A Fallacy At The Heart Of Kitchen-Table Politics
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Ian Jamison: Hi Brian - I'm interested in your thoughts on balancing accountability and longer-term strengthening of institutions/escaping the GOP-created escalation doom loop. Basically, I look at this Bluesky post and ask "Why not Both?" My proposal would be to aggressively escalate once in power, but provide mutually-acceptable off-ramps. I'm interested in what you think about this, and what you think a sweet spot would be that would both lock in the requisite level of change but be more enticing to the GOP than scorched earth…
I think the worst outcome is increasingly unhinged/extraconstitutional GOP control. But best would be a sustainable, long term equilibrium that (even if under duress) gets some sort of cross-partisan buy in that could stop this arms race permanently.
Your instincts here are dead on. It will be a catastrophic error if, Biden-like, Democrats declare “back to normal!” and then make do with whatever warped status quo Republicans leave behind.
But that doesn’t necessarily suggest Democrats ought to embrace eye-for-an-eye turnabout in every instance. To take one example from my Wednesday newsletter, mirror-image retaliation would oblige Democrats to turn political appointees loose on Republicans, rummaging through their federal records for any pretext to prosecute them. But that would simply fulfill the Republican premise that rule of law is pure fiction. We’d be embracing banana republicanism. What you’d ideally want is some combination of meaningful consequences for the people who abused power, and a Republican admission of wrongdoing. We’ll likely never get the latter, but if we don’t get the former, the law will have been transformed into a straightjacket that binds only Democrats.
The courts present a somewhat different dilemma. I think Democrats should swiftly expand the court with justices who can be trusted to quickly reverse the worst precedents since Bush v. Gore. The risk, as norms-respecters love to point out, is that Republicans could turn around and repack the court four or eight years later. It’s true! And for that reason I’d be OK with it if Democrats used the threat of court packing to establish more durable reforms.
But the key is that under any new arrangement the illegitimate precedents really do have to fall. They’re ill-gotten. If Republican justices want to reverse themselves, in a 21st century replay of the Switch In Time That Saved Nine, that might be tolerable. More credibly, Democrats would pack the courts at step one, reset U.S. jurisprudence, then accede to bipartisan court reform at step two.
“Back to normal!” would be Democrats watching the Court suddenly discover presidents don’t have power, and following its hypocritical orders, or taking Republicans at their word that the era of the overreaching GOP judiciary was over—but with all these rotten precedents locked in. Unfortunately I suspect we’ll get something along these lines.
By contrast, I can imagine Democrats playing hardball with mid-census redistricting in a take-it-or-leave-it proposition to Republicans: Agree to nonpartisan gerrymandering nationwide, or we’ll gerrymander you into a tiny rump.
Bill: Have you read or heard about Way to Win’s poll of “skippers”? People who voted Biden in 2020 but skipped voting in 2024. Celinda Lake was the lead pollster.
The results left me a little puzzled.
Supposedly these voters wanted an economic populist who would address health care and cost of living issues - the dreaded “kitchen table” issues. Also, you look at Zohran’s campaign focusing on cost of living and the 2024 Presidential campaign being about inflation - kitchen table stuff. Yet when Hakeem Jeffries or Nancy Pelosi talks about pivoting to kitchen table issues they are met with derision from progressive types. Because I heard about this study from progressives on Blue Skies added to my puzzlement.
With polling like this, can you blame the consultant class for emphasizing kitchen table issues (or is Way to Win aligned with the consultant industry)? Or when the voters say cost of living does it really speak to broader frustrations - perhaps elite impunity? Also tucked in the Way to Win results was the desire for a candidate who would fight for these economic concerns and a perception of Democrats being weak but these didn’t get much emphasis.
I understand the confusion: Disaffected Democratic general-election voters cite kitchen-table economics to explain why they “skipped” the 2024 election. Disaffected Democratic primary voters also cite kitchen-table economics to explain why they mobilized to help nominate Zohran Mamdani. Doesn’t this almost mathematically suggest unpopular Democratic leaders like Jeffries and Pelosi are on to something when they try to drag all politics back to kitchen-table economics?
I think the answer is no, but it’s a multifaceted and nuanced no. So let’s dive in.