"For Democrats this means abandoning the turn-the-page/turn-the-cheek ethos of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in favor of proud accountability for enemies of democracy."
We have spent 10 years pulling our hair out over the fact that there is a double standard between Democrats and Republicans. And, there is! It's worse than ever before.
What's doing the best right now as far as Democratic branding? I think there are three categories that are converging, which will either unite into a TRUE response to the trump era and its root causes, or, well, not:
1.) Zohran: We should not settle for mediocracy. Government can and will be excellent and best-in-class at getting shit done and I will prove it.
2.)"Fighters": Fuck it, this isn't a perfect system but God Damnit I'm gonna fight for the right to make it better and put my heart into it instead of just rolling over.
3.) Economics/American Dream: Something has been taken from our country over the last 60 years: the Middle Class itself. 250 years ago people literally declared they deserve the pursuit of happiness. We have lost our way there. How did we get from there to fucking payday loans on your Mcdonald’s order? You're a chump if you pretend this is normal.
I think that this is alllll coming around to the same core concept. Bear with me…
The Middle Class is not supposed to exist in human civilization. By default, people are going to lie, cheat, murder, violate others, oppress, and exploit when they need to. I'm willing to give Stephen Miller that one.
America, more than literally any other civilization in written human history, rejects this. It is quite literally the reason the United States of America exists: "Dude we can do better than this shit!"
It's why we came here. It's why we fought the civil war. It's why we created the New Deal. It's why MLK marched on Selma.
What is "it"? The fight to try to make the American Dream real. For everyone. The unfulfilled promise: a nation of free people, leading itself with integrity and PULLING IT OFF. America is a theory and answer to a question: Do humans need a King or can they be free? We chose to aspire to be “free”, and America was born.
The day after Woodstock, people in power gave up on this project of proving we don't need a King. The hedge fund manager was born. Reaganomics. 9/11 and the Security State. Neoliberalism. But the Middle Class isn't natural. Without constantly nurturing and protecting it, it will naturally decay.
What's happened, and sort of where we’re at now, is that the citizens of this country know this truth in their hearts. But, they see that politicians either don't know or are willfully blind to it.
The truth is, right now, Democrats should be standing up with their nuts hanging and saying "I believe in building this dream. I accept the double standard. You'll have to kill me to get me to give up on this project."
It's not just messaging, it's not just policy, and it's not just vibes. It's everything everywhere all at once.
I wrote this A YEAR AGO now. Yeesh:
"The story of America is not the American dream. It is the fight to make the dream real. Is is not the dream, it’s the ability TO dream. The courage and vision that has allowed us to keep this bizarre and lovable experiment running for this short life we’ve had as a civilization. The arrogance and love we have for ourselves, the main character syndrome that makes us think we are just crazy enough to be able to do anything that we fucking want because we are Free."
Crack down on corruption = Push Trump's Qatar jet off the back of an aircraft carrier to turn it into a coral reef.
Get tough on illegal immigration = Hire a bunch of immigration judges. Then for people who came here the right way (claimed asylum at a border crossing) swear them in as citizens 100k a pop at college football stadiums across the country.
Be tough on crime = Prosecute Elon Musk for flouting election laws and Jeff Yass for tax evasion.
A lot of people who came here "the right way (claimed asylum at a border crossing)" were not legitimate asylum seekers. Biden's embrace of "asylum" as a loophole to allow millions of people to enter the country to the warm embrace of Republicans singing "fake", "open borders" and so forth was a major factor in Harris' defeat.
Of course, the USA needs immigrants. Of course the system is broken. But Brian's message here applies to Dems on immigration - brag about deportations of criminal immigrants and criminal gangs, champion long-term immigrants who even red-staters understand are their neighbors (make the road to citizenship clearer).
The border chaos was a huge factor in Trump getting reelected. But Biden didn’t wake up one morning and say “gee this asylum thing would be a clever way to get immigrants in the country” - he did not embrace it. It was law. The immigrants recognized they could exploit it because of the extreme lack of immigration judges and that’s exactly what they did. And Biden actually fixed this by requiring refugees to set up appointments via an app from their home countries, ending the scenes of chaos. Of course this came far too late.
I thought for most of his term that Biden did a great job. But in retrospect, he was really unresponsive to two HUGE political issues - and the result was Trump 47. One was his failure on immigration optics and messaging. The other was Merrick Garland and the total lack of a sense of urgency on what Trump and his right-wing enablers were doing. On protecting democracy, Biden gets an "F".
Well, there was also a little thing called *screaming inflation* that wasn't specifically his fault, but that he did less than nothing about during the full three and a half years that it raged under his watch.
Don't follow the news much, do you, or do you get if from biased sources? ....inflation in the first few years of Biden's term were caused by (1) supply chain disruptions from COVID and (2) pent-up demand. By the end of his term, inflation was WAY DOWN.
The US outperformed the rest of the industrialized world in containing inflation post-COVID - it was much higher throughout Europe. So Biden's "do nothing" efforts worked. That doesn't mean much to you if your attention span is short.
