It is important to distinguish between the policies of Democrats and the policies of "Progressives."
My wife and I have been saying this for a long time now--"progressives" are more interested in the self-serving feeling of being "right" than they are in winning.
They have invaded our beloved Democratic Party and made their positions LOUDLY and everywhere. It is important when people write about non-Republicans to clearly make a distinction between Democrats and Progressives. They are NOT the same. They are as different as Democrats and Republicans. So it is not surprising at all that people can endorse Democratic positions and at the same time reject Democrats---it is because they see people running as Democrats as actually being part of the progressive, not Democratic, movement. They are rejecting progressives.
Everyone knew that Harris was not really a Democrat but was a progressive. Just because she recently dropped all of her progressive nonsense talk didn't mean anything---people knew she was just talking in a more moderate/Democratic way to win votes. For one thing, she chose the most progressive governor as her running mate.
Democrats have a choice: kick progressives out of the party and stop identifying them as Democrats or keep losing.
A culture for embittered Democrats that now stoops to denial and serious name-calling of political opponents rather the modest introspection a measure of humility. Proving that it's going to take a few more lopsided losses for them to shake their self-righteous arrogance.
And MAGA, unlike the GOPe, has stolen the economic issues. Of Ruy's 16 principles that he wanted the Democrats aligned with, 14 fit MAGA better than the Democrats and the other two were ties. You really need to ask yourself why you continue to identify with a party that has left you. Your (former) voters have figured it out.
The largest economic policies of right-populism haven't been implemented yet, though. So there's still a bit of the verdict to render--culture does take precedent over policy, yes, but a failure of policy can also make cultural pandering seem thin and manipulative.
People may very well *not* like massive tariffs on imports from major trading partners, especially when it doesn't do anything to bring manufacturing back to U.S. shores. (because it won't) This goes especially for people involved in agriculture--the first group of people to get hit by tariffs are almost always farmers.
Likewise, while people certainly favor border control overall, and "more stringent border control" in the abstract, the kind of aggressive measures implied in MAGA rhetoric may lose its appeal if it means an American military presence in people's cities and towns, massive deportation camps that look terrible on TV and--more importantly--more inflation. That seems to be what Trump's intending.
There will be a recession in the next 4 years, too--if it happens while big tariffs in place, you might easily get a 1970s style stagflationary contraction rather than a standard deflationary business slowdown. I don't think you'll get a 1930s/08 style debt deflation, *but* it's notable that raising tariffs was a key response to the onset of the Great Depression that Hoover implemented.
And, notably, there are a lot of pro-labor policies MAGA has decidedly *not* backed, like raising the minimum wage. If its policies begin to hurt people's livelihoods, and if it continues to cozy up to the placement of oligarchs like Musk in the government--mafia-state style--then more culture war red meat may not be enough; I wouldn't put it past MAGA to make the same mistake Democrats did, and try to rely on cultural issues to carry the day. Cultural issues *do* take primacy...but they are not *everything*.
I certainly wouldn't put it past MAGA to overreach like the Left did. It is the nature of polarized politics to do that. Couple of counterpoints though. Aggressive rhetoric on immigration seems to be designed to get people to simply leave on their own. Come J20, it appears that the first target will be criminals. The second target will be people who already have a deportation order. Then we shall see. The one aggressive threat that may be carried out is the one against sanctuary politicians. This is already against the law and has been since the 1950s (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1324). This, however, will be a law enforcement matter, not a mass roundup.
Here are some words of wisdom from a Democratic icon: Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave. ... The top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens. But for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process. Barbara Jordan.
Tariffs are a much debated topic. You are certainly correct that farmers are the first to be impacted. This was an issue in the runup to CW1, second only to slavery. The economic impact is less certain even if the tariffs are more than a threat to induce certain behavior unrelated to economics. Smoot-Hawley is often cited as contributing to the Depression but the US was not the dominant economy then as it is now. It has been suggested that this time around other countries will use different strategies to deal with it.
