous, year-long negotation.
And they will still be the facts of life next year, when hopefully Manchin and President Biden can agree to a more modest compromise that he can sell back home. "
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Podcast on Hispanic Voters

I am interviewed by Zaid Jilani and Shant Mesrobian on their excellent Inquire podcast. We cover Hispanic voters and the Democrats from a variety of different angles. I think you'll find it interesting.
"In this episode, Shant and Zaid talk to political scientist, demography expert, and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Ruy Teixeira about the sudden and dramatic collapse in support for Democrats from Hispanics.
Ruy wrote a recent article on his Substack on this subject, and has written extensively about the demographic shifts shaping America's political parties, so we talked to him about why he thinks this is happening and what it could mean for national politics moving forward. We hope you enjoy the discussion."
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Friday, December 17, 2021

The Five Deadly Sins of the Left: An Update

About a year ago I published an American Compass essay on “The Five Deadly Sins of the Left.” In that essay, I addressed the surprising fact that the left has not performed as well as one might expect, given the poor performance of free-market capitalism in the 21st century. Even the financial crisis of 2008–09 did not spur any real realignment of voters toward the left. Nor have—so far—the twin economic and health crises brought on by the COVID pandemic. What has gone wrong?
A year ago, I put forward a simple theory. The public just isn’t interested in buying what the left is selling. No matter how loudly the left hawks its wares or how heroically it organizes, it will not succeed. The left’s internal diagnoses lead it to believe that, in picking up the pieces from this global debacle, it can finally gain the elusive majority support it needs. But, I argued, durable mass support for the left will not emerge unless and until it radically revamps its offering, abandoning the unhealthy and unpopular obsessions that consume its attention and distract from actual solutions. In particular, it must find the strength to overcome its five deadly sins: identity politics; retro-socialism; catastrophism; growthphobia; and technopessimism.
So, how is the left doing today? In the year since my essay was published, Joe Biden managed to wrest the presidency from Donald Trump, albeit in a closer election than anticipated and with unexpected losses in the House and state legislatures. Yet despite considerable legislative accomplishments, Biden’s approval rating has sunk to a very unimpressive average of 43%. Democrats appear headed for a drubbing in the 2022 elections where they will possibly lose both the House and the Senate. Meanwhile, the Democratic party’s ratings on many key issues are seriously lagging the GOP’s, and its brand appears to be in serious trouble in broad swaths of the country. While there are many reasons for this gloomy outlook, the five deadly sins I described a year ago provide a useful lens through which to evaluate the left’s quest for a durable electoral coalition.....
The year since I wrote the original essay on the Five Deadly Sins of the Left has not resulted in a sea change in the left’s attitudes embodied in these five sins. Instead, they seem just as or more entrenched than they were. This augurs a future where working class voters continue to drift away from the Left, while highly educated elites increasingly define the left’s profile. The economist Thomas Piketty has referred to this development as the rise of the “Brahmin Left.” For the Brahmin Left, the five deadly sins are virtues, since this is what the enlightened among them believe. But for the working class, as well as less ideological upscale voters, these ideas make the left less attractive.
There is still an opening for a left that promotes universal values, a better model of capitalism, practical problem-solving on climate change, and an economy that delivers abundance for all. But the hour may be getting late. The left needs, without delay, to reject the five deadly sins and embark on a program of de-Brahminization. If they fail to do so, the left is likely to continue to decline in popularity.
Read the whole thing at American Compass!
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