I daresay I follow the news a little more closely than you do, if your misunderstanding of the causes of post-pandemic inflation is anything to go by. Inflation during the "first few years" (it was only a four year term, for crying out loud) of Biden's term was caused, with lag of course, by two things in concert: the nominally independent Federal Reserve's unprecedented program of large scale open market asset purchases and interest rate repression; and the unprecedented combination of stimulus programs (PPP, CARES Act) enacted by a bipartisan Congress. Both were done with good intentions, with the expectation that the pandemic would plunge the global economy into a deep, years-long depression requiring drastic monetary and fiscal action to keep it on life support. But when that depression blessedly failed to materialize--by early 2021 the American economy was not only *not* in recession but was in fact white hot==both Congress and (especially) the Fed made the giant mistake of continuing to pour unprecedented stimulus into the economy as though it *were* in depression. And they continued to pour gasoline onto the roaring inferno that was the US economy (and housing market) for *two full years*.
That "supply chain disruption" you cite as though it were some sort of act of God was mostly artificially induced demand from that stimulus and money-printing, colliding with a shortage of available manufacturing labor. Somehow it failed to occur to the expert economists at the Fed, or the learned members of Congress from either party, that when there is a shortage of supply AND you deliberately create previously unheard-of levels of demand for goods via stimulus AND you do this at a time when millions of people are stuck at home and bored and have more stimmy cash than they know what to do with, the result could be massive price spikes! Nor did it occur to any of these geniuses that when you lower mortgage rates to practically zero AND you flood the economy with excess cash via things like the scandalous PPP, housing prices just might shoot to the moon.
Since you're such a fervent and devoted follower of the news, and with such a long attention span to boot, I'm sure you watched, as I did, Fed chairman Jerome Powell's press conference in June 2021 when he infamously referred to that month's alarming 5.4% YOY CPI inflation as "transitory." The FOMC continued to buy over $100,000,000,000 in Treasury bonds and Mortgage Backed Securities every single month through December of that year, and only then did it begin gradually to taper the amount of monthly money printing. And they kept the Federal Funds Rate at an absurdly low 0.25% until March 2022, as housing prices, which had been soaring since the summer of 2020 as a result of these ridiculous rates, continued to punch through the stratosphere.
That's what caused the inflation, and it could have and should have been foreseen and averted. But Biden had very little to do with any of the foregoing. You remember, don't you, with your long attention span, that I said in my previous comment that the screaming inflation wasn't specifically his fault? Those godawful policy decisions were first made during Trump's first term, albeit with the loud support of both parties, and merely *continued* during Biden's term. Biden's failing was ignoring it and doing nothing about it. Your original comment said that he was unresponsive to two political issues; I'm just trying to point out that he was unresponsive to this one as well, and most voters care an order of magnitude about this issue than about Merrick Garland.
>By the end of his term, inflation was WAY DOWN.
If you don't pay attention to a single other word I typed here, I need you to understand and accept this: the average voter does not give a single tiny damn about inflation being down. To them, inflation being down simply means that prices are still batshit high, and will continue to get higher on top of that, just at a slower pace.
(Inflation was at 1.4% YOY when Biden took office, btw. When he left office it was at 3%.)
Most voters have a misperception that immigrating to the US is relatively straightforward as long as you dot your i's and cross your t's. This is completely wrong though. It's a long complicated process that often goes nowhere.
People who say "my great grandparents came here the right way" are referring to a time when folks could just book a ticket and show up. As long as they a) weren't sick and b) answered officials that they didn't have a job already lined up, then they could stay.
Voters' perceptions of how easy it is to come here legally are completely off. It would be a pretty straightforward policy change to make reality match their perceptions.
Most voters are idiots - otherwise, we would have had Presidents Hilary Clinton and whatever followed. Isn't that the whole point of Brian's Substack? Dems need to deal with the reality of the electorate's perceptions and tell stories that show the best side of good governance.
The asylum law "loophole" (as Bill points ou abovet, it was law) could and was closed, but WAY TOO LATE.
Bringing a bunch of asylees, along with a mix of people who came here in other ways (TPS, refugees, skilled workers, etc) and mixing them all together and swearing them in as citizens 100k at a time accomplishes just that.
These are people who came here legally, followed the process. We can have fireworks, a ton of American flags, all the pomp and circumstance. This is the kind of thing that people like about immigration.
I think generally speaking, specifically to the second half, this is entirely correct. The first half needs to be stronger.
As a Minnesotan who wants us to do better, the reason Nick Shirley was able to walk in and make such a mess is because Tim Walz and his administration left the door wide open and invited him in. To say that "the issue was being addressed professionally" is only a half-truth. It's being addressed professionally now, but the Walz Administration totally botched its handling of these programs, only got serious about it when it became a political liability, and is still screwing this issue up.
For instance, yesterday it was revealed that Walz's "fraud czar" isn't a state employee as first announced but is an employee of consultant firm and that firm won't let him be interviewed by the media. (In the past, as well, outsourcing to a consultancy firm has been a dodge to avoid transparency, as the work product generally then belongs to the firm, not the state. As a less substantial example of this, much of the behind-the-scenes work including the development of incentives for Minnesota's bid for Super Bowl LII was obscured using this method.)