While minimum wage has been a hobby horse of organized labor and the Left forever, it is not really clear that it is objectively a pro-labor policy. The objective minimum wage is zero with labor being replaced by capital or simply off-shored at the margin. Yeah, Musk is an oligarch but so are Bezos, Zuckerberg, Bloomberg and Fink to name a few. All of those are linked at the hip to the Democrats, if not officially part of government. (Neither is Musk.) There probably will be some sort of recession just on the normal business cycle but the biggest threat is the debt.
Agreed that an unobtrusive but effective response to the illegal immigration issue will work best in terms of retaining popular support--as you said, we'll see. One issue I see is that Trump often has trouble with subtlety, and his promise to deploy the military for the mass deportations is not encouraging...but perhaps he's learned a thing or two, and at any rate should be given a fair chance to get things right.
Targeted tariffs are certainly less hazardous than blanket tariffs, but Trump is proposing the latter--again, we will have to see if that's all bluster and he ultimately takes a better, more strategic approach.
I agree that Smoot-Hawley was only a contributing, rather than precipitating factor in the Depression, which, like the 'Lesser Depression' that kicked off with the GFC in '08, was *really* caused by a decades-long build-up in private debt--aggravated by the failure to regulate ponzi schemes in the finance sector created during the proliferation of trusts in the '20s--which inevitably culminated in a financial crisis and an Irving Fisher-style debt deflation. I doubt that's on the menu, as those kinds of crises take a few decades to build up to; but I wouldn't say it's totally impossible, either.
Edit: Disagree that Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. are a comparable species of oligarch to Musk now. Musk is the first Bezos-scale oligarch in several generations to be put at the head of a government department after having directly financed the GOTV of the leader of that government--much less a government department responsible for deciding what parts of the government get funded, and which ones don't. That is pure Orban/Putin/Erdogan-style mafia state oligarch, not your standard donating-millions-to-Super-PACs state-adjacent oligarch. Neither are acting in the public interest, but MAGA should be wary of getting comfy with the former, as it is not a good look to the average working-class person, outside of those that are already members of the diehard Trumpist base.
The seeming---and I underscore seeming---disconnect between Democrat-friendly policies and actual votes for candidates may not be as puzzling as it appears. Votes on issues are a statement of a kind of "wish list." Gee, I'd prefer to have unions, more Medicaid, weed, etc. But when it gets to actual candidates the next question becomes, "But if I vote for Mr. D, the DIRECTION of his party's issues, policies, etc. is really far from where I am" and there is a trepidation about voting for the person because while he may better represent the current policies, underneath there is an adult in the voter who says, "but we really can't go too far, and that's where this guy will go."
In other words, merely being for/against current Democrat policies won't be enough, because the generic party BRAND is Joy Reid, Michael Steele, Joe Scarborough, Whoopi Goldberg, Mark Cuban, Ocasio-Cortez, and any number of truly extreme and weird congresspeople tied in with the Ukraine war and trans policies. Thus a "good" or appealing position on unions will not help if, in the voter's mind, the next step is trans people in unions, or a radical moment-of-conception abortion activist who wants to send money to the Ukes. Put another way, the Democrat party---regardless of specific issues---has today become the toxic party that the GOP under George W. Bush was and only a full flush of all the extremists will restore the balance.
This. Democrats have been really disappointing the past 12 years. They vote in lockstep. There are no arguments or debates. I don't trust any of them to do what they promise because none of them speak out or vote against their party, ever. Even on extreme issues.
Interesting that you frame “Right-to-work” as something which would have made it easier for companies to disrupt union organizing efforts. I've heard it framed as now workers will be forced to pay union dues whether they want to be in a union or not. Dues that flow directly to the Democrat party.
I'd really like to see some interviews with some Missouri people who used to be Democrats, and are now Republicans. My guess is that they would probably say something similar to Vicky and Dan's comment about Democrats versus Progressives. But what exactly distinguishes the two? Michael says we need to be open to people sympathetic to Second Amendment issues and pro life. But he also points out that Missouri just passed an abortion rights law. So what is it exactly about progressives that Missourians don't like?