Tim Walz has rightly lost his political future as a result. This should be a lesson to all Democrats: take this shit seriously from the beginning.
I'm a Minnesotan too and a die-hard Dem........and Sean's narrative is basically correct. It WAS being addressed before Nick Shirley arrived, but it had taken way, way, too long and the amount of money that was part of this fraud was huge.
Unfortunately, we will now get Amy Klobuchar as governor, who has always wanted to be on the Supreme Court or President of the U.S. and has seen her route to that goal as appeasing and reaching out to Republican senators who could vote on her Supreme Court appointment. Amy is a deeply cynical political who still can't figure out what her position should be on ICE in Minneapolis. (She is probably waiting for the polling or focus group reports to come in so she can fine-tune her language.) She is among the top ten Democrats when it comes to approving Trump's atrocious appointees. She's the Dem version of Susan Collins.
She has never shown any principles beyond electability and her own ambition. Plus she's mean. Really mean. (Comes with the narcissism.) So she has very few friends or political allies. BUT she is the choice of "centrists," big-money donors, "respectable" Republicans, national pundits and the usual Democratic political consultants----the same people who brought us the inspiring leadership of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
Will she be better as governor than a Republican? Sure, but what a low bar.
Does she inspire anyone? No. In fact, she makes people---especially young people--hate Democrats even more.
On one hand I know very little about the particulars of this scandal on the other hand this critique of Walz sounds simplistic or maybe just off base.
On The Josh Marshall podcast a few weeks back there was some commentary on this. The scandal and the difficulties in containing it owes much to the lack of state capacity because of outsourcing so many functions. This stems from being trained to believe government is bad and it should be limited. Same thing applies to the California high speed rail project.
Certainly reduced state capacity is part of it. But how the remaining capacity is used is key. If you go back to the OG scandal, the Feeding Our Future one, they just totally whiffed on doing basic oversight. At its peak in spring 2021, FOF claimed to be providing meals equivalent to 3 per day for 130,000 people (29x more than the year before). Yet, despite these numbers and despite receiving multiple complaints about FOF, they did precisely zero in-person site visits to verify these numbers.
I'll grant you that the GOP alternative of racism and retribution is far worse, but we can't go around excusing failures of this magnitude.
This is a good start, but you still can’t seem to acknowledge the blind spot that Democrats have had for the last 15 years or so, encapsulated by the *reluctance* of Minnesota officeholders such as Walz and Ellison to prosecute, due to a fear of appearing racist, as well documented in the New York Times. This fear was well-known, as shown by the talking points provided a juror in an attempted bribery during one of the trials.
The very scouring of the news to highlight fraud that the Right has used for half a century (the “Welfare Queen” of the Regan campaign; though she was, truly, a nasty piece of work!) was leveraged on social media by what became the Black Lives Matter movement to claim that there was an epidemic of unarmed Black people getting shot by police (#iftheygunmedown was an early example), to the point where over half of Democratic respondents were off on the number of unarmed Black people annually shot by police by *two orders of magnitude*. Free speech wasn’t proclaimed by the Left with fingers crossed behind their backs, it was actively derided! “Freeze Peach” was the juvenile version, but even the ACLU backed down from its core mission after Charlottesville, and PEN was met with a protest of over 200 members for giving an award to Charlie Hebdo, who’s staff was murdered 11 years ago for exercising that very right. Didn’t like what they published? Say that, but don’t stand in solidarity with their murderers!
And if anyone of status objected, they were mocked at best, fired at worst. The problems of Cancel Culture were not a distraction, they were us lighting our credibility on fire for all to see. Why would the general public believe us when we cried “Fascist Wolf” if we decried everything - even America itself! - as hopelessly racist to begin with?
And so here we are, attempting to relearn the lessons of the DLC, but with a demand for more accountability to those who don’t follow the American Creed, and without the two decades of time to allow the craziest parts of the Left to discredit themselves. Rather, they entered academia and have continued to oppose the American Creed from there: Billie Eilish doesn’t say “No one is illegal on stolen land” to a standing ovation without decades of “scholarship” wending its way into the public consciousness. And whatever you think of American history, using it to delegitimize America itself is also anti-creedal. Our creed allows them to say this, but just as Brian says we should call out those on the Fascist Right who color within the lines, we must call out those on the Left who really do hate America, so that the electorate knows we don’t agree. Otherwise, you get “Kamala Is For They/Them” ads, and they stick!
So are you prepared to clean house, not just the other guy’s but your own as well? I truly hope so, because the clock keeps ticking, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
The only thing on this planet more irritating that a self-righteous progressive is a self-righteous centrist who is terminally obsessed with pointing out the faults of the former. You're never going to be able to suppress every social justice activist who upsets you. I suggest you take the stick out of your ass and learn to live with it.
I mean, we’re here to get back power, right? That’s the point of my comment: “Stop doing the stupid shit that makes Trump more popular than us”. My making you butt-hurt is just a bonus.
And I'm telling you that's never going to happen. Stupid leftists existed 200 years ago, they existed 50 years ago, and they will almost certainly continue to exist well into th future. If your political strategy is contingent on leftists never engaging in eccentric performative activism, you have no strategy.
And I’m telling Brian and his acolytes to focus a smidge on tamping down the crazy before we get President Vance. See my mention of DLC if you think it hasn’t been done before.
Brian, you’re assuming that public demonstrations of accountability will matter to people who have already decided that one side is all good and the other is all evil. It will not.
You can see it in the fringe views that social media amplifies. On one side: “all immigrants are criminals,” despite the data cutting the other way. On the other: “stopping undocumented brown people at the border is racist,” when preconceptions about identity are the last thing anyone should want at a border crossing.
Unfortunately, these siloed attitudes keep surviving contact with reality. Over and over.
I so agree with this post. But given our current media and 50-year-long fearful, timid pose of the Democratic party, I fear we will not get prosecutions, only another round of "Let's All Move On and Look to the Future." The NYT will be one of the loudest voices to move on.
I think Democrats over complicate these things. It’s simple: Be against all bullies. Those bullies can be rich people, or employers, or the government, or local criminals and degenerates, or…anyone who is hurting the public good for their own benefit. That’s it. That’s the whole ball game.
This whole piece makes some crucial points for the good of the liberal order. Of course I was struck by the line “Any elite who, in earnest, mistakes Elon Musk or Charlie Kirk for free-speech warriors, good-faith interlocutors, avatars of a loyal opposition, is as much a liability to the liberal order as a progressive activist who thinks we should enforce immigration laws as laxly as possible.” Someone like Ezra Klein has already been asked to account for this “Charlie Kirk Practiced Politics the Right Way” op-ed—I understand that he felt compelled to say something comforting after the assassination. But I think his piece was a liability and modeled exactly how not to respond to some bad faith big mouth like Charlie Kirk. So many Democratic politicians ended up making statements that had to be prefaced with “oh what a sad thing to happen to someone who just wanted to debate the tough questions!” Almost 6 months later and Erika Kirk is out in full force continuing the bad faith project her husband started with counter-programming to the Super Bowl for its temerity to feature a Brown, Spanish-speaking superstar.
Hearing him skip a beat every sentence as his 3 brain cells fight to access short-term memory is crazy considering JD Vance crowned him the future of the conservative movement and worthy of the Pulitzer (it's probably got NOTHING at all to do with the fact that the first tranche of Epstein files were released the same day)
Hi Brian! I had a question about a simple political fix; parties are private entities by law, so they can make their own rules, run their own primaries. There's no reason the Democrats can't hold a primary for the Speaker of the House / Majority Leader roles. And then when they're seated they'll be obligated by party to vote for who was chosen by the voters, or face primaries themselves for being faithless! This should make fundraising prowess less important for leadership so we're not constantly governed by Wall St.
Beyond that, I had an idea for a patent law change- for safety fixes. I have ideas for fixing space heaters, desktop pc cases, cell phones, refrigerators, medical cots and gas stoves. If we change it so safety fixes can get patents- and a cut compelled by the government from the manufacturer, who is also compelled to produce the new, safer version- it would create a virtuous system of reward for making the world healthier and safer, create jobs and increase productivity. If you know anyone interested in running a story on this, I'd appreciate it- it will probably have to get to a foreign politician, too, because our congress is probably too corrupt and deadlocked to address this.
Thanks for reading! And kicking Elon out on an immigration charge would be delicious; I'm all for it.
I'm sympathetic to this view from a small-d democratic standpoint, but I don't think it will do much to help on its own when Democratic voters have proven themselves to be absolutely awful at choosing primary winners, kicking things off in '72 with the worst loss in history.
As Miles notes, Dem primary voters are special sunflowers. I have been thinking about Democratic primaries since I was checking old links for something completely different and stumbled over a piece from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA,) called "Want to elect socialists? Run them in Democratic Primaries." From 2017. It was somewhat risque back then to consider this and there was opposition to attaching themselves to the Democratic Party at all. But many seem to have been able to cope.
Odd that a DSA candidate can run in a Dem primary but here in my state, independents etc aren't welcome to *vote* in our closed primaries. This seems like a recipe for ensuring the most extreme candidates (though thanks to the great and strategic voters in MD, it's not as bad as it could be.) I know I risk the wrath of open and big tents, but isn't it time to at least think about all of this stuff from a structural standpoint? In a state like Maryland or Texas on the other side, most elections are sealed in the primary. Maybe it's time for the party to seriously retool.
I think we need to reinterpret "vote" to allow RCV at the federal level and get more parties. Without primaries we'd just get more soulless centrist ghouls
"For Democrats this means abandoning the turn-the-page/turn-the-cheek ethos of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in favor of proud accountability for enemies of democracy."
1000%
My favorite piece you've ever written.
We have spent 10 years pulling our hair out over the fact that there is a double standard between Democrats and Republicans. And, there is! It's worse than ever before.