To reiterate a comment I made to a poster below, I would push back just a bit (but certainly not entirely) on Ruy's thesis and stress that, yes, it's true cultural issues take precedent over economic issues, but economic issues are not *meaningless* either. A failure of policy can make cultural pandering seem thin and manipulative, and the largest economic policies of right-populism haven't been implemented yet.
Many of them may seem appealing in the abstract, but that will change quickly if they hit people's pocketbooks. Re-posting what I said below:
People may very well *not* like massive tariffs on imports from major trading partners, especially when it doesn't do anything to bring manufacturing back to U.S. shores. (because it won't) This goes especially for people involved in agriculture--the first group of people to get hit by tariffs are almost always farmers.
Likewise, while people certainly favor border control overall, and "more stringent border control" in the abstract, the kind of aggressive measures implied in MAGA rhetoric may lose its appeal if it means an American military presence in people's cities and towns, massive deportation camps that look terrible on TV and--more importantly--more inflation. That seems to be what Trump's intending.
There will be a recession in the next 4 years, too--if it happens while big tariffs are in place, you might easily get a 1970s style stagflationary contraction rather than a standard deflationary business slowdown. I don't think you'll get a 1930s/08 style debt deflation, *but* I wouldn't say it's totally impossible, and it's notable that raising tariffs was a key response to the onset of the Great Depression that Hoover implemented.
And, notably, there are a lot of pro-labor policies MAGA has decidedly *not* backed, like raising the minimum wage. If its policies begin to hurt people's livelihoods, and if it continues to cozy up to the placement of oligarchs like Musk in the government--mafia-state style--then more culture war red meat may not be enough; I wouldn't put it past MAGA to make the same mistake Democrats did, and try to rely too much on cultural issues to carry the day. Cultural issues *do* take primacy...but they are not *everything*.
It is important to distinguish between the policies of Democrats and the policies of "Progressives."
My wife and I have been saying this for a long time now--"progressives" are more interested in the self-serving feeling of being "right" than they are in winning.
They have invaded our beloved Democratic Party and made their positions LOUDLY and everywhere. It is important when people write about non-Republicans to clearly make a distinction between Democrats and Progressives. They are NOT the same. They are as different as Democrats and Republicans. So it is not surprising at all that people can endorse Democratic positions and at the same time reject Democrats---it is because they see people running as Democrats as actually being part of the progressive, not Democratic, movement. They are rejecting progressives.
Everyone knew that Harris was not really a Democrat but was a progressive. Just because she recently dropped all of her progressive nonsense talk didn't mean anything---people knew she was just talking in a more moderate/Democratic way to win votes. For one thing, she chose the most progressive governor as her running mate.
Democrats have a choice: kick progressives out of the party and stop identifying them as Democrats or keep losing.
A culture for embittered Democrats that now stoops to denial and serious name-calling of political opponents rather the modest introspection a measure of humility. Proving that it's going to take a few more lopsided losses for them to shake their self-righteous arrogance.
And MAGA, unlike the GOPe, has stolen the economic issues. Of Ruy's 16 principles that he wanted the Democrats aligned with, 14 fit MAGA better than the Democrats and the other two were ties. You really need to ask yourself why you continue to identify with a party that has left you. Your (former) voters have figured it out.
The largest economic policies of right-populism haven't been implemented yet, though. So there's still a bit of the verdict to render--culture does take precedent over policy, yes, but a failure of policy can also make cultural pandering seem thin and manipulative.
People may very well *not* like massive tariffs on imports from major trading partners, especially when it doesn't do anything to bring manufacturing back to U.S. shores. (because it won't) This goes especially for people involved in agriculture--the first group of people to get hit by tariffs are almost always farmers.
Likewise, while people certainly favor border control overall, and "more stringent border control" in the abstract, the kind of aggressive measures implied in MAGA rhetoric may lose its appeal if it means an American military presence in people's cities and towns, massive deportation camps that look terrible on TV and--more importantly--more inflation. That seems to be what Trump's intending.