What's doing the best right now as far as Democratic branding? I think there are three categories that are converging, which will either unite into a TRUE response to the trump era and its root causes, or, well, not:
1.) Zohran: We should not settle for mediocracy. Government can and will be excellent and best-in-class at getting shit done and I will prove it.
2.)"Fighters": Fuck it, this isn't a perfect system but God Damnit I'm gonna fight for the right to make it better and put my heart into it instead of just rolling over.
3.) Economics/American Dream: Something has been taken from our country over the last 60 years: the Middle Class itself. 250 years ago people literally declared they deserve the pursuit of happiness. We have lost our way there. How did we get from there to fucking payday loans on your Mcdonald’s order? You're a chump if you pretend this is normal.
I think that this is alllll coming around to the same core concept. Bear with me…
The Middle Class is not supposed to exist in human civilization. By default, people are going to lie, cheat, murder, violate others, oppress, and exploit when they need to. I'm willing to give Stephen Miller that one.
America, more than literally any other civilization in written human history, rejects this. It is quite literally the reason the United States of America exists: "Dude we can do better than this shit!"
It's why we came here. It's why we fought the civil war. It's why we created the New Deal. It's why MLK marched on Selma.
What is "it"? The fight to try to make the American Dream real. For everyone. The unfulfilled promise: a nation of free people, leading itself with integrity and PULLING IT OFF. America is a theory and answer to a question: Do humans need a King or can they be free? We chose to aspire to be “free”, and America was born.
The day after Woodstock, people in power gave up on this project of proving we don't need a King. The hedge fund manager was born. Reaganomics. 9/11 and the Security State. Neoliberalism. But the Middle Class isn't natural. Without constantly nurturing and protecting it, it will naturally decay.
What's happened, and sort of where we’re at now, is that the citizens of this country know this truth in their hearts. But, they see that politicians either don't know or are willfully blind to it.
The truth is, right now, Democrats should be standing up with their nuts hanging and saying "I believe in building this dream. I accept the double standard. You'll have to kill me to get me to give up on this project."
It's not just messaging, it's not just policy, and it's not just vibes. It's everything everywhere all at once.
I wrote this A YEAR AGO now. Yeesh:
"The story of America is not the American dream. It is the fight to make the dream real. Is is not the dream, it’s the ability TO dream. The courage and vision that has allowed us to keep this bizarre and lovable experiment running for this short life we’ve had as a civilization. The arrogance and love we have for ourselves, the main character syndrome that makes us think we are just crazy enough to be able to do anything that we fucking want because we are Free."
Crack down on corruption = Push Trump's Qatar jet off the back of an aircraft carrier to turn it into a coral reef.
Get tough on illegal immigration = Hire a bunch of immigration judges. Then for people who came here the right way (claimed asylum at a border crossing) swear them in as citizens 100k a pop at college football stadiums across the country.
Be tough on crime = Prosecute Elon Musk for flouting election laws and Jeff Yass for tax evasion.
A lot of people who came here "the right way (claimed asylum at a border crossing)" were not legitimate asylum seekers. Biden's embrace of "asylum" as a loophole to allow millions of people to enter the country to the warm embrace of Republicans singing "fake", "open borders" and so forth was a major factor in Harris' defeat.
Of course, the USA needs immigrants. Of course the system is broken. But Brian's message here applies to Dems on immigration - brag about deportations of criminal immigrants and criminal gangs, champion long-term immigrants who even red-staters understand are their neighbors (make the road to citizenship clearer).
The border chaos was a huge factor in Trump getting reelected. But Biden didn’t wake up one morning and say “gee this asylum thing would be a clever way to get immigrants in the country” - he did not embrace it. It was law. The immigrants recognized they could exploit it because of the extreme lack of immigration judges and that’s exactly what they did. And Biden actually fixed this by requiring refugees to set up appointments via an app from their home countries, ending the scenes of chaos. Of course this came far too late.
I thought for most of his term that Biden did a great job. But in retrospect, he was really unresponsive to two HUGE political issues - and the result was Trump 47. One was his failure on immigration optics and messaging. The other was Merrick Garland and the total lack of a sense of urgency on what Trump and his right-wing enablers were doing. On protecting democracy, Biden gets an "F".
Well, there was also a little thing called *screaming inflation* that wasn't specifically his fault, but that he did less than nothing about during the full three and a half years that it raged under his watch.
Don't follow the news much, do you, or do you get if from biased sources? ....inflation in the first few years of Biden's term were caused by (1) supply chain disruptions from COVID and (2) pent-up demand. By the end of his term, inflation was WAY DOWN.
The US outperformed the rest of the industrialized world in containing inflation post-COVID - it was much higher throughout Europe. So Biden's "do nothing" efforts worked. That doesn't mean much to you if your attention span is short.