There will be a recession in the next 4 years, too--if it happens while big tariffs in place, you might easily get a 1970s style stagflationary contraction rather than a standard deflationary business slowdown. I don't think you'll get a 1930s/08 style debt deflation, *but* it's notable that raising tariffs was a key response to the onset of the Great Depression that Hoover implemented.
And, notably, there are a lot of pro-labor policies MAGA has decidedly *not* backed, like raising the minimum wage. If its policies begin to hurt people's livelihoods, and if it continues to cozy up to the placement of oligarchs like Musk in the government--mafia-state style--then more culture war red meat may not be enough; I wouldn't put it past MAGA to make the same mistake Democrats did, and try to rely on cultural issues to carry the day. Cultural issues *do* take primacy...but they are not *everything*.
I certainly wouldn't put it past MAGA to overreach like the Left did. It is the nature of polarized politics to do that. Couple of counterpoints though. Aggressive rhetoric on immigration seems to be designed to get people to simply leave on their own. Come J20, it appears that the first target will be criminals. The second target will be people who already have a deportation order. Then we shall see. The one aggressive threat that may be carried out is the one against sanctuary politicians. This is already against the law and has been since the 1950s (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1324). This, however, will be a law enforcement matter, not a mass roundup.
Here are some words of wisdom from a Democratic icon: Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave. ... The top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens. But for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process. Barbara Jordan.
Tariffs are a much debated topic. You are certainly correct that farmers are the first to be impacted. This was an issue in the runup to CW1, second only to slavery. The economic impact is less certain even if the tariffs are more than a threat to induce certain behavior unrelated to economics. Smoot-Hawley is often cited as contributing to the Depression but the US was not the dominant economy then as it is now. It has been suggested that this time around other countries will use different strategies to deal with it.
While minimum wage has been a hobby horse of organized labor and the Left forever, it is not really clear that it is objectively a pro-labor policy. The objective minimum wage is zero with labor being replaced by capital or simply off-shored at the margin. Yeah, Musk is an oligarch but so are Bezos, Zuckerberg, Bloomberg and Fink to name a few. All of those are linked at the hip to the Democrats, if not officially part of government. (Neither is Musk.) There probably will be some sort of recession just on the normal business cycle but the biggest threat is the debt.
Agreed that an unobtrusive but effective response to the illegal immigration issue will work best in terms of retaining popular support--as you said, we'll see. One issue I see is that Trump often has trouble with subtlety, and his promise to deploy the military for the mass deportations is not encouraging...but perhaps he's learned a thing or two, and at any rate should be given a fair chance to get things right.
Targeted tariffs are certainly less hazardous than blanket tariffs, but Trump is proposing the latter--again, we will have to see if that's all bluster and he ultimately takes a better, more strategic approach.
I agree that Smoot-Hawley was only a contributing, rather than precipitating factor in the Depression, which, like the 'Lesser Depression' that kicked off with the GFC in '08, was *really* caused by a decades-long build-up in private debt--aggravated by the failure to regulate ponzi schemes in the finance sector created during the proliferation of trusts in the '20s--which inevitably culminated in a financial crisis and an Irving Fisher-style debt deflation. I doubt that's on the menu, as those kinds of crises take a few decades to build up to; but I wouldn't say it's totally impossible, either.
Edit: Disagree that Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. are a comparable species of oligarch to Musk now. Musk is the first Bezos-scale oligarch in several generations to be put at the head of a government department after having directly financed the GOTV of the leader of that government--much less a government department responsible for deciding what parts of the government get funded, and which ones don't. That is pure Orban/Putin/Erdogan-style mafia state oligarch, not your standard donating-millions-to-Super-PACs state-adjacent oligarch. Neither are acting in the public interest, but MAGA should be wary of getting comfy with the former, as it is not a good look to the average working-class person, outside of those that are already members of the diehard Trumpist base.