I daresay I follow the news a little more closely than you do, if your misunderstanding of the causes of post-pandemic inflation is anything to go by. Inflation during the "first few years" (it was only a four year term, for crying out loud) of Biden's term was caused, with lag of course, by two things in concert: the nominally independent Federal Reserve's unprecedented program of large scale open market asset purchases and interest rate repression; and the unprecedented combination of stimulus programs (PPP, CARES Act) enacted by a bipartisan Congress. Both were done with good intentions, with the expectation that the pandemic would plunge the global economy into a deep, years-long depression requiring drastic monetary and fiscal action to keep it on life support. But when that depression blessedly failed to materialize--by early 2021 the American economy was not only *not* in recession but was in fact white hot==both Congress and (especially) the Fed made the giant mistake of continuing to pour unprecedented stimulus into the economy as though it *were* in depression. And they continued to pour gasoline onto the roaring inferno that was the US economy (and housing market) for *two full years*.
That "supply chain disruption" you cite as though it were some sort of act of God was mostly artificially induced demand from that stimulus and money-printing, colliding with a shortage of available manufacturing labor. Somehow it failed to occur to the expert economists at the Fed, or the learned members of Congress from either party, that when there is a shortage of supply AND you deliberately create previously unheard-of levels of demand for goods via stimulus AND you do this at a time when millions of people are stuck at home and bored and have more stimmy cash than they know what to do with, the result could be massive price spikes! Nor did it occur to any of these geniuses that when you lower mortgage rates to practically zero AND you flood the economy with excess cash via things like the scandalous PPP, housing prices just might shoot to the moon.
Since you're such a fervent and devoted follower of the news, and with such a long attention span to boot, I'm sure you watched, as I did, Fed chairman Jerome Powell's press conference in June 2021 when he infamously referred to that month's alarming 5.4% YOY CPI inflation as "transitory." The FOMC continued to buy over $100,000,000,000 in Treasury bonds and Mortgage Backed Securities every single month through December of that year, and only then did it begin gradually to taper the amount of monthly money printing. And they kept the Federal Funds Rate at an absurdly low 0.25% until March 2022, as housing prices, which had been soaring since the summer of 2020 as a result of these ridiculous rates, continued to punch through the stratosphere.
That's what caused the inflation, and it could have and should have been foreseen and averted. But Biden had very little to do with any of the foregoing. You remember, don't you, with your long attention span, that I said in my previous comment that the screaming inflation wasn't specifically his fault? Those godawful policy decisions were first made during Trump's first term, albeit with the loud support of both parties, and merely *continued* during Biden's term. Biden's failing was ignoring it and doing nothing about it. Your original comment said that he was unresponsive to two political issues; I'm just trying to point out that he was unresponsive to this one as well, and most voters care an order of magnitude about this issue than about Merrick Garland.
>By the end of his term, inflation was WAY DOWN.
If you don't pay attention to a single other word I typed here, I need you to understand and accept this: the average voter does not give a single tiny damn about inflation being down. To them, inflation being down simply means that prices are still batshit high, and will continue to get higher on top of that, just at a slower pace.
(Inflation was at 1.4% YOY when Biden took office, btw. When he left office it was at 3%.)
Most voters have a misperception that immigrating to the US is relatively straightforward as long as you dot your i's and cross your t's. This is completely wrong though. It's a long complicated process that often goes nowhere.
People who say "my great grandparents came here the right way" are referring to a time when folks could just book a ticket and show up. As long as they a) weren't sick and b) answered officials that they didn't have a job already lined up, then they could stay.
Voters' perceptions of how easy it is to come here legally are completely off. It would be a pretty straightforward policy change to make reality match their perceptions.
Most voters are idiots - otherwise, we would have had Presidents Hilary Clinton and whatever followed. Isn't that the whole point of Brian's Substack? Dems need to deal with the reality of the electorate's perceptions and tell stories that show the best side of good governance.
The asylum law "loophole" (as Bill points ou abovet, it was law) could and was closed, but WAY TOO LATE.
Bringing a bunch of asylees, along with a mix of people who came here in other ways (TPS, refugees, skilled workers, etc) and mixing them all together and swearing them in as citizens 100k at a time accomplishes just that.
These are people who came here legally, followed the process. We can have fireworks, a ton of American flags, all the pomp and circumstance. This is the kind of thing that people like about immigration.
I think generally speaking, specifically to the second half, this is entirely correct. The first half needs to be stronger.
As a Minnesotan who wants us to do better, the reason Nick Shirley was able to walk in and make such a mess is because Tim Walz and his administration left the door wide open and invited him in. To say that "the issue was being addressed professionally" is only a half-truth. It's being addressed professionally now, but the Walz Administration totally botched its handling of these programs, only got serious about it when it became a political liability, and is still screwing this issue up.
For instance, yesterday it was revealed that Walz's "fraud czar" isn't a state employee as first announced but is an employee of consultant firm and that firm won't let him be interviewed by the media. (In the past, as well, outsourcing to a consultancy firm has been a dodge to avoid transparency, as the work product generally then belongs to the firm, not the state. As a less substantial example of this, much of the behind-the-scenes work including the development of incentives for Minnesota's bid for Super Bowl LII was obscured using this method.)
Tim Walz has rightly lost his political future as a result. This should be a lesson to all Democrats: take this shit seriously from the beginning.
I'm a Minnesotan too and a die-hard Dem........and Sean's narrative is basically correct. It WAS being addressed before Nick Shirley arrived, but it had taken way, way, too long and the amount of money that was part of this fraud was huge.
Unfortunately, we will now get Amy Klobuchar as governor, who has always wanted to be on the Supreme Court or President of the U.S. and has seen her route to that goal as appeasing and reaching out to Republican senators who could vote on her Supreme Court appointment. Amy is a deeply cynical political who still can't figure out what her position should be on ICE in Minneapolis. (She is probably waiting for the polling or focus group reports to come in so she can fine-tune her language.) She is among the top ten Democrats when it comes to approving Trump's atrocious appointees. She's the Dem version of Susan Collins.
She has never shown any principles beyond electability and her own ambition. Plus she's mean. Really mean. (Comes with the narcissism.) So she has very few friends or political allies. BUT she is the choice of "centrists," big-money donors, "respectable" Republicans, national pundits and the usual Democratic political consultants----the same people who brought us the inspiring leadership of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
Will she be better as governor than a Republican? Sure, but what a low bar.
Does she inspire anyone? No. In fact, she makes people---especially young people--hate Democrats even more.
On one hand I know very little about the particulars of this scandal on the other hand this critique of Walz sounds simplistic or maybe just off base.
On The Josh Marshall podcast a few weeks back there was some commentary on this. The scandal and the difficulties in containing it owes much to the lack of state capacity because of outsourcing so many functions. This stems from being trained to believe government is bad and it should be limited. Same thing applies to the California high speed rail project.
Certainly reduced state capacity is part of it. But how the remaining capacity is used is key. If you go back to the OG scandal, the Feeding Our Future one, they just totally whiffed on doing basic oversight. At its peak in spring 2021, FOF claimed to be providing meals equivalent to 3 per day for 130,000 people (29x more than the year before). Yet, despite these numbers and despite receiving multiple complaints about FOF, they did precisely zero in-person site visits to verify these numbers.
I'll grant you that the GOP alternative of racism and retribution is far worse, but we can't go around excusing failures of this magnitude.
This is a good start, but you still can’t seem to acknowledge the blind spot that Democrats have had for the last 15 years or so, encapsulated by the *reluctance* of Minnesota officeholders such as Walz and Ellison to prosecute, due to a fear of appearing racist, as well documented in the New York Times. This fear was well-known, as shown by the talking points provided a juror in an attempted bribery during one of the trials.
The very scouring of the news to highlight fraud that the Right has used for half a century (the “Welfare Queen” of the Regan campaign; though she was, truly, a nasty piece of work!) was leveraged on social media by what became the Black Lives Matter movement to claim that there was an epidemic of unarmed Black people getting shot by police (#iftheygunmedown was an early example), to the point where over half of Democratic respondents were off on the number of unarmed Black people annually shot by police by *two orders of magnitude*. Free speech wasn’t proclaimed by the Left with fingers crossed behind their backs, it was actively derided! “Freeze Peach” was the juvenile version, but even the ACLU backed down from its core mission after Charlottesville, and PEN was met with a protest of over 200 members for giving an award to Charlie Hebdo, who’s staff was murdered 11 years ago for exercising that very right. Didn’t like what they published? Say that, but don’t stand in solidarity with their murderers!
And if anyone of status objected, they were mocked at best, fired at worst. The problems of Cancel Culture were not a distraction, they were us lighting our credibility on fire for all to see. Why would the general public believe us when we cried “Fascist Wolf” if we decried everything - even America itself! - as hopelessly racist to begin with?
And so here we are, attempting to relearn the lessons of the DLC, but with a demand for more accountability to those who don’t follow the American Creed, and without the two decades of time to allow the craziest parts of the Left to discredit themselves. Rather, they entered academia and have continued to oppose the American Creed from there: Billie Eilish doesn’t say “No one is illegal on stolen land” to a standing ovation without decades of “scholarship” wending its way into the public consciousness. And whatever you think of American history, using it to delegitimize America itself is also anti-creedal. Our creed allows them to say this, but just as Brian says we should call out those on the Fascist Right who color within the lines, we must call out those on the Left who really do hate America, so that the electorate knows we don’t agree. Otherwise, you get “Kamala Is For They/Them” ads, and they stick!
So are you prepared to clean house, not just the other guy’s but your own as well? I truly hope so, because the clock keeps ticking, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
The only thing on this planet more irritating that a self-righteous progressive is a self-righteous centrist who is terminally obsessed with pointing out the faults of the former. You're never going to be able to suppress every social justice activist who upsets you. I suggest you take the stick out of your ass and learn to live with it.
I mean, we’re here to get back power, right? That’s the point of my comment: “Stop doing the stupid shit that makes Trump more popular than us”. My making you butt-hurt is just a bonus.
And I'm telling you that's never going to happen. Stupid leftists existed 200 years ago, they existed 50 years ago, and they will almost certainly continue to exist well into th future. If your political strategy is contingent on leftists never engaging in eccentric performative activism, you have no strategy.
And I’m telling Brian and his acolytes to focus a smidge on tamping down the crazy before we get President Vance. See my mention of DLC if you think it hasn’t been done before.