The seeming---and I underscore seeming---disconnect between Democrat-friendly policies and actual votes for candidates may not be as puzzling as it appears. Votes on issues are a statement of a kind of "wish list." Gee, I'd prefer to have unions, more Medicaid, weed, etc. But when it gets to actual candidates the next question becomes, "But if I vote for Mr. D, the DIRECTION of his party's issues, policies, etc. is really far from where I am" and there is a trepidation about voting for the person because while he may better represent the current policies, underneath there is an adult in the voter who says, "but we really can't go too far, and that's where this guy will go."
In other words, merely being for/against current Democrat policies won't be enough, because the generic party BRAND is Joy Reid, Michael Steele, Joe Scarborough, Whoopi Goldberg, Mark Cuban, Ocasio-Cortez, and any number of truly extreme and weird congresspeople tied in with the Ukraine war and trans policies. Thus a "good" or appealing position on unions will not help if, in the voter's mind, the next step is trans people in unions, or a radical moment-of-conception abortion activist who wants to send money to the Ukes. Put another way, the Democrat party---regardless of specific issues---has today become the toxic party that the GOP under George W. Bush was and only a full flush of all the extremists will restore the balance.
This. Democrats have been really disappointing the past 12 years. They vote in lockstep. There are no arguments or debates. I don't trust any of them to do what they promise because none of them speak out or vote against their party, ever. Even on extreme issues.
Interesting that you frame “Right-to-work” as something which would have made it easier for companies to disrupt union organizing efforts. I've heard it framed as now workers will be forced to pay union dues whether they want to be in a union or not. Dues that flow directly to the Democrat party.
"I believe in everything you believe in, but I hate you personally."
Quite the dilemma.
“It’s the culture, stupid.”
I'd really like to see some interviews with some Missouri people who used to be Democrats, and are now Republicans. My guess is that they would probably say something similar to Vicky and Dan's comment about Democrats versus Progressives. But what exactly distinguishes the two? Michael says we need to be open to people sympathetic to Second Amendment issues and pro life. But he also points out that Missouri just passed an abortion rights law. So what is it exactly about progressives that Missourians don't like?
To reiterate a comment I made to a poster below, I would push back just a bit (but certainly not entirely) on Ruy's thesis and stress that, yes, it's true cultural issues take precedent over economic issues, but economic issues are not *meaningless* either. A failure of policy can make cultural pandering seem thin and manipulative, and the largest economic policies of right-populism haven't been implemented yet.
Many of them may seem appealing in the abstract, but that will change quickly if they hit people's pocketbooks. Re-posting what I said below:
People may very well *not* like massive tariffs on imports from major trading partners, especially when it doesn't do anything to bring manufacturing back to U.S. shores. (because it won't) This goes especially for people involved in agriculture--the first group of people to get hit by tariffs are almost always farmers.
Likewise, while people certainly favor border control overall, and "more stringent border control" in the abstract, the kind of aggressive measures implied in MAGA rhetoric may lose its appeal if it means an American military presence in people's cities and towns, massive deportation camps that look terrible on TV and--more importantly--more inflation. That seems to be what Trump's intending.
There will be a recession in the next 4 years, too--if it happens while big tariffs are in place, you might easily get a 1970s style stagflationary contraction rather than a standard deflationary business slowdown. I don't think you'll get a 1930s/08 style debt deflation, *but* I wouldn't say it's totally impossible, and it's notable that raising tariffs was a key response to the onset of the Great Depression that Hoover implemented.
And, notably, there are a lot of pro-labor policies MAGA has decidedly *not* backed, like raising the minimum wage. If its policies begin to hurt people's livelihoods, and if it continues to cozy up to the placement of oligarchs like Musk in the government--mafia-state style--then more culture war red meat may not be enough; I wouldn't put it past MAGA to make the same mistake Democrats did, and try to rely too much on cultural issues to carry the day. Cultural issues *do* take primacy...but they are not *everything*.
Did Kunze take far left positions on social issues or did voters just assume that b/c he's a Dem?