Time for a full-throated progressive patriotism. This is what it would look like to me.
Brian, you’re assuming that public demonstrations of accountability will matter to people who have already decided that one side is all good and the other is all evil. It will not.
You can see it in the fringe views that social media amplifies. On one side: “all immigrants are criminals,” despite the data cutting the other way. On the other: “stopping undocumented brown people at the border is racist,” when preconceptions about identity are the last thing anyone should want at a border crossing.
Unfortunately, these siloed attitudes keep surviving contact with reality. Over and over.
I so agree with this post. But given our current media and 50-year-long fearful, timid pose of the Democratic party, I fear we will not get prosecutions, only another round of "Let's All Move On and Look to the Future." The NYT will be one of the loudest voices to move on.
I think Democrats over complicate these things. It’s simple: Be against all bullies. Those bullies can be rich people, or employers, or the government, or local criminals and degenerates, or…anyone who is hurting the public good for their own benefit. That’s it. That’s the whole ball game.
This is a true piece of horror, that Laura Ingram and Now Elon Musk It’s performative, acting at its worst. Democrats get your acts together.
This whole piece makes some crucial points for the good of the liberal order. Of course I was struck by the line “Any elite who, in earnest, mistakes Elon Musk or Charlie Kirk for free-speech warriors, good-faith interlocutors, avatars of a loyal opposition, is as much a liability to the liberal order as a progressive activist who thinks we should enforce immigration laws as laxly as possible.” Someone like Ezra Klein has already been asked to account for this “Charlie Kirk Practiced Politics the Right Way” op-ed—I understand that he felt compelled to say something comforting after the assassination. But I think his piece was a liability and modeled exactly how not to respond to some bad faith big mouth like Charlie Kirk. So many Democratic politicians ended up making statements that had to be prefaced with “oh what a sad thing to happen to someone who just wanted to debate the tough questions!” Almost 6 months later and Erika Kirk is out in full force continuing the bad faith project her husband started with counter-programming to the Super Bowl for its temerity to feature a Brown, Spanish-speaking superstar.
Democrats should pick up the dropped "rule of law" baton and run with it.
Campaign on nuking the pardon. Do anything to say and draw attention to it.
I challenge anyone to watch more than 5 minutes of this interview with Nick Shirley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IrMqA3fVO0&t=231s
Hearing him skip a beat every sentence as his 3 brain cells fight to access short-term memory is crazy considering JD Vance crowned him the future of the conservative movement and worthy of the Pulitzer (it's probably got NOTHING at all to do with the fact that the first tranche of Epstein files were released the same day)
Yes, he is very, very stupid. He's also very, very influential and we dismiss him at our peril.
A turn to virtue
Hi Brian! I had a question about a simple political fix; parties are private entities by law, so they can make their own rules, run their own primaries. There's no reason the Democrats can't hold a primary for the Speaker of the House / Majority Leader roles. And then when they're seated they'll be obligated by party to vote for who was chosen by the voters, or face primaries themselves for being faithless! This should make fundraising prowess less important for leadership so we're not constantly governed by Wall St.
Beyond that, I had an idea for a patent law change- for safety fixes. I have ideas for fixing space heaters, desktop pc cases, cell phones, refrigerators, medical cots and gas stoves. If we change it so safety fixes can get patents- and a cut compelled by the government from the manufacturer, who is also compelled to produce the new, safer version- it would create a virtuous system of reward for making the world healthier and safer, create jobs and increase productivity. If you know anyone interested in running a story on this, I'd appreciate it- it will probably have to get to a foreign politician, too, because our congress is probably too corrupt and deadlocked to address this.
Thanks for reading! And kicking Elon out on an immigration charge would be delicious; I'm all for it.
- Matt Hissong
I'm sympathetic to this view from a small-d democratic standpoint, but I don't think it will do much to help on its own when Democratic voters have proven themselves to be absolutely awful at choosing primary winners, kicking things off in '72 with the worst loss in history.
Agreed, though I usually think thry're too centrist with their camdidates. I hope Platner wipes the floor with Collins!
As Miles notes, Dem primary voters are special sunflowers. I have been thinking about Democratic primaries since I was checking old links for something completely different and stumbled over a piece from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA,) called "Want to elect socialists? Run them in Democratic Primaries." From 2017. It was somewhat risque back then to consider this and there was opposition to attaching themselves to the Democratic Party at all. But many seem to have been able to cope.
Odd that a DSA candidate can run in a Dem primary but here in my state, independents etc aren't welcome to *vote* in our closed primaries. This seems like a recipe for ensuring the most extreme candidates (though thanks to the great and strategic voters in MD, it's not as bad as it could be.) I know I risk the wrath of open and big tents, but isn't it time to at least think about all of this stuff from a structural standpoint? In a state like Maryland or Texas on the other side, most elections are sealed in the primary. Maybe it's time for the party to seriously retool.
I think we need to reinterpret "vote" to allow RCV at the federal level and get more parties. Without primaries we'd just get more soulless centrist ghouls